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queenluathis is me throwing some half-formed pseudo-philosophical thoughts into the wind. they are not fully fleshed out at all, but, thoughts along these line have been cropping up in my brain a lot lately, and i want to take an initial stab at formulating The Problem As I Perceive It.
so!
the Enlightenment was kind of cool because it decided everyone has this cool thing called Rationality and therefore all humans have a right to liberty and self-determination and all that. democracy, in its most optimistic form, is based on the idea that all us rational agents can use the combination of our rationality + our particular position in society to vote for The Best Possible Thing and come up with The Most Optimal Society.
except modern psychology, statistics, and biology increasingly suggest we’re pretty bad at being rational, even when we’re totally convinced we are making free, rational choices. companies dump gajillions of dollars into advertising because it fucking works, and if merely hearing a stupid jingle on the radio a couple times can make you more likely to buy some shit you don’t need, then what other ways are advertising/mass media/etc influencing us without our knowing? if we have all these unconscious biases against people-not-like-us, if we can be consistently and persistently racist/sexist/etc without even realizing it, and if merely being aware that unconscious bias exists may actually make us more biased, then how the hell can we fix that?
and this is where some sort of technocratic/socialist/communist approach becomes appealing, because maybe we can get all the psychologists and statisticians and whatnot together in a room and decide what The Most Optimal Thing is!
which is how you get libertarian nerds on the internet somehow earnestly advocating for monarchy, because i’m not convinced they’re actually advocating for a monarchy; what they want is A Monarch Who Happens To Be a Technocrat, and will hire a bunch of libertarian nerds to be advisors, and then the monarch will do some Most Optimal Shit because they’ve got more resources/knowledge/etc and thus can make The Most Informed Choices.
obviously i’m not throwing my lot in with libertarian nerds on the internet.
but i think the lefty perspective struggles with this problem, too. liberals ask, reasonably, why it is that poor southern voters vote so frequently against their own interests; turns out southern states receive the most money from various federal programs, and are the poorest, and so on and so forth. and the “why” for that is really complicated and would take a whole book to pick apart, but, i think at least one reason for that “why” is, a lot of these voters are really proud and into the old-school I Make My Own Choices thing, and get nervous about some big government coming in and bossing them around and telling them what to do with their life. they want to say they own all their actions, even the bad ones, even if those actions were taken because of shitty circumstances, even if those actions were unfree in ways they’re not wanting to think about. they’re scared that left-ish policies are going to rob them of their autonomy and their lifestyles.
and the lefty response is a rolling of the eyes and an insistence that offering extra assistance is not some giant government boogeyman dear god, and they’re right! euro-style socialism is totally not the same as some awful technocratic communist thing. offering better welfare isn’t really robbing people of their freedom.
but i do think there’s a gradient, there, in terms of government-assistance-esque policies. on the mild end you’ve got something like, idk, food stamps, where you can take it or not take it as you like. on the other end you have some wacky 1984-esque system where the government takes all kids after age 3 and raises them itself. the latter sounds horrifying! but, maybe there’s people we know are going to be bad parents; if we can ensure that we know enough to raise them in a better situation, should we? i mean, we do have national standards for basic shit like literacy. even flat-earther hyper-conservative christians have to learn how to read and write or the government gets all up in your grill.
the point is, i think you have to recognize that you’re drawing a line in the sand, with Making All Decisions Via Our Best Understanding of Science and Systems on one end, and, Making All Decisions On Our Own (Even If They’re Super Shitty and Irrational), and I think that line’s fuzzier than most people like to think.
(i think where this gets especially complicated is when you involve kids in it. all really hard political arguments start with the kids. it’s one thing to say an adult can go and believe whatever nutty thing they want; it becomes harder when there’s some innocent kid raised in, like, some whacko science-denying cult; is it ever justified to step in when a situation is Not Actually Abusive But Totally Setting This Kid Up for Failure?)
the philosopher in me really likes Pithy Rules and Principles, and thus would love some elegant straightforward way of drawing that line in the sand, of determining when a policy is too reaching, or not enough, or whatever. but, much like the question of free will itself, which hasn’t had a very straightforward philosophical answer since the early 1900s, and the problem of consciousness, which is almost certainly not going to end with any clean singular definition, but rather “consciousness is a combination of these 20 different properties” or whatever—anyway, yeah, i think this problem is going to end up similarly, with no real clear singular guiding principle.
