We can’t steer the future
What about influencing? If, in order for things to go OK, human civilization must follow a narrow path which I individually need to steer us down, we’re 100% screwed because I can’t do that. But I do have some influence. A great deal of influence over my own actions (I’m resisting the temptation to go down a sidetrack about determinism, assuming you’re modeling humans as things that can make meaningful choices), substantial influence over the actions of those close to me, some influence over my acquaintances, and so on until very extremely little (but not 0) influence over humanity as a whole. I also note that you use the word “we”, but I don’t know who the “we” is. Is it everyone? If so, then everyone collectively has a great deal of say about how the future will go, if we collectively can coordinate. Admittedly, we’re not very good at this right now, but there are paths to developing this civilizational skill further than we currently have. So maybe the answer to “we can’t steer the future” is “not yet we can’t, at least not very well”?
it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”,
in part because this is so futile.
if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change, AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.
Agree, mostly. The steering I would aim for would be setting up systems wherein locally self-interested and non-violent things people are incentivized to do have positive effects for humanity’s future. In other words, setting up society such that individual and humanity-wide effects are in the same direction with respect to some notion of “goodness”, rather than individual actions harming the group, or group actions harming or stifling the individual. We live in a society where we can collectively decide the rules of the game, which is a way of “steering” a group. I believe we should settle on a ruleset where individual short-term moves that seem good lead to collective long-term outcomes that seem good. Individual short-term moves that clearly lead to bad collective long-term outcomes should be disincentivized, and if the effects are bad enough then coercive prevention does seem warranted (E. G., a SWAT team to prevent a mass shooting). And similarly for groups stifling individuals ability to do things that seem to them to be good for them in the short term. And rules that have perverse incentive effects that are harmful to the individual, the group, or both? Definitely out. This type of system design is like a haiku—very restricted in what design choices are permissible, but not impossible in principle. Seems worth trying because if successful, everything is good with no coercion. If even a tiny subsystem can be designed (or the current design tweaked) in this way, that by itself is good. And the right local/individual move to influence the systems of which you are a part towards that state, as a cognitively-limited individual who can’t hold the whole of complex systems in their mind and accurately predict the effect of proposed changes out into the far future, might be as simple as saying “in this instance, you’re stifling the individual” and “in this instance you’re harming the group/long-term future” wherever you see it, until eventually you get a system that does neither. Like arriving at a haiku by pointing out every time the rules of haiku construction are violated.
“Peer pressure” is a negatively-valanced term that could be phrased more neutrally as “social consequences”. Seems to me it’s good to think about what the social consequences of doing or not doing a thing will be (whether to “give in to peer pressure”, and act in such a way as to get positive reactions from other people/avoid negative reactions, or not), but not to treat conforming when there is social pressure as inherently bad. It can lead to mob violence. Or, it can lead to a simplified social world which is easier for everyone to navigate, because you’re doing things that have commonly understood meanings (think of teaching children to interact in a polite way). Or it can lead to great accomplishments, when someone internalizes whatever leads to status within their social hierarchy. Take away the social pressure to do things that impress other people, and lots of people might laze about doing the minimum required to have a nice life on the object-level, which in a society as affluent as the modern industrialized world is not much. There are of course other motivations for striving for internalized goals, but like, “people whose opinion I care about will be impressed” is one, and it does mean some good stuff gets done.
Someone who is literally immune to peer pressure to the extent that social consequences do not enter their mind as a thing that might happen or get considered at all in their decision-making, will probably face great difficulties in navigating their environment and accomplishing anything. People will try fairly subtle social pressure tactics, they will be disregarded as if they hadn’t happened, and the person who tried it will either have to disengage from the not-peer-pressurable person, or escalate to more blunt control measures that do register as a thing this person will pay attention to.
Even if I’m right about “is immune to peer pressure” not being an ideal to aim for, I still do acknowledge that being extremely sensitive to what others may think has downsides, and when taken to extremes you get “I can’t go to the store because of social anxiety”. A balanced approach would be aiming to avoid paranoia while recognizing social pressure when someone is attempting to apply some, without immediately reacting to it, and be able to think through how to respond on a case-by-case basis. This is a nuanced social skill. “This person is trying to blackmail me by threatening social exclusion through blacklisting or exposing socially damaging information about me if I don’t comply with what they want” requires a different response than “this person thinks my shirt looks tacky and their shirt looks cool. I note their sense of fashion, and how much importance they attach to clothing choices, and may choose to dress so as to get a particular reaction from them in future, without necessarily agreeing with/adopting/internalizing their perspective on the matter”, which in turn is different from “everyone in this room disagrees with me about thing X (or at least says they disagree, preference falsification is a thing) should I say it anyway?”.
The key, I would think, is to raise people to understand what social pressure is and its various forms, and that conformance is a choice they get to make rather than a thing they have to do or they’ll suffer social death. Choices have consequences, but the worst outcomes I’ve seen from peer pressure are when people don’t want to do the thing that is being peer-pressured towards, but don’t treat “just don’t conform” as an option they can even consider and ask what the consequences would be.