"Martin H. Greenberg & Mark Tier - Visions of Liberty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenberg Martin H)

by Mark Tier
Imagine we're on a plane; we've crossed an ocean, we've landed; we're taxiing up to the gate. As we file
off the plane we have our passports ready.

But something rather strange happens: no one wants to look at them. We see no official-looking types of
any kind.

Perhaps we have to get our luggage first. But as we come down to the baggage carousels we don't see
any customs or immigration officials; nor do we see any barrier between us and the outside world. We
can pick up our bags and walk straight out of the terminal off an international flight into a taxi. Which is
exactly what we do.

Welcome to Freelandia, a country—perhaps it's better to call it a place—which is truly free: there's no
government to invade and restrict our liberties. Of course, Freelandia doesn't exist (yet) except in my
imagination.

And in science fiction, the literature of the imagination. Where else can we skim across the surface of
black holes, dive into the sun, and journey to the beginning, the end, and the edge of the universe? And
visit a society without government that works.

Could that be possible in reality, not just in science fiction? After all, if you counted the number of
societies without government on the fingers of one hand, you wouldn't even open your fist. And if
government disappeared, wouldn't the result be anarchy? Chaos? Isn't government an essential
prerequisite of peace and order?

If we were to travel back in time, some ten or twenty thousand years, before the development of
agriculture and the beginnings of civilization, we wouldn't find any governments as we know them today.
Homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers, living in tribes of some hundred or so people. Yes, tribes have
rulers too. Chiefs and shamans. But tribal chieftains rarely have the power toforce their decisions on the
members of their tribe. They are more like leading citizens who rule by moral suasion and consensus
rather than police power.

That all changed with the development of agriculture some ten thousand years ago. For the first time, a
few dozen square miles of land could support human populations much larger than a hundred-odd
hunter-gatherers. For the first time, our ancestors stayed fixed in one place.

For the first time, there was something to loot.

Pick up any history book and you'll find a record of kings, princes, shahs, chiefs, emperors, czars and
their battles. What were they fighting over? Today, governments will tell you they're fighting for freedom.
But freedom is a very recent phenomenon. The concept of freedom originated with the Greeks and
Romans, but did not become a part of the political landscape until the Renaissance just a few hundred
years ago.

Even today, words that we take for granted like "freedom," "rights," "liberty," and "free will" simply have
no counterparts in most of the world's languages. For most of the world's people, these concepts just
don't exist.
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