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Notes -
I'd agree that the quality of 'tyrannies' (a rather loaded term for "rule by one") "depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them"… but only because all governments depend massively on the quality of the people in them. Personnel is policy, personnel will always be policy. If 'tyranny' is thus problematic, it's only because, like Aristotle noted, it's higher variance than the "rule of few," and "rule of many" is lower variance still, as larger numbers "average out" the extremes of both vice and virtue.
Going back to my comment in the "liberalism and parenting" thread, the liberal project has been about seeking out a set of top-down institutions so well-designed to align incentives that the quality of individual people within the institutions no longer matters, working even for Kant's "rational devils." I'd argue that this is an unworkable project with an impossible goal; any government depending upon human beings depends massively on the quality of those human beings, so we must stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtuous leaders.
But we will never stop dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. Five minutes with the average person should tell you all you need to know about including them in your system. You either have to build a more perfect system, or exclude those people entirely.
People consistently try to build a more perfect system because they notice things are broken, and correctly intuit that building a more perfect system is preferable to trying to make other people perfect.
Why not? Were people in the Middle Ages doing so? Or did they hold that
And that the world is fallen, we are barred from Eden by the sin of Adam, the poor we will always have with us, and perfection will only be in the Kingdom to come?
People have always worked to make things a little better, but they accepted that some things are just facts of life, that cannot be changed, only endured. Only with the "Enlightenment" did the West really start trying to immanentize the eschaton.
Why can't we reverse this? Why can't we get back to people accepting that parts of life, including the government from time to time, are simply going to suck, and that's just how it will always be?
Much as with the medieval era, it seems like a total civilizational collapse back into barbarism and pre-industrial technology would probably do the trick, so why not something less extreme?
I hope I don't need to point out that this is a hard sell to anyone in the information age. Please, by all means, share your less extreme plan for getting people to accept this.
I'd say you do, actually. Are you familiar with Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions? Because what I'm describing is part of Sowell's "Tragic Vision," which he holds as defining the right, in contrast to the left's "Utopian Vision." And even now, 37 years after that book was published, there are still plenty of people who hold the Tragic Vision.
So, what is your plan?
I don't particularly have one for much of anything cultural or political except "wait for our Augustus." But just because I, personally, don't have a specific plan for accomplishing the triumph of the Tragic Vision over the Utopian Vision, doesn't mean it can't happen.
I'm very confused. Please don't take this the wrong way, maybe I'm misunderstanding your position.
You want people to accept that parts of life are going to suck and will always suck. You want people to put in a leader that will make things suck... less...? Or put in a leader that will make things suck more? Or are you asking for a leader that will make things suck less for you and more for others?
How are you going to get people to accept that things will suck for them forever? When in the information age, it is trivially easy to be bombarded with information about how great things are for some of them? Even monkeys flip their shit when they see another monkey gets grapes.
I mean, you could just go directly to naked use of force, but that doesn't seem to be what you're proposing. Unless you want an Augustus to apply force for you.
How did we get most people throughout human history to accept it? It's not like your average peasant was entirely unaware of how much better off the local baron was than him, and yet they accepted that this was just the way the world is. Every single Chinese revolution until the late 19th century took "the system" as basically fixed and was merely about changing who sat in the big seat.
The issue is utopianism. You get the difference between "we can make things better" and "we can make things perfect," yes? The position that human ingenuity can be applied to solve a number of problems, and the position that human ingenuity can be applied to solve all our problems? The difference between "we could do more to help the poor" and "we could eliminate poverty"?
Again, it's the idea that every problem has a solution, that we can intelligently design ever-better institutions (superior to any locally-evolved ones, no matter how time-tested), that we can build Heaven upon Earth — this is what I'm against. You seem to think that this view is the natural, default human perspective. I'm with Sowell in pointing out that, historically, it is anything but the norm. You may have absorbed the Utopian Vision so thoroughly that you can't readily conceive people not doing so, but even now in "the Information Age," the Tragic Vision still has its adherents.
I get that irrational persistence and sunk cost fallacy are pretty common human failings, but I've got to hope that after enough failures to immanentize the eschaton, enough failures of liberalism and "enlightenment" thought, enough disasters (or maybe just one disaster of sufficient severity) from attempts to achieve a "perfect system" that gets all the incentives aligned just right… that even the most irrationally persistent will call it quits and accept the limits of human capacity.
(Whether or not this either necessitates or gives rise to a return to religion — given the association of the Tragic Vision with traditional religion, and the difficulty of living with both it and atheism — is another question.)
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