What You Must Consider

This article was motivated by a friend sending me an article of his own on the design of a new governance architecture. It’s going to be partly a response to that, but also more general commentary on how people generally think about solving the problem of governance.

Link to the document: https://pygochelidon.garden/notes/institutional-design/techno-federation/

I don’t want to go into the specifics of this type of governance, and will instead lay out general principles that you must contend with when thinking about governance. I also want to lay out why total design of society is incredibly difficult, and probably untenable.

There are also a few other strands of thinking I will be attacking here:

Consensus-based models - Models of governance that focus on non-coercive means of enforcement. Popular with anarchic thinkers.

Mass Democracy - Not democracy in general, but rather the view that we should maximize the number of things that get decided by the masses voting.

The Moral Universe - The label for these kinds of people seems to change every few years, but as of writing, the dying label for them is modern ‘woke’ people. I specifically mean the most aggressive strand of this thinking: people who generally view problems with governance strictly in terms of morality, and think that if people would just have empathy and do/think the right things, many meaningful problems can be solved.

Community Gardeners - I don’t really have a good name for these people, but just generally people who think that many problems with modern industrial society can be solved through communities running their own versions of things: their own servers for communication, their own food supply, libraries, etc. The term ‘mutual aid’ comes to mind.

Think of this more as a sort of ground truth. A set of things that just simply exist as-is, not a set of normative statements around how the world should work. Social media driven worldviews seem to collapse the way the world works and how it should work into one; they reject the real constraints that bind our actions outright and replace it with a worldview that could only exist without those constraints. The task here is to accept the constraints and build a set of normative politics on top of that.

Governance is Difficult

Governance is a full time job, and generally, people don’t want to have that job. They just want to live their lives. There are all these things that we have to do as a society to keep things running: go to work, pay your taxes, don’t do crime, have harmonious relationships with the people around you, file tons of paperwork for tons of reasons, etc. These are things you’re more or less forced to do, so people just generally want these things to not take up too much of their energy. When they do take up too much energy or there’s very little benefit to doing some of these, people generally start getting political. Your job should provide a reasonable living, your taxes shouldn’t be too high, licenses should be straightforward to get, there shouldn’t be crime around you, etc. Streamlining these things requires large governance structures full of people working 40+ hours a week. This isn’t something you can offload to the general populace and have them meaningfully solve. We have families and jobs that already demand our full attention.

What I’m enumerating here is the reason why I’m suspicious of concepts of the masses administering their own lives. It’s not that I think they’re dumb; it’s that governance is too demanding for us to do well while we have a pile of other obligations. Maybe 200 years ago that was a more reasonable ask, but even state governments have to handle roads and other infrastructure, policing, education, healthcare, welfare, their own tax system, resource management like water rights and zoning, and all the sub-political structures under them like counties and larger cities. Not only is managing this very demanding, but what normal person actually wants to manage this? This is where the mass democracy and consensus-based models fail. Some degree of coercion is necessary to keep all of this running, and you need specialized people who can actually spend 40+ hours a week absorbing the demands of the job so normal people don’t have to.

Many Things are Structural

We don’t just simply do things for moral reasons when it comes to governance. Our hand often gets forced because of various structural constraints. An upcoming example would be that the funds used to service Social Security will run out in the 2030s. If that happens, SS will only be able to front about 80% of the scheduled benefits moving forward. On top of this, the entire system assumes more workers paying for retirees’ benefits, which, with our current low birthrates, is not an assumption that will hold. Our hand is forced on this issue, and there’s not really much that can be done except for really unpopular decisions:

1. Raising the age of retirement
2. Increasing payroll taxes
3. Cost of livings adjustments (specifically to lower your benefits)
4. Or get rid of the institution?

A historical institution that previously stabilized our society is struggling to exist in a world where its operating assumptions no longer hold. A fix that isn’t unpopular is asking for a miracle. Problems involving war, the economy, international relations (such as those with China, Russia, Iran, etc.), taxation, national security concerns, etc. all face tough constraints that leave few good answers. This isn’t for moral reasons, but rather for structural ones. The stability of society is pretty much always a top priority for any system of governance, and appealing to everyone’s moral whims is not. This is a constant clash I see: social media tends to frame everything morally and ignore that there are structural reasons for decisions made.

Infrastructure Is Itself a Trap

That sounds vague, but what I mean is when we build infrastructure and rely on it, the maintenance of said infrastructure stops being optional. Today, we feed 8 billion people, and if we stop using industrial farming practices, many of those people will starve. Thus it becomes hard to see moral opinions on our food sources as anything but painfully removed from reality. Cage-free meat, proper organic food, fair trade food, these all cost more money and you can’t possibly expect most people to adopt these practices. The premiums are genuinely staggering, and for some products the differential can be something like +50-100% of the original cost. We created a global industrial food system that billions of people rely on. We can’t opt out of it at this point.

This applies to many facets of human life. The existence of the modern state prevents you from being swallowed up by some other nearby state. We live in some semblance of a global arena and paradoxically, you need a modern state and all of its coercive apparatuses to protect yourself. We also built a global economy around fossil fuels (specifically oil), and now rely on everything you get from oil downstream: plastics, various fuel types for boats, planes, and heavy industry, asphalt, fertilizers, etc. We rely on these products for modern society to function. Try running a science lab without plastics, or an industrial farm without fertilizer. Same goes with cement and concrete production. Once we build infrastructure we rely on, going back is more or less impossible.

Community gardens sound great, but you’re not feeding millions of people with them, and your silly little Fediverse is always going to be more work than most people are willing to put in. To industrial farming and centralized social media we go.

If We Would Just Do X

I find this argument to be rather lazy, and don’t want to take it seriously, but maybe something should be written about it.

There’s always some form of argument people make where they say “if people would just do x, we could solve some problem”. Not exclusive to inhabitants of the Moral Universe, but it is very common. Human civilization is a long tradition of us figuring out that people don’t generally just do the right thing, or at the very least society often provides incentives that point people elsewhere. If crime pays, people do it in large enough numbers to create modern cartels. If spreading socially-corrosive narratives pays, then people will do it in large numbers. And we can even talk about social currency, removed from money: gaining a social reputation for poor behavior itself directs people to do those poor behaviors. There’s a lot that fights people just simply ‘doing the right thing’. People have never just simply done the right thing on a large scale, and our multitude of social institutions is itself great proof.

Ending

Our social media discourse has spiraled out of control and away from reality. Any discourse worthy of attention should start with what actually is before it pretends it make an assertion as to what should be. If your picture of reality is self-indulgent and wrong right out the gate, why should anyone listen to you? Reality is full of difficult decisions and hard tradeoffs. If you can’t engage with this, why bother engaging with politics at all? I push for humbly trying to engage with reality over anything because the act of asserting what should be is not done through discourse; it’s done through our actions, and if your world model sucks, your actions will too.

T, our conversations over the years has kept me sharp. As always, I appreciate your intellectual correspondence.