Epicureanism and wealth

I've done some reading about history lately, and I've noticed the unappealing aspects of what our ancestors called "wealth," namely, the fact that until fairly recently, the wealthiest people in society had to live under conditions we would consider "camping," even if they could afford expensive perfumes to mask their unwashed body stench, wore soiled and lice-ridden silk clothes, ate spoiled but well-peppered meat off of golden plates, and had slaves, servants and clients to order around.

I've also noticed the deficiencies of traditional philosophical critiques of wealth. For example, I've just finished reading The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt, about a 15th Century CE humanist scholar who discovered a manuscript of Lucretius' De rerum natura in an Alpine monastery and reintroduced a set of unsettling ideas into Western civilization around the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation, when more and more printed editions of Lucretius' poem went into circulation among the educated. Lucretius propagandizes Epicurean philosophy in a way which the Latinists of the time found compelling and disturbing, and I have the impression that his secular cosmology fueled a kind of alternative Reformation among Europeans who began to allow themselves to think about the untenable aspects of christianity despite their indoctrination.

But to the point of this blog post, in Chapter 8 Greenblatt lays out Lucretius' principal doctrines, which anticipate to an amazing degree what modern secular humanism advocates, except in one notable area. Epicurus and his followers taught and practiced a kind of monastic lifestyle based on withdrawal from society and a minimal use of resources, based on an argument about the simplicity of humans' natural needs for their happiness. Given the pervasive poverty of human societies before the industrial revolution, that made sense; when you have few requirements, you can satisfy them with little effort. Greenblatt writes:

Most people grasp rationally that the luxuries they crave are, for the most part, pointless and do little or nothing to enhance their well-being: [Quoting Lucretius] "Fiery fevers quit your body no quicker, if you toss in embroidered attire of blushing crimson, than if you must lie sick in a common garment."

Well, now, let's look at this more closely. First of all, with the wealth produced by the modern economy, people can eat nutritious diets year round; that has the effect of making the human body more resistant to infectious diseases and parasites which can cause "fiery fevers." People guessed at the connection between nutrition and vulnerability to diseases even in premodern times: Fernand Braudel in The Structures of Everyday Life quotes a peasants' proverb about how a full cooking-pot provides the best protection against malaria, back before people figured out the connection between malaria and mosquitoes.

Secondly, in the modern world we have the knowledge to control infectious diseases and parasites through public health measures like hygiene, vaccinations and sanitation. Some of these measures don't even involve high technology, like draining swamps, isolating your drinking water from fecal contamination, and making and using soap to keep your hands clean. People in the ignorant and impoverished past, even Epicureans with their slightly more advanced state of enlightenment, didn't know how to do those things, or else they didn't have the resources to do them.

And thirdly, if you still come down with an illness like the flu which causes a fever, you can take aspirin or another drugs to alleviate your symptoms, take a bath, put on clean pajamas, lie down on clean sheets in a comfortable bed in a temperature controlled room, and rest until you feel better. And during your convalescence you can also drink clean water ("plenty of fluids"), watch television, listen to recorded music and surf the internet or read books and magazines on a tablet PC, all things which Lucretius couldn't have imagined as alternatives to suffering a fever in the conditions he knew.

In general, the modern humanist outlook differs from the suffering-oriented secular world views of the past, including Epicureanism, because we can do more to alleviate suffering now. Why? Because the nature of wealth has qualitatively transformed since the Industrial Revolution, so that wealth itself has become more powerful and effective in improving our lives. The traditional philosophical disdain of the pursuit of "luxuries" doesn't make as much sense now when even philosophers can appreciate the value of having a reasonably comfortable recovery from a fever thanks to the greater potentials of wealth.

Does the Cryonics Institute still deserve my attention?

I have to wonder about that, considering that Robert Ettinger created it primarily for the cryonic suspension of his mother, his two wives, several of his friends and, eventually, himself. Yet he never seemed interested in trying to make it into a technologically progressive venture, though perhaps he couldn't have done that any way for reasons beyond his control; I haven't visited the facility, but I have the impression of it as a paleofuture, preserved-in-amber sort of monument to Ettinger's 50-year-old vision. You'd almost expect it to become a branch of the Henry Ford Museum.

