I don’t know if you have read it, a fascinating book, “How will Capitalism End” by Wolfgang Streeck. It has nuggets like this one:
“After a certain amount of time, it may no longer be possible to stop the rot: expectations of what politics can do may have eroded too far, and the civic skills and organizational structures needed to develop effective public demand may have atrophied beyond redemption, while the political personnel themselves may have adapted entirely to specializing in the management of appearances,rather than the representation of some version, however biased, of the public interest.”
Look at the government response to almost anything: Public health, the homeless, building large infrastructure, healthcare, military procurement, diplomacy, forest fire suppression…. It’s incompetence everywhere. These people all got where they are by pretending to be what they are supposed to be, with no actual experience and skill behind them.
Presented with an actual challenge that requires a skilled response, they are as hopeless as an actor who plays a brain surgeon trying out an actual surgery. I present you Blinken and Sullivan as “diplomats” for example. You could replace them with a wind up doll repeating platitudes about “democracy and freedom” and never notice the difference.
Best if your nation's Founder is your ethics advisor.
Confucius laid China's ethical foundation and it works as well today as it has for 2000 years: rulers establish society's ethics by example: "Let people see that you only want their good and the people will be good. The relationship between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows across it. If good men were to govern a country continually for a hundred years they would transform the violently bad and dispense with capital punishment altogether". Analects.
I read an interesting book recently, _Fixing the Game_ by Robert Martin. It may be that the destruction of community predated the legalism. https://rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/fixing-the-game . It's an outline of what has gone wrong with capitalism, by a capitalist, with concrete suggestions about fixing the mess and having companies return to doing good by 'delighting their customers' rather than focusing on fooling the expectations market for as long as possible and driving share price increases. We've created a business climate that normalises deceit, and wonder why we have so many liars running around making a mess of things all over. (I only found your substack today, and as Martin's book is the most useful thing I have read recently in _my_ quest to try to understand the world I suspect that it would be of interest to some of your readers as well.)
I believe that Martin would disagree with your statement "As a matter of simple logic, a system based on competition cannot provide a holistic solution, except by accident, and this is becoming increasingly obvious" and instead argue that it's not the competition but the reframing of the focus of the goal of the competition on increasing share value as the culprit. When maximising customer delight was the focus, we seem to have generated them, and perhaps that was not an accident.
This book is aimed at a non-mathematical audience. I'd have preferred more quantitative analysis, but that's me. It probably will go more good in the world as it is written. And it is quite a refreshing change from those books written 'to make you smugly feel superior as the world burns, because I taught you how to make conversational points with your friends and appear clever' that sell so well these days. It concludes with concrete proposals for how to reform the system, and _not by adding more laws_.
I am not sure the word 'liberalism' has all the characteristics to which you ascribe. Should I substitute the word 'conservative?' Should I subscribe the New Testament? The Old Testament? The libertarian impulse to substitute individual sovereignty to community? What is the correct word?
I've mused about a question similar to your obesity story: how to approach carbon dioxide issues. A lot of conversations about climate change necessarily drift into a blame assignment game, as is the case with a lot of social problems (smoking, guns, COVID, and yes, obesity, too, being other examples.). If you will, this, what one might call "wrongspeak" is the obverse of the "rightspeak," as this presumes that the "wronged" person had "rights" that were somehow violated by the offending person--the one who "deserves" the blame. But who is to be "blamed" for carbon dioxide? It is literally the byproduct of life. If one wants to be strict about it, no one can evade some share of blame--they live, don't they? (Besides, it's not even the most serious greenhouse gas--iirc, that distinction belongs to another very common substance, water vapor, but that's a bit irrelevant.). One reason, I suppose, to pay attention to carbon dioxide is it's ubiquity: since it is produced everywhere, through all manner of activities, its production can presumably be curtailed through all sorts of activities that can be performed by many people at relatively low cost (to individuals). But we don't just say, wrt too many social issues, X is causing such and such problems. Let's ALL do what we can to mitigate the problem without thinking who the "villain" is. Instead, we become indignant that "everyone's" right to X has been violated and A is to blame.
This usually makes the problem harder to resolve: the designated villain, "deserving" or not, does not want to be crucified and resist. Those who feel that they are the "victims" whose "rights" were violated don't want to do their share to solve the problems--because it's not "their fault." So, for a long time, nothing gets done because nobody wants to own the problem and do something about it. But the advantage of focusing on something like carbon dioxide is that everyone has some part in its production so everyone can do something to reduce its production. But making the debate one about "rights" and "wrongs" necessarily destroys this possibility.
You know, "Liberalism," as the term is used today, reminds me of Talmudism or Tafsirism. In First Century Roman Judea it was known as Phariseeism. "Legalism" it has come down as in classic Christian Systematics and New Testament studies.
Nasty stuff, Legalism. A whole new wave of "Christians" has embraced it with the zeal of fanatics. "Judeo-Christianity" is their stand-in for "Liberalism." Neocons -- Pharisees -- is their name in the political dimension.
FWIW, I was writing today elsewhere that, at least for USA, Theology is to replace Law as the stabilizing outrigger of military operations. Russia and India are already there.
