None of the current popular ways of thinking will help us do anything other than what we’ve always done.
If all of the methods needed to solve our problems are known to some and available to all, then why do our problems remain unsolved? If people do whatever they are incentivized to do and there are available methods to solve our worst problems, wouldn’t all incentives start to line up leading people toward those solutions?
Two chapters back, we reviewed some arguments demonstrating that society has the tools to solve its current problems. In the previous chapter, we looked at why the habits and perspectives of most people will always functionally align with the incentive structures of society — even if virtually no one in society holds those views or endorses those behaviors.
So, if we have all of the answers and people’s behavior tends toward whatever is systemically incentivized, then everything’s gonna be alright. Right? … right?
My task now is to demonstrate that the most popular tools for social change cannot do any of the things their advocates promise. But, they can keep growing in popularity. Much of this is due to something called evolutionary mismatch and the oddly under-recognized rationality of short term bias.
There’s a way in which all of this is obvious. Whatever we mostly do is what has gotten us what we mostly have. And, everything that is widely loved must first be widely experienced. Insistence on doing the same old things in the same old ways, therefore, is strong. This isn’t only true for died in the wool conservatives. Those who most aggressively brand themselves as free thinkers keep holding campus sit-ins and rasping out strained ballads of social change over acoustic guitars, just as they have for unknowable generations. Seriously. Thousands of years ago, in the garden of Academus, a bunch of queer dudes sat around talking about how the state was wrong for martyring their teacher. That’s literally where the word academy comes from. If being a conservative is wanting to keep things the same, everyone is a conservative.
I digress.
In this chapter we’ll be looking at the counter-intuitive reason that our contemporary aversion to punishment makes us more evil, poking a little at the strange way in which that is actually an argument for restorative justice (covered more thoroughly in part four), how we were all intentionally duped by one guy into thinking that democracy is a good thing, and we’ll take a deep dive into a disambiguation of the concepts of perspective and opinion. To tie a nice bow around all of that, we’ll borrow a little Stephen Covey to show why all of the above factors make popular methods of thinking and engaging with social issues unproductive at best. In most cases, popular movements make terrible trades for short term gains. And, when you understand all of the ideas in this chapter, you’ll know why.
“Geez, Deacon. It’s like every chapter in this book could be its own book.”
Yeah. I know.
Well, if you wanna stay tuned, sign up for updates here. It’s been a fun ride so far.