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A fair point. There was a big post I've tried to write a couple times about exactly this, how the partisan politics of my youth deeply ingrained an idea that the system actually ran things, that the key powered the car. And this is in fact how I grew up thinking about the constitution, as though the paper and ink had a life of their own, as though the social system that emerged from them was as dependable as gravity. I think a lot of people still think of it that way.
Thinking about it, though, wasn't that the point? Weren't the Constitution's authors attempting to create an instinctive, unquestioned norm, something where compliance didn't have to be enforced on a case-by-case basis, but could simply be assumed? My church seems "alive" to me, because we don't argue about whether God exists, whether Jesus died for us, or whether our goal is to serve him. If those were live issues within my church, if the preacher and the elders considered them live issues of debate, I'd be looking for a new church, because I would consider my current one to be "dead". Ideally, wouldn't it be the same for the constitution?
This was me, for a long, long time, as you no doubt noticed, and the temptation is still there.
There's a deeper thread I wish I had more time to follow; briefly, the systems, when they work, make things a lot easier for everyone involved. Certainly that's how it was for me. I didn't want to accept that there wasn't a systemic answer available, because non-systemic answers seem riskier and scarier than systemic ones. Probably it's no more complicated than the difficulty of distinguishing prudence from cowardice; the latter will always frame itself as the former, one can always say that that any risk is too great.
A scene from one of my favorite films:
Tommy wants a plan. He wants a systemic answer that assures him everything is going to be fine, that risk is minimal. He wants lines to color inside and the assurance that as long as he does his part, everything will work out. A lot of people are like Tommy. I certainly was, and still am to at least some extent. Freedom is scary. You changed my mind pretty significantly by having a similar conversation once upon a time, but for this reality to sink in one has to be willing to accept the possibility of considerable losses. There's another effort-post I've been considering, looking at rationalist and proto-rationalist fiction, stuff like HPMOR and Ender's Game, and the way certain Enlightenment assumptions bleed through every part of the narrative: there's a right answer, there's a winning move to find if you're clever enough, there's always a way out, a way to fix things, a way to get what you want. The same idea comes through in a lot of Scott's and Yudkowski's writings. They look at the world and imagine there's a system to manipulate, a right answer to parrot back, a solution. Hence Utilitarianism's attempts to "solve" morality like a math problem, and all the absurdities and atrocities that result. My experience is that this idea is very attractive, and it dies very hard.
This is the sort of magical thinking that we almost inevitably engage in because our minds are a tiny subset of the enormous universe that they are trying to model, so our minds inevitably have to simplify almost everything about reality.
Another such simplification, for example, is the idea that there is such a thing as "the left" and "the right".
Another is viewing the economy through abstractions like "the market" or "socialist planning" rather than viewing it as an immensely complicated system of land, physical materials, people who all have their own motives, computers, communications flying every which way, and so on.
It often is for a long time until it isn't.
Lenin: "there are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades happen".
But it is difficult to function without the belief in this dependability, even though to be convinced of the dependability would again be magical thinking. So again, our minds simplify in order to face reality.
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