It seems to me a false dichotomy of business or state. There is a more important thing than either which gets ignored: culture, and I'll tell you why and why it gets ignored.
If we totalize everything into markets, then only that which can be monetized or profited from matters. This is a true criticism of free markets, that it only cares about profits (and that goes to the individual level -- are you going to go to work if you're not making enough money to profit somewhat from that labor?). The incentives often mean that people get more of what they want or need because you profit by providing services people want, but market efficiency is ruthless and sometimes what is efficient to the market isn't efficient for humanity.
If we totalize everything into the state then only that which can be powered by the state or will empower the state matters. This is a true criticism of the state, that only truly cares about power. To totalize everything under the national state is definitionally fascism. The incentives mean that people get more interference in their lives, and sometimes that's good -- I don't want roads built by Jethro's discount roads with no design being followed and for my car to get caught in a sinkhole every week -- but often what empowers the state does not empower humanity.
One thing the Ronald Reagans and Margaret Thatchers of the world were right about is that we have been on the road to fascism since the beginning of the world wars. The state used to be 5% of GDP, now it's 50% or more in some developed countries. So-called neoliberalism claims to want to shrink government power, but all it really seems to do is cut services for the poor and increase services for the rich, because the state is primarily focused on empowering itself and the utilization of that power, so unchecked will take over everything. In reality, neoliberalism is a false ideology that doesn't deliver on the things it claims and instead just refactors a state that was created when there was a stronger culture into a lower culture state with fewer guardrails. If your culture doesn't actually care about the poor, why pay into such a system when you can make an argument for handing trillions to big business instead? It reduces social security nets, but instead of returning the money to the people, it starts paying favors to the wealthy and powerful. In this way, the state and the market become symbiotes for themselves, but parasites for the society.
It's important here to understand that the state and markets aren't always entirely self-interested and destructive. However, these typically occur because of a third pillar which provides broader limitations to both, culture.
Culture is important because it needs to work as the mediator between the excesses of powers such as the state or the merchant class and the people. It doesn't get talked about because a properly operating culture doesn't usually profit individuals and doesn't usually empower rulers, and a distributed culture may instead be controlled by nobody in particular. Even centralized powers like the church need to guide while not disrupting or opposing consensus too much or people will tune out (as billions have, in fact). The thing is, culture is the overlay that keeps markets and the state honest more than they keep each other honest. Chivalry wasn't imposed by the state on itself, but by the culture to ensure the warrior class in the state was acting nobly and they weren't just violent thugs. In the East, Confucianism was a cultural counterbalance to the bureaucracy, ensuring that it didn't totally consume everything.
Politically, this leads to a "both sides are obviously wrong" conclusion that many people think is centrist, but is instead something else entirely. In Zen Buddhism, there is a parable that goes something like this:
The student asks the buddhist master whether a dog has a buddha nature. The master said "Mu" and the student was englightened".
In this case, "Mu" means "unask the question", or "the question is wrong". In the question, it pre-assumes that there is such a thing as a buddha nature that something has or does not have. In the same way, the question "should the state or the market have more power" pre-assumes that either of these has a correct answer, when reality is more complicated than that.
What we see instead is that culture is either coopted or attacked into irrelevance by both forces which don't want competition.
There is a stated "culture war" out there, but in reality it isn't about culture per se, it's about facets of the state or the market trying to impose norms on everyone that are beneficial to themselves. These forces drape themselves in a veneer of culture, but it isn't about culture at all. We can tell this because the final word isn't about who is right and who is wrong, but about who gets to rule.
I've been somewhat enlightened this summer in passing on culture to my son, and realizing all the things that it involves. You're reading stories, you're telling stories, you're singing songs, you're doing things -- and the whole process doesn't involve buying much of anything, and it doesn't involve the state stepping in and doing much of anything (though I'll admit, you can make a lot of use of common goods such as parks or walking trails).
I found it very interesting that despite going outside up to 3 times every day and making use of different parks, trails, or other facilities, most of them were empty virtually every time I went there. There weren't other fathers playing with their sons, there weren't other mothers playing with their daughters, there weren't even kids playing with other kids. It was a ghost world. Where are they? I tend to believe they're sitting somewhere being monetized.
