Nature and Analogical Thinking

If Kevin Kelly is right that the invented increasingly resembles the created (Out of Control), and if Clay Christensen is right that associative/analogical thinking is the key to innovation (The Innovator’s DNA), then shouldn’t we be examining nature much more with an eye to getting innovative ideas? E.g., look at trees to figure out buttressing? Birds for flight?

Balancing community and individuality

Communalism without individualism is slavery; Individualism without communalism is misery

The Fascism Formula

The best way to get fascism in society is to convince people that something equivalent to fascism is the opposite of fascism, thus leading them to run to fascism in the name of getting away from it.

The Pinker Delusion

Psychologist Steven Pinker often says that we believe in God because our brain is playing a trick on us—we’ve evolved for survival, not for truth and so we believe untrue things that had survival value for our ancestors. But in other contexts, Pinker says that we should rely on reason because the truth is useful and so our brains evolved to give us the truth. The contradiction is obvious. Should we believe our brains because it tells us to believe in God and our brain evolved for truth, or should we refuse to believe our brains because they are deception machines in which case we shouldn’t believe rationality either? To say, “We should only believe our brains when it tells me something I like” is unfounded prejudice. Why reject part of our brain’s truth apparatus, but not another? Pinker has no answer.

The third desire

Fukuyama postulated that history would end in liberal democracy since it satisfied our material and thymotic desires. But beyond our need for material goods and recognition is also our need for worship. We can’t understand the current world and its fractures, zealots, and move towards illiberalism if we don’t understand that something more than material well being or superiority was behind the Salem Witch hunters of the 1690s, the Catholic inquisitors in the 1490s, or their woke equivalents today. The need to worship explains why universities have become medieval in their approach to free speech, why irrationalism has taken over the Republican Party, and why Putin is invading Ukraine. The God shaped hole in the heart is the crucial explanatory variable left out of most social theories today and until we recognize it, we can’t find the only appropriate solution.

Rise of Intolerance from Lack of Pluralism?

James Madison understood that freedom is well-served by pluralism, particularly pluralism in religion since it is the realm of life that addresses the most basic, sacred, and fundamental of our beliefs. Until recently, there was a Judeo-Christian “background orthodoxy” that framed the value structure of society in broad terms shared by major American religions, but there was religious pluralism nonetheless which led people of whatever faith to value free speech, tolerance, and openness for the sake of self-preservation if nothing else (when everybody is a religious minority, the Nash equilibrium in game theory is to cooperate on tolerance of minorities. That is now changing with the rise of a new religious majority. As traditional religion declines, woke religion rises to fill the void and, unlike its predecessor, the woke religion is monistic and unitary rather than pluralistic and diverse. There aren’t multiple sects of Wokism with competing dogmas as there were multiple sects of Judeo-Christian religion in previous eras. Tolerance and free speech were well-served by the pluralism that prevailed throughout most of American history, but they are poorly served by the monism of our current religious era.

Comparing Lockdowns to the Iraq War

Both seem to follow a seven-step pattern:

1. SCARY PROBLEM causes panic among the population (9/11, COVID-19 outbreak)

2. General feeling that politicians must do SOMETHING to stop SCARY PROBLEM

3. Politicians roll out a SOMETHING despite the fact that there is no evidence the SOMETHING will do anything to solve the SCARY PROBLEM (Iraq War, lockdowns)

4. Public (and media) supports politicians doing this SOMETHING, assuming they can trust the experts and that politicians wouldn’t be advocating for it if it wasn’t going to help solve the SCARY PROBLEM

5. The SOMETHING doesn’t do anything to stop SCARY PROBLEM and actually causes more harm than good, but the public doesn’t recognize it and still continues to support the SOMETHING as a matter of inertia

6. Public finally realizes that the SOMETHING is actually doing more harm than good, and that their politicians are more inept and less driven by evidence than they thought

7. Public loses trust in those in the government who advocated the SOMETHING (Rumsfeld, Fauci)