With his amazing verbal jiu jitsu I'm amazed he couldn't talk his way out of it.
His trial was like watching a real lawyer. I mean, a real lawyer who was high on heroin andayahuasca and drunk, but a real lawyer!
His trial was like watching a real lawyer. I mean, a real lawyer who was high on heroin andayahuasca and drunk, but a real lawyer!
I'm doing some worldbuilding for my next book, and ended up with this as one of a handful of essays I built along the way. Maybe someone else might find it interesting, just remember I'm just some random loser on the Internet, I'm not claiming to know anything.
Meditations on the post-metamodern churches
So before we start, I’m just a dude. I’m not some cardinal, I’m not a pastor, I’m not deeply engaged with things, so keep that in mind because otherwise you might think too much of just guy saying just some things. Next, please consider that I’m not saying anyone has to do anything to *your* church, this is a thought experiment about *a* church, playing with an epistemological framework, not a big call to action. Finally, if you’re not Christian, instead of getting offended that someone would talk about Christianity succeeding and taking over society, just take it for some dude having some thought experiment because that’s what it is. That’s all it will ever be.
A post-metamodern church at first glance seems like a contradiction in terms.
The church emerged shortly after the axial age, an era where many of the world’s religions and philosophies were developed to resolve the issue of a growing world. The coin meant that you didn’t need a direct relationship with every person who did work with you, which led to a societal collapse because people didn’t need to be ok with other people they worked in the community with, and so values fell apart. Religions came about to provide a superstructure people could work in that would ensure a stable society in spite of the disconnection between people. In some ways, it’s an interesting parallel to today, where you can survive without ever coming into direct contact with another human being for any reason – your food is contactless delivered by an app, your job is work from home, your entertainment is online and pre-recorded.
Of course, the primary purpose of a church isn’t social cohesion, it’s spirituality, and it embedded radical ideas about suffering, redemption, and moral absolutism that hadn't really taken hold in the same way before. It’s fundamentally a different thing than most things, especially today.
It was a pre-modern organization that was brought into the modern age and harmed by enlightenment ideals then cut down to nothing in the postmodern age like many social institutions.
The thing is, such a contradiction isn’t something we necessarily need to resolve under post-metamodern superposition. It can be true that some of the lessons of Christianity don’t make sense today, but it can also be true that it’s worth following Christianity. The modern age science strongly suggested that God doesn’t exist according to logic and reason, but it can also be true that outside of that realm there is evidence all around us that God does exist, including the fact that once we stray from the commandments of God society seems to start falling apart. It’s a metaphysical truth that if God created the universe then it doesn’t make sense to assume one can find His footprints here, in the same way you own a television, but most of you have never opened up the back to look inside. The fact that you can’t put a gram of God on a scale and balance Him against a gram of brass doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist, and to assume that it does only shows you can’t conceive of viewpoints other than the present dominant one.
To show the falsity of empirical materialism as the sole epistemological basis of the universe only works if you cease being human or cease paying attention to being human. You can't measure love empirically. Some people might say "Oh, but we can measure the parts of the brain that cause love, we can measure the chemicals that trigger love", but that's not the question -- the question isn't "can you find signs of love in the real world", it's "can you measure love", and the answer is without a human being telling you something to convert one epistemological framework to another, you cannot. You have to consider multiple frameworks at the same time, each one true and meaningful but incomplete.
In the same way we try to measure love, we try to measure God. We prove that people do feel something special when they deeply pray, and we think because we can see blood flow levels in a brain scan it proves there is no god because our brains behave in a way. Does this mean that love doesn’t exist either? Such an argument could also be extrapolated into “Well it proves that God only exists in our heads”, but does it? If we can prove that religious experiences are something with measurable effets, but we also know that God is a metaphysical entity, then all we’ve proven is that we can measure at least one aspect of religion as having a real and tangible effect on reality.
There are some important theological implications with the superposition epistemology. One of the most important is that Christianity holds many lessons, and people will need certain lessons more or less at different times. For some people, what is needed is the loving grace of Jesus's message, but today what's needed for many people is the harder edged truth of the old testament moralism. Both are true and absolutely parts of the biblical canon, but sometimes an individual doesn't need forgiveness, they need to be told that right and wrong exist and they are expected to be good or they'll lose their kingdom, and even if they repent their kids will lose their kingdom even if you're ok. On the other hand, some people need to be told that God is all-loving and will forgive you of your sins if you repent because otherwise the weight of those sins will crush individuals who are otherwise good people. Part of the role of a post-metamodern pastor is understanding that different parts of the bible are more or less weighted situationally.
This view of the world is explicitly not relativistic -- there is one whole truth revealed by God in the bible, and it is all true at all times. Instead, it is a view that God's Word is truth -- there is a solid ground we can walk on, but different roads are built on the ground, and sometimes different roads are more relevant than others for individuals in the moment. This point is important because premodern Christian theologians would almost certainly attack any application of God's Law which claims any part of the bible is simply false, and rightly so -- to reject part of God's Law as presented in the Bible is to reject Christianity.
One postmodern deconstruction of the bible which has been quite successful as an attack on Christianity is that different parts of the bible advocate for different things. The Simpsons (a TV show which is the epitome of postmodern deconstruction) has Ned Flanders, its epyxy of Christianity in its purest and most righteous form, telling God in a prayer "I followed all of the bible, even the parts of the bible the disagree with the other parts!" -- but postmodernism is modernism, and so it is the linear, rational view of truth which requires every line of Truth to be perfectly interconnected at applicable at all times like Newtonian Physics (which aren't themselves so because the universe isn't rationalist the way the enlightenment thinkers believe -- it turns out we have mysteries such as dark energy, dark matter, neutrinos which barely interact with matter, and quantum physics which have rules of their own but are totally unintuitive to people living at a macro scale), so for people in a modernist and postmodernist worldview such a criticism seems devastating to the religion. Under a superposition viewpoint, just as newtonian physics, dark matter and dark energy and neutrinos, and quantum physics are all truths that simply exist in the same space, all the different lessons of the bible also exist in the same space.
