https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lTM5K7LjpqU
Hello, and welcome to Navigating Patterns. This is the first video in my series on how I make sense of the world. It is my hope that in sharing my observations, experience, and tools, I can help you to make better sense of the world. In this series, I shall be weaving together two major themes. How to make sense of the patterns unfolding in the world now, and how to use sense-making tools in our everyday interactions. What I’d like to lay out for you now is a vision of how people appear to be acting in the world around us, and why I think they may be acting this way. As humans, we try to make sense of the world, and when we do so, we tend to oversimplify. We can easily build models of the world which are logical and linear. However, this robs us of the deep understanding and appreciation for the world around us. The most common model I see people using to map the world right now looks something like this. You at the top, and others at the bottom, connected by a single line or relationship, which is the friction between you and others. What this does is to reframe all social interaction in terms of politics, implying that all problems can be solved using political power. It makes politics the only way to affect any kind of change in the world. So where does a model like this lead? Well, it gives us a single view of the world that is easy to grasp and understand. However, it also leaves us with a single perspective, and therefore we can only see a single line of difference between ourselves and everyone else with respect to each and every problem which we have. One side effect to a single perspective view like this is what we often refer to as othering. Further, this single perspective view places you in direct conflict with everyone else. Of course, you are not alone in the world. So you seek others who share your views, one issue at a time. Of course, no one shares every view that you have, and so no one is truly an ally on all fronts. This is very alienating, ultimately. One advantage to this sort of view is that it does frame all problems as a matter of politics. Therefore, all solutions are just a matter of political influence. Politics is, quite correctly, the natural mediator between you and others. It represents that there is a third party with the authority to use force to make a situation go your way. This makes the use of force, from a third perspective, with a call to a shared authority, able to protect your perspective. However, politics will fail to solve all of the problems you have. Aside from politics being the art of trade-offs, politicians are prone to deception to get the power you so willingly give them to feel safe in your unchallenged views. The big failure here is that most problems are wrapped up in one another. While you may be able to solve a single problem with a single perspective and the application of force, this typically creates problems that you cannot see from that single perspective. This increases the problems inherent with the law of unintended consequences. Further, complex problems cannot be fixed with a single perspective, and most problems happen to be complex. Finally, every problem has to be viewed individually through this lens, and your only available option for each issue is force. The failure of political solutions to deliver the safety you desire, as making you safe from one problem will expose you to other problems, will cause you to become bitter and resentful. Now, fortunately for everyone, this isn’t the world we live in. Our world is not that simple. It’s not closed. It’s not easy. Our world is much more complex. The downside to this is that politics is not going to help. You see, politics is downstream of culture. It is the last projection at the very end of the road when everything’s already been done. And now we’re just seeing it enacted. Basically, we are putting into law the behaviors we have already acted out. In some sense, this is easy to see. If you’re familiar with certain historical events, and really most historical events follow this particular pattern, the historical pattern of change works as follows. The people start doing something, which then becomes common and ultimately calls for a change to the law, cause people to protest. Then more people know about the issue and vote accordingly. Eventually, the politicians realize that they cannot stem the tide that swept them into office even if they didn’t intend to keep their promises. So change comes from the bottom and rises up through the political system and is ultimately ensconced in law. A prime example of this from history is suffrage. Now, there have been many suffrage movements in the United States. And if you aren’t familiar with that fact, you should look it up. It’s a fascinating topic. The most well-known suffrage movement in modern times is the right of women to vote. Long before the law was passed, women were voting illegally. People voted illegally and the only reason it was passed is because the government couldn’t actually stop women from voting. As the idea became more untenable, local officials let them vote. State and federal officials be damned. This wasn’t a political movement. This was a people movement that changed politics, as most movements actually are. So politics represent the downstream effects of people’s actions in almost all cases. You can frame it differently, but you have to leave out a lot of the most important information. And it’s a much bigger picture than that. Now, you may fairly ask for a counter example, which I’ll provide for you, but perhaps not in the way that you expect. A proper counter example in this instance is prohibition. You see, the folks in the northern U.S. wanted to stop everybody from drinking because they were trying to build the Shining City on the Hill by way of purifying the people. In the north, they believed that drinking would be stopped if only the institutions that enabled drinking were ended. The south doesn’t believe in this sort of approach to public control and believed that your drinking problem was between you and God, not some function of the institutions that allowed drinking to take place. In short, your behavior wasn’t something the government had the right or ability to regulate. So what happened as a result? The law was passed, but people did not stop drinking. The second-order effects, unintended consequences, of trying to force people not to drink caused far worse societal damage. You see, one side saw the solution to drinking as a political problem. They insisted that a higher order was important and threatened politicians and got them to create a law to solve it. And not only didn’t it work simply because people wouldn’t follow it, but more death, more crime, and more personal shame happened. The upshot was that this deeply damaged society as a whole and fostered a culture of distrust of the government. And it also created an environment where organized crime was glorified long after prohibition had stopped. You see, when the people are drinking and they don’t think it’s wrong, they’re going to support the organizations that help them drink, even when they aren’t political organizations. So what this is meant to demonstrate is that the political solutions are typically impossible because the government is a small number of people and the rest of the people is a much larger number of people. You can’t practically prevent them from doing anything. There just aren’t enough people in the government to enforce any laws. Laws have to come from the will and engagement of the majority, ultimately, or at least a plurality, or those laws don’t last long. While it might work in the short term, that is a small, simplified perspective that doesn’t account for factors like time and entropy. So if you think your world is just you versus others and the solution is politics, you’re just going to run into trouble. The failure of this solution to fix your problem will likely end in your annoyance and ultimate resentment towards not only politicians, but those others, which will inevitably still be there long after the laws are passed, in spite of your solution. Changing the politics does not change the will of the people. Changing the politics does not change people’s minds. Now, fortunately for all of us, there is a better way to view the world. This view doesn’t encourage political solutions and breaks down the power lens. You can view the world in a more complex way that isn’t too complex, so it still allows you to understand the world. And that’s what I’ll be going over the next time we talk about how I see the world the way it is today and where I think it’s going. Thank you for your time.