Monthly Archives: October 2016

Future of Voluntary Law, Social Promises, Voluntary Law

A Promising Chaos

chaos-by-brilliant-hues

It is not in the least bit presumptuous to design a new legal system based in personal self-sovereignty and mutual benefit, for peacefully out-competing and thus, replacing all legal systems based in privilege and oppression.  There is no presumption being made about the future.  The future of a chaotic system is unpredictable, because the granularity of knowledge about the system’s present state is always coarser than the granularity of the differences that can lead to divergent outcomes.  In other words, we can never know perfectly where we are going, because we can never know perfectly where we are.  Certainly, human society is a chaotic system, full of uncertainty and tumult.  We can design the new legal system to fulfill all our design objectives given all factors we know of, but cannot know whether, or how, the design will be implemented.

What we strive for is the most optimal design, given what we know, without any presumption of destiny.  In that spirit of optimizing the design, we propose phrasing voluntary laws in accordance with their intended effect.  That is, as personal promises to accept a certain consequence “B” in the event one commits a certain act “A.” So for example “The penalty for a slap in the face shall be two counter-slaps” becomes, in promise-based law:”If I slap you in the face, I promise I will let you slap me back twice, unless my slap was justified by proportional self-defense.”  This is a silly example, of course, but illustrates the point:  voluntary laws are essentially socially directed, personally made promises to other society members.  For example, some voluntary laws are social promises to provide no less than a specified remedy for specified wrongs, subject to certain defenses.  Application of TROTWET ensures that voluntary laws are in fact social promises.  It is helpful to the people who must understand and implement their own laws, if the laws are phrased in a way that more naturally aligns with their ordinary meaning, and does not obviously implicate revolutionary consequences.

This is the thinking behind VLDA’s pivot to “social promises” and “social promise societies” as better terminology for engaging the general public.  “Voluntary law,” with its revolutionary overtones, will not be discarded, but reserved mainly for the smoky back rooms where the socially aware exchange ideas, such as places like this blog.  And perhaps for discussing reforms in state laws.

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Image credit to Robbi Robbins (Brilliant Hues)

Some Rights Reserved under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

 

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Future of Voluntary Law

Plans For A Voluntary Future

bear-with-imagination-and-sky-small

I’ve been away for a while, and starting to feel like I owe my cherished readers an explanation for the long pause in new posts.  All is well with me, and the pause does not indicate any waning of enthusiasm for the principles written about here for the past few years.  Besides the usual friffage of fascist toil and family life, I’ve been busier than usual with political activism.  That is a topic for another day.

There been no lassitude.  I’ve been busy finishing up my book, “An Introduction To Voluntary Law.”  I’ve reorganized it, written more than a dozen new chapters, and edited some of the chapters already posted here.  It’s coming together very nicely, and I hope will be ready for publishing early next year.  Finishing the book is not just an arbitrary goal.  It is a closing of the philosophical circle.  There is a vision, an analysis, a plan – quite a bit more than I’ve already published here.  My statement of introduction to a new type of law, and a new type of hope, is nearly complete.

Plans are in the works to set up a registered non-profit, to obtain funding for carrying the mission of the Voluntary Law Development Association to the next phase.  The new entity will be a non-profit, public benefit educational institute for development of voluntary law, for instruction and certification of voluntary law society members for various roles, and for empirical research in the science and practice of voluntary law.  Next year and beyond will be occupied with developing the resources, human and financial, for carrying out these missions.

The website vlda.org will be revamped too.  With publication of the book, there will be less need to lay out the basic principles in detail on a website.  The site will evolve more towards a news hub for the few people interested in my personal thoughts and doings in the area of voluntary law.  While the purpose of vlda.org will diminish, the amount of online content and instruction in voluntary law will increase, under the new educational institute.

Among the colleges of the new Institute, a College of Social Engineering will begin its founding project: configuring the network tools that will enable the world’s first online social promise society.  Every voluntary law is a social promise, and nothing more, and every social promise society will be a voluntary law society as I’ve been writing about here.  We won’t call social promises “laws,” because people have forgotten what law is, and the term confuses hearts and minds.  In the end, real and functioning social promise societies will teach people that social promises are the only laws worth following.  And that only laws worth following are actually “laws.”  A great deal of what people call the law today will be finally recognized and rejected as barbaric, destructive diktats.

All that explains the pause.  See you on the other side.

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