My conception of the post metamodern and superpositional church is as the core of a new culture, and one of the superpositions that it will have to hold is figuring out how to deal with the issue of non-believers. One of the problems with churches that exists today is that it doesn't seem to really have any idea of how to handle this. On one hand, you have churches which disregard all of God's law in order to try to get people into the door. They say that there are no such things as sins if the postmodern world doesn't agree that those are sins, and that's anyone who comes in regardless of even whether they believe in God in any sense of the word is essentially free to rampage however they wish. On the other hand, other churches look upon anyone who doesn't follow the exact teachings of that specific Church to the letter as heretics to be shunned. Now I don't think that either one of those extremes is wise. Individuals who come to church for spirituality aren't going to find any value in being told that no matter what they do it's right. On the other hand, individuals who come to church hoping to find something that they don't have aren't served in any way by turning them away at the door. When an unbeliever is in the church, I believe that the superposition at work would be that on one hand everyone accepts that they don't believe and that there is a commandment in the Bible against bearing false witness, so trying to force religion down people's throats and trying to bully them into claiming belief in the thing that they don't believe in is actually a violation of the ten commandments. At the same time, a Christian ought to be trying to save souls, and it is very much true that if you can help convince somebody that Christianity is true and the Bible is the word of God and that they should participate in the church, then you should do that thing. At the same time, a Shepherd can only herd a sheep that is in his flock, if the sheep is in someone else's field at Shepherd will never be able to herd them. So the truth ends up sounding almost like a Taoist proverb, that simultaneously one must be and soft as the morning grass, but as firm as the mountain. In this case, it is because the believers must be accepting of others and embrace them into different activities and the like, but be unyielding in terms of their own moral certitude. If Christianity is the truth, and Jesus is the light, then simply showing people a better way will results in people changing their mind. For a world that absolutely requires a new way forward in terms of building local communities, becoming that community and having a strong moral background behind it is essentially a salve for what ails the world, and to be that salve is to own the culture for generations to come.
Churches today, perhaps because that's what their remaining attendees demand, focus so much on forgiveness, and it's a hollow message for most people. We've got forgiveness. We are living in the most forgiving era of human history, where you aren't held responsible for anything you do ever. What people want is to be told "No, there's a right way and a wrong way to live, and you're living the wrong way" -- but that's not what people hear. All they hear is "Jesus loves you and forgives you". That's the message for a different step -- At first you need to learn the rules, then you need to internalize the rules, and once you've done that and you realize how flawed you are -- that's the moment that forgiveness is required because you need to repent and ask forgiveness for your flaws or wallow forever under the weight of your sins -- but you can't do that until you understand the weight of your sins.
So one question would be “Why do we need any of the above? The government provides charity, and the Internet can provide many support groups and other functions”, which I think must be pushed back on. The government leviathan is not sustainable and is on the verge of collapse. Historically speaking, socialism in this form (not marxist socialism, but a large welfare state that is intended to bodge fixes into social problems) doesn’t last. Bread and circuses kept the Roman Empire going for a while, but once they had lost their moral center, it is surprising how quickly it fell, and Christianity picked up the pieces. Although it was arguably less effective, the orthodox church in Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union played a similar role. Second, the Internet is not a real place. We used to understand that. You can have 10,000 friends on facebook and nobody to help you move a couch or clean up a park. You require local, offline social networks as a human being, and our collapsing society is proof of that. In terms of self-help groups as ideological foundation, I tend to think ideology has to be local. You can’t pay 4.99 a month to some website and have your soul saved, you need to be able to look a wise man in the eye and bare your soul. Besides that, the Internet is a product of our time, and it is a fleeting one. Go back to the fall of the western Roman empire, and many of the roads the Romans built became impassable after the empire fell. A relatively minor regional war between Ukraine and Russia has resulted in oil pipelines being destroyed and potentially many internet underwater fiber optic lines being cut. Imagine a world where the hegemonic powers of today collapse – will your Internet friends be there to help protect your home, or will you even know how to find any of them in a world where we don’t even tell each other our real names and certainly not our addresses?
As a sign of its transcendent wisdom, Jesus already fully embodies post-metamodern superpositional thinking. He demanded his follower accept the truth of God’s Law alongside the truths of grace, love, and mercy. His treatment of the Pharisees mirrors criticism of modernist thinking which requires a single absolute truth they can twist as they do.
One interesting criticism is that this makes theology too difficult, but I’d argue the opposite: If one tries to simplify complex things too much, one makes them more complicated thereby. Take a 4-way stoplight. If you look from overhead, it’s obvious which direction cars will move based on the lane they’re in and the state of their turn signals. If you look at it from the side, it’s more complicated but typically people will be able to figure it out. If you look only at the middle of the intersection it will be impossible to know anything because all the additional complex information has been removed.
I suspect that nearly every breed of theologian would have major issues with how I’ve considered things here. A counter-argument to most of them would be that they need to to explain why their institutions are failing so hard before criticizing a new idea of how to do things. It's like "Wow how many followers have you lost in the past 20 years? That's impressive. Tell me more about how you have all the answers."
