If you don’t like the direction things are going, you can turn around and walk the other way. But there’s no guarantee the other way actually goes anywhere, and in fact it usually doesn’t;
Can “the direction things are going” not go anywhere?
Given the high cost of a rebellion, be it individual or societal, militaristic or narrative, it seems prudent to set yourself up for success as much as possible before-hand. In practice, this seems to mean having a concrete positive vision with strong evidence that it will actually work in reality. Otherwise tearing down the system will just leave you with rubble.
So people usually come up with a vision and then don’t check if it will work, instead of just finding out what will work?
Can “the direction things are going” not go anywhere?
It can also not go anywhere, but (at the individual narrative level) it’s usually been walked before by big chunks of the population, so there’s pretty high confidence that it’s not a dead end.
So people usually come up with a vision and then don’t check if it will work, instead of just finding out what will work?
I think I’d prefer to be a bit more charitable: it seems plausibly very difficult to tell if something new will work in advance without actually trying it. But certainly rebels don’t tend to pitch their visions with enough epistemic humility: “here’s a new form of government we’d like to experimentally try” vs “here’s a new form of government that will solve all our problems”?
Can “the direction things are going” not go anywhere?
So people usually come up with a vision and then don’t check if it will work, instead of just finding out what will work?
It can also not go anywhere, but (at the individual narrative level) it’s usually been walked before by big chunks of the population, so there’s pretty high confidence that it’s not a dead end.
I think I’d prefer to be a bit more charitable: it seems plausibly very difficult to tell if something new will work in advance without actually trying it. But certainly rebels don’t tend to pitch their visions with enough epistemic humility: “here’s a new form of government we’d like to experimentally try” vs “here’s a new form of government that will solve all our problems”?