So, yeah… It’s been a long time since I last used this blog - but you don’t want to read a blog post about how I haven’t been using my blog. I’ll cut to the meat, and come back to the blog-related stuff at the end.
I have spent far too many brain cycles thinking about politics.
I’ve come to realize this over the course of the last few years. For many years before that, I spent a great amount of mental and emotional energy on political issues. I would get really riled up about the latest misbehavior of the government, or the mistreatment of political candidates who approximated my beliefs at the time. We actually created a rule in our house (although the rule only really needed to apply to me) - no politics before bedtime. I literally would have trouble sleeping if I got my brain spinning on politics within the last hour or two before hitting the sack. It was, in this way at least, having a negative impact on my health.
During those years, my political philosophy was based, pretty much purely, on ethical rules. In a nutshell, these can be summed up by what’s called the Non-Aggression Principle - essentially the rules that we all learned as children for how to interact with other people. Be nice. Don’t hit, don’t steal, don’t lie. Do unto others. It’s OK to defend yourself, but otherwise live and let live.
My fundamental objection to government, at least as it seems to be implemented everywhere, was that it was breaking these rules. It was attacking people who hadn’t attacked anyone. It was taking stuff from people without their consent. And this was bad because - well, because those were the rules, you see. And breaking the rules was bad, regardless of the outcome. The ends never justified the means.
Maybe I got older and more mature or maybe I just got tired, but I can put my finger on a few concrete things that impacted my thinking.
We had kids. I’m of the opinion that when you have kids, they should become the most important thing in your life. You become directly responsible for the immediate well-being and also for the healthy growth of a human being. To do this properly, I think you ought to devote your whole self - all your energies - to the task. I’ve been attempting to throw myself into this and, frankly, it doesn’t leave much for obsessing about politics or anything else.
There’s also what economists call “rational ignorance”. I realized that all the energy I was putting into politics - keeping up with the latest government transgressions, the election news, the extended debates in forums like /r/Libertarian - was not doing me any good. There was no benefit to me when I got all upset over whatever the latest thing was. (This is not to say that those things were not upsetting. Frankly many of them were, in my opinion, appalling.) My getting riled up made me unhappy, and did not improve things one bit. My debates on reddit and elsewhere were primarily with people who were already cemented enough in their political beliefs that they would venture into an obviously political forum. Their minds were not likely to be changed. I was accomplishing essentially nothing by doing what I was doing, and I slowly recognized that I could do much greater good by applying my energy in other ways, such as to parenting.
I also started reading Less Wrong: a website for people who try to think rationally. I cannot over-stress the impact that this site has had on my thinking processes. In mere hours of casual reading (OK, maybe in the hundreds of hours by now, but I read slowly, and I really dig this site), I seriously feel like a changed person - and yet I also feel that I’ve just barely begun on the road to rationalism. I have learned so much that I seemed to already know, but for some reason never applied. For example, I realized that I want to believe what is true, even if it hurts. I realized that I may be much worse at accepting new information, and changing my mind if appropriate, than I once thought I was, especially when it comes to political matters. I also learned that, if really pressed, I think the ends can justify the means, although it pains me greatly to write that. (But, importantly, this doesn’t apply generally to humans!)
Meet the new me, same as the old me. (Sorta)
When I say “the new me”, I mean who I am now compared to, say, when I last wrote in this blog. When I say “same as the old me”, I mean that I’m still a libertarian, although you might have been wondering given some of what I wrote above.
When I say “sorta”, I mean that although I still think it’s fair to call my political philosophy libertarianism, the arguments that I use to support the philosophy are different now. It’s no longer good enough for me to say “These rules are axiomatically the right rules, and therefore it’s wrong for anyone to violate them, I don’t care if he is wearing a police uniform”. Axiomatic ethical rules don’t sit well with me anymore, primarily because, well, a thing that’s supposedly axiomatic shouldn’t be subject to so much disagreement! Saying a rule is axiomatically correct is, to my mind, one short step away from saying “it’s right because I said so!”
So, what do I say now to justify my libertarian position? I say that people are self-serving. Power corrupts. We cannot give people the sort of power that we give government officials and expect it not to be misused. It’s simply a fact about humans that if you give us power, we’ll use it to benefit ourselves. It’s built into our brains. I think that giving a relative few people the authority to do nasty things to other people is a plan that’s bound to backfire. Sooner or later, nasty things will be done - but when they are, they’ll be done with the authority of the state. There won’t be any public outcry; no manhunt for the criminal responsible, because the actions were taken “for the greater good”, or “in the interest of national security”. As world history demonstrates, government officials can get away with quite a lot.
The only solution to this that I can see is not to give human beings this sort of power. Either don’t give any people any exemptions to any of the rules, or find some way to restrain those exemptions to only very carefully selected circumstances - some way much stronger than, say, writing a constitution and asking the people in power to police themselves.
If we seriously cannot come up with any better way to arrange things, then we ought to only grant power to people who have been specially trained from childhood for the role. I’m talking Dalai Lama type training here. It takes a lot to train a person to act against his natural, built-in mental circuitry. Needless to say, politicians, of all people, are not fit to wield power.
I wouldn’t have done my rationalist homework if I wasn’t suspicious of myself.
Any good rationalist should, I think, be suspicious any time his reasons for a stated belief change, but the belief itself does not change. I am quite concerned that I am continuing to fall victim to the host of ways that humans have for avoiding changing one’s mind. All of the above argument seems perfectly valid and persuasive to me, of course. We’ve got to arrange our relationships somehow, and right now what I wrote above is my best thinking on how we should do it.
That said, I really do feel that I should try harder to challenge myself, and possibly arrange a rationalist’s crisis of faith.
I’m now living under a rock of my own design.
I think about politics much less frequently than I used to, and I feel better for it. As I wrote above, all the agonizing wasn’t helping anything. Nowadays, I try hard not to agonize, and try to treat the problems more as simple facts of life. I don’t bother watching the news anymore, or keeping up with the latest government shenanigans, apart from the bits and pieces that leak into the social forums I follow. I’m doing my best to spend my energies on things where I can really make an impact. Like raising my kids to be kind, generous, thinking people.
Now, about this blog…
I’m writing here again because sometimes I just want to write. Writing helps me think. I find it useful to look back at what I wrote in the past, because electronic records are much more reliable than my own memory. For this reason, I’m not removing any of the old posts on this blog, even though some of them are a little painful for me to read now. (Particularly the bits where I get all emotional about Ron Paul… Come on, past self, you’re only hurting yourself..)
Facebook, which is the primary such site that I use (because it’s where my friends are), seems like a poor place for articles such as this. I have enough of a dislike of Facebook that I’d like to keep things like this elsewhere, so that if something like Google+ or Diaspora becomes the next thing I won’t need to take any special action.
I also have a fantasy that involves other people being inspired to converse with me and others about the things I write. I don’t think I have a single comment on any post anywhere on this blog, and my Facebook postings don’t frequently get comments, which is why I call it a “fantasy”.
I’ve got no idea how much more I’ll write here. I’ll only say that, for now, anyway, if I write, this seems like a good place to do it.