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I'm committing a major faux-pas by posting a second consecutive top-level comment, but it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)
What's something that you were wrong about?
I'll start. I was wrong about marijuana legalization. It was a bad idea and we never should have done it. Marijuana is, contra urban legend, actually pretty addictive. And it makes productive people into unproductive people. The benefits, such as they are, are best enjoyed in moderation. But legalization has resulted in a whole new class of junkies that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, weed culture is gross.
Scott, as always, says it best:
In any case, what were you wrong about?
Okay.
I’m less and less in favor of libertarian ideas than I was before. There are some behaviors that are harmful to society even if done behind closed doors because the pathologies they cause or enable tend to be a net drain on resources. Drug use is a big one, which is being made more obvious by the recent legalization of marijuana. But the same can be said of both the consumption and production of porn, the glorification of overconsumption and consumerism, and the normalization of ignorance.
There is an actual fate. Blank slates and infinite possibilities are both absurd lies we tell ourselves because we can no longer tolerate the notion of limits to ourselves and others around us. The results have been a disaster. We teach kids to want things that they won’t be able to achieve and then they get stuck with the horrific realization at 25 that they will have lifelong consequences for believing that junk we told them in school and on TV. It also creates social problems as those who were promised a future in the now over saturated elite ranks agitate for what they were told was a birthright, and at the same time the low status jobs go unfilled because those who should be doing those jobs went for elite jobs. Or we tell women to girlboss which, frankly only maybe 5% of women can even be middling good at, and get shocked when it means that women aren’t filling the traditional female jobs or having kids.
Crime is only deterred by the certainty and harshness of punishment. Compassion is nice, but what it teaches criminals is that there are no consequences to doing serious crimes. The results are that areas of the city where criminals are most active become too dangerous to live or work in. And this harms those too poor to flee. What those areas need is over-policing, harsh punishment for first time offenders, and zero tolerance for crime no matter what the criminal’s past is. When people don’t have reason to fear the lawman, the law doesn’t exist, and eventually you have people forced into defending themselves.
Most of the wokeness in schools and Hollywood is a result, not a cause of the decline of those institutions. We aren’t teaching that just because the state says to. We teach it because we have lost the institutional ability to teach math, science, reading and writing. Test scores on those subjects are not good, and a ten minute conversation with even college graduates shows a shocking level of ignorance about the world outside of their bubble. Unless you’re a STEM student, chances are that you know less about the outside world than their high school educated grandparents at the same age. In the arts, I suggest the same thing — the complexity of characters, plots and dialogue have fallen quite a bit from the kinds of things people were writing a generation ago. Modern art frankly sucks at this point, as artists generally lack the skill to make representations of the real world.
Would you agree if I said that these "harmful behaviours" all depend on the people who engage with them? The trade-off is actually what age limits achieve. Why can't children drink alcohol? Because children can't bear that much freedom, they'd likely destroy themselves. So before 18, drinking is a "harmful behaviour", and afterwards, it's not, under the assumption of course that people above the age of 18 have more self-control. I agree that, for society, more rules can be better, but I personally don't need nearly that many myself. So less libertarianism is only best under the assumption that everyone should live by the same rules. A more flexible "Every individual should have as much freedom as they can handle" opens up more more interesting possibilities. Finally, may I add that rules are of almost no importance? Same with police, laws, restrictions. These are just symptoms of deeper problems. If you need them in the first place, something has already gone wrong. Even if cocaine was legal, I would still avoid it. For a society, it's more important that its citizens don't want to do drugs, than it is for said society to ban drugs.
I agree that "over-policing" is a good idea now. It worked in El Salvador I believe. But why is it necessary in the first place? I think it's possible to cultivate people in such a way that you don't need rules. For example, I allow myself to be as immoral as I want, but I don't ever feel like doing anything bad, so the natural consequences of doing whatever I like is that I do what's right.
Perhaps, the need for rules is a sign of decline?
But you can't control them then. The need for control is a need for rules is a sign of decline; people who love are more productive than people who fear, but fear is the fallback option (per Machiavelli).
The assumption that people under the age of 18 don't have self-control is actually very, very damaging to those of them that already have it but also take social messaging [a little too] seriously. The people you want to accelerate hold themselves back for the benefit of the people who will never be responsible- these rules are redistributionist, communist even (while the most common person to scream about this won't make this argument they are, trivially, directionally correct).
Yes, but that pipeline is ripe for abuse. Best example for that is gun licensing in areas that do more invasive checks; they're going to come for that freedom with the excuse of "nobody needs it" and there's strength in numbers.
It requires a more temperate people to do this properly. Europeans can do it more often these days (and have more liberal gun laws than several very populated US states); Americans clearly can't (I think it's a genetic problem with the English). But the fact the freedoms are granted by default is what brings in liberals-who-deserve-liberalism, temperate people who don't want to jump through the hoops.
I love being around people who are competent and developed, around such people you can just let cause and effect do its thing, without worrying about where you're heading. Is your point that a mentally healthy society cannot be properly controlled, which is why people in power are implementing changes which reduce the mental resilience of the population? Because if so, I do agree.
Oh, I don't believe that myself, I just agree with society that there's more people with self-control above 18 years of age than below. We are punishing capable people by designing society in a way which protects the lowest common denominator. But my point is that, while I'd like to give everyone more freedom, it would only result in a more hedonistic society. The sort of "rights" that people are after today just seems like the desire to indulge in harmful behaviour and to destroy oneself. Activists are trying to get rid of social judgement towards behaviour which is harmful (like being obese, having casual sex, or fetishism) but one is in a really bad state if one seeks agency for such reasons.
By the government? Sure. Our society isn't good enough that we can give somebody the authority to decide who gets to have freedom and who doesn't. By the way, I said as much freedom as one could handle, not as much as they needed :) Here's a quote by Taleb that I quite like: "I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist". I must agree with him that something goes wrong as a result of scaling. I've only experienced "rules aren't necessary" in smaller communities.
Perhaps the sort of calm which is a result of confidence and competence? For I don't think being "temperate" is good on its own, if it means having no strong convictions, not caring much, and having weak emotions and drives. It has been said by Nietzsche, Jung and Jordan Peterson that one cannot be a good person if they can't be dangerous, and I can only agree with them.
Anyway, is this temperateness something we can cultivate in people? For it's my point that there's something fundamental in people which makes all the difference. Something that, if it turns out alright, everything will work out, and if it doesn't, then you need rules, and regulations, laws, and punishment, surveillance, micromanagement, and so on. My point is that improving society can only be done by improving people directly (from the inside, not outside), and that this kind of improvement is sufficient. People are the atoms of society, any "solutions" on the upper layers are wasted. Japan doesn't have less crime because they have better laws, but because they're Japanese. The Japanese are not a consequence of Japan, Japan is a consequence of the Japanese people. People, their characters, and their nature is the root of everything, and everything else is downstream from that and barely worth bothering with (at least, that's my current worldview). Please let me know if I misunderstood you along the way
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