Mr Thiel and his colleagues say their ocean state would have no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.

It sounded way too similar to the arguments that those rights many of us fought so hard for are just in the way of making money.

Still, i decided to check it out. After all, i have suggested my own experiment, though that one with family forms.

I listened to Patri Friedman’s talk on The Feast. I agree with many things Patri mentions, especially he emphasis on systems: “Invisible processes lead to the visible things we see around us.” His talk, though, helped me sharped my concerns. First, he seems to be making just as many assumptions as those not advancing governmental experiments, ignoring the invisible processes he is assuming. Then, he does not take into account findings in science. And finally, many of the feminist critiques of the liberal approach to ideas of justice are very applicable. I will address each in turn.

Assumptions & Processes
The first assumption Patri makes is that something that was started more than a decade or so ago is bad. Just because we get new techie toys every second does not mean that we have to reinvent everything. Take that saying seriously: There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Sure, improvements help and yet, the basic structure remains the same as it has been ever since it was first invented. Patri is not advancing any other reasons for the need of new governments. There is another assumption tied in here, which is harder to untangle because Patri doesn’t seem quite as clear: He seems to refer to government both as an industry and as a product. If it is an industry what is it producing? If it is a product what is it exactly? North and South Korea have different products, he claims. Okay, that doesn’t mean, though, that the government as a whole is a product. This premiss seems to be ill-defined yet necessary for his whole idea to work. If there is no product, there is no product testing needed.

The invisible process that Patri subscribes to, he does not question: Growth is good and progress means new, faster products. The idea that growth is good has fundamentally contributed to several crises we are currently facing as a planet, including global climate disruption and economic collapse. Last i checked there is only one Earth and even if we start populating the high seas, there is a limit to growth simply by the fact that the Earth is a limited resource.

Scientific Findings
Living on an oil-rig is tough. Workers there are facing challenges that go way beyond experimenting with governmental forms. I don’t see much on the Seasteding website that would design a system of assistance. For one, there are no psychologists on staff. Although i haven’t researched it, i am certain that there are a host of psychological challenges people face by simply living so far removed from what they are used to, confined onto a platform to live with the same people for an extended period of time.

Patri lists the core challenges as political autonomy, engineering, business models, and community. The website, though, concentrates on engineering, law and politics, and business. No research into community, whatever that might have meant in Patri’s talk. This probably also means ignoring much of the learning from existing intentional communities, many of whom are experimenting in ways of governing different from democracy.

There also does not seem to be any awareness of the influence those invisible processes Patri mentions have on us. Research in neuroscience could be enlightening here, though it would again require moving away from a focus on business toward a focus on people. For example, some neuroscientists are finding that conflict resolution programs might not work unless we address the underlying differences between the two groups in conflict. Even in an environment where people come together with the intention of healing the conflict, not acknowledging those differences can reek unexpected havoc. Which leads me to my final concern.

From a sustainability perspective, importing food does not work. The Seasteding Institute plans to import most foods, not aware of the invisible processes that currently enable long-distance food. The times of cheap energy are rapidly coming to an end and we need to figure out ways of growing our food more locally again. It probably would be possible to design a seasted as almost self-sufficient. The website does not indicate that there’s in interest for doing that.

Justice
Iris Marion Young pointed out that a focus on an ideal system ignores the invisible processes that perpetuate that system. Seasteding is supposed to avoid this, i guess, by completely removing people from the existing system to let them design and live in a new system. As pointed out in the previous section, though, that isn’t that easy. I consider myself a feminist – viewing all genders as equally worthy and valuable. Yet, i still notice how i react out of sexist beliefs that i carry around, like valuing male attention more than female. It is embarrassing and frustrating to uncover these beliefs. I can only choose to consciously counteract them if i am aware of them. There is nothing in the Seasteding proposal that would allow for such consciousness raising. The assumption seems to be that people don’t bring their beliefs, ways of behaving, or habits to a new place. Or maybe the assumption is that those things would simply fall away on high seas. Neither assumption makes much sense when we simply look at immigration.

Overall, the Seasteding proposal seems to be an elaborate way of circumventing laws that were meant to improve democracy – improve rather than reinvent the wheel. In a lot of ways, Seasteding does not go deep enough: Government is not the invisible process we need to experiment with. It’s how we interact, how we live our lives that is creating massive inequalities between people. Maybe Seasteding is good for business. Most of us are already hurting from this business as usual and these ideas sound like they would enlarge the inequalities further rather than making our society more compassionate.

Addendum
The story of Iceland shows that oil-rigs aren’t necessary to create a new government. And the new government people fought for put an end to financial services gambling. No oil-rigs required. Just people fed up with inequality.

Keep in mind that this isn’t meant as a list to tell us that we’re not green enough because we’re “just” eco-friendly. For one thing, I don’t know how feasible some of these things are – at least in the way we live now. The list is meant as food for thought. It is also meant to take an honest look at our lives and find areas where we might be green-washing our behavior – by really not being as sustainable as we could be. And I could be wrong with some of these. Please add your own examples to the comments! If you want my reasoning of why I put something in a certain column, please ask.

