Sunday 13, February 2022
Credentialism
Nobody is happy with the political system we have. Probably nobody has ever been happy with the regime they live under. It’s like a knockout tournament in tennis: everyone who enters ends up losing his last match, with a single exception, whatever the number of entries.
Humans have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about why this is, and what system they can devise which will do a better job. I guess that in primitive societies and in animal groups, there was no overarching set of rules. The rewards went to the strongest, and disputes were resolved by fighting. This does not work above a certain size of society, so the next least bad system is to let a king emerge. Society strikes a bargain that it will give up its right to use force to the king, who in exchange will use what is now his monopoly of force to settle disputes through something called law.
The practicalities of having the king resolve a dispute over the right to farm some out of the way field in the dark interior doesn’t work, so this monopoly of power is franchised out to lots of minor kings, or barons to whom these powers are delegated. This seems to be a workable system which seems to have been refined over many millenia. To make it workable, a system of law which codifies reasonable behaviour is developed and a specialized profession is created to apply these rules, and to whom power to resolve disputes is delegated.
By a process of evolution, societies each discover a system that is no less bad than neighbouring societies. These systems are battle harded, and work, but undoubtedly create winners and losers. Because all societies have losers, all societies have individuals who think that the systems they live under are unfair. To reverse this unfairness, alternative modes of organization are proposed, and end up being tried.
These new systems: democracy, socialism, democratic socialism, anarchism, liberalism, libertarianism, Marxism, Stalinism, Xi Jin Ping thought, all probably have merit, but do not fix the fundamental problem that they create new winners and new losers. There is another system, conservatism, which is the thesis that however bad the current system is all alternative systems will be even worse, and at least we know exactly where the flaws in our current system are and can individually adapt our lives to minimize the downside.
In all societies, there is a battle for hearts and minds, and the battlefield is the media, and, increasingly, social media. Open debate is not encouraged. Every side wants to avoid being entirely honest about the incentives they face, and the consequences for the losers who will be created if their proposals are enacted. So, we end up with a sort of pretend debate where neither side is allowed to say what it is really thinking. In fact, there is not really any debate. There are just parallel campaigns where different parties, different political philosophies plug their particular line as persuasively as they can in perfectly isolated siloes. The elites have discovered that direcly engaging with their opponents is a futile exercise. Buying a newspaper, or setting up a Facebook group with a hidden agenda is just so much more effective. I don’t mean buying today’s paper. I mean, like Jeff Bezos buys newspapers. It’s even more effective to write a book. Remember those?
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