Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Still no.

Not even maybe?
ER — (archived)

I suppose economic collectivism doesn't count. The ultimate collective
is the publicly owned corporation, where nobody owns it all but everybody works for someone, and the only rights anyone has were earned by their forefathers getting the crap beat out of them in picket lines for the last century and a half.

Human beings are apes, we are social omnivores, not solitary predators, everything we do we do as collectives, even our individual brilliance must be channelled through a collective, whether it be a private bureaucracy or a public one. Balancing the hierarchies we need to organize ourselves as societies while at the same time providing the maximum amount of freedom we deserve as human being is a process which has to be worked out, if necessarily, through struggle. It is not the result of a set of philosophical principles determined a priori. It varies through space and time, and it works better in some circumstances than in others, but it is not the result of an idea, its the result of a dialogue, social intercourse.

I've worked for private bureaucracies, public ones, and military ones. I've also worked in every variation and combination, universities, non-profits, Mom and Pop shops, government contractors, you name it. There are enormous differences between them, but they have nothing to do with which category they belong to. The good and bad and indifferent all have to do with the local conditions not the political theory under which they're organized.

The system we have in this country right now, and in most of the industrialized democracies, did not arise overnight, it is the result of economic and political struggle and compromise and experimentation and a lot of trial and error. And sometimes it doesn't work right and it never works perfectly. I and people like me feel part of our democratic heritage is that we have the right to alter the environments we work and live in, not because of philosophy, but because we earned it historically by our labor and our sacrifice and and our blood. We are not going to give that up so that someone else's taxes can be lowered and his paperwork cut back. In this country we have always been progressive, we have always been able to exploit the virtues of capitalism and reap its benefits while controlling its brutality and abuses.
Maybe sometimes we've gone too far, but as a whole I think we've done a pretty good job as a nation in working out this compromise. America has an incredible tradition of liberalism and it has worked, without collapsing into either collectivism or mercantilism.

How we handle this process of organizing ourselves is what democracy is all about, and that means struggle, debate, and even conflict. And sometimes we'll make mistakes and sometimes we'll get lucky. But I have no intention of letting anyone or any philsophy who has it all figured out for me, whether right or left, to tell me they know what's best for me. And I'm certainly not going to let my life and my country be dominated by the political philosophy of a dead science fiction writer.

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