FYG Premise 3: Theory of Optimal Society

****I STRONGLY encourage you to read the Premise 1 and Premise 2 posts before you read this one. If you choose to start with it, be my guest, but be prepared to look VERY stupid if you make dissenting comments that fail to consider the historical evidence presented there that leads to the concluding argument here.*******

So, having established the basis of rejection of ideologies as a guide to morality and social structure by virtue of their proneness to contradiction and ease of abuse (as well as other problems I will point out in this post), and the hypothesis that the existence of government is a market response to the needs for stability and monopoly on force and that it must hence continue to provide some semblance of these in order to keep from being eliminated by simple natural selection, what does this mean for determining appropriate roles for government, its nature, and when it can be said to overstep its bounds?

Most people with even a remote interest in politics, regardless of level of education, have some idea of what their perfect society would look like, in some cases these ideas can be very intricate and well thought-out. For simplicity's sake, even most societies proposed by ideologies in their original form - thousands of editions and convenient co-opting by oppressive regimes for their purposes notwithstanding - can be said to paint a well thought-out picture of utopia that, while not perfect, addresses many of the problems facing society at the time of their inception. Political ideologies based in judeo-christian religions, for example, propose monogamy or at least limitations on polygamy and sexual promiscuity, limitations on indulgence and resources invested in vice, and general communal cooperation in various forms. Similarly, political ideologies associated with the increased role of the state, such as socialism, propose to limit competition by leveling the playing field for those who are not born into more priviledged conditions, and historically have sided with oppressed race and religious minorities in an attempt to promote their equal access to economic resources. Ideologies with roots in Eastern religions and sometimes those associated with communal solutions, such as the various forms of communism, seek to instill cooperation rather than competition as a means toward greater efficiency. The problems the majority of ideologies, as well as people's individual ideas of utopia, seek to solve are usually very relevant and real, especially with consideration for the time of their inception. Monogamy and the concept of family seek to promote parental responsibility and reduction in the number of homeless children, limits on vice seek to ensure direction of resources toward necessities, ideologies intended to level the playing field or eliminate competition altogether lay at their base the goal of equality before the law and the economy that cannot be taken away by thugs and those with access to more resources and thus of greater interest to thugs, as described in Premise 1.

The problem with ideologies and personal utopias, however, is that they tend to be blunt instruments - excellent in theory, but upon implementation not only achieving the opposite of the desired result, but causing colossal collateral damage in the process. My personal theory for why this occurs is that, upon implementation and conversion from moral theory to policy, the majority of ideologies lose sight of their goals almost entirely. Proponents of religion-based ideologies completely forget that the purposes of their ideologies were to promote tolerance and cooperation and rather focus on unhealthy fascination with supernatural life after death or the fear of fire and stone raining from the sky as punishment for ideological non-compliance. Proponents of socialist and communist solutions forget that the goal was to ELIMINATE oppression, and wholeheartedly hand their liberties over to government or communal authorities along with any capacity for recourse, to alleviate the threat of unchecked power in private hands, such as corporations. Limited government and free-market ideologies are no strangers to these fallacies either, as they immediately equate any power or function of government to oppression of their liberties, without thinking of how they might preserve said liberties against other aggressors in its absence. This list could go on and on, but the point is that ideological utopias are nothing short of fairy tales: people's ideological ideas of morality and rights always differ from one another, and attempts to acquire ideological rights by one group will always result in the oppression in terms of ideological rights of another.

Despite these seemingly irreconcilable differences among people, however, my proposed answer is heavily based in Premise 1, which advises a rejection of all faith-based axioms and a scientific approach to collective action. To create a model for a scientifically optimal society, it is necessary to first understand what exactly the goals of such a society are. Ideological rhetoric and superstition aside, however, various peoples' personal ideas of utopia offer significant clues to what just about every human's idea of societal perfection has in common. For example, just about everyone wants a society in which there is significant guarantee for the physical safety of themselves and their children. Similarly, most people seem to want reasonable access to living necessities such as food, potable water, protection from the elements (clothing, homes, etc.), health including the prevention of the spread of poison or pandemics and reasonable access to health care, and in most cases some form of security in the event they should become incapacitated in some way. Another want most people agree on is access to some form of opportunity for progress - whether its reasonable access to a quality education for their children, the capacity for materilistic or spiritual upward mobility, and so forth. Finally, liberties are a very touchy subject and just about every possible idea of liberty tends to be someone else's idea of oppression of others; however, people tend to agree on wanting the freedom to fulfill their sexual desires and reproduce, the freedom to speak their minds without fear of repression, and the freedom to engage in some reasonable forms of leisure or entertainment. Notice that none of this is an ideological implication that people have "rights" to any of the things listed. It is merely a crude list of common demands that people have to which the political and social market naturally responds. Ideologies, for the most part, are attempts to respond to these demands at their core, but their pre-occupation with faith and supernatural axioms - motivations for these notwithstanding - tends to make people lose sight of this purpose.

So, if human nature, as animals, is the pursuit of safety, reproduction and fulfilment as defined by their predominantly common demands above, then it makes sense that an optimal society is one that provides these to all its members at its most efficient capacity possible. Most people agree with the preceding statement for the most part, but their fundamental differences lie in their methodologies for achieving it. THIS is where science comes in. Unlike ideologies which rely on often outdated faith-based stereotypes and generalizations of what is good and bad, a plethora of statistically accurate observational and scientific measurements are available to truly determine whether the social machine is achieving its maximum potential in this regard. Of course, for every legitimate scientific measure, there are about 100 ways to abuse it with the purpose of either promoting an ideology or, far more frequently, misinform the public into compliance with inefficient policy that somehow benefits whoever abuses the measure. This, however, does not destroy the credibility of statistics or science, as the abuses clearly defy the rules it itself sets for their legitimate use.

It is important to note that an optimally efficient society is NOT synonymous with a perfect society or utopia. Just as in any scientific or industrial venture, the goal is always to maximize efficiency and minimize the chance of any form of failure or catastrophy, the social science model accepts that maximization is not perfection and minimization is not elimination, so in this optimal society some lack of access to the demands described above still exists, everyone cannot be happy all the time. This turns many people away from this line of thinking as they see giving up the pursuit of perfection promised by their utopian ideology as defeatist. In essence, however, this model simply does away with Santa Claus by admitting that perfection is not possible, and poses the scientific hypothesis that a system that attempts to implement any faith-based ideology without mindfulness of scientific measurements, even if the INTENT is perfection, will in actuality be far less efficient than itself.

The implication of this model for modern society, and my focus will be predominantly on societies with liberal democracies, is that public policy must be measured scientifically in a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether or not it is really worthwhile. The government is not a given, there is no scientific backing for any faith-based claim that anything is right or wrong just because of the source, even if that source is the government or any majority. The government operates on compliance, and its function is to provide a maximally efficient social model as described above. The posts in this blog following these three Premises outlining basic theory will focus on my hypothesis that, in the United States and many similar Western democracies, government has long since reached the point of diminishing returns in this regard. This is not to say that these societies are perfect or don't face serious social challenges. However, the continued attempts by government to alleviate every social plight to appease competing fairy-tale models a perfect society only serve to shift the costs from one group to another, often increasing them in the process, all while simple rollbacks in regulation altogether would minimize the costs in the sense of efficiency. Ideas for how and why this happens, who it benefits and how people are motivated to comply with it and even promote it, and what can be done to reverse the trend, will all be topics of further discussion. I thank you for your attention, and invite your comments and thoughts on my ideas.