H.C. Minh wrote:

So the final question is "are people capable of a form of
'altruism' by attempting to negotiate before shooting"?

Capable? Most people probably are. Likely to attempt negotiation?
Based on what passes for pro-gun rhetoric in this country, I'd guess not.

The only motivation for anyone to negotiate is the belief that
there's something to gain. If I believe, however, that I'm better
armed, more skilled, quicker on the trigger, or otherwise very likely to
prevail in a gunfight, then negotiation isn't necessary. I can get
everything I want by shooting first, instead of settling for only part
of what I want as a result of negotiation. Whether I actually WILL
prevail after the shooting starts is another question; but by the time
we answer that one, the opportunity to negotiate is long gone.

Heinlein was good at asking provocative questions, and at providing
answers which, I believe, were intended to be extreme rather than
accurate. Rather than a true sage or philosopher, IMHO, he was more
like an extremely interesting mega-troll. And one of the most common
problems with taking his ideas too seriously is the fact that so many of
them assumed a world in which ALL his proposals were accepted and
adopted completely and simultaneously. That's one of the luxuries of
writing fiction, and of specualating about a future that hasn't yet
become real.

In real life, every man will not make himself dangerous on the same
day, in the same way, or to the same extent. And the people who go
first, if real history is any indication, might very well prevent all
the rest from following their lead.

If I have a gun, then you need one. If I'm pointing my gun at your
head, and telling you that I don't want you armed, then you're not going
to find Heinlein's proposal real useful.

Of course, that's exactly the argument used so often by pro-gun
activists. And it's the reason we have a "right to bear arms" in the US
constitution. In effect, the second ammendment says that if the
government tries to subvert us at gun point, then we ought to be able to
take Heinlein's suggestion, and point our own guns right back at the
government, and thereby compell our leaders to negotiate. That, in
principle, prevents tyranny.

What Heinlein omits from his over-simplified world is the very real
fact that all arms are not created equal. If a cop points his pistol at
me for unjust or oppressive reasons, I can point mine back at him. Fair
enough. Will that compell him to become reasonable and to negotiate
with me? Not likely. It'll instead compell him to call for backup.
I'll do the same, of course. Then the cop will call for rifles and
shotguns, since we're at a standoff with handguns. My friends and I
will respond in kind. Then the cop calls for an armored vehicle. I can
probaly match that, since I'm a machinist who knows how to tinker with
cars, so we're still even. Then the cop gets a helicopter, or an army
tank from the local national guard station, or, eventually, a whole air
force. And I'm gonna have a real hard time keeping up for very long.
So, in the end, the only thing that's negotiable is how ****ed off the
cops and the government are, and how badly they're going to treat me
after I've made them haul out their tanks and air forces. I don't win.

Of course, if you carry "the right to bear arms" to its logical
extreme, then I SHOULD have access to all the weapons that the
government has. In fact, I should have access to any and all forms of
self defense that ANYBODY else has, anywhere in the world, since I never
know where a threat to my safety and freedom might come from.

Does that work? I doubt it. As in any other human endeavor, there
will be a wide range of skills, financial resources, and ruthlessness,
among the members of any significant population. In a big enough
population, it's reasonable to assume that the capacity to be dangerous
will be distributed in a nice, neat, bell-curve kind of way. Roughly
two thirds of us will be close to the average, and therefore able to
effect a standoff with one another in most cases, and to make
negotiation preferable to gunshots. And about one sixth of us will be
at the bottom end of the curve, effectively powerless.

Please note that "powerless" involves only the capacity for
self-defense. Someone who's not good with guns, but good at something
else, like maybe surgery, might be an extremely valuable member of our
society; but might still be unable to negotiate for his freedom, his
life, or even for the things he needs to practice surgery, and to save
other lives. Not a good situation, when you consider how many kinds of
vital, productive work can only take place in an environment of relative
security and freedom, and which don't necessarily involve marital skills
of any kind.

And, of course, there will be roughly one sixth of the population
who are "ahead of the curve", and who don't need to negotiate at all
with the other 84% of us who aren't as dangerous as they are. How do we
protect ourselves from them?

Heinlein's proposal, followed carefully and logically, and combined
with natural, inescapable, random differences among human beings,
creates an immediate and unimpeachable aristocracy of firepower, which
the population as a whole will be unable to overthrow. Worse, Heinlein
implicitly ENDORSES the creation of this special class, and discourages
the arguments, political processes, and social attitudes which, in real
history, have been the only ways that human beings have ever come even
close to actually protecting themselves from large-scale gunpoint
oppression.

