The Coronavirus

[TnT]

One model: There is "DE-scription, there is PRE-scription and there is PRO-scription. I think folks generate their own personal belief system with various mixtures of the three.

Description shows how good we are as individuals at perceiving, interpreting and defining objective reality. Of course, that's the primary problem in the branch of philosophy called epistemology. The study of this is not trivial. However, often we can gather a group of people of good faith and come up with a decent picture of "reality." A shared set of facts, figures and interpretations that can roughly describe some piece of reality of interest.

PREscription is more abstract. This is the part of our belief system where we decide how things SHOULD be. Sometimes, pieces of our reality are as they SHOULD in our opinion. Sometimes little or nothing is. Then, of course, we go around ranting about how things need to change to be as they SHOULD be. So ... there SHOULD be peace. There SHOULD be kindness and generosity. There SHOULD be safety, jobs, food, shelter, healthcare, etc.

PROscription is also abstract, but perhaps resides more in the present reality. These are our beliefs of how things should NOT be. Thus, there should NOT be war, violence, injustice, racism, etc.

Some folks I know tend to be mostly Proscriptionists. Others, mostly Prescriptionists. What makes politics difficult is that some PROscriptionists think there should NOT be government, or regulations, etc. Runs headlong into the PREscriptionists on the other side who might want a benevolent regulated socialism.

What I find mostly missing is an adequate DEscription of our civilization/society, AND an articulate PRE and PRO scription of the desired outcome, AND a change management plan to get from point A to point B.

Take the issue of racism. One side PROscribes its existence, while DEscribing its existence with much evidence. The other side covertly PREscribes its existence, while denying that it even exists, thereby dodging the DEscription part.

So we can't even come up with a shared picture of the description of the issue. How in the world, then, can the issue be negotiated and a change management plan designed and executed.

Back to a point made in a previous post, intelligence only deals with how much facility we have at sorting and rearranging our information, interpreting it and deciding whether we like or don't like our reality, then running it through our belief system, which has little to do with our intelligence, and coming up with our own desired outcome.