Some people might be deeply skeptical of these ideas. I think it's right to be skeptical. I'm just a man, and I'm using a limited view of the universe to try to figure out what could happen in the future. One of the truths one must keep in mind while engaging with the superpositional model is that the model itself could be wrong, and the ways we think of the model could be wrong, and the conclusions we come to could be wrong. It isn't a model with great surety of its own superiority like modernism, it's just "well, this makes the most sense to me right now". The idea that I’d come up with a perfect theology is facially absurd.
Meditations on the post-metamodern churches
So before we start, I’m just a dude. I’m not some cardinal, I’m not a pastor, I’m not deeply engaged with things, so keep that in mind because otherwise you might think too much of just guy saying just some things. Next, please consider that I’m not saying anyone has to do anything to *your* church, this is a thought experiment about *a* church, playing with an epistemological framework, not a big call to action. Finally, if you’re not Christian, instead of getting offended that someone would talk about Christianity succeeding and taking over society, just take it for some dude having some thought experiment because that’s what it is. That’s all it will ever be.
A post-metamodern church at first glance seems like a contradiction in terms.
The church emerged shortly after the axial age, an era where many of the world’s religions and philosophies were developed to resolve the issue of a growing world. The coin meant that you didn’t need a direct relationship with every person who did work with you, which led to a societal collapse because people didn’t need to be ok with other people they worked in the community with, and so values fell apart. Religions came about to provide a superstructure people could work in that would ensure a stable society in spite of the disconnection between people. In some ways, it’s an interesting parallel to today, where you can survive without ever coming into direct contact with another human being for any reason – your food is contactless delivered by an app, your job is work from home, your entertainment is online and pre-recorded.
Of course, the primary purpose of a church isn’t social cohesion, it’s spirituality, and it embedded radical ideas about suffering, redemption, and moral absolutism that hadn't really taken hold in the same way before. It’s fundamentally a different thing than most things, especially today.
It was a pre-modern organization that was brought into the modern age and harmed by enlightenment ideals then cut down to nothing in the postmodern age like many social institutions.
The thing is, such a contradiction isn’t something we necessarily need to resolve under post-metamodern superposition. It can be true that some of the lessons of Christianity don’t make sense today, but it can also be true that it’s worth following Christianity. The modern age science strongly suggested that God doesn’t exist according to logic and reason, but it can also be true that outside of that realm there is evidence all around us that God does exist, including the fact that once we stray from the commandments of God society seems to start falling apart. It’s a metaphysical truth that if God created the universe then it doesn’t make sense to assume one can find His footprints here, in the same way you own a television, but most of you have never opened up the back to look inside. The fact that you can’t put a gram of God on a scale and balance Him against a gram of brass doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist, and to assume that it does only shows you can’t conceive of viewpoints other than the present dominant one.
To show the falsity of empirical materialism as the sole epistemological basis of the universe only works if you cease being human or cease paying attention to being human. You can't measure love empirically. Some people might say "Oh, but we can measure the parts of the brain that cause love, we can measure the chemicals that trigger love", but that's not the question -- the question isn't "can you find signs of love in the real world", it's "can you measure love", and the answer is without a human being telling you something to convert one epistemological framework to another, you cannot. You have to consider multiple frameworks at the same time, each one true and meaningful but incomplete.
In the same way we try to measure love, we try to measure God. We prove that people do feel something special when they deeply pray, and we think because we can see blood flow levels in a brain scan it proves there is no god because our brains behave in a way. Does this mean that love doesn’t exist either? Such an argument could also be extrapolated into “Well it proves that God only exists in our heads”, but does it? If we can prove that religious experiences are something with measurable effets, but we also know that God is a metaphysical entity, then all we’ve proven is that we can measure at least one aspect of religion as having a real and tangible effect on reality.
There are some important theological implications with the superposition epistemology. One of the most important is that Christianity holds many lessons, and people will need certain lessons more or less at different times. For some people, what is needed is the loving grace of Jesus's message, but today what's needed for many people is the harder edged truth of the old testament moralism. Both are true and absolutely parts of the biblical canon, but sometimes an individual doesn't need forgiveness, they need to be told that right and wrong exist and they are expected to be good or they'll lose their kingdom, and even if they repent their kids will lose their kingdom even if you're ok. On the other hand, some people need to be told that God is all-loving and will forgive you of your sins if you repent because otherwise the weight of those sins will crush individuals who are otherwise good people. Part of the role of a post-metamodern pastor is understanding that different parts of the bible are more or less weighted situationally.
This view of the world is explicitly not relativistic -- there is one whole truth revealed by God in the bible, and it is all true at all times. Instead, it is a view that God's Word is truth -- there is a solid ground we can walk on, but different roads are built on the ground, and sometimes different roads are more relevant than others for individuals in the moment. This point is important because premodern Christian theologians would almost certainly attack any application of God's Law which claims any part of the bible is simply false, and rightly so -- to reject part of God's Law as presented in the Bible is to reject Christianity.
One postmodern deconstruction of the bible which has been quite successful as an attack on Christianity is that different parts of the bible advocate for different things. The Simpsons (a TV show which is the epitome of postmodern deconstruction) has Ned Flanders, its epyxy of Christianity in its purest and most righteous form, telling God in a prayer "I followed all of the bible, even the parts of the bible the disagree with the other parts!" -- but postmodernism is modernism, and so it is the linear, rational view of truth which requires every line of Truth to be perfectly interconnected at applicable at all times like Newtonian Physics (which aren't themselves so because the universe isn't rationalist the way the enlightenment thinkers believe -- it turns out we have mysteries such as dark energy, dark matter, neutrinos which barely interact with matter, and quantum physics which have rules of their own but are totally unintuitive to people living at a macro scale), so for people in a modernist and postmodernist worldview such a criticism seems devastating to the religion. Under a superposition viewpoint, just as newtonian physics, dark matter and dark energy and neutrinos, and quantum physics are all truths that simply exist in the same space, all the different lessons of the bible also exist in the same space.
