Love doesn’t scale.
– Eric S. Raymond (spotted yesterday and discussed by Joshua Herring)
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Perfect. I’ve been saying “socialism doesn’t scale” for years to nobody in particular, but not only is this someone people might listen to, it’s actually a better way of putting it. Nobody thinks of their family as socialist, even though its principles can be applied there, and actually work fairly well. Excellent quote.
Raymond, concise and to the point, as always. This really is perfect. And, of course, very few people will get it. But all you have to do is take it ONE step beyond the personal, and you can see, indeed, that love doesn’t scale.
It works in purely economic terms but what about charity? And good works outside the family?
For example: it’s perfectly possible to see something happen to a loved one, or to understand a social problem because you have seen it hurt a member of your family, and to be motivated by that to do work with no financial remuneration. In these cases you may well be motivated by love, and you are in a way scaling it.
The difficulties arise when the state gets involved.
If, as a libertarian, you argue that charity and philanthropy will look after the truly deserving welfare cases, then surely your thinking assumes some sort of “scaling” of love?
This is also true in the animal world- if you’ve got scales, you don’t have much of a love-life! Snakes, goannas, crocs- all love-challenged beasts.
Does love descale?
If so, I’ve got some bathroom cleaning it could do for me.
Only Love is divisible by infinity.
OK, so “love doesn’t scale”. Which means???
I assume you mean “scale up”.
Lots of things don’t scale up: democracy (worked fine in Athens, would be terrible here); communism (worked OK in a few communes here over the centuries, was terrible when tried out on large scales).
In order to have a reasonable discussion, we have to agree on what “love” is.
Any takers? The problem is, it means many things to many people.
ZZMike,
Meaning doesn’t scale?
As usual, Heinlein said it best. “Love is when someone else’s happiness is essential to your own.”
I think Heinlein also said that it is an act of love when you put someone else’s happiness before your own.
I don’t think I agree. If two parents love their first child, they don’t love that first child any less after the second and third children are born.
Time doesn’t scale, but a parent’s love for a child does.
All or nothing at all.
I suspect that what ESR means is that Love Doesn’t Scale by degrees of abstraction.
So you can love beings that you ‘know’ personally, but you can’t actually love other classes of ‘unknown’ beings. You might have some sentiment towards your concept of these beings, but this is not love – typically it’s vanity.
ZZMike said of communism that it “worked OK in a few communes here over the centuries…”
I disagree. All those communes failed and broke up unless they jettisoned their attachment to communism. Some failed spectacularly fast, too.
As always definitions are important but lots of monastic communities are older than America, not? Seriously commited folks, monks & nuns. That sort of commitment doesn’t scale well either. Same thing?
Further levels of meaning: In heavy-duty trucking, the verb “scale” refers to maximum GVW, as in “What’ll she scale?” If the soul weighs 21 grams, love may not scale at all…
Obviously this discussion stumbles on the definition of love and the intended scope of Raymond’s observation. But, whether it’s to do with “love” or not, there is surely there is an interesting issue here.
In any society or group, there will be SOME people who through no personal fault cannot look after themselves. The disabled. The very old and infirm with no family. Teenagers from a poor background who cannot afford expensive health treatment.
To care for these people, you either retain limited state provision, or rely on some form of charity and philanthropy. If you believe in the latter, unless you believe every philanthropist personally knows the people they help, you must also believe that people CAN sympathise beyond the personal.
If you don’t believe that libertarianism would lead to un-coerced acts of goodwill to people that are not known to the good-doers know personally, what do you do about the rump of the honestly helpless? I can’t see how anyone without a serious answer to that question is ever doing more than theorising.
Joshua said that people thought libertarians were heartless. That may be true, but for me the issue is practicality, unless you’re willing to leave a small number of people to starve.
Perhaps love does scale, but as some sort of inverse square law. The further removed one is from the love source the thinner the love gruel one gets.
Philanthropy and charity are good, and necessary I think for a decent society, but they don’t begin to match what goes on in a functioning family. Huge government programs are worse, like insane Munchausen-by-proxy mommie-dearest worse.
The love of parents for up to ‘n’ children without dilution or favorites is probably true for small n. I have 2. I think their orbital radii are the same…but I wonder if I had 18 children if I would feel the same.
Feeding a city is a truly massive and complex undertaking. Feeding the tiny minority of people who are genuinely helpless is not anything like the same scale of problem.
Someone opined that Raymond meant love doesn’t scale by orders of abstraction. I think he meant the same thing any computer scientist would mean when they say “scale” – he’d mean orders of magnitude. He’d also be talking about individual systems, not multiple overlapping or competing systems, which do indeed scale because you simply have more of them.
Libertarian thought supposes that a free market with a reduced or absent welfare system creates abundantly more wealth and incentivises people to care about each other better than a welfare system, that is to be more neighbourly. If you understand that the free market eliminates most of the hunger by generating wealth, the family is the prime sharer of that wealth, followed by simple neighbourliness (which is incentivised by removing the welfare system). Then size of the community left hungry through being both lonely and helpless is vanishingly small and love is no longer required to scale.
Think of it like the 80/20 rule as you would apply it for optimum efficiency. The scalable solutions are applied first. The most scalable solution leaves 20% for the next most scalable solution, and 4% to the third most scalable solution, and so on.
Actually, it depends on what your definition of love is. If love means never having to say your sorry, then a lot of politicians and CEO’s are the recipients of a lotta love.
ESR got it right. Just ask anyone who brought a stringer of bluegill to his wife.
Our differences stem from the broad meanings attached to that all-purpose word, ‘Love”. If he had said ‘True love doesn’t scale.’, you might have the start of a scientist’s attempt at a romance novel.
As a Christian, I am commanded to love my neighbour, but that doesn’t mean to go and make love to her!
When commenting on this quote, could you please define which meaning of love is the one you will use?
Thank you for the patient explanation Simon Gibbs.