📝: democracy, capitalism, polite secular agnosticism, etc are all appealing in that they aren’t answers to the questions that they address, ie they’re systems which punt the decision-making to the sum of whatever people do personally, which is what would happen if you didn’t have a system in place
I don’t like +1ing anything, but this is an important point that I’ve repeatedly tried to make (with a lot less brevity).
Also it’s worth saying that “appealing” != “is actually a good answer.”
this is true but it seems like undersells the merit of those things, insofar as the questions that they address probably don’t have satisfactory answers and when you don’t have a system you’re significantly more likely to have brutal internecine warfare that decays into a system controlled by whoever does the warfare the best, so being able to stuff the “system hole” full of gauze in order to prevent that failure state actually is really useful
1. In an absolute formal sense, sure, those questions don’t have universal answers…but they do have answers that work well for large numbers of people, and which sometimes (for one reason or another) require some level of institutional support in order to be implemented. Culture actually does useful things, because humans with free choice don’t invariably gravitate towards the solutions that are best for them. This is a bog-standard trad / paleoconservative point, and it’s often used to obfuscate important truths, but that doesn’t make it false in and of itself.
2. More importantly, the “system-less system” does in fact have its own emergent internal subsystems, which operate according their own inhuman logic and give rise to their own forms of destructive warfare. Capitalism (in the ideal sense) precludes coercive theft, but it certainly encourages various forms of sociopathic profit-seeking, which in context can’t be constrained by “the authorities notice that there’s a problem and crack down on it.” I’m not going to go into the parallels with democracy and polite secular agnosticism, because Internet Explosions, but they’re obvious.
…and, yes, all this is infinitely better than actual faction warfare in the streets. But it doesn’t seem like a good ceiling for social achievement.
these are all good contributions
i was sort of thinking, yk, in an american context, basically the only like claim the us is making on a country scale is that the dollar should be a universal unit of account
(also that the us is morally justified by default to the extent that they cant stop bombing the middle east bc that would require deciding that that was a mistake in the first place)
like instead of systems there are objects with system type which just say “do not put anything else here”, which is like kind of also what they’re doing with the dollar on a global scale? “this is how everyone will count, now go forth and do whatever” as a combination of ontological control and not actually doing much. im not being very articulate.
…eh. Words are hard.
Come to think of it, I wrote a short essay on this topic a while ago.