My conception of the post metamodern and superpositional church is as the core of a new culture, and one of the superpositions that it will have to hold is figuring out how to deal with the issue of non-believers. One of the problems with churches that exists today is that it doesn't seem to really have any idea of how to handle this. On one hand, you have churches which disregard all of God's law in order to try to get people into the door. They say that there are no such things as sins if the postmodern world doesn't agree that those are sins, and that's anyone who comes in regardless of even whether they believe in God in any sense of the word is essentially free to rampage however they wish. On the other hand, other churches look upon anyone who doesn't follow the exact teachings of that specific Church to the letter as heretics to be shunned. Now I don't think that either one of those extremes is wise. Individuals who come to church for spirituality aren't going to find any value in being told that no matter what they do it's right. On the other hand, individuals who come to church hoping to find something that they don't have aren't served in any way by turning them away at the door. When an unbeliever is in the church, I believe that the superposition at work would be that on one hand everyone accepts that they don't believe and that there is a commandment in the Bible against bearing false witness, so trying to force religion down people's throats and trying to bully them into claiming belief in the thing that they don't believe in is actually a violation of the ten commandments. At the same time, a Christian ought to be trying to save souls, and it is very much true that if you can help convince somebody that Christianity is true and the Bible is the word of God and that they should participate in the church, then you should do that thing. At the same time, a Shepherd can only herd a sheep that is in his flock, if the sheep is in someone else's field at Shepherd will never be able to herd them. So the truth ends up sounding almost like a Taoist proverb, that simultaneously one must be and soft as the morning grass, but as firm as the mountain. In this case, it is because the believers must be accepting of others and embrace them into different activities and the like, but be unyielding in terms of their own moral certitude. If Christianity is the truth, and Jesus is the light, then simply showing people a better way will results in people changing their mind. For a world that absolutely requires a new way forward in terms of building local communities, becoming that community and having a strong moral background behind it is essentially a salve for what ails the world, and to be that salve is to own the culture for generations to come.
Churches today, perhaps because that's what their remaining attendees demand, focus so much on forgiveness, and it's a hollow message for most people. We've got forgiveness. We are living in the most forgiving era of human history, where you aren't held responsible for anything you do ever. What people want is to be told "No, there's a right way and a wrong way to live, and you're living the wrong way" -- but that's not what people hear. All they hear is "Jesus loves you and forgives you". That's the message for a different step -- At first you need to learn the rules, then you need to internalize the rules, and once you've done that and you realize how flawed you are -- that's the moment that forgiveness is required because you need to repent and ask forgiveness for your flaws or wallow forever under the weight of your sins -- but you can't do that until you understand the weight of your sins.
So one question would be “Why do we need any of the above? The government provides charity, and the Internet can provide many support groups and other functions”, which I think must be pushed back on. The government leviathan is not sustainable and is on the verge of collapse. Historically speaking, socialism in this form (not marxist socialism, but a large welfare state that is intended to bodge fixes into social problems) doesn’t last. Bread and circuses kept the Roman Empire going for a while, but once they had lost their moral center, it is surprising how quickly it fell, and Christianity picked up the pieces. Although it was arguably less effective, the orthodox church in Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union played a similar role. Second, the Internet is not a real place. We used to understand that. You can have 10,000 friends on facebook and nobody to help you move a couch or clean up a park. You require local, offline social networks as a human being, and our collapsing society is proof of that. In terms of self-help groups as ideological foundation, I tend to think ideology has to be local. You can’t pay 4.99 a month to some website and have your soul saved, you need to be able to look a wise man in the eye and bare your soul. Besides that, the Internet is a product of our time, and it is a fleeting one. Go back to the fall of the western Roman empire, and many of the roads the Romans built became impassable after the empire fell. A relatively minor regional war between Ukraine and Russia has resulted in oil pipelines being destroyed and potentially many internet underwater fiber optic lines being cut. Imagine a world where the hegemonic powers of today collapse – will your Internet friends be there to help protect your home, or will you even know how to find any of them in a world where we don’t even tell each other our real names and certainly not our addresses?
As a sign of its transcendent wisdom, Jesus already fully embodies post-metamodern superpositional thinking. He demanded his follower accept the truth of God’s Law alongside the truths of grace, love, and mercy. His treatment of the Pharisees mirrors criticism of modernist thinking which requires a single absolute truth they can twist as they do.
One interesting criticism is that this makes theology too difficult, but I’d argue the opposite: If one tries to simplify complex things too much, one makes them more complicated thereby. Take a 4-way stoplight. If you look from overhead, it’s obvious which direction cars will move based on the lane they’re in and the state of their turn signals. If you look at it from the side, it’s more complicated but typically people will be able to figure it out. If you look only at the middle of the intersection it will be impossible to know anything because all the additional complex information has been removed.
I suspect that nearly every breed of theologian would have major issues with how I’ve considered things here. A counter-argument to most of them would be that they need to to explain why their institutions are failing so hard before criticizing a new idea of how to do things. It's like "Wow how many followers have you lost in the past 20 years? That's impressive. Tell me more about how you have all the answers."
Some people might be deeply skeptical of these ideas. I think it's right to be skeptical. I'm just a man, and I'm using a limited view of the universe to try to figure out what could happen in the future. One of the truths one must keep in mind while engaging with the superpositional model is that the model itself could be wrong, and the ways we think of the model could be wrong, and the conclusions we come to could be wrong. It isn't a model with great surety of its own superiority like modernism, it's just "well, this makes the most sense to me right now". The idea that I’d come up with a perfect theology is facially absurd.
