I mean, I was mainly reiterating the point you make in your final paragraph. It’s something like, I can imagine a sort of pessimistic, cynical perspective in which the idea that we can ever transcend false impressions of just universes is laughable, and awareness of this dynamic (and skill at exploiting it) simply becomes a part of the toolkit, and you hope that good people are more aware and more skilled because it’s a symmetric weapon that makes winners win more and losers lose harder.
Or you could imagine someone with actual optimism that broken systems can be done away with entirely, and who thinks it’s worthwhile to spend significant capital (both social or otherwise) to make sure that no one ever forgets that it’s unjust and no one can get away with acting as if it is,while maybe also doing their best to try various experiments at installing new modes of understanding.
There seems to be a trap, wherein it’s always easy to postpone changing the overall world order, because in any given instance, with any given set of limited goals, it’s usually better to work within the system as-is and use realism and pragmatism and so forth. But on a policy level that just props the thing up forever.
What I’m not sure about is what balance to strike, at a policy level, between using the levers and knobs that the universe and the culture have provided, and trying to carve new control features into the existing system.
Alas, I had no clear or interesting thoughts, just the above expansion on the question you’d already gestured toward.
I’m pretty sure there’s no good answer to this, yet. I have my own intuitions, which are vastly different from everyone else’s—but the general pattern of what actually happens seems to be “keep going until some kind of cultural tipping point happens, the current regime loses the Mandate of Heaven, and a revolution puts them all up against the wall.”
Some people are really good at telling when to foment a revolution, but this seems regrettably uncorrelated with being good at telling whether the revolution is justified, or will lead to better results.
I mean, I was mainly reiterating the point you make in your final paragraph. It’s something like, I can imagine a sort of pessimistic, cynical perspective in which the idea that we can ever transcend false impressions of just universes is laughable, and awareness of this dynamic (and skill at exploiting it) simply becomes a part of the toolkit, and you hope that good people are more aware and more skilled because it’s a symmetric weapon that makes winners win more and losers lose harder.
Or you could imagine someone with actual optimism that broken systems can be done away with entirely, and who thinks it’s worthwhile to spend significant capital (both social or otherwise) to make sure that no one ever forgets that it’s unjust and no one can get away with acting as if it is, while maybe also doing their best to try various experiments at installing new modes of understanding.
There seems to be a trap, wherein it’s always easy to postpone changing the overall world order, because in any given instance, with any given set of limited goals, it’s usually better to work within the system as-is and use realism and pragmatism and so forth. But on a policy level that just props the thing up forever.
What I’m not sure about is what balance to strike, at a policy level, between using the levers and knobs that the universe and the culture have provided, and trying to carve new control features into the existing system.
Alas, I had no clear or interesting thoughts, just the above expansion on the question you’d already gestured toward.
I’m pretty sure there’s no good answer to this, yet. I have my own intuitions, which are vastly different from everyone else’s—but the general pattern of what actually happens seems to be “keep going until some kind of cultural tipping point happens, the current regime loses the Mandate of Heaven, and a revolution puts them all up against the wall.”
Some people are really good at telling when to foment a revolution, but this seems regrettably uncorrelated with being good at telling whether the revolution is justified, or will lead to better results.