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The core fallacy here is believing that we can all agree to supersede biological imperatives and everything will all go fine. The challenge of society is the es
by cookiecaper 9y ago
The core fallacy here is believing that we can all agree to supersede biological imperatives and everything will all go fine. The challenge of society is the establishment of a system that cooperates with biology to create a peaceful, prosperous environment for all members of that society.
Humans are naturally competitive. Humans have tribal instincts (which include a default hostility to known outgroups). Humans have a fundamental tendency to hoard resources to ward off the mortal dangers of scarcity and decay, visible in our dietary inclinations just as much as in the way we handle the abstraction of money. Like most other successful animals, we have an instinct to secure resources not just for ourselves but for the generations that will follow after us.
These are inborn instincts and impulses, installed by millions of years of evolution. They cannot be hand-waved away. As a species, we are stuck with them, for better or worse.
Throughout the 20th century, we see the rise and fall of economic policy that refuses to acknowledge these realities. This willful blindness inflicts a large amount of suffering on the populations that fall for the delusion that we are now superhuman.
The argument is not that physical impulse does not need restraint, nor that society shouldn't have structure and authority. It is merely that our social systems need to exist as background processes that optimize and refine our basic natures instead of trying to pretend like they don't exist.
Just as denial of the underlying structure of computer systems will, at best, seriously impede performance, denial of the underlying structures of human psychology will, at best, bottleneck any society.
Hardcore socialist redistribution systems are so denialist that they result in the equivalent of a nation wide Blue Screen of Death shortly after bootup. Let's take notice of the blood and agony of the 20th century and not install SOCIALISM.DLL anymore.
- state_less 9y agoWe also have lesson from the 1920s to draw from and the breaking up of monopolies. Social security has social in the name, and nobody wants that social program to die off without something better replacing it (except for some crude wealthy folks). This isn't an install/uninstall thing. More of an alloy of waxing/waining ideas.
- cookiecaper 9y agoI agree that it's probably more useful to conceptualize economies as kernel subsystems with complex interdependencies rather than individual drivers. :)
- michaelmrose 9y agoThe pretense of tying the state of the system as is to biology seems to amazingly silly. We are the product of billions of years of evolution. Society is a much more recent artifact that has already seemed to go through several stages over thousands of years none of which has had time to leave much of a mark on the underlying biology. In the words of jack nicolsons character in as good as it gets sell crazy someplace else we're all stocked up here.
- cookiecaper 9y agoRight, that's what I said. Any cultural ideals, let alone modern ones, haven't been around long enough to make a dent in our biology ... so we should stop pretending that our instincts are irrelevant and that we can just say "ALL HUMANS WILL NOW COOPERATE IN PERFECT SOCIAL HARMONY, BY DECREE FROM THE GREAT LEADER" and expect it all to go swimmingly. Useful social systems contemplate typical human behavior and account for it in a reasonable way, instead of pretending that it won't apply. When you create a central chokepoint for all ownership and economic resources, the distributors show massive favoritism for the ingroup (generally government bureaucrats and their relatives), while the rest of the population is essentially left to starve. Anyone who claims the purity of their political philosophy or their strength of character or the quality of the education of their central planners will prevent this from occurring under their implementation of centralized resource distribution is essentially claiming to hold a trump card over human biology, and they should be immediately discounted, because that's not how it works. Instead, we keep trying to reboot it, hopeful that this time, the superhumans are in charge. It is disappointing to see that juvenile dismissals like yours are apparently now countenanced on HN, especially when they're the result of a misreading in the first place.