CI has even charged the same amount for a suspension for years, in effect a paleofuture price; and if you don't contract for separate arrangements for perfusion with cryoprotectants from the Suspended Animation company, apparently it just does a straight freezing of your body in liquid nitrogen - which practically defeats the purpose of cryonics because the mammalian brain responds in disastrous ways when you do that to it.

So how much of CI's desultory existence derived from Ettinger's influence? Now that he has gone into his own probably self-defeating cryonic suspension, will that give younger cryonicists with a commitment to getting things right the opportunity to step into the vacuum and make CI into something more dynamic and effective? Or will CI just continue to drag along as a marginal, financially threadbare effort until some catastrophe causes the loss of all of its suspendees, Ettinger included?

And in general, what would it take to give cryonics the sort of energy and excitement we associate with the recent emergence of the knowledge economy? I don't expect two guys in a dorm room to come up with an idea for a breakthrough in cryosuspension which turns into a business in a few years comparable to Apple, Google or Facebook, and which also happens to make them billionaires; but can we find a sweet spot between the two extremes which will push cryonics out of its 1960's dowdiness and inadequacy, and allow it to enter the respectable company of iPads, personal genomics, exoplanetology and other areas of the 21st Century's dynamism?

I got a flu vaccination today.

And I haven't "depopulated" yet. In fact, I feel fine.

Who has the energy for crank magnetism?

I just marvel at people with borderline psychiatric issues who can generate the cognitive energy to pursue all kinds of crank obsessions which have no practical significance to their lives: Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, fringe political view points, fringe medical speculations, problems in marginal countries which don't matter that much in the scheme of things, etc.

By contrast, I don't care about 9-11 "truther" obsessions, a coming ice age, blaming the world's problems on Jews, the electric universe, Libya, fluoridated water, Lyndon LaRouche's nonsense, HAARP and all the other garbage with collects in some people's minds.

No idea too nutty for Rick Potvin

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2011

Latest Time cover might be a clue as to how the buildings were demoleculurized.

Source [Static] Time's latest cover might
indicate the truth-- that a particle beam weapon powered by the ionosphere
demolecularized the buildings.

The disintegration of the WTC buildings couldn't have been done with jet fuel. The debris and dust at the base of the tower was far far less than the total volume of scrap of the building, equipment and people. Most of it vapourized or demolecularized into a fine dust. The dust has never been analyzed. The amount of energy required to do that had to have been provided from a source. The source of power that most people don't realize is 100 miles over our heads in the ionosphere. Tesla proved that. And Tesla had invented superweapons based on the principle over 100 years ago. The memorial of light beams is a joke because is covers up the weapon "in plain sight" and now TIME has revived that memorial on its cover, making the daring "in plain sight" cover-up of the source of the particle beams: Space-- or the ionosphere. The precise beaming of particle beams can now be executed. This was a demonstration of a new class of weapon.

Thomas Donaldson on "The Death of Science Fiction" (1986)

Apparently Thomas didn't consider the possibility that science fiction could "die" because of the deceleration in progress, as in Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation thesis, leading people to reduce their expectations about "the future." By contrast, the fantasy genre, which Thomas dismisses because he thinks its focus on witches and princes doesn't address modern concerns, has thrived in the past quarter century. Harry Potter goes to a special school to study magic, not to learn, say, nuclear munitions, spaceship navigation or virtual wargaming to help defend Earth from an alien attack.

I can think of recent examples in science fiction where the authors treat "the future" as a game instead of an exercise in serious foresight. For example, John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation (2011), about the discovery of an intelligent species on a Earth-like exoplanet, insults the reader's intelligence by having the human characters in some unspecified time in "the future" use allegedly futuristic gadgets called "infopanels," when we can buy those things now from businesses like Walmart and call them smart phones, tablets or iPads. He might as well have portrayed televisions as a futuristic technology and given them a fancy name, like the "visiplates" in 1930's science fiction. In other words, Scalzi didn't want to bother with the challenge of thinking about what life really could look like in a society capable of interstellar travel. His novel would make more sense if he set it in 2011 in a place like New Guinea and have it deal with cryptozoology.

