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You're doubtless familiar with the story of the ants and the grasshoppers. Do you recognize a difference between the ants' reply to the Grasshoppers' demands and the phrase, "I've got mine, screw you"? Does it matter how and why the ants got theirs, or is the question of desserts eternally confined to the present state?
What's your evidence that "Caring About Other People" (which people? caring how?) delivers superior outcomes to "not" caring about other people? The policies Progressives describe as "Caring about other people" don't appear to preclude encouraging people to make risky choices, and then standing back and clucking regretfully as the consequences drive them to various forms of ritual public suicide united by thorough degradation and languorous agony. I personally would rather be swiftly dead or permanently jailed than live out the fitful and deranged trajectory of Travis Berge to its bitter conclusion. A system of "caring about other people" that reliably proliferates lots of Berges, and worse, evidently involves a somewhat nonstandard definition of "caring".
So long as such systems exist, it behooves the responsible and the prudent to wall them off from everything of value to the greatest extent possible, for the simple reason that instinctive, atavistic destruction will always be cheaper and easier than the amassment of value, of the good, of virtue. Actual care for others demands as much: those persuing goodness should be protected and encouraged, those pursuing evil should be given every incentive to change their ways, and blocked from executing their designs in the meantime.
...All of which is a long way to make a simple point: The claims you're implicitly making are completely demolished by multiple decades of observed results. "Caring about other people", in the peculiar way Progressives define the phrase, demonstrably makes the world into a rotting sewer.
If the ants say "I've got mine, go build your own, and if you can't do so before winter that isn't my problem" then we are in The Parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, and we are supposed to feel at least somewhat sympathetic to the ants. NIMBYism is where the ants say "I've got mine, and if you build your own I will shoot you" which puts us in a kind of reverse It's a Bug's Life.
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Apologies for the confusion. I had no intention of claiming one set of values is "superior" to another. In fact, I thought I directly stated that the difference in goals meant that debating which approach is "superior" isn't a meaningful conversation to have in this context.
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The innocence project reliably puts out stories of the wrongfully convicted or executed. If you propose a general increase in 'swift death' or 'permanent jail', how do we balance Berges against Cameron Willinghams? Our system reliably proliferates Berges, as it does pedophiles, fraudsters, schizophrenics, people with nine toes ... because out of hundreds of millions of americans, five hundred people who are released and later reoffend is genuinely difficult to avoid.
Not that you don't have a point, but the evidence here isn't enough to claim "progressives demonstrably make the world into a rotting sewer". Especially since crime rates, over the past 400 years, have consistently trended down, as everything's become more progressive. This is one of the issues I take with neoreaction generally - a monarchist claims crime was better under monarchy because of strict order, etc, but I've never seen this really elaborated upon, other than 'I read lots of victorian literature and they say so', yet crime seems to have decreased generally.
I think in cases like Berges, some form of institutionalization is probably a massive improvement over the current method. That is to say, if I knew my life were going to go down Berges' trajectory, I would rather be institutionalized, and failing that I would rather be dead. His fate is viscerally horrifying to me, and the fact that we, from my perspective, encourage and allow such states to play themselves out without meaningful intervention is unconscionable.
Berges didn't need the full weight of the war-on-drugs criminal justice system. He didn't need a SWAT takedown. But neither did he need to be treated to a revolving-door parody of civil consequences. Once it became apparent that he was completely incapable of making good choices under his own power, he should have been locked up in some sort of minimum-security prison, there to either have the opportunity to rebuild some semblance of personal character, or at least be protected and to protect others from his own worst impulses.
Nor is it obvious to me that our society proliferates Bergeses in the same way it proliferates schizophrenics and people with nine toes. I think there is a fairly direct causation from the absurdly permissive social policies, particularly around highly addictive drugs, crime, and vagrancy, and the way his life ended. He lost control, and the social structures around him refused to help him in any way that worked or mattered.
Piss and shit on the streets, everywhere, together with trash, filth, used needles, infectious waste. Rats, and with them outbreaks of vermin-borne plagues. These are some of the highlights of the social experience in west-coast Progressive strongholds. I think "rotting sewer" is a reasonable summation. I don't want to live in such conditions, and I don't want to share a polity with the people who create and sustain them.
As for crime...I'm wondering if you've checked the stats lately. Here's 1900 to 2000. Here's the recent years, including the eye-popping 30% increase in 2020 that correlated with a major Progressive push to reform policing. I don't see how one matches those figures to a claim of "crime generally going down." We are currently sitting somewhere around five times the murder rate we enjoyed prior to the first modern Progressive era of the 1920s-30s, and the downward slope we enjoyed following the massive increase of the second progressive era of the 1960s-70s seems to be well and truly over.
Worse, one must consider the staggeringly massive investments and restructurings our society has made over the last century, all in an explicit attempt to solve the problem of violent crime. From militarized policing, mass-incarceration, ubiquitous surveillance, forensic science, to trauma medicine, to the increasingly regimented and invasive educational and psychological interventions, we've expended vast sums of money and human lives, and done massive, highly questionable modifications to our core social institutions, many of them with their own harmful side effects. And all this, by our best evidence, could only partially slow the long-term increase, and that to only a limited degree. Now we're headed back up again, quite rapidly, with our previous policy options thoroughly expended. When the murder rate skyrocketed in 2020, that was with a century of crime-suppression and harm-mitigation techniques, many of them ruinously expensive, already in place or expended.
So now... what?
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I apologise in advance for posting in response to your comment rather than any of these other ones, but it seemed as good a place as any.
Put simply: NIMBYism is not a position where we just don't care about other people. That would be the maximised libertarian one, where people get to do as they like. NIMBYs care about what other people do lots and lots, be they OP or anyone else. So, by all means, please do - please do go for a regime that doesn't care about people. I think it would be better than a system that cares too much or one that is actively malicious.
I agree, and that in fact was my entire point. The person I responded to chose the "NIMBYs don't care about others" framing. I'm attempting to point out that they're using an extremely non-central definition of "caring" that delivers nonsensical results.
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It's not just progressives who fall into this trap. I have seen many on the right who are preoccupied with other people, too. I think both sides have a tendency to moralize , but about different things.
That's fine if people want to make stupid choices. Just don't make me pay for the externalities or make me have to pretend that these are values to aspire to.
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