Those Other People

One thing that bothers me a lot about some people's prognostications is how little they trust other people. Everyone knows how much everyone else is a hard core moocher. But of course, they themselves would never do such a thing.

If everyone says everyone else is a moocher, but they aren't, what is that supposed to mean? Do we really have such little faith in other people that we can't come together to solve problems in the most obvious way?

Universal social security could help all people with financial security. Such a system wouldn't work if everyone decided to quit their jobs and just live off of the pension. But I wouldn't do that. I bet you wouldn't do that. Would so many people do it that it would break the system? Even if the pension was such a small amount of money, you'd be barely scraping by with it? Somehow I don't think that's very likely.

Still, everyone knows everyone else is a terrible person. Just not them.

The Naivete of Libertarianism

Libertarians are either naive or cruel. Somehow they all seem to have a condescending attitude whenever they write about thinkers of competing ideologies, but really it's their own ideology that makes the least sense.

Their first failure is believing that an unregulated market is a free market. That is not the definition of a free market. A free market requires symmetric information by all parties involved. An unregulated market does not require information to be spread to all participants, so it is not a free market.

Additionally, markets will never take into account externalities. Pollution and public health would greatly suffer if factories were able to pump their toxins into the atmosphere. Without some form of regulation, factors like these would never be checked.

Libertarians also think that any agreement by 2 people should be allowed. However, as any lawyer will tell you, drawing up agreements is very difficult and time consuming. There is a ton of paperwork involved in the purchase of a house, but all of those forms are standardized and governed by various laws. They are designed to protect both parties in the transaction. Imagine if both parties had to comb through each and every word to make sure that the other hadn't changed some wording to completely overhaul the document. It would be an overwhelming burden.

People also have limited brainpower. If every time I went to the store to buy some milk, it would drive me crazy if I had to check every label to make sure it was pasteurized, homogenized, safely transported, and every other imaginable factor in the safe creation of milk. Even if I did manage to get all of that information together, who would stop them from lying? Who would punish them if they did?

Somehow, libertarians think that other political philosophies are naive, when they are the ones who think that if there are no rules, everything would be fantastic. Well, at the dawn of mankind, there were no rules. If it was such a great system back then, why hasn't it lasted until the present day?

Libertarians might say that the rise of governments ruined the pure world that existed before. But if a libertarian world was unable to stop the rise of oppression, doesn't that also mean libertarianism wouldn't protect people from oppression anyways?

Of course, maybe libertarians don't care if oppression happens as a result. Often these types of people also think they're above average and would benefit from a society with less rules. In that case they're pretty much bullies who wish the teacher would go away so they could extract what they're owed by people "beneath" them. In any case, there's no reason to believe their utopia would lead to any better outcomes than those of other misguided idealists.

Dogma

One of the key features of human society is the ability to cooperate with total strangers. For example, coworkers are not likely to have met before starting their jobs, but none the less are able to work towards a common goal. People from the same nation feel a kinship with one another even though they have never met. The same goes for religion and ethnicity.

Some of these bonds are stronger than others. While big box store employees may or may not feel a connection with each other, people from the same church will likely sacrifice a great deal for one another. Part of this binding agent is the shared identity of those involved.

This shared identity has been manipulated by those who wish to create a more cohesive society. Extremist groups often have a very simple if unrealistic view of the world. However, this simplicity allows many people to identify with that ideology, and creates a very strong bond between people with otherwise nothing in common. The communists during the 20th century were great exploiters of this fact. Modern day radical Islamists are similarly able to forge strong bonds and loyalties.

While it is easy for people with less attachment to reality to come up with simple philosophies for people to rally around, the more same people of the world should not ignore the power of shared philosophy. Defining one that is both easy to understand and support yet also appeals to our higher aspirations over our base instincts is not a simple task, but such a philosophy would help bring together the sensible people of the world against insanity.

Freedom

In America, the word "Freedom" gets thrown around a lot. Whenever someone does something that conservatives don't like, they always say it's taking away our "Freedom". Anything from better science standards in education to universal healthcare brings an angry roar to preserve "Freedom".

Strictly speaking, the are right that these initiatives restrict people ability to do certain things. Background checks on guns will force people to reveal more about themselves to the government. Not allowing people to dump toxic waste in the river forces companies to invest in proper disposal.

However, everything is a trade off, and some freedoms are more important than others. Having background checks on gun purchases trades the ability to buy weapons freely for a greater freedom from armed criminals. Stopping toxic waste dumps may cost a company a lot of money, but people who depend on the water will be free to use it without the fear of contamination.

