NSmolenskiFan on Nostr: Humans evolved to have strongly anthropomorphic models of how the world works. If ...
Humans evolved to have strongly anthropomorphic models of how the world works. If something bad happens, we immediately look for someone (usually another human) to blame and punish. This is the “political mode”—find someone specific to punish or eliminate, and then the problem will be solved. Right?
Wrong. The world is vastly more complex than our Dunbar number-oriented social brain can account for. Our moral reflexes are built for simple, in-the-moment, relational reasoning, and few of us are incentivized to do the long-term, boring, scientific work of understanding causality across the many domains that impact our lives. And that understanding is always partial: we see as through a glass, darkly.
This leads to a pessimistic outlook on the possibilities of political action in general, whether authoritarian or democratic. Quite simply, most problems do not have “political” solutions, if the political is understood as the moral logic of attributing responsibility and blame in public. This is why social scientists like Mises and Hayek urged first and foremost intellectual humility. Humility doesn’t mean “doing nothing.” It means tailoring our actions to those areas of life over which we have actual control, not presuming to understand and control things we can’t.
At the end of the day, politics solves for enabling feelings of moral satisfaction for groups of people who enjoy seeing their enemies subjugated while reaffirming their own belonging in the powerful—winning—group. That is, quite simply, not only useless but counterproductive. It actively gets in the way of solving the problems that ostensibly motivate political outrage.
#BTC #Politics
Wrong. The world is vastly more complex than our Dunbar number-oriented social brain can account for. Our moral reflexes are built for simple, in-the-moment, relational reasoning, and few of us are incentivized to do the long-term, boring, scientific work of understanding causality across the many domains that impact our lives. And that understanding is always partial: we see as through a glass, darkly.
This leads to a pessimistic outlook on the possibilities of political action in general, whether authoritarian or democratic. Quite simply, most problems do not have “political” solutions, if the political is understood as the moral logic of attributing responsibility and blame in public. This is why social scientists like Mises and Hayek urged first and foremost intellectual humility. Humility doesn’t mean “doing nothing.” It means tailoring our actions to those areas of life over which we have actual control, not presuming to understand and control things we can’t.
At the end of the day, politics solves for enabling feelings of moral satisfaction for groups of people who enjoy seeing their enemies subjugated while reaffirming their own belonging in the powerful—winning—group. That is, quite simply, not only useless but counterproductive. It actively gets in the way of solving the problems that ostensibly motivate political outrage.
#BTC #Politics