I don’t know if you have read it, a fascinating book, “How will Capitalism End” by Wolfgang Streeck. It has nuggets like this one:
“After a certain amount of time, it may no longer be possible to stop the rot: expectations of what politics can do may have eroded too far, and the civic skills and organizational structures needed to develop effective public demand may have atrophied beyond redemption, while the political personnel themselves may have adapted entirely to specializing in the management of appearances,rather than the representation of some version, however biased, of the public interest.”
Look at the government response to almost anything: Public health, the homeless, building large infrastructure, healthcare, military procurement, diplomacy, forest fire suppression…. It’s incompetence everywhere. These people all got where they are by pretending to be what they are supposed to be, with no actual experience and skill behind them.
Presented with an actual challenge that requires a skilled response, they are as hopeless as an actor who plays a brain surgeon trying out an actual surgery. I present you Blinken and Sullivan as “diplomats” for example. You could replace them with a wind up doll repeating platitudes about “democracy and freedom” and never notice the difference.
Best if your nation's Founder is your ethics advisor.
Confucius laid China's ethical foundation and it works as well today as it has for 2000 years: rulers establish society's ethics by example: "Let people see that you only want their good and the people will be good. The relationship between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows across it. If good men were to govern a country continually for a hundred years they would transform the violently bad and dispense with capital punishment altogether". Analects.
I read an interesting book recently, _Fixing the Game_ by Robert Martin. It may be that the destruction of community predated the legalism. https://rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/fixing-the-game . It's an outline of what has gone wrong with capitalism, by a capitalist, with concrete suggestions about fixing the mess and having companies return to doing good by 'delighting their customers' rather than focusing on fooling the expectations market for as long as possible and driving share price increases. We've created a business climate that normalises deceit, and wonder why we have so many liars running around making a mess of things all over. (I only found your substack today, and as Martin's book is the most useful thing I have read recently in _my_ quest to try to understand the world I suspect that it would be of interest to some of your readers as well.)
I believe that Martin would disagree with your statement "As a matter of simple logic, a system based on competition cannot provide a holistic solution, except by accident, and this is becoming increasingly obvious" and instead argue that it's not the competition but the reframing of the focus of the goal of the competition on increasing share value as the culprit. When maximising customer delight was the focus, we seem to have generated them, and perhaps that was not an accident.
This book is aimed at a non-mathematical audience. I'd have preferred more quantitative analysis, but that's me. It probably will go more good in the world as it is written. And it is quite a refreshing change from those books written 'to make you smugly feel superior as the world burns, because I taught you how to make conversational points with your friends and appear clever' that sell so well these days. It concludes with concrete proposals for how to reform the system, and _not by adding more laws_.
Of one desire "to have some idea about how stuff works in real life". . .
here's a real life example of how things work in real life . . . https://les7eb.substack.com/p/ukraine-notes-the-long-proxy-war-67b
Ethics are for "the common folk". Remain well behaved. or else.
I am not sure the word 'liberalism' has all the characteristics to which you ascribe. Should I substitute the word 'conservative?' Should I subscribe the New Testament? The Old Testament? The libertarian impulse to substitute individual sovereignty to community? What is the correct word?
I've mused about a question similar to your obesity story: how to approach carbon dioxide issues. A lot of conversations about climate change necessarily drift into a blame assignment game, as is the case with a lot of social problems (smoking, guns, COVID, and yes, obesity, too, being other examples.). If you will, this, what one might call "wrongspeak" is the obverse of the "rightspeak," as this presumes that the "wronged" person had "rights" that were somehow violated by the offending person--the one who "deserves" the blame. But who is to be "blamed" for carbon dioxide? It is literally the byproduct of life. If one wants to be strict about it, no one can evade some share of blame--they live, don't they? (Besides, it's not even the most serious greenhouse gas--iirc, that distinction belongs to another very common substance, water vapor, but that's a bit irrelevant.). One reason, I suppose, to pay attention to carbon dioxide is it's ubiquity: since it is produced everywhere, through all manner of activities, its production can presumably be curtailed through all sorts of activities that can be performed by many people at relatively low cost (to individuals). But we don't just say, wrt too many social issues, X is causing such and such problems. Let's ALL do what we can to mitigate the problem without thinking who the "villain" is. Instead, we become indignant that "everyone's" right to X has been violated and A is to blame.
This usually makes the problem harder to resolve: the designated villain, "deserving" or not, does not want to be crucified and resist. Those who feel that they are the "victims" whose "rights" were violated don't want to do their share to solve the problems--because it's not "their fault." So, for a long time, nothing gets done because nobody wants to own the problem and do something about it. But the advantage of focusing on something like carbon dioxide is that everyone has some part in its production so everyone can do something to reduce its production. But making the debate one about "rights" and "wrongs" necessarily destroys this possibility.
You know, "Liberalism," as the term is used today, reminds me of Talmudism or Tafsirism. In First Century Roman Judea it was known as Phariseeism. "Legalism" it has come down as in classic Christian Systematics and New Testament studies.
Nasty stuff, Legalism. A whole new wave of "Christians" has embraced it with the zeal of fanatics. "Judeo-Christianity" is their stand-in for "Liberalism." Neocons -- Pharisees -- is their name in the political dimension.
FWIW, I was writing today elsewhere that, at least for USA, Theology is to replace Law as the stabilizing outrigger of military operations. Russia and India are already there.
Finster's Third Law readeth thusly:
Legalism breeds lawyers.