Thomas's observation that cryonicists should (ideally) focus on "the future" as a personal issue still remains valid, however. Though with the aging, infighting, attrition and financial problems of the cryonics movement, I can see how that has gotten problematic. It also doesn't help when some cryonicists still engage in handwaving about imaginary "molecular nanotechnology" and "mind uploading" as the solutions to our survival problems, when physics or neurobiology may not allow these things to exist or happen in our universe. It probably damages the cryonics movement's credibility with serious, educated people who might otherwise feel inclined towards our goals to keep invoking speculative futurology from circa 1990, when the world has moved on from then without progress towards these technological fantasies.

From Cryonics magazine, June 1986:

CRYONICS AND THE DEATH OF SCIENCE FICTION

by Thomas Donaldson


At one time or other in their lives, many cryonicists read science fiction avidly. I myself have a lot of attraction for it. At bookstores I will go to the science fiction section and look over the new books available. But for some reason, I almost never find what I want and leave the science fiction section empty-handed.

Cryonicists also will note, much more than most people do, how hostile most science fiction seems to cryonics. Cryonics almost never appears, in science fiction, as a positive thing. From Larry Niven's "corpsicles," one of whom is batted to the center of the Galaxy and back like a tennis ball (in "A World Out Of Time"), to Norman Spinrad's Jack Barron (in "Bug Jack Barron"), who is the victim of the evil plotter Benedict Howards who holds a stranglehold over life and death through his control of cryonics, science fiction authors have never caught on to the wonder and promise of what we are trying to do.

Furthermore, even immortality has a bad press among science fiction authors. One of the most interesting, and most characteristic, ways in which immortality comes to us is as a gift (or a curse) from the aliens. It's rarely something we human beings discover for ourselves. We discover Faster Than Light (FTL) drives for ourselves quite often, but immortality (which in practical terms is likely to open up the stars at least as effectively), almost never. Even John Varley, who of all the contemporary science fiction authors has most assimilated the possibilities and meaning of biotechnology, has his biotechnology coming to us via aliens from the "Ophiuichi Hotline," not as the result of our own scientific and economic efforts. (Varley is a very interesting case and deserves extended discussion elsewhere).

What is the reason for this bias among science fiction writers? What accounts for this hostility?

The reason why science fiction authors don't like immortality and cryonics is because it means the end of science fiction. Now, I expect this to be a controversial hypothesis, especially with any science fiction fans who are also readers of CRYONICS, but I think I can defend it well.

Let's look at the role that the future plays in science fiction. Its biggest role is to provide a faraway unreachable place, the ideal location for dreams and terrors. No one expects to live in the world of Robert Heinlein's Friday. It's just a place to play with ideas and possibilities. Frederick Pohl is another interesting case in point. In "MAN PLUS," Pohl gives us a castrated bionic man (does anyone out there believe that such a thing could seriously happen as Pohl described it?). In "AGE OF THE PUSSYFOOT" (which is one of the most positive science fiction novels dealing with cryonics), the story Pohl presented seems very unlikely when seen in its own terms. Why would all of these people flee from life and responsibility by entering suspended animation when a global crisis arises? We might just as easily (and incredibly) suppose the plot device of everybody deciding to go to sleep just before the dam breaks! The elements which these stories lack is concerned, careful involvement with reality. I don't mean that their authors have to get everything right, I mean that they don't even try.

In science fiction, the future is a convenient place for dreaming. No one would ever actually end up there. They could have chosen Timbuktu or Ethiopia just as well; except that nowadays retirees with heart conditions can buy tickets to Timbuktu for $400, and sleep comfortably at the local Hilton when they arrive.

And so, into this fandom of the "future" as the quintessentially unreachable and faraway place, steps CRYONICS AND IMMORTALITY. The future suddenly stops being "Friday"'s world and becomes the middle of next week. It's close. Nobody writes science fiction about the middle of next week. They look at their schedules to see what appointments they have.