In some ways, Trump taking on traditionally left wing talking points is genius.
"Down with big pharma! They're just the worst!"
"Yeah! Fuck those guys!"
"Wtf we need to save big pharma!"
"Down with big pharma! They're just the worst!"
"Yeah! Fuck those guys!"
"Wtf we need to save big pharma!"
After the first 5 words I'm like "this has gotta be on standing"
And look at that, standing.
And look at that, standing.
Terrible reading about Trump doing exactly what he said he was going to do. What does he think he is, a democratically elected leader of the executive in government?
"uh guys? I really think you should take down the poster saying 'dont be a gay, work safe today!'"
"What's wrong, you like working unsafe?"
"Um... I just think that poster from the 1950s might not be appropriate today."
"I can't believe this guy hates safety..."
"Forget about the sign that says 'work safe on the digger, don't be a--' no we need to take that sign down immediately!"
"You're fired for being anti Safety!"
"What's wrong, you like working unsafe?"
"Um... I just think that poster from the 1950s might not be appropriate today."
"I can't believe this guy hates safety..."
"Forget about the sign that says 'work safe on the digger, don't be a--' no we need to take that sign down immediately!"
"You're fired for being anti Safety!"
Meditations on meritocratic democracy
The biggest risk of democracy is the tragedy of the commons and the race to the bottom.
Plato's republic warned about the risk of democracy in this way, and in the cycles of civilization democracy is the last step towards tyranny, as a demagogue will step in promising "freedom" and "justice". Often, they turn against the elite, sometimes taking from them and giving to the people—at least for a time. Once in power, the demagogue consolidates control, turning democracy into tyranny.
According to Plato, we start with Aristocracy, rule by the wise, move to Timocracy, rule by the strong, move to Oligarchy, rule by the rich, to Democracy, rule by the people, finally ending in Tyranny, rule by the tyrant.
To understand discussions of an aristocracy it's important to note that Plato's original definition of aristocracy is not necessarily a hereditary aristocracy. In fact, his model of the progression of governments openly states that the wise rule, and the children of the wise become strong, and then the children of the strong become rich, and only then do things collapse into democracy, which shows that hereditary aristocracy is contrary to platonic aristocracy. Where I speak of aristocracy, I am referring to platonic aristocracy except where I'm specifically discussing historical contexts, but often I will use the term meritocracy because it better serves the purpose of getting across the idea of rule by the meritous.
That being said, although the idea of a structural hereditary aristocracy is definitely wrong, there is merit in believing that a functional hereditary aristocracy could end up coming out of any sort of system because the smart children of smart people are then taught by those smart people who are also wise to also be wise, and so in that way the children of the smart and wise are likely to take up the mantle. It is true that in some ways this is deeply unfair, conferring status by accident of birth. It is also true that regardless of fairness, we want the smart and wise to rule to remain rule by the wise.
Democracy is considered sacrosanct today as one of the founding principles of the modernist west, but much of western history didn't include democracy, and arguably we don't have it today. Athenian Greece spent some time as a democracy, but it was a relatively short time period compared to the much longer periods under rule of a king, and democracy ultimately devolved there. Rome spent time with democratic elements, but ultimately collapsed into an empire. After the fall of the western roman Empire and until the modern period, most of Europe was under rule of monarchs, and constitutional monarchies which provided power to voters were somewhat lacking compared to the power of the monarch.
Republics such as America which most people would argue are the most democratic places as you can tell simply from the name are not democracies, they are in fact republics where the leaders in the Republic are selected by the people. The original American method didn't even have the people selecting all of the leaders in the republic, because for example the Senate was entirely appointed by state governors. The House of Commons in parliamentary democracies also representative form of republic, where only people who have been selected by the people have a chance to affect policy.
One of the major benefits of democracy in both it's direct democracy and Republican versions is substantially increased buy-in in government by the people because they had a chance to select who is in charge or to be directly involved in the decisions. Now this benefit is not a pure benefit, it is only a benefit if the policies instituted by that government are wise. You see, if the government is unwise then it will be able to institute those unwise policies to a much greater level than any other form of government. According to literature, Democratic forms of government are capable of taxing at nearly double the rate in terms of the size of the economy compared to other forms of government.
It is ironic that political operatives who constantly chant about "our democracy" also fear demagogues who may eliminate democratic institutions -- by tipping the scales closer to democracy, they hasten their descent into tyranny.
All the negative above must however be considered alongside the reality that some of the most important, powerful, influential, rich, free, and overall meritorious civilizations of all time often had some form of democratic institutions including ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
Among such excellent civilizations, the remainder often had forms of meritorious method of elevation for individuals, such as the Chinese bureaucracy based on how individuals did on a state exam or the ability of royalty to mint new nobility or demote existing nobility. Both democracy and meritorious promotion provide a chance for new information to get into the sphere of privileged elites resulting in better leadership.
The purpose of creating a republic is to try to prevent the failure of democracy by having the electric select the best among them to lead. In this way you have both elements, of democracy and meritocracy or aristocracy.
There is, however, a problem with Democratic republics with universal suffrage, and that would be that if everybody gets a chance to have a say, and people who aren't of merit get a chance to choose their representatives, then there's a good chance that those Representatives will also not be of merit. The fundamental risk of demagogues doesn't necessarily go away if people democratically vote as democrats.
The obvious solution to me is to eliminate universal suffrage. In this way we would want to create an aristocracy of voters who could then select their representatives as the best among themselves. In the past suffrage was extremely limited, and some of those eras ended up being quite prosperous. For example, in England only nobles could vote for a long time, and in America it was land owning white men.
