Well, first of all, happy Independence Eve to all my fellow USians out there. I’m greeting you today because I will not be writing a blog post tomorrow, since I will not be working tomorrow, barring the unforeseen (exclusis improvisis one might say in Latin).
I suppose I could pre-write a post for tomorrow and schedule it to be published in the morning, but that would require a fair bit of extra work, and I barely have the energy to survive to the end of any given day as it is.
As for tomorrow’s holiday, I think it is important for US citizens (“Americans”) to remember what tomorrow represents: the signing (and publication) of the Declaration of Independence, asserting the end of British rule in the colonies and the formation of a new, independent nation.
In this present time, when the extremes of both ends of the political spectrum show all too clear leanings toward authoritarianism, it’s worth rereading the Declaration of Independence in full, including the list of grievances. I will link to it as part of this post. It’s not very long, really‒the main text contains only 1320 words, barely longer than yesterday’s blog post‒and it’s worth rereading at least once a year (as is the Constitution).
It’s not that there’s anything astonishingly ingenious about those documents, let alone “divine” in character, though they are well thought out and nicely expressed. It’s the notions they convey that matter, among which (implicitly) is: human “authority” is almost always a misnomer.
Stephen King has authority over the universes of his books, because he actually authored them. Ditto for me regarding my universes. But the real world is under no one’s authority, since as far as we can tell, it has no author, and no one understands it completely.
There is such a thing as expertise‒it varies quite a bit in its quality, but experts do exist and it tends to be worthwhile to listen to them within their areas of knowledge. But experts are fallible, and those who would take part in “running” the various governments are extremely fallible, since it is an area of poorly developed science.
It’s worthwhile to remember and emphasize this fact, because naked house apes are prone to be swayed by primate dominance hierarchical urges, just as much as Vervet monkeys and chimpanzees and baboons are. And since these proclivities are more or less instinctive, they don’t feel like mere thoughts. They feel like perceptions. They feel like direct experiences of the nature of reality.
They are experiences of some aspects of reality, of course, but they are frequently misleading ones. It’s worthwhile remembering that politics, especially politics with authoritarian leanings*, tends to attract those who want to have power for its own sake, for their own sake‒not only those who really want to look out for the people and institutions of their particular nation‒though often they will pretend, even to themselves, that they are seeking some “greater good”.
But if there is such a greater good, and if the glaringly mediocre minds that claim such things can understand it, then that notion can be carefully communicated, and if it truly is good and great, then that should be clear and convincing to any honest and intelligent interlocutor.
Admittedly, there may be many biases that prevent every living hominid from accepting even the clearest bodies of evidence and argument; there are people who claim to believe the Earth is flat, after all, and that is not very bright. But one should at least find a tendency toward confluence of judgment among those who live by the intellect, such as philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, physicists, engineers, etc. When ideas are tested honestly and rigorously against reality, they tend to converge over time, because as far as anyone can tell, reality is at root unitary.
But those who seek political power are not generally drawn from fields that encourage and focus on rationalism, empiricism, and fallibilism. And though I do not doubt that many people go into politics hoping to do actual good and to be of service, there are also very many who crave power over others, for whatever reasons, or even without reasons. Such people do not tend to be our best and brightest, for as someone once wrote, “power lust is a weed that grows only in an untended mind”**.
This is why checks and balances and votes that include inputs from many (potentially all) people in a society, as well as frequent changes of office, are useful. Weird shit, being unconstrained by reality, tends to be all over the place, ceteris paribus, compared to more grounded, realistic shit. So, hopefully, in most cases, the overall mean or median or mode of good ideas is going to tend to be more reality based.
It’s not perfect, and we can certainly strive to improve it. We can seek increased and better education, and encourage ourselves to seek to understand reality and to traffic in rigorous and self improving ideas to make it ever better. But a crucial point is that there is no human authority over the world, and the sorts of people who would arrogate to themselves such power are not among the best and brightest.
As the old song says, “He can’t even run his own life, be damned if he’ll run mine.”
Anyway, Happy Independence Eve, again, and have a happy Independence Day tomorrow if you are in the US and celebrate it. Don’t be put off by the lamentable state of current politics. The ideas in the Declaration of Independence are still worth celebrating.
*e.g., the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
**Yes, I know who said it. But though I do like to give credit for well-turned phrases, it’s often the case that naked house apes will either latch onto or dismiss out of hand ideas solely based upon who said them, not on the quality of the ideas. This is not rational, but it is horribly typical. I’ve written about this before, this problem of attribution. So, since it’s the message that matters, not who said it, I will sometimes refrain from revealing a quotation’s source, with implicit apologies to such sources.