All the ridiculous opposition to any action which restricts an action is blind to the other freedoms we gain from that restriction. With a stronger social safety net, people will be able to take more risks to pursue their passions without endangering their own livelihoods or those of the people who depend on them. Allowing people to fulfill themselves is definitely worth the cost of a few more dollars in taxes.

The End of History

The way history is taught, everything is simply presented as fact. Every event inevitable. The steady march of time takes on a heavy sense of fate. The course was never in doubt. The ending written in advance.

Of course, that is definitely not the case. No one would have predicted the rise of Rome during the Hellenic era. While later writers wrote that Rome was the successor of the great Greek civilizations that came before it, that was more of a tacked on fiction than anything else. Yet its legacy lives on today, immortalized by their marks on modern European language and culture. Every great nation on the continent claimed bits of Rome's glory as their own.

In 1770, none of the British American colonists would have guessed that just 6 years later, they would be declaring independence from their overseas rulers. Even fewer would dare gamble that the new government would take representational democracy to a whole new level and forgo a monarch, unlike almost every other nation in Europe. Yet by 1790, independence was won, a constitution was written, and the world was changed.

However, despite the great uncertainty surrounding any event in history, all that has come to pass is usually taught as a series of immutable events. The rough spots are smoothed over, giving a false veneer of perfection.

Since everything seems to have wrapped up so perfectly, some may even forgo thinking about current events. The cold war is over! The good guys won! McDonald's and KFC for everyone! Just a few small issues like malaria and global warming will be fixed shortly, and then there's nothing more to worry about! Of course, anyone paying attention will realize there are still more problems to be had.

Even then, by the time it comes to think about continuing history, there is always a disjunction between the pretend perfection of the past and the messiness of the present. What we had been taught were the perfect solutions to past problems are applied with disastrous results to new issues. It seems like the living are less competent and all knowing than our wise predecessors. After all, they solved everything perfectly! The fact that everything seems so uncertain and dire to us must mean that everything will come crashing down. We have arrived at the end of history.

This perspective does no one any good. Glossing over the faults and uncertainty of the past just leaves us scared and confused when confronting the future. Not everything that has happened was meant to happen. Not all the issues that confront us are unsolvable, even if no one has ever solved them before. We must brush away the illusion that history was perfect, embrace the fragility of fate's path, and fight to harness it into a better future.

Luck

It is rather daunting how little people control of their own lives. No one controls who their parents are. No one controls what era they were born in. No one picks how intelligent they are. Disposition to hard work is also just the luck of the draw. Some children are born with crippling disease, despite having done no wrong to anybody.

If pretty much everything about us is determined by luck, it's pretty much impossible to say that anyone really deserves better than anyone else. Even if someone works hard to attain a higher station in life, they may have just been born that way.

A market system can incentivize people to do certain actions. Growing food to feed people. Mining energy to light and heat. While people may deserve their gains from an economic standpoint, it does not directly follow that they deserve it from a moral standpoint. The market is merely a tool to encourage activity needed or desired by people. It is not a tool for determining the moral value of anything.

Agents of Change

Lots of change gets attributed to technology companies. Facebook changed the way we communicate. Google changed the way we search for information. Instagram changed the way we brag about ourselves.

The reality is none of those companies changed anything. All they did was write an app or make a website. Many other people have done that, and nothing really happened. What really changed things was individual people deciding to use these websites or apps instead of something else. There was no government mandate threatening to throw people in jail if they didn't sign up for Facebook. No holy decree came down demanding Google replace encyclopedias. No one made your post that vintage filter selfie of you on the beach with some totally hot guy/girl/man-eating bear on the beach.

To say that any of those companies changed people would be giving them way too much credit. They merely created a tool for doing something people were already doing. To say otherwise takes away the agency from the people actually performing the verbs.

After all, you are the one who is ineptly trying to flirt with people through text rather than in a sketchy alcohol service establishment. You are the one sitting on your butt Googling the best brand of butt plug rather than asking all your friends and neighbors. You are the one passive-aggressively showing your friends you're a better person than they are. None of those companies made you do any of those things. That was you. Active voice.

So the next time you want to blame some tech company for changing the way society works, realize that a company is just a small group of people. The only way change actually happened was that other people, not in the company, thought it was a good idea and started using the product. The next time you share a post to Facebook about how technology is ruining everything, realize that it couldn't have happened without your cooperation.