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You’re not totally wrong with “burn it down” in the sense of bureaucracy. The sociologist Weber felt they were actually efficient systems up to a point, and even necessary for democracy, but then became the worst nightmares that we could never undo. And as we see much more recently, Graber argued that any time you asked the government to streamline, it would just increase regulations, paperwork, bureaucrats needed for the aforementioned, etc.
So we have this necessary evil to start the kind of system we wanted in place, it’s only getting worse, and any candidate with smart ideas who wants a chance gets sucked right into it. “Reform” only reproduces the problem in a slightly different direction. Like Akira or a T-1000 I guess.
Interesting. Okay, so let’s say, we do “burn it down”. Is it just the human condition? Are we doomed to repeat everything even if we could start anew tomorrow?
I guess what I struggle with is, while I hate current status quo, I don’t see a situation where things are better if we did burn it down. In fact, they’re exponentially worse after all structure is hypothetically burned.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here: we’ve been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. And frankly, reimagining an entire way of life is really intimidating. But the current way of living is not sustainable either.
I think of this as akin to Moses wandering the desert for 40 years (the ins and outs are contested among scholars, of course) — the purpose of wandering was to shed the lived memory of Egypt and allowing a new generation to start over with the knowledge of what happened before, but not the suffering of it.
Ultimately I’m against retreating into nihilism, nor do I think rationalizing cosmetic changes to the status quo as truly progressive is a solution either. We are forced to work and live in the “wrong state of things” so to speak, and we can either try to drag this out for generations or have some kind of “snap” that allows for a significant do-over with the fresh wounds of The Now very much on our minds.
You’re not totally wrong with “burn it down” in the sense of bureaucracy. The sociologist Weber felt they were actually efficient systems up to a point, and even necessary for democracy, but then became the worst nightmares that we could never undo. And as we see much more recently, Graber argued that any time you asked the government to streamline, it would just increase regulations, paperwork, bureaucrats needed for the aforementioned, etc.
So we have this necessary evil to start the kind of system we wanted in place, it’s only getting worse, and any candidate with smart ideas who wants a chance gets sucked right into it. “Reform” only reproduces the problem in a slightly different direction. Like Akira or a T-1000 I guess.
Interesting. Okay, so let’s say, we do “burn it down”. Is it just the human condition? Are we doomed to repeat everything even if we could start anew tomorrow?
I guess what I struggle with is, while I hate current status quo, I don’t see a situation where things are better if we did burn it down. In fact, they’re exponentially worse after all structure is hypothetically burned.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here: we’ve been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. And frankly, reimagining an entire way of life is really intimidating. But the current way of living is not sustainable either.
I think of this as akin to Moses wandering the desert for 40 years (the ins and outs are contested among scholars, of course) — the purpose of wandering was to shed the lived memory of Egypt and allowing a new generation to start over with the knowledge of what happened before, but not the suffering of it.
Ultimately I’m against retreating into nihilism, nor do I think rationalizing cosmetic changes to the status quo as truly progressive is a solution either. We are forced to work and live in the “wrong state of things” so to speak, and we can either try to drag this out for generations or have some kind of “snap” that allows for a significant do-over with the fresh wounds of The Now very much on our minds.