Our society is what we make it. We can shape our institutions. Physical and human characteristics limit the alternatives available to us. But none prevent us, if we will, from building a society that relies primarily on voluntary cooperation to organize both economic and other activity, a society that preserves and expands human freedom, that keeps government in its place, keeping it our servant and not letting it become our master.
-Milton & Rose Friedman, Free To Choose: A Personal Statement
If one cares about safety (and who doesn't), one does well to take a skeptical look at the safety-industrial complex, and its reliance on moral intimidation to pursue ends other than safety.
. . . if left unchallenged, the pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities. Infantilization slips in, under cover of democratic ideals. I will insist, on the contrary, that democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence. This is what social trust is built on. Together, they are the minimal endowments for a free, responsible, fully awake people.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
They were convinced that what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all. It is true that our government and our society determine, to a considerable extent, our external circumstances, but the Stoics understood that there is at best a loose connection between our external circumstances and how happy we are.
-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)
I have a three-layer model of human behavior, in which we play games at the level of the individual, the tribe, and society. The games that we play at each level can undermine the other levels.
In the
game of bowling, your score depends on where you roll the ball. You either
knock the pins down or you don’t.
For
toddlers, bowling alleys invented bumper bowling.. If you roll a ball that would
have landed in the gutter, scoring zero, it instead hits a bumper and ricochets
toward the center of the lane. You get points every time, whether you are good
at aiming the ball or not. I see bumper bowling as a metaphor for what our
culture is looking like nowadays.
-Arnold Kling, from here
All species struggle to survive and strive to reproduce. A chance mutation about 200,000 years ago made early Homo sapiens more sensitive to social information. This mutation increased the number of oxytocin receptors in the brain's frontal lobe, enabling out ancestors to not only understand what others were doing cognitively, but also experience the emotions of others. This helped early humans survive by enabling them to draw on social resources more effectively.
Over time the mutation spread. Rather than being limited to living in small bands of kin-based groups as our genus had for millions of years, Homo sapiens could live in increasingly larger and more complex societies because they could intuit others' intentions. The most basic social information is the intention to help or harm. As culture flourished, societies developed norms in which helpers were embraced and the selfish and violent were ostracized. . . .
We truly became social creatures when the brain network that oxytocin activates allowed us to determine who to trust. Knowing when to trust strangers led to large-scale societies. In these communities, an individual's survival depended on many others. Cooperation among nonkin provided social insurance against a bad crop or an unsuccessful hunt. Communities began to function like superorganisms in which each segment nourished the other parts.
Paul J. Zak, Immersion: The Science of The Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness
..........................with Will Durant:
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within
At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.
The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean.
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
You can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.
Tightly constrained by risk-averse, health-and-safety-obsessed society, many children are unable to light fires, paddle canoes, make shelters, use knives or cope with darkness. Further, children are discouraged from acts of physical courage and this is more serious than it appears, for we learn with our bodies as well as our minds—or rather we learn with the mind-body—and when we see our physical selves modelling bravery, our sense of moral courage, political courage, emotional courage or intellectual courage is heightened.
-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood
Fred Siegel pointed out how the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer some seventy years ago could see the future contours of a working class regulated, controlled, and yet ridiculed by a new intellectual and bureaucratic elite.
"The masses are on the way out," he wrote. "The [elites] are finally catching up with us. We can hear the swish of leather as the saddles are heaved on our backs. The intellectuals, and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us." Hoffer foresaw the New Class that would try to govern the working people much as the colonial officials governed the natives. "They are," he wrote, "an army of scribes clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated.
-Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
I would say that the quality of our society will be inversely proportion to the level of political energy. One of the toxic effects of social media is to elevate the level of political energy. We would be much better off with people putting energy into their relationships and their work.
-Arnold Kling, from here
In a big country, there are always going to be crazy people at the margins.
-Jonathan Chait, lifted from here
A certain amount of arbitrary rule-ness must be tolerated—or welcomed, depending on your point of view—to keep the world and its inhabitants together. A certain amount of creativity and rebellion must be tolerated—or welcomed, depending on your point of view—to maintain the process of regeneration. Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules. Every creative act, genuine in its creativity, is likely to transform itself, with time, into a useful rule. It is the living interaction between social institutions and creative achievement that keeps the world balanced on the narrow line between too much order and too much chaos. This is a terrible conundrum, a true existential burden. We must support and value the past, and we need to do that with an attitude of gratitude and respect. At the same time, however, we must keep our eyes open—we, the visionary living—and repair the ancient mechanisms that stabilize and support us when we falter. Thus, we need to bear the paradox that is involved in simultaneously respecting the walls that keep us safe and allowing in enough of what is new and changing so that our institutions remain alive and healthy. The very world depends for its stability and its dynamism on the subsuming of all our endeavors under the perfection—the sacredness—of that dual ability.
Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.
-Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life
. . . humans are social animals and communication plays an important role in decision-making. We frame out thinking in terms of narratives. And able leaders - whether in business, in politics, or in everyday life - make decisions, both personal and collective, by talking with others and being open to challenge from them. Humans, uniquely, produce artefacts of extraordinary complexity and are able to do so only by the successful development of networks of trust, cooperation and coordination. Market economies function only by virtue of being embedded in a social context.
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers
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