Why is Consensus Important for People with Views not Winning?

[pbrower2a]

(02-12-2022, 04:10 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(02-11-2022, 09:07 AM)David Horn Wrote: That's unlikely to work in practice.  First, the most predatory members of society reign when the rules are slack to nonexistent.

I'm not asking for a lack of rules, I'm asking for more streamlined rules, with a focus on giving existing laws teeth rather than adding additional layers of red tape Things like, for example, reporting requirements and additional kinds of audits rather than trying to micromanage people's behavior for moralistic reasons or pry into more private matters. Admittedly, the idea of "fuck the rules" style anarchy is appealing to me on some level, but in practice, yes, it's basically just a power vacuum, which creates a culture too unstable to allow for the kind of long term planning necessary to make markets work.

Any attempt to micromanage personal behavior risks personal freedom. If such freedom is callow license, then such may be appropriate (thus efforts to block access to child pornography). If it is instead an effort to improve human behavior at the expense of essential freedom then we have some conflicts. It is not acceptable to use the excuse "but it will make us more prosperous". If people were perfectly moral by some standards, then they would submit to serfdom and acquiesce in an aristocratic order in which elite power, indulgence, and gain are the sole virtues that society recognizes.  Should the economic elites attempt to enforce such through fraud or political chicanery, then we will need a popular revolution that stops such -- and it will not have pretty results.  

The instability of our culture reflects conflicts of interests between labor and management, and one effect of COVID-19 (which may be THE defining event of this Crisis Era unless somebody sets forth on a course of conquest where such is unwelcome) may be a shift in the relative power of labor and management. 

Quote:

Quote:Second, destroying any pretext of social cohesion makes response to the First problem nearly impossible.  Third, once things get bad enough, the only way out is the long wait for death ... and that be insufficient as well.

Since when does social cohesion have to come from top-down mandates? I'd argue that, if anything, our sense of community was stronger when our institutions were a little more lean. People form bonds by sharing common experiences, actually doing things together, not having bureaucratic structures enforce more rules.

The elites can at times be in the position of imposing such mandates. A leadership that shares the ideology and ruthlessness of a Pinochet will impose its will from the top down, and anyone who gets in the way can end up dead. Unless you count Brazil as an advanced industrial society, the USA is the only one that has had chattel slavery within the last 170 years, and that can be an attractive model for people with exploitative mentalities. Can you imagine a social order more likely to induce narcissistic personalities than the antebellum South? '

We are not out of the woods on the danger of a plutocratic tyranny. The economic elites recognize that Trump was too risky and excessively offensive. They have found themselves with the Democrats in control of the Presidency and both Houses of Congress -- and they want such to fail. For them the public interest centers on their own vile desires for having everything possible, with the rest of America being livestock at the most charitable and vermin at worst. It is difficult to see what moral virtues come naturally to elites of ownership, basically heirs who feel entitled to maximize profits by enforcing scarcity, and hardly anything could better prepare a youth for a life of unabashed narcissism than matriculation in education that leads to membership (for all practical purposes inherited) in the managerial elite. These two elites become mirror-image Marxists, the sorts who believe that a Marxist critique of capitalist society is the optimum. 

The American political system was not made for an aristocratic elite. It depends upon the dispersion of economic power. Small shopkeepers were the basis of American democracy, and if we find such unrepeatable due to technological change and industrial progress, then we need to rein in those who would monopolize the economy and turn us into serfs -- or acquiesce in our own subjection.