There’s the relentless submission to another’s goals, which you are not expected to consider, condone or adopt, and there’s the desire for effectiveness in carrying out your own desires.
One is oppressive and soul-sucking, one is liberating and joyful. Lots of unhappiness comes from assuming they’re the same.
It seems like most people who use Utopian thinking make the mistake of assuming that other people value the same things that they value, and are willing to sacrifice the things that other people value to accomplish them. They don’t seem to get that the peasants want “Progress” or whatever only insofar as it helps them not starve, but beyond that that they’d rather get drunk or hang out with their friends.
See, it’s absolutely not guaranteed that you’ll act wisely if you’re very very intent on implementing your worldview, particularly when your actions are informed by far-mode thinking. When some compartmentalization is needed most, humans seem to abandon it, devolving into fanatics whose Idea is all-encompassing (see Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism), then push on blindly. The only known defense against that is to treat yourself and everything around you with a degree of apriori skepticism and laxity. Akrasia might have saved us from some pretty scary dictator—perhaps even a black-swan one that would’ve outweighed all the disadvantages of human inefficiency in history.
Consider that, if somehow, humans evolved with a much weaker sense of large groups like nations, and everything fell apart into city-states all the time, someone would be saying: “If only we could be united by that most rare and wonderful feeling known as patriotism! It’d stop all that anarchy, and I hardly see something as constructive and positive as that sublime idea leading to, say, genocide!” I fear that our inefficiency might be the same Pandora’s box that we shouldn’t unlock until we can get an adult to do it for us.
The problem doesn’t come from acting on your beliefs, it comes from not changing them in response to finding out that they make you miserable.
If you remain inefficient intentionally, you don’t get things that you want. If you swiftly act maximally in accordance with your beliefs, you can find out more quickly what living by them is like. If you don’t like it, then you should just change your mind. If you don’t act, you never find out.
There’s different kinds of efficiency.
There’s the relentless submission to another’s goals, which you are not expected to consider, condone or adopt, and there’s the desire for effectiveness in carrying out your own desires.
One is oppressive and soul-sucking, one is liberating and joyful. Lots of unhappiness comes from assuming they’re the same.
It seems like most people who use Utopian thinking make the mistake of assuming that other people value the same things that they value, and are willing to sacrifice the things that other people value to accomplish them. They don’t seem to get that the peasants want “Progress” or whatever only insofar as it helps them not starve, but beyond that that they’d rather get drunk or hang out with their friends.
See, it’s absolutely not guaranteed that you’ll act wisely if you’re very very intent on implementing your worldview, particularly when your actions are informed by far-mode thinking. When some compartmentalization is needed most, humans seem to abandon it, devolving into fanatics whose Idea is all-encompassing (see Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism), then push on blindly. The only known defense against that is to treat yourself and everything around you with a degree of apriori skepticism and laxity. Akrasia might have saved us from some pretty scary dictator—perhaps even a black-swan one that would’ve outweighed all the disadvantages of human inefficiency in history.
Consider that, if somehow, humans evolved with a much weaker sense of large groups like nations, and everything fell apart into city-states all the time, someone would be saying: “If only we could be united by that most rare and wonderful feeling known as patriotism! It’d stop all that anarchy, and I hardly see something as constructive and positive as that sublime idea leading to, say, genocide!” I fear that our inefficiency might be the same Pandora’s box that we shouldn’t unlock until we can get an adult to do it for us.
Hold strong opinions lightly.
The problem doesn’t come from acting on your beliefs, it comes from not changing them in response to finding out that they make you miserable.
If you remain inefficient intentionally, you don’t get things that you want. If you swiftly act maximally in accordance with your beliefs, you can find out more quickly what living by them is like. If you don’t like it, then you should just change your mind. If you don’t act, you never find out.