Unmaking Sense

We could do without police and soldiers if we could be sure that no rogue elements would exploit the vulnerability that creates for their own ends. Self-organised societies all suffer from this vulnerability, as Asimov’s Mule illustrates and as we have experienced with such rogue elements as Stalin, Hitler and Trump.

The self-organisation possible on the basis of simple locally-implemented rules can serve many purposes. How do we reconcile individual and collective interests? Are they even incompatible? Does naked self-serving behaviour offer as much or as little prospect of collective well-being as co-operative behaviour?

Balance; Opposition; Representation; Individualism; Simplification. In a word: BORIS.

Agreement; accommodated dissent; freedom to speak, defend and disagree; a free flow of reliable information; education; a fair legal system; respect for minorities by majorities; and the personal active participation of every citizen in the system that is operated in their name.

We avoid fighting despite our differences by accommodating dissent, and by accommodating dissent we preserve differences that create the resilience that allows us to solve most of our problems.

We like to think that there is only one rationality. But in fact there are as many rationalities as there are sets of assumptions about which we choose to be rational. We choose those assumptions depending upon our passions, upon the kind of person that we want to be, and our rationality and those passions together define or constitute the kind of person we are. All human conflict arises from and can be explained by this state of affairs.

This episode makes clearer the notion that we introduced in the first episode of series 7 about making our concept of perfection more practical, more attainable and less damaging.

Summarising the project and starting to implement it.

Once we are alerted to the possibility that the patterns, laws and trends we observe in the world may arise spontaneously, we can be more circumspect about attributing things to conspiracies. They may just arise as the spurious patterns that are inevitable in any large samples. Ramsey Theory again. But so may the successes we observe be attributable to serendipity rather than talent, skill or anything that makes their authors worthy of praise.

What we are prepared to think true and to believe, even what we think truth to be, when divorced from experiments in life and what it is best to believe in their interests, becomes all-too-easily no more than a means of determining whether we are loyal members of a tribe whose beliefs are arbitrary, mere indications of whether members are “sound”. Those who fail the test are variously ostracised, persecuted or, in extreme cases, burnt at the stake.