Ultimately limited suffrage was eliminated and universal suffrage implemented, because these forms of aristocracy were self-evidently unfair and non-meritocraric. In Britain, whether your dad was a royal fart sniffer had little bearing on your merit to be making decisions. In America, which race your dad was or what gender you were or whether you were able to grab a cheap piece of land really didn't have any bearing on your merit either (though I'd argue land ownership is more reasonable a metric than any of the others)
So in my view, the answer is a meritocratic Republican democracy.
Under such a system, the vote is not guaranteed, but achieved.
So how would such a system work?
First, we'd need a body who could separate the wheat from the chaff. Our point isn't universal suffrage, but it is still broad suffrage. I don't think we need particularly high standards to solve the demagogue problem. One principle which has been extremely functional in the past for limiting the issues of corruption is having different classes represented in a group to retain a balance of power. You could cover different power centers with a seat for each, from religion to workers to business owners to farmers -- some sized group, and it would likely change composition over time to represent the different power centers composing society. It could be that the council is selected randomly among voters in these blocs and for a very limited time, similar to jury duty. Refusing to participate without very good cause would be a dark stain on you, leading to a review of your voting privileges (and perhaps you could say the same for other public services such as jury duty). In this way who is picking voters is constantly varied so no entrenched elites get to form, nobody knows in advance who will be on the council so they can't be pre-corrupted, and nobody is stuck doing it forever. It could also have checks and balances from the judiciary and republican leadership to ensure massive flaws have a chance to be resolved.
I'm imagining a system that is straightforward.
We'd grant points based on a written competency exam, individual life achievements including financial (has to be you, you don't get a vote because your dad's rich), business, philosophical, practical, spiritual, military, cultural, and general contribution to society at large.
We’d then take away points based on various negative aspects such as being a rich guy who got there through government payments -- sorry, you work for us, we don't work for you -- or welfare payments for a poor person. Doesn't mean you cant be meritorious enough to justify a vote, but it'll be much harder for you to earn a vote if you're a net tax consumer than a net tax provider.
In a separate meditation, I discussed redesigning the school system, and that would be key to this whole system -- instead of creating just disposable workers, we would treat our children as potential meritorious Democrats and so would give them an aristocratic education mixed with a broad vocational education. The point wouldn't be to create a person who can get into a particular job, we'd be trying to create great people who are capable of being broadly successful, with a separate system for specific vocational training as required(but most jobs should be able to train their people). I've defined my terms in that meditation so I won't reiterate here, but the point is that we ought to be pushing people to be the elite class, to be excellent, to be worthy, and to live as if they are part of a nobility because they are (even if it's a minor role in voting)
I want to stress that the education is not that which will make you meritorious, it is solely intended to be a fertile soil from which meritorious individuals may sprout. It is entirely possible that a person who fails or drops out of school becomes meritorious, or that a person who does very well in school fails to become meritorious.
One large counter-argument is that “everyone ought to have a say in governance”, or “everyone deserves a vote”. Universal rights are an argument with a lot of strength, but we can’t assume that it’s the #1 dominant truth at all times. Some people might get their hackles up at this statement, but let me give examples that prove it. The dead have no right to vote (jokes about corrupt elections aside). People in other countries who are not citizens of your country have no right to vote in your elections. We don’t let convicted serial killers vote. We don’t let babies vote. This might seem irrelevant and obvious, but it shows that universal rights is one truth and other truths can override it. So what sort of things could potentially stand in contrast to universal rights? I think there’s a strong argument to be made that existential continuity of a civilization that protects at least some universal rights is a strong contender.
I think there’s also an argument that without arbitrary barriers to suffrage, meritorious democracy still has universal suffrage. Anyone *could* put the work in and potentially become meritorious if they wanted suffrage. With a diverse variety of ways to show merit, it’s just a matter of trying to become more meritorious and people who don’t only have themselves to blame. Not meeting the mark? Study for the exam harder and get a higher mark. Volunteer in your community more. Spend more time in church. If you refuse to do everything, then in the end I think there’s an argument to be made that if you aren’t willing to work for political power, you don’t deserve it anyway.
A person might say that if voting is a “right,” it shouldn’t be contingent on meeting a certain level of virtue or social utility—that to do so subverts it from a right into a privilege. In reality, all rights are contingent on their manifestation by the person who has them. You may have a right to speech, but refuse to speak ever, meaning you never manifest that right. You may have a right to bear arms, but refuse to buy a gun, meaning you never reach the qualification for bearing arms and thus have no right to bear arms because you have to arms to bear. Many individuals who may cry foul about "voting rights" would be perfectly ok with requiring a protest permit to limit the time, place, and manner of protests, or for requiring a gun license to own and operate a firearm, or for requiring individuals pay property taxes to own property and not have it seized by the government.
Some people might then want to discuss rights vs. responsibilities, but I would argue this is an outdated modernist view of the world. Voting is in fact both, and it must be treated as both. It is a right afforded to individuals under a democratic system (whatever conditions that right comes to manifest under in a particular system), and it is a responsibility to act with virtue and merit both in pursuit of manifesting that right and in using that right.
Another valid argument is that the system can be corrupted, and there’s no doubt that’s true. As I’ve argued in other essays, the counter to state corruption can only be state checks and balances to a certain extent, but beyond that it must be culture which defines the reality of a society. The state influences culture and culture influences state, but the key here would be strong social institutions outside of the state that would help keep people honest.
The biggest risk of democracy is the tragedy of the commons and the race to the bottom.