What am I going to study, you ask? I have been accepted into the master’s program of the philosophy department at SF State. The areas of philosophy that I am particularly interested in are feminist and moral philosophy, especially applied ethics. I would like to center my investigation of these areas around the development of an ethical framework that helps us humans create life-affirming and sustainable societies that are just to all individuals no matter what our relationship status.

Musings over our current economic and environmental situation have deepened my interest in addressing these problems more rigorously by switching careers. As the financial crisis deepens, most economists and policy makers suggest that the way out of the crisis is to spend. They call on the government and individuals to increase our spending, ignoring that one of the root causes of the crisis is a mountain of debt. This debt was largely created by a desire for growth – economic growth as well as the idea of “more” on the individual level. We were accumulating stuff in an attempt to attain happiness in life. If only we could get this one more thing, we’d be happy and our life would have meaning. Overconsumption – and the associated debt – is a symptom of an ethical crisis that might lead to the destruction of our life support system. Back in the 1950s, Victor Frankl talked about an existential vacuum. The existential vacuum emerged from a meaning crisis in most of the Western world: As religions were replaced by humanist ideas, no ready-made life meaning was available and humans no longer felt connected to something larger.

Additionally, our connections to other human beings have narrowed with the increasing emphasis on the nuclear family. The community of friends and acquaintances merged into the idea of “The One” – one person who can meet all of our needs. Underneath the façade, though, the needs for connection and meaning remain unfulfilled. Combine this need deficit with an economic system that pushes growth as the only factor that matters and the consumption and debt patterns we are witnessing now result.

In order to create a life-affirming and sustainable society, we need to find an ethical framework that reconnects us with genuine sources of meaning. My task as philosopher is to help develop this kind of framework that provides potential answers – or guidelines on how to find them – to the quest for meaning in life and the desire to be part of something larger. I suggest that there are better ways to fill the existential vacuum: By strengthening our connections to ourselves and to other people, as well as nature. These connections have to be founded on a profound understanding of justice – an affirmation of the individual as connected to a larger world, no matter who that individual is or how these connections are established (i.e., through marriage or friendship or anything in between). In order for us to increase our chances of survival as a species we need to change our priorities. This redefinition, though, requires a vision of a new way that is grounded in a deep understanding of our interconnections but does not need religious concepts.

Alex Gibney, the filmmaker summarizes the underlying lesson well in his commentary in the extras of the DVD: “I think the story of Enron exposes the major flaw in capitalism, which is the crude belief that raw self-interest left untethered will always result in the best possible social good. It’s not so.” Instead it results in the enrichment of the few and the raping of the rest of us. Why are we letting this happen? Are we so determined to become the few that we overlook reality? Are we so blinded by the money we’ll never make but think we could that we can’t see that there has to be a better way? A way that allows everybody a decent way of living rather than the obscene splendor of the few? The documentary contains a clip of Ken Lay talking to reporters bemoaning the fact that his net worth shrank from $100 million to a mere $20 million after the Enron collapse (this is at least in the bonus material of the DVD). And that’s after setting aside funds for anticipated legal defense cost and settlement. $20 million is far more than most people make in a lifetime. Nobody called Lay on that. How can he get away with feeling sorry for himself?

Somehow this all reminds me of a Yiddish joke that I listened to often as a teenager. A man comes to a rabbi complaining that his friend doesn’t talk to him anymore ever since he’s made a bit more money. The rabbi asks the man to look out the window. “What do you see?” he inquires. The man describes the scene he sees: People hurrying along on their business; kids playing; a couple of friends playing cards; an old woman watching over a baby. The rabbi asks the man to turn to look into the mirror. “What do you see?” he asks. The man laughs and says “I see myself.” “You see,” explains the rabbi, “when you put a little bit of silver underneath, all you can see is yourself.”

Have we gotten so caught up in the earn-and-spend cycle that we don’t see the masses of homeless? Or feel the moral outrage of even having homeless people in a country as rich as the US? Then there are the people – including children – without health insurance and on and on. And yet, the top keeps on enriching themselves and we, the masses, wonder when the next sale is. How have we become so numb to moral dilemmas? How did we become too complacent to be outraged long enough to actually change something?

If you look only at the religiously unaffiliated, the percentage of warming by human activity folks increase to 58%, or 77% of those who think there’s global warming. Looking at the chart, clearly religion has an influence on temperature perception and attributed cause. The more religiously conservative, the less likely a person is to notice the warming and attribute it to human activity. Religious influence is endangering our life support system in (at least) two ways: Ignoring the problem of climate disruption (if you think that it’s either not happening or we’re not the biggest contributor, you’re not going to do anything about it) and multiplying fruitfully without regard to overpopulation (the more people there are on the planet, the more consumption happens, contributing more CO2 to the atmosphere).