What would happen to Friday's world if most of the people who read Heinlein's book seriously expected to be there? They would read it in the same frame of reference in which they read their appointment schedules. If they seriously believed it (very unlikely!), they'd immediately start thinking of what they could do to stave off such a disaster. Or, more likely, they wouldn't even bother to read such fantastic drivel.

Embodied in science fiction we see a particular attitude toward the future which is fundamentally nonactivist. The future is a place of dreams, to be visited only by dreamers. There's nothing wrong with dreaming, but it's hardly what we, as cryonicists, are doing when we think about and plan for the future.

The important thing about science fiction is the location of the dreams and the consequences this implies. Any sustained plan of action aimed at altering the world must involve coming to grips with the future. If the future is the location of our dreams, we cannot seriously attempt to come to grips with it. I once attended a science fiction convention because, on the surface anyway, it seemed a likely place to recruit more cryonicists from. What better group of people to approach than one which was concerned about, as a serious issue, the world of the future?

But my expectation was far from the mark. I didn't find people who were interested in getting to the future, or even people who were concerned about the real possibilities of tomorrow -- or the next hundred or five hundred years for that matter. What I found was people who were interested in playing mind games. People who were interested only in building intellectual sand castles; complicated fantasies which would be washed away with the next wave. The science fiction community, virtually to a man, was not populated with people who were at all concerned about the future as the location of action, but rather with people who dressed in costumes from the Middle Ages or who were concerned with creating interesting, exciting, and above all safe fantasy worlds. Safe because there was never for a moment the possibility they could experience any of the danger, hard work, or disappointments associated with those worlds -- were they to become real. (One is reminded of the definition of adventure: Someone a thousand miles away having a hard time.) All of us have dreams and fantasies which we would never wish to see become real and in which we would never invest more time or energy than it takes to create and contemplate them on a rainy afternoon. There are many, many more of these kinds of dreams than the real ones -- the ones that change the world and shape the future. To take an activist attitude toward the future can be very threatening to someone who places their idle dreams and escapist fantasies there.

Stop and look at science fiction for a moment. Really look at it. What does it concern itself with? Why, contemporary themes, of course!: pollution, or nuclear disaster, or changes in reproductive biology which are on the horizon or are already here. Dreams, after all, are the way we emotionally absorb our desires and experiences. Everyone has such desires, fleeting attractions (sexual and other), worries about job, spouse, prospects, fantasies of winning the Lottery and being the center of everyone's gaze. Every single one of these dreams depends upon very particular circumstances of time and place. Even a small change in economics or biology would make such a dream pointless.

Once someone (who was not and never will be a cryonicist) asked me what my ambitions were, after I was frozen and revived. To which I could only answer that all such ambitions depended too much on time and place, to have specific ambitions in such a future would be like wanting to be chief oarsman in the trireme in 1986.

Our present dreams assume a LOT of specifics about our biology. A species able to change sex at will just wouldn't have the same kinds of fantasies we have now. No way! Even if that just became an OPTION, the fantasies would have to change. I believe that this underlies a lot of the hostility science fiction has shown to biological technology. Even to noncryonicists, it's very evident that as we advance in THAT direction, the basis of our fantasies will blow away. An accurate tale of the future would tell the story of people doing alien things to achieve goals equally alien. This is not the stuff of which people want to make their fantasies today.

This isn't even a problem unique to biological technology. It's just a statement about history and change. Six hundred years ago the enterprising young man wished to attain knighthood and a fiefdom of his own. There was no such thing as a nation-state, hence no concept of patriotism, nor of the common good. To attempt medieval knighthood in 1986 becomes laughable. It had even become laughable by 1600, as Cervantes showed (but then, who reads "Don Quixote" now?).

Science fiction authors therefore have a problem. They want somehow to transpose a contemporary world into another fantasy world, but without too many elements of fantasy. In particular, with nothing which would portend a fundamental change in the way people think, in what they believe and thus in how they behave. A bit of extra gadgetry, sure, but no fundamental inventions.

I believe this is why (citing a major contemporary development) computerization escaped them so much. Asimov's "FOUNDATION" novels, for instance, take place tens of thousands of years from now yet in a curiously 50's kind of world, where the sorts of things we do with our personal computers are done in the Fifties' way. Not only that, but Asimov is clearly aware of the technology. That's exactly what his robots are about. The interesting point about this is what this technology (his robots) is not doing rather than what it does.