Plato's republic warned about the risk of democracy in this way, and in the cycles of civilization democracy is the last step towards tyranny, as a demagogue will step in promising "freedom" and "justice". Often, they turn against the elite, sometimes taking from them and giving to the people—at least for a time. Once in power, the demagogue consolidates control, turning democracy into tyranny.
According to Plato, we start with Aristocracy, rule by the wise, move to Timocracy, rule by the strong, move to Oligarchy, rule by the rich, to Democracy, rule by the people, finally ending in Tyranny, rule by the tyrant.
To understand discussions of an aristocracy it's important to note that Plato's original definition of aristocracy is not necessarily a hereditary aristocracy. In fact, his model of the progression of governments openly states that the wise rule, and the children of the wise become strong, and then the children of the strong become rich, and only then do things collapse into democracy, which shows that hereditary aristocracy is contrary to platonic aristocracy. Where I speak of aristocracy, I am referring to platonic aristocracy except where I'm specifically discussing historical contexts, but often I will use the term meritocracy because it better serves the purpose of getting across the idea of rule by the meritous.
That being said, although the idea of a structural hereditary aristocracy is definitely wrong, there is merit in believing that a functional hereditary aristocracy could end up coming out of any sort of system because the smart children of smart people are then taught by those smart people who are also wise to also be wise, and so in that way the children of the smart and wise are likely to take up the mantle. It is true that in some ways this is deeply unfair, conferring status by accident of birth. It is also true that regardless of fairness, we want the smart and wise to rule to remain rule by the wise.
Democracy is considered sacrosanct today as one of the founding principles of the modernist west, but much of western history didn't include democracy, and arguably we don't have it today. Athenian Greece spent some time as a democracy, but it was a relatively short time period compared to the much longer periods under rule of a king, and democracy ultimately devolved there. Rome spent time with democratic elements, but ultimately collapsed into an empire. After the fall of the western roman Empire and until the modern period, most of Europe was under rule of monarchs, and constitutional monarchies which provided power to voters were somewhat lacking compared to the power of the monarch.
Republics such as America which most people would argue are the most democratic places as you can tell simply from the name are not democracies, they are in fact republics where the leaders in the Republic are selected by the people. The original American method didn't even have the people selecting all of the leaders in the republic, because for example the Senate was entirely appointed by state governors. The House of Commons in parliamentary democracies also representative form of republic, where only people who have been selected by the people have a chance to affect policy.
One of the major benefits of democracy in both it's direct democracy and Republican versions is substantially increased buy-in in government by the people because they had a chance to select who is in charge or to be directly involved in the decisions. Now this benefit is not a pure benefit, it is only a benefit if the policies instituted by that government are wise. You see, if the government is unwise then it will be able to institute those unwise policies to a much greater level than any other form of government. According to literature, Democratic forms of government are capable of taxing at nearly double the rate in terms of the size of the economy compared to other forms of government.
It is ironic that political operatives who constantly chant about "our democracy" also fear demagogues who may eliminate democratic institutions -- by tipping the scales closer to democracy, they hasten their descent into tyranny.
All the negative above must however be considered alongside the reality that some of the most important, powerful, influential, rich, free, and overall meritorious civilizations of all time often had some form of democratic institutions including ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
Among such excellent civilizations, the remainder often had forms of meritorious method of elevation for individuals, such as the Chinese bureaucracy based on how individuals did on a state exam or the ability of royalty to mint new nobility or demote existing nobility. Both democracy and meritorious promotion provide a chance for new information to get into the sphere of privileged elites resulting in better leadership.
The purpose of creating a republic is to try to prevent the failure of democracy by having the electric select the best among them to lead. In this way you have both elements, of democracy and meritocracy or aristocracy.
There is, however, a problem with Democratic republics with universal suffrage, and that would be that if everybody gets a chance to have a say, and people who aren't of merit get a chance to choose their representatives, then there's a good chance that those Representatives will also not be of merit. The fundamental risk of demagogues doesn't necessarily go away if people democratically vote as democrats.
The obvious solution to me is to eliminate universal suffrage. In this way we would want to create an aristocracy of voters who could then select their representatives as the best among themselves. In the past suffrage was extremely limited, and some of those eras ended up being quite prosperous. For example, in England only nobles could vote for a long time, and in America it was land owning white men.
Ultimately limited suffrage was eliminated and universal suffrage implemented, because these forms of aristocracy were self-evidently unfair and non-meritocraric. In Britain, whether your dad was a royal fart sniffer had little bearing on your merit to be making decisions. In America, which race your dad was or what gender you were or whether you were able to grab a cheap piece of land really didn't have any bearing on your merit either (though I'd argue land ownership is more reasonable a metric than any of the others)
So in my view, the answer is a meritocratic Republican democracy.
Under such a system, the vote is not guaranteed, but achieved.
So how would such a system work?
First, we'd need a body who could separate the wheat from the chaff. Our point isn't universal suffrage, but it is still broad suffrage. I don't think we need particularly high standards to solve the demagogue problem. One principle which has been extremely functional in the past for limiting the issues of corruption is having different classes represented in a group to retain a balance of power. You could cover different power centers with a seat for each, from religion to workers to business owners to farmers -- some sized group, and it would likely change composition over time to represent the different power centers composing society. It could be that the council is selected randomly among voters in these blocs and for a very limited time, similar to jury duty. Refusing to participate without very good cause would be a dark stain on you, leading to a review of your voting privileges (and perhaps you could say the same for other public services such as jury duty). In this way who is picking voters is constantly varied so no entrenched elites get to form, nobody knows in advance who will be on the council so they can't be pre-corrupted, and nobody is stuck doing it forever. It could also have checks and balances from the judiciary and republican leadership to ensure massive flaws have a chance to be resolved.
