Political Engineering or The Lack Thereof
Blender Dumbass
November 12, 2024👁 148
https://blenderdumbass.org/articles : 👁 1
The main reason a lot of the Roman concrete structures are still standing is that those structures were not engineered, but rather, built to be the strongest. The difference is that anybody with enough resources can make a strong building, or an unbreakable bridge, but rarely those resources are available. Engineers on the other hand have to design structures that barely hold, with the least possible resources. The lunar lander had walls as thin as foil, because taking up to the moon, the mass required to make a strong lunar lander was extremely expensive. Engineer's job is therefor to come up with weakest acceptable design beyond which any waste is too expensive. But here if an over-complication occurs, the manufacturer just loses money. In other activities, if an engineer fails to make the structure just barely on the edge of what's acceptable, the entire thing collapses. And I'm of course talking about politics.
Freedom is the most unstable political substance. Tyranny or Oppression are self-stabilizing because even to facilitate the existence of Freedom, some Oppression is required. When the conversation stops being about what is getting us more freedom, but rather, what is the most we can do to stop tyranny, we are destabilizing freedom, paving a way for tyranny. And the only way to combat this, is to use clever political engineering to have just the bare minimum amount of power to cause the system to stabilize towards freedom and not towards oppression.
If I lost you here, perhaps I shall try to dive a bit deeper into what I mean, so you could have a chance at understanding it. There is a line between freedom and oppression, both of which are control of one type or another. And the line is very thin. When somebody has control over somebody else it is power. An injustice. Oppression. But control over one's self is freedom and completely justified, no matter how stupid it might look from the outside perspective. Freedoms you are more familiar with, like freedom of speech, are coming directly from this. If I control my body, I control my mouth, and so I have a right to use my mouth to do any sounds what so ever. Whether you like it or not. Notice how this is not about utility or anything. Free Speech is not useful and therefor has to exist. It is more fundamental than that. Controlling how another person can use his mouth is a direct oppression akin to rape. It is control over another person's body. And I'm not saying here that Free Speech or any other freedom isn't useful. Its just that the usefulness is a secondary benefit.
The instability of Freedom comes from the slight paradoxicality of it. Say you are a person with a choice between using Free Software to do your computing and using Proprietary Software. With Free Software you are insured to have freedom. But you still have to have the freedom to use the non-free, proprietary software. If you don't have that freedom, you don't have freedom. But then if you choose to use non-free software you don't have freedom either. Therefor the system isn't stable. There are 3 possibilities here: 1. You choose Free Software. This way you have freedom. 2. You choose proprietary software. This way you lose freedom. And 3. You choose to limit yourself to not being able to choose proprietary software, in which case you also lose freedom. In even the simplest example like this your odds of losing freedom is 2 to 1. And this kind of decision you have to do constantly, which makes it very likely that at some point you will lose freedom.
Another instability comes from the fact that most people do not respect your freedom. If everybody would respect your freedom, there would not be, for example, proprietary software to begin with. And therefor freedom would have been a lot more stable. But a lot of people have an ambition for power. And if nothing stops them from having power, they will. In order to stop people from gaining power, somebody must interfere with their goals. Somebody needs to put roadblocks into their way. Somebody must exercise power to stop power. And that is the problem. If we increase power to stop power, we still increase power. If we are trying to fight an injustice so desperately that we forget about freedom, we are creating another injustice in the process. And therefor it is paradoxically impossible to even have freedom, at least fully, in the first place.
The best possible thing we can do is to optimize the system in a such a way that power is at its lowest possible, just barely enough to defeat power. Which kind of starts to resemble the ideas in the beginning of this article, where I talked about engineers. Most governments around the world aren't even trying to optimize for freedom. They see an injustice and attack it with full force. Similar to how Romans built their structures. A very wasteful endeavor. And while with Roman concrete it was just a waste of material, to make things stronger, which was not particularly terrible, fighting with injustices by creating injustices is a whole another type of waste.