The state also steps in and if they find your kids playing with other kids without direct adult supervision, you could have a visit from a police officer or CFS. Are kids really in so much danger? Not according to all the statistics we see, yet the state steps in anyway to mediate moments that don't belong to them. Simply because that's how they take a little more power for themselves, as is the nature of the state removed from the constraints of culture. In this way, the false dichotomy of state vs. market is fully visible, because as the state increases its grip, people require market solutions -- whether it's larger solutions like daycare, or smaller solutions like tablets with unlimited streaming, to pacify children who would otherwise react strongly to having their freedom to have a childhood taken from them.
You end up where perhaps a couple could have one working parent and one stay at home parent, but you instead need two working parents to pay for all the additional services you need because the state dictates you need them.
The suffocation of people by the state and the market has the effect of stifling culture. If one parent is working and one can stay home, the one who stays home is often dealing with cultural work including organizing events within the local community, volunteering with community organizations, or just spending time doing stuff in a decentralized manner to make the world a better place. Kids end up raised by the school and by commercial daycare instead of by their parents, and so their culture is dictated by the state, eliminating true culture.
So what does rebuilding culture look like? I think there's a few things everyone can do immediately.
1. Create culture. Its easier than ever to write a book, to sing a song, to produce a cartoon, to program a video game. It doesn't have to be great, it just needs to be authentically by you. I made a video game called "Quest for a King" as a teenager, and it was pretty impressive for the work of a teenager, but nothing revolutionary. However, my cousin saw that video game and was inspired, and today he's a world famous video game programmer. I'm not taking large credit for his success, but I do believe it showed him it was entirely possible to create something himself.
2. Raise your kids yourself, and with purpose. The data on this is unavoidable. First, a child with two parents is statistically speaking so much better than a child with one parent, who is statistically speaking so much better than a child with no parents. Then on top of that, it doesn't just matter that you show up, it matters that you care, it matters what you're teaching your kids. It isn't just about what you write on a chalkboard, it matters how you live your life, how you treat others around you. This doesn't mean necessarily that you have to homeschool and refuse to ever use daycare, but it means that the time you do spend with your kids needs to be meaningfully spent so you have a chance to pass culture on (and it does mean you have to pay attention to what the schools and the daycares are doing to ensure it meshes with your values).
3. Engage with problems with culture, not always markets or the state. If the local park is full of garbage, sometimes the right answer isn't to ask the council to send someone to clean it, or to pay a company to clean it up, it's to go there with a garbage bag and clean it up yourself. I made a habit of this at the parks I went to with my son, and he started picking up garbage on his own and throwing it away before he understood any idea of me telling him to do anything. He did it because I did it, and that's a slice of culture you can't buy or have imposed upon you by the state. People can get together, form groups, and work together to build local cultures, and the best of those can grow to become influential beyond a small group of people.
4. Think for yourself. Seems obvious on paper, but in reality a lot of people wait for someone else to think for them, and that's where the state and the market get their chance to inject themselves into situations they have no business in. You don't just do the previous points the way you think the state or the market wants you to, you do it the way you think is the best way to do it. The bar is insanely low from them because the bar must always be set low with the state or the market because it needs to cater to the lowest common denominator. By contrast, culture (and especially local culture we create ourselves) can set the bar infinitely high and tell people to strive for the highest bar, then reward the people for how much closer to the bar they get.
Premodernity had a variety of cultures, some of which were so powerful they shape our thinking today, such as the ancient Greeks or ancient Indians. Modernity had powerful elements of culture, but its focus on rationality, empiricism, and logic also eroded culture by assuming the influence of culture was the natural state of man and so didn't need to be accounted for. This gave an opening for ideologies where the state took over the culture such as Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism, or ideologies which assumed such a void would be filled with the natural goodness of people such as classical liberalism, both of which proved fatally incorrect. Postmodernity (I always argue we entered the postmodern period after the world wars proved modernity catastrophically incorrect) continued the mistake by deconstructing and destroying institutions in culture because they could be shown on paper to be imperfect, destroying cultural institutions which then were replaced by the state and the market.
400 years of cultural destruction has resulted in the problems we see today: Atomization of the individual and destruction of culture including institutions such as families and organized religion. People are materially wealthier than ever in all of history, but we're miserable, stressed out, divided, and the state is more powerful than ever, and the market is deeply corrupt and despite wealth being greater than ever before, so is inequality.
