Don’t be mistaken, I have no blanket pessimism. I think that there are probably concrete, local, ad-hoc ways to find out and set up better systems of policies, e.g. whether a viable and true Universal Basic Income could be a good replacement for the welfare state—I have absolutely no opinion at the moment—and if yes, how could it be instituted. And if life becomes stably better through good concrete policies, that would be cause enough for joy.
However, better political systems are located one or two meta levels above the systems of policies, as most people (well, most people who think at all) think that they—not specific individuals within them, individuals need to be interchangeable—should be the engines of producing better systems of policies. E.g. “socialism” is a set of systems of policies, both economic and social ones—a set which was largely generated through irregular process and not as an output of a political system—while representative democracy is a political system. And on the absolute scale of our satisfaction—not their scales in relation to one another, like Churchill’s famous quip about democracy—all known political systems applicable to industrial civilization have been really fucking awful at creating systems of policies.
E.g. we can plainly see that neither democratic nor authoritarian, neither unified nor diverse Great Powers of the 1900s produced a system of policies that would’ve kept them out of WW1. In retrospect we feel that staying out of the war entirely was the only sane goal under the circumstances and a hugely important measure of success. Well, they all failed miserably and reaped disaster. Some were dragged in a little slower or more reluctantly than the others, but they all failed horribly. And their political systems were not only fairly varied, they were designed with quite different philosophies.
So, given the outside view, I say that trying yet another new political system with a new design philosophy (e.g. Moldbug’s “Neocameralism”) is very, VERY unlikely to be an improvement. Despite long and diverse experience, humans appear entirely incapable of designing political systems that contain mechanisms of not failing at policy creation and not exploding.
Don’t be mistaken, I have no blanket pessimism. I think that there are probably concrete, local, ad-hoc ways to find out and set up better systems of policies, e.g. whether a viable and true Universal Basic Income could be a good replacement for the welfare state—I have absolutely no opinion at the moment—and if yes, how could it be instituted. And if life becomes stably better through good concrete policies, that would be cause enough for joy.
However, better political systems are located one or two meta levels above the systems of policies, as most people (well, most people who think at all) think that they—not specific individuals within them, individuals need to be interchangeable—should be the engines of producing better systems of policies. E.g. “socialism” is a set of systems of policies, both economic and social ones—a set which was largely generated through irregular process and not as an output of a political system—while representative democracy is a political system. And on the absolute scale of our satisfaction—not their scales in relation to one another, like Churchill’s famous quip about democracy—all known political systems applicable to industrial civilization have been really fucking awful at creating systems of policies.
E.g. we can plainly see that neither democratic nor authoritarian, neither unified nor diverse Great Powers of the 1900s produced a system of policies that would’ve kept them out of WW1. In retrospect we feel that staying out of the war entirely was the only sane goal under the circumstances and a hugely important measure of success. Well, they all failed miserably and reaped disaster. Some were dragged in a little slower or more reluctantly than the others, but they all failed horribly. And their political systems were not only fairly varied, they were designed with quite different philosophies.
So, given the outside view, I say that trying yet another new political system with a new design philosophy (e.g. Moldbug’s “Neocameralism”) is very, VERY unlikely to be an improvement. Despite long and diverse experience, humans appear entirely incapable of designing political systems that contain mechanisms of not failing at policy creation and not exploding.