2024-12-01

Brokenness

My take-away from this election is that the main problem is not so much the people who made whatever decisions they made on election day, but the fact that they thought those were the right decisions. While there's plenty of blame to be pointed at individuals who maybe should have known better, this – much like poverty or unemployment – is a systemic problem, not a collection of individual failures.

A bad decision was made, for bad reasons, on a very important topic – and not for the first time, nor even the latest of a handful, but just as kind of a poster-child for a long series of oscillations between really bad decisions and clearly better decisions that somehow still only just made it in the door.

For me, I think, this latest and most deeply utter failure of the system has kind of reframed my attitude towards society. The system isn't just broken (that was never news); what has been revealed here is that it's too broken. It can't be held together with chewing-gum anymore. Replacement parts aren't available. It's too far gone to be worth focusing on repairing it or even pushing it down the road in the hope of finding a repair shop.

The election process is kind of horrendous, the court system is ghastly, law enforcement is brutal, the legal system is punitive and elitist... I could go on. (...and I'm speaking as someone who has never been arrested, won the only court-case I've ever been involved in, lives in a privileged neighborhood of the sort the police actually try to serve, never been targeted by a hate-crime, have an acceptable skin-color...)

Maybe I should say "re-reframed", because the framing I'm finding myself with now isn't new; I'd just talked myself out of it, convinced myself that it was reflective of a conceited/elitist attitude -- but on examining my values, I don't think that's true.

Change Overwhelm

I do understand why this is happening: it's basically "future shock". I always kind of rejected the implicit idea of this as a problem, as a reason to slow down or hold back technological progress, because discovery – technological and otherwise – always seemed to me like kind of the whole point of our existence, if there is one to be found.

The problem is not the change itself; it's that the social (and governmental) mechanisms we have in place for dealing with it aren't up to the task. Too many people understand too little (because of how much there now is to understand, and how much more understanding becomes available -- for benefit or for exploitation -- pretty much every day), and our democratic processes have proven utterly ineffective at stopping too many people from being manipulated into making the worst possible choices.

Our government was designed for a horse-and-buggy era, and all we've done since then is strap on ever-more-powerful engines -- and now we've got a horse-cart with jet-engines duct-taped on it. "It's a miracle", I said a few years ago, "that it hasn't fallen apart yet". And now here we are.

Directions

I find myself more in a place where I think we need to firmly embrace the best technology we can get our furry, impoverished little hands on and... Be More Clever Than They Are with it, towards the goals of learning and art, of creating spaces where those things can happen more freely. Be the upstart scurrying small mammals who can outpace and outlive the dinosaurs.

I want a system that isn't designed to fail. I want an ecosystem and society that we can manage responsibly – and if that means building anew from the soil up and from the grassroots up, then that's what we need to do.

...and that's where my energy is going. I don't imagine that I can single-handedly get something started, but I do think I have some tools and ideas that could be instrumental towards that.

Attitude Adjustment

It seems to me that in our planning at this point, we need to think less like we're part of the larger society, and more like we're aliens who have crashlanded on Earth and are mingling with humans, self-assimilating into the culture as best we can, but lately realizing that... well... these people are nuts, and we need to get more tightly connected amongst ourselves.

Unfortunately, in the crash we lost any technology we had (and knowledge of same, except as a hypothetical), so we don't have any special abilities or power that they don't have.

...except empathy, and the ability to understand the evidence of our own senses and experience, and to be relatively unswayed by dogma and rhetoric.

What can we build together? How can we get together and start on that work, with our limited resources?

Risks

It seems to me that the inherent danger in seeing oneself as a member of a group that sets itself apart from society at large, and declaring that this group must seek power -- ideally in order to protect itself and others from malevolent actors -- is that it will start to think of itself as superior, and to think of that superiority as right and proper justification for anything it does. History is certainly not lacking in examples ("manifest destiny" in early US history, Israel this year, the ongoing cancer of racism deeply embedded in "white" culture for the past 4+ centuries...).

What I take away from that lesson is that we have to have a very solid set of priorities and ethical boundaries for usage of that power, should we manage to acquire it -- and that those priorities and boundaries must inherently support enforceable accountability for themselves. They must not become sacred and unquestionable; they must be a choice that each member of the group has arrived at, uncoerced.

What I come up with, for myself and for any group I'd want to assist with efforts at power acquisition, is this:

My loyalty is to neither nation nor culture nor species -- nor even "intelligence" or "sentience". My loyalty is to discovery and learning (the active version of "truth") and to art (aesthetic appreciation and creation -- the active version of "beauty"), each in equal measure.

I see "compassion" as arising naturally and inevitably from these, but maybe that needs to be spelled out separately...

In any case, I see those two elements as the essential basis of all civilization, of anything that can truly call itself "civilized". I don't know that there has ever been such a thing on this planet, but some times and places have come a lot closer than others -- while both the US and much of the world at large seems to be moving in the other direction lately. (...although there are a few bright eddies and islands of hope here and there.)

Notes

I originally posted bits of this on TootCat. Related posts: broken rules affirmations GitGov technical debt a brief metaphor 3 political axes pol party fail politics as entertainment