If we totalize everything into markets, then only that which can be monetized or profited from matters. This is a true criticism of free markets, that it only cares about profits (and that goes to the individual level -- are you going to go to work if you're not making enough money to profit somewhat from that labor?). The incentives often mean that people get more of what they want or need because you profit by providing services people want, but market efficiency is ruthless and sometimes what is efficient to the market isn't efficient for humanity.
If we totalize everything into the state then only that which can be powered by the state or will empower the state matters. This is a true criticism of the state, that only truly cares about power. To totalize everything under the national state is definitionally fascism. The incentives mean that people get more interference in their lives, and sometimes that's good -- I don't want roads built by Jethro's discount roads with no design being followed and for my car to get caught in a sinkhole every week -- but often what empowers the state does not empower humanity.
One thing the Ronald Reagans and Margaret Thatchers of the world were right about is that we have been on the road to fascism since the beginning of the world wars. The state used to be 5% of GDP, now it's 50% or more in some developed countries. So-called neoliberalism claims to want to shrink government power, but all it really seems to do is cut services for the poor and increase services for the rich, because the state is primarily focused on empowering itself and the utilization of that power, so unchecked will take over everything. In reality, neoliberalism is a false ideology that doesn't deliver on the things it claims and instead just refactors a state that was created when there was a stronger culture into a lower culture state with fewer guardrails. If your culture doesn't actually care about the poor, why pay into such a system when you can make an argument for handing trillions to big business instead? It reduces social security nets, but instead of returning the money to the people, it starts paying favors to the wealthy and powerful. In this way, the state and the market become symbiotes for themselves, but parasites for the society.
It's important here to understand that the state and markets aren't always entirely self-interested and destructive. However, these typically occur because of a third pillar which provides broader limitations to both, culture.
Culture is important because it needs to work as the mediator between the excesses of powers such as the state or the merchant class and the people. It doesn't get talked about because a properly operating culture doesn't usually profit individuals and doesn't usually empower rulers, and a distributed culture may instead be controlled by nobody in particular. Even centralized powers like the church need to guide while not disrupting or opposing consensus too much or people will tune out (as billions have, in fact). The thing is, culture is the overlay that keeps markets and the state honest more than they keep each other honest. Chivalry wasn't imposed by the state on itself, but by the culture to ensure the warrior class in the state was acting nobly and they weren't just violent thugs. In the East, Confucianism was a cultural counterbalance to the bureaucracy, ensuring that it didn't totally consume everything.
Politically, this leads to a "both sides are obviously wrong" conclusion that many people think is centrist, but is instead something else entirely. In Zen Buddhism, there is a parable that goes something like this:
The student asks the buddhist master whether a dog has a buddha nature. The master said "Mu" and the student was englightened".
In this case, "Mu" means "unask the question", or "the question is wrong". In the question, it pre-assumes that there is such a thing as a buddha nature that something has or does not have. In the same way, the question "should the state or the market have more power" pre-assumes that either of these has a correct answer, when reality is more complicated than that.
What we see instead is that culture is either coopted or attacked into irrelevance by both forces which don't want competition.
There is a stated "culture war" out there, but in reality it isn't about culture per se, it's about facets of the state or the market trying to impose norms on everyone that are beneficial to themselves. These forces drape themselves in a veneer of culture, but it isn't about culture at all. We can tell this because the final word isn't about who is right and who is wrong, but about who gets to rule.
I've been somewhat enlightened this summer in passing on culture to my son, and realizing all the things that it involves. You're reading stories, you're telling stories, you're singing songs, you're doing things -- and the whole process doesn't involve buying much of anything, and it doesn't involve the state stepping in and doing much of anything (though I'll admit, you can make a lot of use of common goods such as parks or walking trails).
I found it very interesting that despite going outside up to 3 times every day and making use of different parks, trails, or other facilities, most of them were empty virtually every time I went there. There weren't other fathers playing with their sons, there weren't other mothers playing with their daughters, there weren't even kids playing with other kids. It was a ghost world. Where are they? I tend to believe they're sitting somewhere being monetized.
The state also steps in and if they find your kids playing with other kids without direct adult supervision, you could have a visit from a police officer or CFS. Are kids really in so much danger? Not according to all the statistics we see, yet the state steps in anyway to mediate moments that don't belong to them. Simply because that's how they take a little more power for themselves, as is the nature of the state removed from the constraints of culture. In this way, the false dichotomy of state vs. market is fully visible, because as the state increases its grip, people require market solutions -- whether it's larger solutions like daycare, or smaller solutions like tablets with unlimited streaming, to pacify children who would otherwise react strongly to having their freedom to have a childhood taken from them.
