So much of our public policy is damaged by voter’s emotional attachments. https://open.substack.com/pub/billhulet/p/the-tragedy-of-the-commons?r=4ot1q2&showWelcomeOnShare=true
So much of our public policy is damaged by voter’s emotional attachments. https://open.substack.com/pub/billhulet/p/the-tragedy-of-the-commons?r=4ot1q2&showWelcomeOnShare=true
This was an interesting article. Thank you for sharing.
The final two sentences hit me rather hard, despite being someone who just got into their 30s.
A lot of people are very emotionally driven, and inexplicably and unknowingly believe in some kind of destiny, and that some path is already set out for them and they are meant to only walk it. And we see this reflected in basically every major religion, and even the irreligious are sometimes bought into it.
I don’t know how exactly we can change enough minds to help people look at the world around them, and their relationship with it, differently. We could create a grand story with a fictional world that follows those principles, not really in a mythological or religious sense, but simply a story of a different world. It may not immediately garner a sizeable following, and would definitely take a good storyteller to come up with interesting and perhaps even gripping stories that could change how we view life, but perhaps I’m just trying to force myself to be optimistic about humans.
Thanks for the feedback. Conversations with readers are what make the whole enterprise worth doing.
I came to much the same idea about using world-building and stories to help people get around their delusions about the world. I wrote a couple novels that tried to explain a rational, sophisticated response to the particular craziness we see all around us right now. (Our lives seem to have become something like a William Gibson cyber-punk novel with James Bond movie villains.) Sales have been slow for Cult Smashers of the 21st Century! and The Climate Trials, but I’m still having fun.
I’m glad to see the Fediverse expanding, though. Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc, added to the Open Source movement give me hope that we can eventually create a society based on co-operation and intelligence instead of brute force and greed. The wisdom of age suggests, however, that if such a beast does come along it won’t be because of some master plan by the likes of us but because it spontaneously arose through some unknown self-organizing principle. Just because the Dao follows its own path doesn’t mean it won’t eventually end up in a better place.