No, dude. You’re thinking backwards. If you can’t answer foundational questions, you literally don’t know what “it” is, so how are you going to make “it” work? If you can’t deal with an idea conceptually, what makes you think you’ve got the competence to deal with it practically?
I’m not ignoring anything. Focusing on first steps first doesn’t mean you deny there are more steps...
But back your claim. You claim that the foundational questions “depend” on whether we can make it work. Explain that dependency. “You can’t just ignore that there’s no way to make it work...” So, you’ve already decided there’s no way to make it work. How did you do that? What stops it from working?
Your last paragraph was interesting, though. There you allow that “impossible to make it work” is an “if”. For every “if” there’s a counter-if: if it’s possible to make it work, then the answer to, “What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first?” is: because we’re delusionally paranoid.
But your statement fails, because you can’t determine if it’s possible to make “it” work until AFTER:
1. You understand what “it” is. 2. You have answers to foundational questions about “it”. 3. You understand “it” well enough to actually try to make “it” work. 4. You actually try very hard, in every which way you can think of, over and over, to make it work but fail to make “it” work—at which point you are justified in saying, “We couldn’t make it work,” but no one is ever justified in saying, “It cannot be made to work.”
So, you’re really making claims without any rational/evidential basis here.
If you can’t answer foundational questions, you literally don’t know what “it” is, so how are you going to make “it” work?
Because your “foundational questions” are not the type of questions that describe what it is. They are the type of questions whose answers depend on whether we can make it work. The answers to your questions would be something like:
Why haven’t we noticed that we’ve been trying to achieve fairness and prosperity on the basis of such a perverse principle?
Because if other principles don’t work, picking the one that does work, even if it has problems, isn’t perverse.
How could we be so naive as to think that we can make anything work until we figure out what went wrong with our thinking?
Because if getting rid of property doesn’t work, this question is based on a false premise—there isn’t actually anything wrong with our thinking.
What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first?
People are repulsed by running society based on something that doesn’t work.
If you can’t even get people to think about an idea rationally, openly, and honestly, how the heck are they ever going to experiment with it properly to gain an intelligent basis for answering the “make it work” question?
If it doesn’t work, this question is based on a false premise, because if it doesn’t work, they have in fact answered the question intelligently.
No, dude. You’re thinking backwards. If you can’t answer foundational questions, you literally don’t know what “it” is, so how are you going to make “it” work? If you can’t deal with an idea conceptually, what makes you think you’ve got the competence to deal with it practically?
I’m not ignoring anything. Focusing on first steps first doesn’t mean you deny there are more steps...
But back your claim. You claim that the foundational questions “depend” on whether we can make it work. Explain that dependency. “You can’t just ignore that there’s no way to make it work...” So, you’ve already decided there’s no way to make it work. How did you do that? What stops it from working?
Your last paragraph was interesting, though. There you allow that “impossible to make it work” is an “if”. For every “if” there’s a counter-if: if it’s possible to make it work, then the answer to, “What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first?” is: because we’re delusionally paranoid.
But your statement fails, because you can’t determine if it’s possible to make “it” work until AFTER:
1. You understand what “it” is.
2. You have answers to foundational questions about “it”.
3. You understand “it” well enough to actually try to make “it” work.
4. You actually try very hard, in every which way you can think of, over and over, to make it work but fail to make “it” work—at which point you are justified in saying, “We couldn’t make it work,” but no one is ever justified in saying, “It cannot be made to work.”
So, you’re really making claims without any rational/evidential basis here.
Because your “foundational questions” are not the type of questions that describe what it is. They are the type of questions whose answers depend on whether we can make it work. The answers to your questions would be something like:
Because if other principles don’t work, picking the one that does work, even if it has problems, isn’t perverse.
Because if getting rid of property doesn’t work, this question is based on a false premise—there isn’t actually anything wrong with our thinking.
People are repulsed by running society based on something that doesn’t work.
If it doesn’t work, this question is based on a false premise, because if it doesn’t work, they have in fact answered the question intelligently.