A lot of damage has been done, and the lumpenproletariat is very, very stupid and wants to regard its political party the way it regards its gridiron football team. And it likes the propaganda that media feeds it. If we’re going to create a cohesive public-driven, public-serving government, we’ll have to invent some sociology that we don’t have yet.
I don’t know if that’s fully possible. I think the tools are already here, but they’re just really hard to use. Even an effective ideology like Marxism couldn’t rise above the basic mechanisms of power and social dynamics. I don’t think we should look to transcend human nature, but work with it. No theory will change how life develops based on its environment, so we need to focus on changing that environment for the better rather than searching for the impossible. Ideas can’t save us by themselves anyhow.
The difference between transcending human nature and working with human nature is a sorites paradox, and has been since the dawn of civilization. Each step of creating a society that allowed for larger societies, from dozens to thousands to millions, was transcending human nature until we found a system that worked. Yes, every civilization decays and falters, often due to disrupting factors, hence the classic goal of a thousand year reign hasn’t yet been achieved.
Sociological development can be used to facilitate public involvement in civics, or to shield civics from public involvement with a veneer of deception. The problem isn’t that we don’t know the problems or solutions to them, but that those who gain power would rather be powerful than functional or happy, and are glad to exert that power to preserve it even against those who mean them well. It’s a warbler feeding and nurturing a cuckoo chick (at the expense of her own offspring) except in this case the chick never matures and flies off, rather it just keeps growing and sucking up more resources like a cancer.
How do we work with this human nature? Consider also if we fail to curb this tendency, the proverbial chick will also poison our global ecology until it is uninhabitable even to those who mind the industries that feed it. Hopefully, it is a barrier we break much the way we’ve escaped monarchy. But is that transcending human nature or working with it?
Personally, I’m already coming to terms the human species is facing existential risk, and if it doesn’t facilitate its own extinction, may cause so much damage as to limit our future ambitions; no space-faring colonization in our future, and most of our culture as we know it today is not going to survive the next few centuries regardless of whether the species does.
The whole problem stems from us prioritizing the species over each other. When we worry about genes or humanity as a concept, we miss out on the billions of people that actually matter. If we all choose to not reproduce, instead focusing on making the most of our lives, it’d be better than our descendants living enslaved by a societal machine till heat death. We think about the forest instead of the trees, when the former only exists for the sake of the latter.
The sad truth of capitalism is that not even the rich are in charge. The principles of accumulating power drive it, not the well being of wealthy families. If they escape the cycle and focus on their own happiness, someone else replaces them. It’s power for the sake of power. Not even the dictator really matters, just their power.
I don’t know if that’s fully possible. I think the tools are already here, but they’re just really hard to use. Even an effective ideology like Marxism couldn’t rise above the basic mechanisms of power and social dynamics. I don’t think we should look to transcend human nature, but work with it. No theory will change how life develops based on its environment, so we need to focus on changing that environment for the better rather than searching for the impossible. Ideas can’t save us by themselves anyhow.
The difference between transcending human nature and working with human nature is a sorites paradox, and has been since the dawn of civilization. Each step of creating a society that allowed for larger societies, from dozens to thousands to millions, was transcending human nature until we found a system that worked. Yes, every civilization decays and falters, often due to disrupting factors, hence the classic goal of a thousand year reign hasn’t yet been achieved.
Sociological development can be used to facilitate public involvement in civics, or to shield civics from public involvement with a veneer of deception. The problem isn’t that we don’t know the problems or solutions to them, but that those who gain power would rather be powerful than functional or happy, and are glad to exert that power to preserve it even against those who mean them well. It’s a warbler feeding and nurturing a cuckoo chick (at the expense of her own offspring) except in this case the chick never matures and flies off, rather it just keeps growing and sucking up more resources like a cancer.
How do we work with this human nature? Consider also if we fail to curb this tendency, the proverbial chick will also poison our global ecology until it is uninhabitable even to those who mind the industries that feed it. Hopefully, it is a barrier we break much the way we’ve escaped monarchy. But is that transcending human nature or working with it?
Personally, I’m already coming to terms the human species is facing existential risk, and if it doesn’t facilitate its own extinction, may cause so much damage as to limit our future ambitions; no space-faring colonization in our future, and most of our culture as we know it today is not going to survive the next few centuries regardless of whether the species does.
The whole problem stems from us prioritizing the species over each other. When we worry about genes or humanity as a concept, we miss out on the billions of people that actually matter. If we all choose to not reproduce, instead focusing on making the most of our lives, it’d be better than our descendants living enslaved by a societal machine till heat death. We think about the forest instead of the trees, when the former only exists for the sake of the latter.
The sad truth of capitalism is that not even the rich are in charge. The principles of accumulating power drive it, not the well being of wealthy families. If they escape the cycle and focus on their own happiness, someone else replaces them. It’s power for the sake of power. Not even the dictator really matters, just their power.