Even birth control (a very tame biological invention!) plays little apparent role in this science fiction. Why? Because it was too fundamental, not enough like a gadget. Birth control meant something. It meant that women and men could neither of them have exactly the same kind of sexual fantasies, terrors, and inhibitions they had before that time. The dreams got changed. Only a little, but they changed.

In fact, biology and medicine have lots more to do with our dreams than do spaceships. Let's consider Poul Anderson's books, the Flandry series and the Polesotechnic League. These are novels of swashbuckling and derring-do. A really advanced medical technology, even of repair (much less of immortality) turns them to drivel. (Cryonicists experience this kind of shift in perspective every day: decapitation just does not have the same meaning to us!) What would happen to Flandry if he had had himself cloned and his memories duplicated? Flandry would go on, but his story would lose a lot in the transition.

We can see that a lot of art forms will be changed by immortality. Crucifixion scenes, for one, are likely to disappear... and yes, folks, science fiction is one of those art forms likely to disappear.

I think that for any human tool or device there is its particular form, and then behind that, the more general needs that it satisfies. Sure, the horse and buggy disappear, but the need for individual transport goes on. One interesting question to ask is "what may take the place of science fiction?"

Let's look at fantasy as an alternative. Fantasy takes place in a world by definition unreachable, because it does not exist. It's also a much more archaic world, where magic is used instead of technology. The fundamental problem with fantasy is that we've evolved a lot since the days of the witch and the prince. These old symbols just don't speak to a lot of our concerns today.

On the other hand, most science fiction stories don't present really technologically advanced worlds. Often the rocket just substitutes for the airplane: it gets you to another place, another world, what does it matter how this world came about or where this world may be? In science fiction terms, the trouble with a REALLY advanced world is that the concerns of people within it will bear about as much relation to our own dreams and terrors as witches and princes do.

One possibility for what will eventually happen is that the "future" might disappear from science fiction. It's easy enough to remove the pretense that these stories take place in the future. You simply invent another world, an alternate world. Some of the best "science fiction" stories I've read do exactly this. The point is that a story which takes place in the future must invent a historical connection between the present and the story. It must concern (like the world of Robert Heinlein's "Friday") entities like the California Republic, which bear some relation to the real here and now state of CALIFORNIA (a ridiculous one, after scrutiny). If the story hinges on some piece of new technology, what allows this other world to have it even though we don't (yet)? Proponents of science fiction of course may object that such a story would lose reality. Well, reality is a strange thing to ask of a work of fiction! What we ask of a work of fiction is that the conduct of people and affairs in it not violate our sense of how real people would really act. We ask this of all serious stories.

The other possibility is that science fiction may become populated with people who are genuinely concerned about the future and genuinely interested in what it will really be like. It is possible that science fiction authors may appear who are concerned with exploring the impact of developments that can be seen and predicted with some confidence today, but which are truly some distance in the future.

There would be several requirements to be met before such science "fiction" writers could appear. The first would be that they will have to care enough about the future to find out what's really ahead. They'll have to do their homework on biological technology and molecular engineering. They'll have to do some deep thinking about people: what makes them what they are; where do their needs and wants come from and how will changes in their biology and their technology alter these needs and wants? In short, they'll have to start thinking about and writing about the future not as some place merely to "escape" to, but rather as a place to live in.

By now, most of you will realize that the one essential change required to make that transition is to believe, really believe that you are personally going to confront that future. Only cryonicists can do that, and the fact is, most of us are too busy consulting our appointment books and worrying about how we're going to keep that date with tomorrow to give much thought to anything else.

So much for the future of science fiction.

Responses to Ayn Rand's alternative humanism

The September-October issue of The Humanist just came out, and I had hoped that it would publish my letter in response to its wrong-headed article about cryonics in the July-August issue.

I had no such luck, and I have a separate blog post about that article in the works. The letters section did print a couple in response to the July-August issue's article about humanist films which argues for including the film version of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead in that genre.

