I haven’t posted in a while due mostly to school and its harsh demands on my time and creative energy. There have been a few things on my mind, though. Little things, liberty, government, morality.
It seems to me that government, by its nature, walks a very fine line between legitimate communal necessity on the one side and all the worst possible human failings on the other.
In any group beyond a certain size, (and I tend to think this size is defined by the number of people you can know on a first-name basis) some form of collective organization eventually becomes necessary. Some form of conflict mediation between members of the group, and some form of collective decision-making in issues that affect the community as a whole, are both needed for any kind of cohesiveness and stability. The problem seems to be that it is very hard to build a governing structure that does not put individual humans in positions of power. Once the position of power exists, the certainty of corruption exists. Perhaps more insidious than corruption is the tendency of people to do what they think is right. This is great on an individual basis, but when someone’s moral sense can become law, this is bad news.
You know this instinctively. In fact, it is programmed into moral brains to avoid imposing our moral will onto others, even when a greater good is at stake (see http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/293/5537/2105), despite evidence to the contrary in the behavior of religious fundamentalists. When it comes down to it, most people have a strong sense of what is right, but reject the idea of personally forcing someone else to follow their rules. So why all the abuse? The answer is essential corruptive nature of power and, dare I say it, human nature. Not that human nature is inherently corrupted, or corruptible, but there will always be some percentage of the population who seeks advantage above all else. This is a necessary component of the population, just as we also need a few (but not very many) radical altruists. All it takes is one person with the will to exploit the cracks.
So a position of power and advantage exists, and those who seek power and advantage naturally gravitate to them. Generally any one person is power is not too bad, but the power of the position expands over time, and those who don’t think it through are happy to have the government enforce the rules they agree with, not realizing that someone they disagree with in that same position will have the power to enforce different rules. After all, when it is the government, things are abstracted to a degree, you are not personally putting murderers to death for instance, but you can feel good about supporting a government which happens to be doing what you personally feel needs to be done with murderers. (Of course, when someone has the power to put murderers to death, all they have to do is call you a murderer…)
But you know all this, its the ancient problem of governance that has plagued our hierarchy-loving social animal selves since the first large-scale cultures emerged. The question is, what do we do about it? Two questions occur to me:
1) Why have a stable coherent society in the first place? OK, stability is good, but when we say coherent, we tend to mean contiguous. Which is to say, we Americans all live within these borders, so we are American, and the United States government defines our society. Why? Because historically, the land you lived on was your source of food, water, power, and history. Territory was everything, and those who held it were joined to it very deeply. Is this really relevant in the modern age? Boundaries are increasingly meaningless in terms of communication and trade, and these are the sources of our power these days. We separate ourselves from the land that feeds us, we buy food, music and ideas from around the world, and our neighbors are those we know online. Why is America a geographic area, and not just an ideal, a philosophy? Why is a community of scientists from around the world not a far more sensible fundamental societal unit than the random handful of people who live within your congressional district?
2) Is the coming reign of our robotic overlords really such a bad thing? You can’t corrupt a computer algorithm with power and influence…..
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