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That's right. I think the insistence by many ideologues that there's a very simple way out, and if the world just adopted that thing, all of these problems would fade away, as vestiges of a tired, corrupt system, where an elite manufacturer these problems that otherwise wouldn't exist.

Sometimes things like that are true. They're certainly true in many respects with regards to human rights and flourishing in autocratic regimes. They're also true to a lesser extent with examples of political-economic capture in liberal democracies. But this is all besides the point.

Whenever people think about "the system" as an obstacle, the important implication is that system is a obstacle to a thing. What is that thing? Often, the assumption is that thing is a state of nature of organic human flourishing that would happen absent these imposed constraints. But that's a implicit statement about the shape of the state of nature that has no empirical grounding whatsoever. Which I think, generally makes it fair to characterize such belief systems as utopian and/or fanatical.

Rosalia 2y ago

You’re a very good writer and clearly a skilled conceptual thinker.

I agree completely. I particularly like your description of the imagined utopia of “organic human flourishing.” As you say, that’s debatable.

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Discussion

Mike Brock 2y ago

Don't give me too much credit. I'm cribbing heavily from Hobbes and Locke right now.

nobody 2y ago

Interesting worry.

Thinking about the end of antibiotics working and emergence of super bugs usually keeps me up at night.

I believe many of the societal issues we are facing are technology based. Technology is outpacing human evolution, and our brain’s capacity to interpret the changing world around us. Ideologies and information are colliding. The old way vs. the new way. Who’s right vs who’s wrong. People are being forced to join a side as all around us the tears in the tapestry of the illusion we agreed on as a shared version of reality are starting to show.

Mike Brock 2y ago

Yeah, almost all of our problems to some extent are problems of our collective making. There's certain things we cannot be said to hold collective accountability for as species. We don't control the weather. We don't control the movement of plate tectonics. We cannot control whether some celestial event such as a massive asteroid impacts renders the planet uninhabitable -- although our technological capacity for planetary defense is advancing.

But everything we create introduces problems. Even the simple invention of software. It created the problem of programming errors -- which today could have civilization-scale consequences and has made cybersecurity such an important problem.

I could be wrong of course, but I'm not sure we could have had an alternate history where we reached the levels of prosperity we have, and avoided the emergence of system-dependent problems, and the compounding of systemic risks that propagate through the interplay of these systems.

I think there's reason to believe that this universal reality can be found in the second law of thermodynamics itself.

Mike Brock 2y ago

And it may, among other things, be the resolution to the Fermi Paradox. Which would be a scary thought.

Rosalia 2y ago

What do you mean by “it?”

Mike Brock 2y ago

The metastability envelope being limited in civilizational systems at a critical complexity threshold -- where corrective mechanisms for coordination cannot cope, leading to the self-destruction of all technological civilizations. This is referred to as the "Great Filter" resolution to the Fermi Paradox.