I'm imagining a system that is straightforward.
We'd grant points based on a written competency exam, individual life achievements including financial (has to be you, you don't get a vote because your dad's rich), business, philosophical, practical, spiritual, military, cultural, and general contribution to society at large.
We’d then take away points based on various negative aspects such as being a rich guy who got there through government payments -- sorry, you work for us, we don't work for you -- or welfare payments for a poor person. Doesn't mean you cant be meritorious enough to justify a vote, but it'll be much harder for you to earn a vote if you're a net tax consumer than a net tax provider.
In a separate meditation, I discussed redesigning the school system, and that would be key to this whole system -- instead of creating just disposable workers, we would treat our children as potential meritorious Democrats and so would give them an aristocratic education mixed with a broad vocational education. The point wouldn't be to create a person who can get into a particular job, we'd be trying to create great people who are capable of being broadly successful, with a separate system for specific vocational training as required(but most jobs should be able to train their people). I've defined my terms in that meditation so I won't reiterate here, but the point is that we ought to be pushing people to be the elite class, to be excellent, to be worthy, and to live as if they are part of a nobility because they are (even if it's a minor role in voting)
I want to stress that the education is not that which will make you meritorious, it is solely intended to be a fertile soil from which meritorious individuals may sprout. It is entirely possible that a person who fails or drops out of school becomes meritorious, or that a person who does very well in school fails to become meritorious.
One large counter-argument is that “everyone ought to have a say in governance”, or “everyone deserves a vote”. Universal rights are an argument with a lot of strength, but we can’t assume that it’s the #1 dominant truth at all times. Some people might get their hackles up at this statement, but let me give examples that prove it. The dead have no right to vote (jokes about corrupt elections aside). People in other countries who are not citizens of your country have no right to vote in your elections. We don’t let convicted serial killers vote. We don’t let babies vote. This might seem irrelevant and obvious, but it shows that universal rights is one truth and other truths can override it. So what sort of things could potentially stand in contrast to universal rights? I think there’s a strong argument to be made that existential continuity of a civilization that protects at least some universal rights is a strong contender.
I think there’s also an argument that without arbitrary barriers to suffrage, meritorious democracy still has universal suffrage. Anyone *could* put the work in and potentially become meritorious if they wanted suffrage. With a diverse variety of ways to show merit, it’s just a matter of trying to become more meritorious and people who don’t only have themselves to blame. Not meeting the mark? Study for the exam harder and get a higher mark. Volunteer in your community more. Spend more time in church. If you refuse to do everything, then in the end I think there’s an argument to be made that if you aren’t willing to work for political power, you don’t deserve it anyway.
A person might say that if voting is a “right,” it shouldn’t be contingent on meeting a certain level of virtue or social utility—that to do so subverts it from a right into a privilege. In reality, all rights are contingent on their manifestation by the person who has them. You may have a right to speech, but refuse to speak ever, meaning you never manifest that right. You may have a right to bear arms, but refuse to buy a gun, meaning you never reach the qualification for bearing arms and thus have no right to bear arms because you have to arms to bear. Many individuals who may cry foul about "voting rights" would be perfectly ok with requiring a protest permit to limit the time, place, and manner of protests, or for requiring a gun license to own and operate a firearm, or for requiring individuals pay property taxes to own property and not have it seized by the government.
Some people might then want to discuss rights vs. responsibilities, but I would argue this is an outdated modernist view of the world. Voting is in fact both, and it must be treated as both. It is a right afforded to individuals under a democratic system (whatever conditions that right comes to manifest under in a particular system), and it is a responsibility to act with virtue and merit both in pursuit of manifesting that right and in using that right.
Another valid argument is that the system can be corrupted, and there’s no doubt that’s true. As I’ve argued in other essays, the counter to state corruption can only be state checks and balances to a certain extent, but beyond that it must be culture which defines the reality of a society. The state influences culture and culture influences state, but the key here would be strong social institutions outside of the state that would help keep people honest.
The fact that some places still have covid signs up shows how often those spots are actually cleaned post-covid.
"he wore a dress once to kill a guy"
Jeez, low bar. Pretty sure Mel Gibson wore a dress in one of his movies, is he trans too?
Jeez, low bar. Pretty sure Mel Gibson wore a dress in one of his movies, is he trans too?
Sounds like a great way to ruin a perfectly good loaf of bread and a perfectly good isopropanol.
I've got a Bip S, I think one of the last ones sold new. 45 day battery life and truly water proof, but there's no question that the pebble is a superior smart watch.
Dems when they don't have slave labour to pick their cotton, clean their homes, and raise their kids
The two things I loved about it is it had a better data link than many smart watches today so you'd actually get your notifications, and the way you could use the buttons on the side to pick a quick response. Amazing how many conversations you could engage with using only "yes" "no" "maybe" "lol" "I'll get back to you in a bit, busy"
And the one week battery life, that's like my minimum. Moved to android watch after, and it's stupid. If I have to charge my watch every night, I'm probably not going to remember.
And the one week battery life, that's like my minimum. Moved to android watch after, and it's stupid. If I have to charge my watch every night, I'm probably not going to remember.
"You have to rebuild with climate reality in mind"
I think he means rebuilding in another state that has a fire management plan that isn't "burn baby burn"
Not the sort of thing I'd say as governor, but I wouldn't last 5 minutes as governor of california.
I think he means rebuilding in another state that has a fire management plan that isn't "burn baby burn"
Not the sort of thing I'd say as governor, but I wouldn't last 5 minutes as governor of california.