evil can all agree that they love money but good people can't decide what being good means.
And part of the reason of that is any attempt to coordinate what being good means will necessarily end up with bad actors who want to inject their little things, and suddenly what it is to be good has a bunch of little strings attached that bad actors can use to justify evil.
The solution probably isn't scalable, it's that people just need to be trying to do what they think is best without letting themselves get too caught up in the hubbub of trying to standardize it all. Historically, the best that anyone could do would be coming up with a set of common standards for the people immediately around you that were the ones that mattered. Universal standardization is ultimately an invention of modern nationalism. People didn't used to have to be that standardized, even stuff that you would think of as standardized like religion would be somewhat relational, and depending on your local church.
That didn't mean that those local decisions would necessarily be even better than the universalized ones, but at least people could choose where they wanted to be, whereas under the more nationalist view, everywhere has to be the same thing.
The solution probably isn't scalable, it's that people just need to be trying to do what they think is best without letting themselves get too caught up in the hubbub of trying to standardize it all. Historically, the best that anyone could do would be coming up with a set of common standards for the people immediately around you that were the ones that mattered. Universal standardization is ultimately an invention of modern nationalism. People didn't used to have to be that standardized, even stuff that you would think of as standardized like religion would be somewhat relational, and depending on your local church.
That didn't mean that those local decisions would necessarily be even better than the universalized ones, but at least people could choose where they wanted to be, whereas under the more nationalist view, everywhere has to be the same thing.
@sj_zero this was a lot of words and i'm not sure why nationalism is involved with it at all. pushes against nationalism are most commonly by money actors that want easier access to Control, because regulatory domains inhibit easy access to Control (cf. Deming's note that many regions with varying regulations are suboptimal for business.)
Sorry, I'm trying to compress ideas that I've now spent two full books going into into a post on the internet, and because I think it's quite a different way of thinking, it needs room to stretch its legs.
What you are talking about in the initial post doesn't necessarily have to involve nationalism, but nationalism revolves about the standardization and centralization of control, and that directly relates to what you're talking about -- a standardization of the people requires a standardization of what is considered to be the good.
As I have previously written, nationalism is not the existence of the nation state. It is about the centralization of the conception of the people as Central to the nation state. The nationalist revolutions that we saw in the modern era came about because the peoples in various regions felt like they ought to have self-determination as Nations rather than their previous status as parts of larger empires. A consequence of this idea is that a lot of the previous relationships that were fuzzier and thicker were sanded off to justify the concept. After all, if the people weren't a leligible thing, how could the people be a central justification for central office seizing power?
As an example, after the French revolution, one of the first things that revolutionary France did was start standardizing France. The metric system came about because different regions had their own individual measurement systems before that, and even the language people spoke was standardized, so even though a region might have spoken a regional dialect for centuries, those people would be pushed towards speaking the same language that they spoke in the capital.
Pre-modern Nations were a lot fuzzier, you might have loyalty to your village, to your region, to your lord, to your church, to your family, and to your guild all at the same time, in a big part of pre-modern life was juggling all of these competing loyalties. The standardization of modernization in revolutionary France and elsewhere was in part intended to eliminate the need to be embedded in all of these different relationships and to replace them all with loyalty and identification with the state.
From there, it becomes clear why I brought it up because it represents this sort of centralized picking of what is good, and an attempt at setting a universal form of what is good that everyone has to follow.
That's been one of the tragedies of this historical moment. People don't realize how thoroughly modernism succeeded, and so even people who think that they are rejecting modernism are often just part of a different revolutionary faction espousing the same fundamental ideological framework and epistemology. Even people who believe that they are being traditionalist and had their traditions so badly wiped out that they still believe in this centralization and standardization of the people.
What you are talking about in the initial post doesn't necessarily have to involve nationalism, but nationalism revolves about the standardization and centralization of control, and that directly relates to what you're talking about -- a standardization of the people requires a standardization of what is considered to be the good.
As I have previously written, nationalism is not the existence of the nation state. It is about the centralization of the conception of the people as Central to the nation state. The nationalist revolutions that we saw in the modern era came about because the peoples in various regions felt like they ought to have self-determination as Nations rather than their previous status as parts of larger empires. A consequence of this idea is that a lot of the previous relationships that were fuzzier and thicker were sanded off to justify the concept. After all, if the people weren't a leligible thing, how could the people be a central justification for central office seizing power?
As an example, after the French revolution, one of the first things that revolutionary France did was start standardizing France. The metric system came about because different regions had their own individual measurement systems before that, and even the language people spoke was standardized, so even though a region might have spoken a regional dialect for centuries, those people would be pushed towards speaking the same language that they spoke in the capital.
Pre-modern Nations were a lot fuzzier, you might have loyalty to your village, to your region, to your lord, to your church, to your family, and to your guild all at the same time, in a big part of pre-modern life was juggling all of these competing loyalties. The standardization of modernization in revolutionary France and elsewhere was in part intended to eliminate the need to be embedded in all of these different relationships and to replace them all with loyalty and identification with the state.
From there, it becomes clear why I brought it up because it represents this sort of centralized picking of what is good, and an attempt at setting a universal form of what is good that everyone has to follow.
That's been one of the tragedies of this historical moment. People don't realize how thoroughly modernism succeeded, and so even people who think that they are rejecting modernism are often just part of a different revolutionary faction espousing the same fundamental ideological framework and epistemology. Even people who believe that they are being traditionalist and had their traditions so badly wiped out that they still believe in this centralization and standardization of the people.
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