L. K. Samuels: Trending quotes

“How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? How do you keep a wave upon the sand?' These words from The Sound of Music bring out the elusive nature of chaos. In life, most things cannot be captured for long. It is like trying to encapsulate time itself.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. vii.

Life , Music , Nature , Time

“Governments are terrorists, but they hide their actions behind the label of nationalism and patriotism: war becomes defense; theft becomes “taxation”; slavery becomes 'conscription'; terrorism becomes 'defense.' Few people question the violations; rather, if they do protest, it is because the government is oppressing the 'wrong' group of people, and not because they regard coercion itself as wrong.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: Facets of Liberty: A Libertarian Primer, (1985), pp. 139-140. (Chapter 17: “Who’s Afraid of No Government?”)

War , People , Question

“Without precise predictability, control is impotent and almost meaningless. In other words, the lesser the predictability, the harder the entity or system is to control, and vice versa. If our universe actually operated on linear causality, with no surprises, uncertainty, or abrupt changes, all future events would be absolutely predictable in a sort of waveless orderliness.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 280

Universe , Change , Future

“The more complexity, the more unpredictability and therefore the more uncontrollability. You cannot control what you cannot predict.”

L. K. Samuels

Speech at the Libertopia Festival, San Diego, CA (August 30, 2013)

“Complexity has always been difficult to resolve and to understand. Evolutionary biologists were among the first scientists to recognize this problem, when they dug their way toward new theories about evolution. They discovered that matter does not lack purpose.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 129

Way , Understanding , Problem

“Government succeeds by failing: the more incompetence, the greater the potential reward in the arena of the public sector.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 246

“Disorder is more exacting, arising when coercion is substituted for coordination—preventing members in a system from determining their own destiny. History is littered with examples of excluded parts rising up to confront those exclusive few who claim they are representing the whole.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 130

History , Parting

“The politics of control and manipulation can only have a degenerative effect on civilization and stability. When larger systems dominate smaller ones, society and its members must face a host of bad choices, debilitating harm, and dicey outcomes. Once the leviathan has been released, few can really control its movements. So once the damage has become visible, historians can point to the inevitable source of the criminality: the ‘structured order’ of politics, rather than an ‘unstructured order’ of the people. To the gullible, this is a shocking revelation. How could any system entrusted with maintaining order destroy the very thing it had sworn to uphold?”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 91

People

“True change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is futile for political systems to force human beings to cooperate or construct social bonding structures. People already do that, naturally; it is evident in our evolutionary history.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 348

People , History , Nature , Change

“Simplicity in a system tends to increase that system’s efficiency. Because less can go wrong with fewer parts, less will. Complexity in a system tends to increase that system’s inefficiency; the greater the number of variables, the greater the probability of those variables clashing, and in turn, the greater the potential for conflict and disarray. Because more can go wrong, more will. That is why centralized systems are inclined to break down quickly and become enmeshed in greater unintended consequences.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 191

Parting

“When it comes right down to physical war and bloodshed, governments don’t protect people; people protect governments.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 180

War , People

“Because information is often biased, outdated, or inadequate, command-based systems rely on obtuse information to produce blunt solutions. Wielding force like drunken revelers, political systems gamble on the singularity of direction to fix a multiplicity of problems, woefully ignorant that one size does not fit all. Blinded by political ideologies, they rarely act to solve underlying problems. Karl Hess (1923-1994), a former presidential speech writer, noted this condition, observing, ‘Politicians occasionally do the right thing—but only after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 17

Problem

“The economics of Italian Fascism is often ignored or trivialized because so much of it is found in today's world economies.”

L. K. Samuels

“The Socialist Economics of Italian Fascism,” Library of Economics and Liberty, July 6, 2015 http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2015/Samuelsfascism.html

World

“Despite the absence of physical equality in nature, political systems engage in grand endeavors to dictate perfection and equality in a universe devoid of both. In their egalitarian and quixotic quest to redistribute wealth, they rob Peter to pay Paul, which only creates a state of dependency, not of equality. Any attempt to impose equality can only bring about more inequality. Rev. William J. H. Boetcker expressed this same insight in 1916, writing, 'You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 72

Nature , Strong , Universe , Dependency

“Money and generous benefits can easily alter a person’s political outlook. Ideology follows the money.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 301

Money , Personality

“Under complexity science, the more interacting factors, the more unpredictable and irregular the outcome. To be succinct, the greater the complexity, the greater the unpredictability.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 40

Science

“Things evolve to evolve. Evolutionary processes are the linchpin of change. These processes of discovery represent a complexity of simple systems that flux in perpetual tension as they teeter at the edge of chaos. This whirlwind of emergence is responsible for the spontaneous order and higher, organized complexity so noticeable in biological evolution—one–celled critters beefing up to become multicellular organisms.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 335

Change

“Without chaos there would be no creation, no structure and no existence. After all, order is merely the repetition of patterns; chaos is the process that establishes those patterns. Without this creative self-organizing force, the universe would be devoid of biological life, the birth of stars and galaxies—everything we have come to know.”

L. K. Samuels

"Chaos Gets a Bad Rap: Importance of Chaology to Liberty", Strike-The-Root (Feb. 18, 2015) http://www.strike-the-root.com/chaos-gets-bad-rap-importance-of-chaology-to-liberty

Life , Star , Birth , Universe

“Order is not universal. In fact, many chaologists and physicists posit that universal laws are more flexible than first realized, and less rigid—operating in spurts, jumps, and leaps, instead of like clockwork. Chaos prevails over rules and systems because it has the freedom of infinite complexity over the known, unknown, and the unknowable.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 9

Law , Freedom , Universe

“Decentralized systems are the quintessential patrons of simplicity. They allow complexity to rise to a level at which it is sustainable, and no higher.”

L. K. Samuels

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 221