Words&Dirt

“‘Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.

‘And that is the one practical difference.’

‘He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.’

Major Reid paused to touch the face of an old-fashioned watch, ‘reading’ its hands. ‘The period is almost over and we have yet to determine the moral reason for our success in governing ourselves. Now continued success is never a matter of chance. Bear in mind that this is science, not wishful thinking; the universe is what it is, not what we want it to be. To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives––such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. Force, if you will!––the franchise is force, naked and raw, and Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force.’

‘But this universe consists of paired dualities. What is the converse of authority? Mr. Rico.’

He had picked one I could answer.

‘Responsibility, sir.’

‘Applause. Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal––else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does no control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority…other than through the tragic logic of history. The unique “poll tax” that we must pay was unheard of. No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead––and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.’

‘Superficially, our system is only slightly different; we have democracy unlimited by race, color, creed, birth, wealth, sex, or conviction, and anyone may win sovereign power by a usually short and not too arduous term of service––nothing more than a light workout to our cave-man ancestors. But that slight difference is one between a system that works, since it is constructed to match the facts, and one that is inherently unstable. Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we ensure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility––we require each person who wishes to exert control over the state of wager his own life––and lose it, if need be––to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert.’”

––Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein, loc. 2496-2518

“The new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwidth links. But the post-Singularity world does fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological life). I think certain notions of ethics would apply in such an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve this understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now; perhaps there are rules for distinguishing self from others on the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind and self will be vastly more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought) need never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says, ‘God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale our comprehension.’”

–– “Technological Singularity,” by Vernor Vinge, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 373