His stand on anonymity is regrettable. I would say he believes we should exercise extreme caution in the abolition of institutions, which I agree with. I don’t think that makes him or I fascists. Institutions have done a great deal of good as well as evil.
People are the issue. Not institutions. Change the people, change the institutions. Changing institutions without changing people will net nothing.
You will never change people. Institutions will always trend towards it. We don’t need them.
One reason I expect people to change is that people adapt to their environment. The broken institutions we have now are a part of our environment. Take those away and we would readapt to the better environment.
That would be a really big experiment that could go potentially very very badly. Regardless of how corrupted they are now, those institutions were formed for a reason, and I think it is very easy to overlook or misunderstand how different things were in times before them.
I’m playing devils advocate a bit here, but the world is awfully complex and there are sure a bunch of us. I think ideas to make the world a better place require a great deal of humility and pause and have to be weighed against the potential for how things could go wrong.
There certainly is a lot of good that we want to maintain. I’m at a loss for exactly how to do it.
But at the very least, getting more people to realize how far they are from theoretical maximum freedom, to realize the social contract is a theoretical construct and not a reality, to think about whether they think Hobbes was right, that seems like a productive start.
I whole heartedly agree. It is a great thing to discuss. The more discussion had, the more dialogue and genuine debate, the higher the chances that we end up with an idea and implementation that minimizes the risk and moves the goal forward.
And increasing freedom is a worthy goal.
We can talk about it all we want, we can even have good institutions along the way, but as long as they are run by humans, they will tend toward corruption eventually. This was the whole point of the Protestant reformation, but that’s a topic for another day.
Indeed. Along with the counter reformation. But I agree it’s best left for another day.
But we don’t want to get rid of humans. But I think changing the hearts must come before changing the institutions will have any meaningful impact.
Definitely don’t want to get rid of humans. Human maxi here. I am not sure we need institutions to allow human greatness to flourish though. Human nature will also never fully flourish because it is corrupted. This is the fall of man and a never ending battle against our nature. Back to Protestant faith again.