Specifically, the article says the following:



And the letters say in response:



As the letter by Bob Zannelli in Ocala, FL, shows, lately Rand's critics have fixated on an obscure episode in Rand's 20's, a decade when most of us do stupid things, where she became intrigued by the story about a teenage boy named William Edward Hickman who reportedly kidnapped and murdered a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker. The mystery novelist Michael Prescott wrote about this odd period in Rand's life several years ago, based on published information about her; and Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra mentions Hickman in connection with Rand even earlier; so the Hickman problem hasn't exactly hidden in plain sight. Progressives and mainstream humanists didn't care about Ayn Rand until some prominent people on the right started to talk about her influence on their political views, then they rediscovered this information about her and now regularly use it as a shortcut to try to discredit her.

Rand does give me the sense that she didn't like children, and her hostility towards them comes across in Atlas Shrugged. The hobo Jeff Allen, who had seen better days as an auto worker, tells Dagny Taggart about the time one of the frustrated men at his former employer had struck "a mean, ugly little eight-year-old" girl named Millie Bush who had gotten braces under the company's new health care plan, and had knocked out all her teeth! Rand, in other words, uses her authorial ventriloquism in a way which shows that she didn't want us to feel sorry for the girl's assault and permanent disfigurement, even though as a child she had no control over the situation. I guess Randian heroes don't need orthodontics in their youth.

Rand tries to "balance" that by describing the Objectivist mother (which sounds like a contradiction in terms) in Galt's Gulch who tells Dagny that her two thriving boys, aged 4 and 7, represent the woman's "career," one which she couldn't practice in the socialist America beyond the heroes' doomstead because of all the irrational philosophy they would encounter. When I compare the two depictions of childhood, the latter one about the boys' upbringing in utopian conditions seems to me pro forma and, well, not "heartfelt," for lack of a better word. The former one, about the girl and her braces, hints at something about Rand's real opinion of children. Did Marion Parker make a cameo appearance in Atlas Shrugged as Millie Bush?

And even if the novel does show a holdover from Rand's interest in Hickman, does it really address Rand's world view to focus on this aspect of her life? She didn't write novels celebrating child murderers, after all. I notice that people on the left who become infatuated with terrorists and murderers like Trotsky, Mao, Che Guevara, etc., and who even put up posters of their images in plain sight, don't seem to receive the same opprobrium. Why do they get a pass for admiring men who wreaked murder and rapine wholesale, while condemning Rand who had an irrational infatuation with a murderer with only one known victim? (The Wikipedia article doesn't indicate that the teenage Hickman killed "serially," as the letter in The Humanist claims; but that hasn't stopped Rand-haters from embellishing the story about him at Rand's expense.)

No, I suspect something else accounts for the WTF? reaction mainstream humanists display when they have awakened to the existence of the Rand phenomenon after its long incubation: They see her world view, despite its nutty and absurd aspects, as competition for their version of humanism in the culture wars. And as the example of China's fleeing millionaires suggests, that world view does have its plausible aspects; it does model how many of the world's alpha producers see the state as a dangerous manifestation of human behavior that they either have to manage, avoid or evade for their survival. Instead of focusing on that part of Rand's philosophy, Rand's humanist and progressive critics try to change the subject by dragging out something embarrassing from Rand's past which doesn't matter that much to our lives in the here and now.

Ayn Rand doesn't seem likely to go away, and I predict that the efforts by mainstream humanists and AlterNet types to discredit her won't work because they still act according to her framing of their agenda. Like it or not, it looks increasingly as if the mainstream humanists have a competitor which they don't know how to respond to on its own merits, apart from the use of ad hominem and well-poisoning attacks against it. Ironically they have plenty of empirical arguments they could use instead, but mastering those takes some preparation.

More shrugging Chinese Atlases

And yet progressives profess not to understand why the world's alpha producers seek tax heavens, sovereign individual status, passports from other countries, "five flags" arrangements and so forth:

Top of Chinese wealthy's wish list? To leave China

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese millionaire Su builds skyscrapers in Beijing and is one of the people powering China's economy on its path to becoming the world's biggest.