We have a finite unstable amount of freedom. And this is our currency, our only currency, to fight oppression. Because we can remove some of our freedom and turn it into a bit more power. A bit more oppression, to catch a bit more criminals. But we should never overdo that. All criminals ( that are bad ) are oppressing people in one way or the other. Rapists and Murderers do that directly to the person's body. Thieves do that the person's belongings. And other oppressors to that in other ways. So in order to have freedom we should stop them. But if to catch a thief you need to completely undermine freedoms of the rest of the population, you are wasting the freedom resources. You are a terrible political engineer, completely and utterly under-qualified for the job.
A lot of today's political landscape is just brewing with this kind of insanity. Most cities in the world are filled with surveillance cameras, so just in case something bad would start happening, those in power could respond more effectively. This is already too much waste. This is already almost a complete disregard toward privacy, freedom to control what you want to tell others about yourself, just to increase power a little bit. A little bit! To maybe, possibly, somewhat aid the powers to stop some powers. If we were talking about a bridge. And that it could be stronger if we put one more million dollars into it. And therefor it will less likely to collapse. It is one thing. Yes those needing to pay it would probably be not very found of this idea. But if your bridge's integrity is dependent on it self, it is a completely different problem. If to make it stronger, you need to make it weaker, it is an absolutely inexcusable type of stupidity to do it. With freedom we only have that, freedom. Somebody might want to take it away. But if we take more to stop that person, than what this person could have taken, we are making it worse, by even trying. If to catch one criminal we have to turn the entire city into a surveillance machine for a day. How many people will lose freedom to that criminal in a day, versus how many more people will lose freedom to stop that criminal in that same day?
Say he is a very bad guy and he is going to kill 10 people today, in a town with 100 residents. So he will violate freedoms of 10 people if we don't stop him. We should stop him! In order to stop him, though, we decide to use mass surveillance, which doesn't even mean that it will help us catch the criminal, but it will definitely violate freedoms of all 100 people in the town. In this case we are committing 10 times as much crime. This is not a smart design. A smart design would have dealt with this criminal without taking other people's freedom with it. Or maybe if the criminal would have oppressed 10 people, the cost to catch that criminal with a smart design would not have exceeded 10 people's freedoms. And that is including that one criminal's own freedom. Because putting a person into a cell is directly violating this person's freedom.
An engineer would laugh at you today if you would try to build a strong structure by just filling a thick wall full of steel. This is way to wasteful. The same, or greater strength could be achieved by choosing the right materials and shapes. Triangles, for example are incredibly strong. And a lot of structures today are build from thin pieces of material connected into triangle meshes. This is way lighter, way cheaper and therefor a lot smarter. Why aren't we doing the same with politics?
Happy Hacking!!!
1. Religious
God is almighty. He can do anything. And he wants something from humans. Something from humans to do for him. Why, if he is almighty, he doesn't just make it impossible for us to do otherwise? Well here is a religious answer, actually coming from Jewdaism: God wants people to have Freedom.
It is extended even more with the story of Exodus. There were slaves. And the story about re-gaining freedom. And how challenging it is to regain freedom. People walked around for 40 years, when they could have done the trip in a week. Because slaves are not prepared to be not-slaves. It takes time to think like a free person. The whole story has a message about freedom. It is about freedom.
The best illustration of the this duopoly between the true belief in God and the pseudo-poser way of the ultra religious belief, which is all just theatricality, is illustrated wonderfully by Lars Von Trier in his film "Breaking The Waves". I suggest you to take a look.
2. Scientific
It is meaningless to even ask the question of "Is there God?" because answers on both sides are what's called "Unfalsifiable". Meaning that there is no conceivable test which could be done which will stop all debates about it. And the test doesn't exist because it doesn't actually change anything, whether there is God or there isn't God. Both ways there will not be a measurable difference in the world.
By any means, everybody's equality before the God, as a concept was very helpful to establish the modern ideas of individual Freedom. All people are equal. And trying to be God-like ( as in trying to take control over other people ) as something bad that should not be done, also came from those religions. Freedom as we know it, on which the whole western philosophy is based got out of those religions. And if you are a true believer, and not just a theatrical poser, you should know it.
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