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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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How are you going to get people to accept that things will suck for them forever?

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.)

I also strongly disagree that utopianism on earth is possible. I am not your enemy, and I've been the victim of this more than enough.

But I also know that people won't ever stop. I can't think of any way to stop them other than killing them or oppressing them in large numbers. Maybe once we build the god machine that's got an IQ several factors of ten above mine we can turn it to this problem, if someone doesn't turn it to the problem of building utopia first.

Please, tell me what your plan is for getting people to accept that problems cannot be solved, that we should all roll around in the dirt forever. People want to make things perfect. People will never stop dreaming of the perfect system that will allocate things perfectly and solve for all suffering under the sun. You can't tell them heaven does not exist and then castigate them for wanting to build one.

If you don't have a plan, then this is just whining - complaining about human nature. Sure, you can argue for RETVRN to the old days when people just accepted that things sucked, but how are you going to get people to accept it?

Go straight to violence? I could buy that argument. All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Maybe religion again, getting people to accept that their present sufferings are going to be compensated later in another life. In which case what do you plan to do about the discontents and those who don't care about another life? Shoot them?