Thursday
Social engineering schemes always fail. As the noted 20th century English philosopher Ringo Starr eloquently noted: “Everything the government touches turns to shit.”
My Starr was quite correct. Since the dawn of human society, centralised control, in one form or another, has always, eventually, collapsed that society. But why is that?
The usual suspect is incompetence, it being largely true that incompetent people tend to gravitate toward the power and prestige offered by public office. It can be summed up as the urge to spend one’s life telling other people how to live theirs. My wife suspects that I am of this ilk. My only saving grace is that I restrict my insightful forays into the attempted behavioural modification of my family.
Those who aim higher, toward the giddy peak of engineering society, lack the wit to understand that societies are not constructs, they are organic growths. People do not respond positively to demands for this or that sort of behaviour. They act in the manner that best accords with their survival – as they see it. The fact that they are sometimes (often) wrong and that they need to change is an illumination that has to be arrived at by each individual; or not. That is why those of a low IQ tend toward criminality. A personal level of ethics, by its very nature, stems from the individual. It cannot be imposed from on high.
So, it is not just incompetence at the task at hand; it is that the task itself is misguided.
The more that individuals are allowed to gain either prosperity or poverty based on their own decisions, the better those decisions will tend to become. The more that such decisions are imposed from on high, the less ethical people will tend to be.
Is that not blindingly obvious?
Governments can engineer neither individual ethics nor prosperity, but they can, and do, consistently, engineer individuals with a low level of ethics, resulting in low morality societies, with the resultant widespread poverty.
The greater the social control, the more poverty is created.