The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal

The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - Designing For Jedi

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October 25th, 2010

08:35 am

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Designing For Jedi
“If you could live in any fictional world,” I asked my audience, “What world would you live in?” And a surprising percentage of people replied, eagerly, “Star Wars!”

“Now, wait a minute,” I said. “You’re not guaranteed to be a Jedi.”

That’s humanity, I suppose; given a fictional future, we blithely assume that we’ll be the movers and shakers. Those peasants and slaves, scrabbling in the dust on Tattooine? They’re the extras. This is our life, and as the stars we’re going to be on top.

It’s why I have a problem with libertarians.

I’m reading Bill Bryson’s At Home: The Short History Of Private Life, which largely focuses on the Victorian Era — appropriate, given that one of the hallmarks of the Victorian Era is the rise of the middle class and the technology required to get the middle class some homebound niceties.

The Victorian Era, it must be said, is pretty much a libertarian’s wet dream. No taxes for the supremely rich. Practically none of those pesky “laws” to get in the way of business operations. (Clearly, a world where you can employ eight-year-old kids to fix the gears on your weaving looms isn’t going to whip a whole lot of regulations on folks.) Anyone who can come up with a good invention can patent it, then make a fortune by dint of cleverness and gumption alone.

…and people went fucking broke all the damn time.

Bryson’s book, which is completely like every other book I’ve read on businessmen in the Victorian Era, is a litany of “This guy developed a marvelous idea, didn’t see its potential, sold it to someone else for a pittance, died broke. This guy came up with a great idea and manufactured it himself, but everyone ripped it off; he died broke. This guy had a great idea and manufactured it, became a millionaire, made a bad decision at the end of his life, he died raving in the streets.”

Now, “broke” isn’t as we understand it today, what with our namby-pamby housing laws and our welfare cheese; when you went broke in those days you often went workhouse broke, raving sick broke, the kind of ugly broke where you died in a fucking alleyway. Imagine the kind of broke where nobody knows what happened to Donald Trump because he made a bad decision and wandered into a river, and that’s pretty much where we are Victorian-wise.

Meanwhile, thanks to all of this unfettered business, we had the many and fetid horrors of child labor, of the horrid food sold to the poor and chronicled in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (which was exaggerated, of course, but the food was wretched and unsafe), of the rich and middle class ripping off the poor so there’s no possibility they can move upwards, of the rich and middle class working their servants practically to death (eighteen-hour days with one day a month off to attend to their private business)…

…and that’s all what I hear when I hear libertarians saying that if we let businessmen thrive, they’ll do right by the people. We did that, and they didn’t. The assumption that we’ve somehow become more moral than the Victorians strikes me as being ludicrously silly.

It should be noted that the people who lived in that environment worked slowly to change their punishing time into something resembling more of ours now. They had to live in it, and they wanted it changed.

(Well, for them. The poor, just as then as they are now, were demonized to the point where being poor was entirely their fault and a moral failing.)

There was a rising technological tide that floated all boats back then, which was definitely a help. And capitalism is a good mechanism to get new things to a massive number of people in a quick way, which accounted for some of the widespread changes that we saw. Yet looking at what actually happened back then, I wonder whether the libertarians quite understand that the world so many of them seem to be espousing actually existed, and it was terrible.

It had a lot of upward mobility. There were, in a few decades, more millionaires than had ever existed before. But that upwards mobility also came with an awful price, and that price was a dreadful failure mode that devoured some of the best minds of their generation.

I suspect what’s happening in the minds of libertarians is that they’re the Jedi.

Yeah, maybe those dumb businessmen got ripped off, but me? I’ve got the midichlorians. I’m not going to be among the seething masses of failed businessmen — my intellect will carry me to the top. I don’t need to worry about the bottom, because I’ll never be there.

A lot of libertarians reek of that superiority — they’re smart, and all they need is for society to stop holding them back. Then they’ll be geniuses. And who needs to care about anyone else?

Certainly there are libertarians who have a more nuanced view. They don’t want all the taxes gone, they tell you — and doubtless some of them don’t. But when you talk to a lot of ‘em, it often has that tang of a Democrat saying they just want a little more gun regulation, or a Republican asking for just a few more controls on abortion. One gets the feeling that they’re arguing that because it’s a stepping stone, not because they believe in the overall need for taxes and regulation.

Nor do I deny the underlying libertarian impulse that less taxes and fewer regulations help make it easier for businesses, which often drives a large and useful growth. But to talk to a lot of libertarians and Republicans, the whole point seems to boil down to the idea that we’re gonna be the Jedi — and anyone who isn’t isn’t worth discussing.

Look, I’m sympathetic. As a young liberal, I was all for giving free stuff to people until I read the history of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Bridgeport’s Father Panik Village. Then I had to reevaluate how my ideas worked in the real world, because clearly giving people free housing with few strings led to collapsing societies, and what do we do then?

I had to look at how things actually worked. Because the world I’d envisioned happened, and it really didn’t pan out too well.

Truth is, the chances that any of us will be a Jedi are pretty slim. Designing a society for the benefit of genius multimillionaires means that a lot of average people are going to get crushed underfoot. (Nor should we design a society entirely for the benefit of the indigent, but that’s another entry.)

There’s a price to be paid for no regulations, and that cost comes in human value. We need a government to step in and stop that from happening, because we had a world where we relied on individual morality, and it chewed up a lot of people, smart and dumb alike.

When you're looking to see what your philosophy will ultimately lead to, you need to see if there are any real-world analogs. In the case of “no laws and no regulations will make for infinite beauty!” , it existed. So you should probably learn from it.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/27297.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

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From:	bart_calendar
Date:	October 25th, 2010 12:52 pm (UTC)

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Don't forget all the deaths from syphilis and cocaine in that era. And that if you were female and poor prostitution was pretty much your number 1 job choice.

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From:	anivair
Date:	October 25th, 2010 01:12 pm (UTC)

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Has that changed a lot? It's still a pretty popular choice among the female poor. Especially if you throw in the rest of the adult industry.

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SOMALIA YAY