And if this aristocracy exists, of course, there is certainly no
guarantee that it won't be at least partially populated by true
sociopaths, and become the WORST thing that ever happenned to humanity.

You may recall that Heinlien had an answer to all these problems.
In "Stranger In A Strange Book", he invented a special class of "perfect
witnesses" - people with perfect memories, perfect integrity, and
perfect capacities for logic and judgement, who were called upon to be
the mediators or arbitrators in all forms of human negotiations and
disputes. These people were universally accepted, and were beyond
reproach or question. They could, therefore, become the trump card
played by justice and sanity, whenever those things were threatened.

Obviously, this answer was pure fiction. We'd all like to think
that there's a god, or a perfect witness, or SOMEBODY somewhere who
could, with the wave of a hand, sweep away all the ignorance, prejudice,
and dishonesty in the world, and who could make sure that justice was a
real, constant, and reliable part of our lives. Sadly, that ain't gonna
happen in the real world anytime soon.

The other thing Heinlein ignored in his "perfect world" scenarios is
the fact that there has always been, and will always be, a significant
(and growing) segment of any population which does NOT see negotiation
as a good idea under any circumstances. There are always some people
who - at least in their own views - have no hope of gaining anything
from negotiations, and nothing to lose by choosing other options. I'm
thinking about some of the folks who now populate the worst
neighborhoods of America's inner cities - people for whom life is cheap,
and killing is considered a part of life, and dying isn't all that big a
deal. Or maybe the Palistinians would fit in this category. An amazing
number of them seem willing to commit suicide, just for the privilege of
killing others while they're at it. These people are the ones who DON'T
think that a general melee, or any other form of random violence is such
a bad idea. The seem to imagine that ANY change from the status quo
would be an improvement, and that killing and dying are acceptible
prices to pay for the hope of change.

Would people like this become less of a threat to general security
and freedom if they were as well armed as any other people, or any other
organization of people? Or, to put it another way, would the world be
safer from terrorism if Al Queda were allowed and encouraged to have its
own air force, rather than needing to steal commercial planes in their
pursuit of what they consider justice? Did the knowledge that the US is
well armed, and very capable of shooting back, deter the attacks of two
years ago? Does the knowledge that police forces are well armed, well
orgainzed, well trained, and very capable of returning fire, prevent
drug-gangs from shooting at each other in the streets of our cities, or
bank robbers from robbing banks every single day? Of course not.

To a "reasonable" person, the threat of capable response from an
enemy might be cause to consider negotiation preferable. But that kind
of "reason" is not now, never has been, and never will be, nearly
universal. Even when the weapons in question were nuclear warheads, and
even when the "negotiators" were supposedly the best and brightest
leaders that major nations could produce, and even when the destruction
of an entire species was conceivable, the US and the USSR came
astonishingly close to trading shots, on at least one occasion. And,
obviously, Saddam Hussein and company weren't constrained by the
knowledge (even though it had been dramatically demonstrated just a few
years earlier) that the US could win in a gunfight. And there are
plenty of other examples, of course, of people who are just as happy to
inflict pain and injury on others, as to win some benefit for themselves.

If Heinlein truly believed that people like these would eventually
be selected out of existence, then he was a fool. The numbers of
dissatisfied, disenfranchised, disgruntled, disfuntional, and disturbed
people are limitless. Every time we kill one, two others get mad at us.
The people in the middle east, and in the Balkan countries, and other
places, have been fighting the same wars, for the same reasons, over the
same little bits of sand and dirt, for THOUSANDS of years! MILLIONS
have been killed, and there are millions more still fighting. The
de-selection that Heinlein imagines is simply NOT going to happen.

Heinlein was an optimist - even to the point of being irresponsibly
optimistic about human nature, and about the homogeneity of motivations
that drive six billion individual people.

In my view, the more we encourage everybody to be dangerous, the
more total danger there will be. That doesn't mean I'm not concerned
about the dangers that already exist. I just don't think that adding
more fuel to the fire will cause it to burn itself out without also
destroying the whole house. I'm still hoping that parts of the house
might be saved by the skillful use of some water or a fire extinguisher.

KG
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