so!
the Enlightenment was kind of cool because it decided everyone has this cool thing called Rationality and therefore all humans have a right to liberty and self-determination and all that. democracy, in its most optimistic form, is based on the idea that all us rational agents can use the combination of our rationality + our particular position in society to vote for The Best Possible Thing and come up with The Most Optimal Society.
except modern psychology, statistics, and biology increasingly suggest we’re pretty bad at being rational, even when we’re totally convinced we are making free, rational choices. companies dump gajillions of dollars into advertising because it fucking works, and if merely hearing a stupid jingle on the radio a couple times can make you more likely to buy some shit you don’t need, then what other ways are advertising/mass media/etc influencing us without our knowing? if we have all these unconscious biases against people-not-like-us, if we can be consistently and persistently racist/sexist/etc without even realizing it, and if merely being aware that unconscious bias exists may actually make us more biased, then how the hell can we fix that?
and this is where some sort of technocratic/socialist/communist approach becomes appealing, because maybe we can get all the psychologists and statisticians and whatnot together in a room and decide what The Most Optimal Thing is!
which is how you get libertarian nerds on the internet somehow earnestly advocating for monarchy, because i’m not convinced they’re actually advocating for a monarchy; what they want is A Monarch Who Happens To Be a Technocrat, and will hire a bunch of libertarian nerds to be advisors, and then the monarch will do some Most Optimal Shit because they’ve got more resources/knowledge/etc and thus can make The Most Informed Choices.
obviously i’m not throwing my lot in with libertarian nerds on the internet.
but i think the lefty perspective struggles with this problem, too. liberals ask, reasonably, why it is that poor southern voters vote so frequently against their own interests; turns out southern states receive the most money from various federal programs, and are the poorest, and so on and so forth. and the “why” for that is really complicated and would take a whole book to pick apart, but, i think at least one reason for that “why” is, a lot of these voters are really proud and into the old-school I Make My Own Choices thing, and get nervous about some big government coming in and bossing them around and telling them what to do with their life. they want to say they own all their actions, even the bad ones, even if those actions were taken because of shitty circumstances, even if those actions were unfree in ways they’re not wanting to think about. they’re scared that left-ish policies are going to rob them of their autonomy and their lifestyles.
and the lefty response is a rolling of the eyes and an insistence that offering extra assistance is not some giant government boogeyman dear god, and they’re right! euro-style socialism is totally not the same as some awful technocratic communist thing. offering better welfare isn’t really robbing people of their freedom.
but i do think there’s a gradient, there, in terms of government-assistance-esque policies. on the mild end you’ve got something like, idk, food stamps, where you can take it or not take it as you like. on the other end you have some wacky 1984-esque system where the government takes all kids after age 3 and raises them itself. the latter sounds horrifying! but, maybe there’s people we know are going to be bad parents; if we can ensure that we know enough to raise them in a better situation, should we? i mean, we do have national standards for basic shit like literacy. even flat-earther hyper-conservative christians have to learn how to read and write or the government gets all up in your grill.
the point is, i think you have to recognize that you’re drawing a line in the sand, with Making All Decisions Via Our Best Understanding of Science and Systems on one end, and, Making All Decisions On Our Own (Even If They’re Super Shitty and Irrational), and I think that line’s fuzzier than most people like to think.
(i think where this gets especially complicated is when you involve kids in it. all really hard political arguments start with the kids. it’s one thing to say an adult can go and believe whatever nutty thing they want; it becomes harder when there’s some innocent kid raised in, like, some whacko science-denying cult; is it ever justified to step in when a situation is Not Actually Abusive But Totally Setting This Kid Up for Failure?)
the philosopher in me really likes Pithy Rules and Principles, and thus would love some elegant straightforward way of drawing that line in the sand, of determining when a policy is too reaching, or not enough, or whatever. but, much like the question of free will itself, which hasn’t had a very straightforward philosophical answer since the early 1900s, and the problem of consciousness, which is almost certainly not going to end with any clean singular definition, but rather “consciousness is a combination of these 20 different properties” or whatever—anyway, yeah, i think this problem is going to end up similarly, with no real clear singular guiding principle.
