Morgus, I'm leaving for RoseCon tomorrow; neither I nor the other mods will be on the forum much until next Tuesday.  Now, you've just made a post about The Bell Curve, one of the most controversial books of our time, and you've somehow parlayed that into suggesting that people who score low on IQ tests are idiots.  I implore you, for the next week or so, will you please try especially hard not to be tactless and offensive?

Here's a document expressing many of my opinions. I might not necessarily agree with some of their specific prescriptions, but their taxonomy of human instincts and philosophy is worth looking into, IMO.

http://ia600301.us.archive.org/35/items … ytrich.pdf

He believes that humanity is driven by 4 urges: the urge to survive and reproduce, the urge to create, the urge to control, and the urge to take through cunning. In the current stage, cunning dominates by means of property law and the "sorcery" of modern finance. He likens capitalism to a pre-Christian theocracy which dominates the public by means of arcane, fundamentally meaningless rituals and symbols. Although this is somewhat outdated; the parasitic dominion of cunning has, in the modern era, expanded to include politics, both "left" and "right" wing, and the media. The other three urges, however, are not necessarily superior. The urge to create, that is to fabricate, is generally too specific to encompass the complexity of human existence and will generally result in a debased existence if allowed to run "free." A world dominated by the urge to control, such as the old European monarchies, is basically a brute autocracy without purpose. And finally, a world dominated by the urge to survive and procreate, that is, blind herd instinct and the free reign of bodily urges and immediacy, is basically prehistoric society, the dominance of the "man with a club."

He proposes that human society should be dominated by a fifth primal urge, the urge to understand. In his mind, human curiosity forgoes the nonsense and stagnation that's characteristic of the other four urges while taking care of human needs, and he believes that it is strong enough to subjugate the other four urges without destroying them completely, as all four are needed to survive. In his mind, this urge is both purposeful, like the urge to create, and adaptive, like the urge to survive and the urge to steal while being socially acceptable even in the extreme case.

Last edited by Overlord Morgus (08-08-2012 03:43:32 PM)

Who are you talking to?

This is a good start. It's probably not perfect, but pretty much anything is more logical than our current financial regime.

http://technocracy.org/transition/banki … ialbrief29

And in my view, an ideal society isn't likely to need much of a government at all. And an ideal society requires ideal people. It's like in the book version of No Country for Old Men, it's very easy to govern good people, but governing bad people is basically impossible.

The most ideal control system is one in which the environment variable stays within parameters without the intervention of a control variable. This is also the most difficult kind of control system to study.

I started making a post about how democracy is overrated, but it ended up coming off way to much as an anti-democratic rant. So scratch it, and I'll just say it's overrated, is as abusable as any other form of government, and the national will can often be very morally questionable and troublesome when it's actually enforced (as was the case after the French Revolution and many present and past religious-sect quarrels, among other things). The larger the nation becomes, the more sub-cultures it starts to incorporate, and the more vulnerable these sub-cultures become to the majority if adequate safe-guards aren't implemented and perpetually maintained. Implementing those in the first place isn't all that easy, but ensuring that they get maintained over decades, centuries, or more as people try to circumvent them or tear them down is the real difficulty. Democracy also lends itself to uninformed decision making, obstructionism, and factionalism.

These latter points can be great though, despite also being frustrating and problematic.

A government should be able to provide certain services. Education, infrastructure, etc. These things are (almost) universally desired, although the methods of desired implementation certainly vary. So by having a government that lends itself to obstructionism and factionalism we're able to get the big picture stuff done, even if we don't do it all that well all of the time. The small picture stuff, that would either make thing work wonderfully or ruin them completely depending on your view, facts, or the situation, often doesn't get sufficiently acted on to ever become truly problematic to anyone.

In short, you can make a case that the least functional democracy is the best democracy, and that it's better than many alternative forms of government because - while they might work much better ideally - the other forms are ultimately more open to abuse by individuals, groups, or sects. I'd go so far as to at least ponder the suggestion that the "best" democracies might end up not remaining democracies, but would transfer into other forms of government instead, which might then spiral into something far worse.

But that said, I think democracy is open to enough problems that it's certainly not undeniably the number one type of government. As such, I don't think we have any business forcefully spreading it (or using soft-power to spread it instead). That is, any moral business. Whether it's in our national interest to spread our type of government - forcefully or otherwise - is an entirely different question.


Further Edit: Gio's page one Civ based point of "they all have merits" is probably the best and shortest answer.

Last edited by Valeli (12-03-2012 07:35:27 PM)