He sits at the top of a country — economy booming, influence spreading, military swelling — widely expected to dominate the 21st century.

Yet the property developer shares something surprising with many newly rich in China: he's looking forward to the day he can leave.

Su's reasons: He wants to protect his assets, he has to watch what he says in China and wants a second child, something against the law for many Chinese.

The millionaire spoke to The Associated Press on condition that only his surname was used because of fears of government reprisals that could damage his business.
China's richest are increasingly investing abroad to get a foreign passport, to make international business and travel easier but also to give them a way out of China.

The United States is the most popular destination for Chinese emigrants, with rich Chinese praising its education and healthcare systems. Last year, nearly 68,000 Chinese-born people became legal permanent residents of the U.S., seven percent of the total and second only to those born in Mexico. Canada and Australia are also popular.

It is a bothersome trend for China's communist leaders who've pinned the legitimacy of one-party rule on delivering rapid economic growth and a rising standard of living. They've succeeded in lifting tens of millions of ordinary Chinese out of poverty while also creating a new class of super rich. Yet affluence alone seems a poor bargain to those with the means to live elsewhere.

Despite more economic freedom, the communist government has kept its tight grip on many other aspects of daily life. China's leaders punish, sometimes harshly, public dissent and any perceived challenges to their power, and censor what can be read online and in print. Authoritarian rule, meanwhile, has proved ineffective in addressing long standing problems of pollution, contaminated food and a creaking health care system.

"In China, nothing belongs to you. Like buying a house. You buy it but it will belong to the country 70 years later," said Su, lamenting the government's land leasing system.

"But abroad, if you buy a house, it belongs to you forever," he said. "Both businessmen and government officials are like this. They worry about the security of their assets."

This shows the danger of attributing too much benevolence to China's selective use of economic freedom. Its leaders don't want to allow more freedom in general, and they plan to expropriate the country's new wealth to advance their political and military agenda. The exodus of rich people from China will help to defund these leaders' projects.

More support for my thesis about Ayn Rand's alternative humanism?

Ayn Rand sounds nutty and confused about a lot of things; but in some ways her world view still makes relatively more sense than the slough of abnegation offered by progressives. She wouldn't scold people who enjoy a breakfast of corn flakes, orange juice and premium coffee, for example, just because corporations produce and market those goods. Nobody keeps Americans from eating the daily ration of gruel progressives apparently think we should have for breakfast instead. And in general, Rand says we shouldn't feel guilty for: Existing; exercising both our physical and our cognitive powers (e.g., sex and thinking) because she emphasizes mind/body integration; wanting material goods; wanting to develop ourselves; wanting to become financially successful through honest means; wanting radical life extension* (implied in her writings); and other goals progressives seem to object to. She has a dissenting humanist cast to her thinking which makes mainstream humanists uncomfortable because she emphasizes self-regarding aspects of human life, which puts her more in line with the pagan Greek tradition and at odds with the christian moral assumptions mainstream humanists seem not to have liberated themselves from as much as they believe.

At least some humanists have started to catch on. The issue of The Humanist magazine which features a wrong-headed article about cryonics also has an article about films with humanist themes which argues for including the film version of The Fountainhead:

After humans cast off the shackles of religion, what’s left for our species but to bask in the glory of humanity itself? We are presented with humanism, as if it had slipped on a Superman costume. It is magnificently symbolized by Gary Cooper, hands on hips, standing atop the tallest skyscraper in the world, his shirt blowing in the wind like a cape. I’m not being cynical here. This image is a good thing.

I suspect the leftist attack on Rand's popularity among conservatives also reflects a struggle going on for the "ownership" of humanism in the U.S. Instead of showing conservatives' hypocrisy, the fact that many conservatives no longer consider her atheism a deal-breaker suggests to me that they have started to participate in the secularization process along with the rest of American society. I don't endorse everything the Rand cultist in this video says, but he does address the growing acceptance of Rand's atheism on the right:



* One of my cryonicist friends call Rand's philosophy "the poor man's immortalism."

Another video about Tyler Cowen and the Great Stagnation

Tyler Cowen's TED talk on the Great Stagnation

A national registry of atheists?