You end up where perhaps a couple could have one working parent and one stay at home parent, but you instead need two working parents to pay for all the additional services you need because the state dictates you need them.
The suffocation of people by the state and the market has the effect of stifling culture. If one parent is working and one can stay home, the one who stays home is often dealing with cultural work including organizing events within the local community, volunteering with community organizations, or just spending time doing stuff in a decentralized manner to make the world a better place. Kids end up raised by the school and by commercial daycare instead of by their parents, and so their culture is dictated by the state, eliminating true culture.
So what does rebuilding culture look like? I think there's a few things everyone can do immediately.
1. Create culture. Its easier than ever to write a book, to sing a song, to produce a cartoon, to program a video game. It doesn't have to be great, it just needs to be authentically by you. I made a video game called "Quest for a King" as a teenager, and it was pretty impressive for the work of a teenager, but nothing revolutionary. However, my cousin saw that video game and was inspired, and today he's a world famous video game programmer. I'm not taking large credit for his success, but I do believe it showed him it was entirely possible to create something himself.
2. Raise your kids yourself, and with purpose. The data on this is unavoidable. First, a child with two parents is statistically speaking so much better than a child with one parent, who is statistically speaking so much better than a child with no parents. Then on top of that, it doesn't just matter that you show up, it matters that you care, it matters what you're teaching your kids. It isn't just about what you write on a chalkboard, it matters how you live your life, how you treat others around you. This doesn't mean necessarily that you have to homeschool and refuse to ever use daycare, but it means that the time you do spend with your kids needs to be meaningfully spent so you have a chance to pass culture on (and it does mean you have to pay attention to what the schools and the daycares are doing to ensure it meshes with your values).
3. Engage with problems with culture, not always markets or the state. If the local park is full of garbage, sometimes the right answer isn't to ask the council to send someone to clean it, or to pay a company to clean it up, it's to go there with a garbage bag and clean it up yourself. I made a habit of this at the parks I went to with my son, and he started picking up garbage on his own and throwing it away before he understood any idea of me telling him to do anything. He did it because I did it, and that's a slice of culture you can't buy or have imposed upon you by the state. People can get together, form groups, and work together to build local cultures, and the best of those can grow to become influential beyond a small group of people.
4. Think for yourself. Seems obvious on paper, but in reality a lot of people wait for someone else to think for them, and that's where the state and the market get their chance to inject themselves into situations they have no business in. You don't just do the previous points the way you think the state or the market wants you to, you do it the way you think is the best way to do it. The bar is insanely low from them because the bar must always be set low with the state or the market because it needs to cater to the lowest common denominator. By contrast, culture (and especially local culture we create ourselves) can set the bar infinitely high and tell people to strive for the highest bar, then reward the people for how much closer to the bar they get.
Premodernity had a variety of cultures, some of which were so powerful they shape our thinking today, such as the ancient Greeks or ancient Indians. Modernity had powerful elements of culture, but its focus on rationality, empiricism, and logic also eroded culture by assuming the influence of culture was the natural state of man and so didn't need to be accounted for. This gave an opening for ideologies where the state took over the culture such as Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism, or ideologies which assumed such a void would be filled with the natural goodness of people such as classical liberalism, both of which proved fatally incorrect. Postmodernity (I always argue we entered the postmodern period after the world wars proved modernity catastrophically incorrect) continued the mistake by deconstructing and destroying institutions in culture because they could be shown on paper to be imperfect, destroying cultural institutions which then were replaced by the state and the market.
400 years of cultural destruction has resulted in the problems we see today: Atomization of the individual and destruction of culture including institutions such as families and organized religion. People are materially wealthier than ever in all of history, but we're miserable, stressed out, divided, and the state is more powerful than ever, and the market is deeply corrupt and despite wealth being greater than ever before, so is inequality.
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@sj_zero Yes that is what was wrong with the Soviet Union. It's not that Soviet state bureaucracy was worse than Western state bureaucracy. It's that everything was done by state bureaucracy in the USSR.
The American education system looks a whole lot like Soviet agriculture. It always underperforms, the real reasons are politically off limits, so you have a bunch of credentialed experts tinkering with things that never actually fix the problems.