Genuine question, but what institution do any of you (Agora Road Travelers) actually place your faith in?
In terms of institutions in their current form that I trust:
The military (American, obviously). It's the only US institution with racial, ethnic, and religious demographics reflective of the population as a whole, and by forcing random people who are wildly different to
just do the damn work it does the hard lifting of forcing these people to accept one another and get on with life. No woke bullshit required. The discipline taught within is well known and has saved countless young men from falling off the straight and narrow.
The free market. Humans naturally default to min-maxing their way to whatever objectives and goals they have, so by providing people with both incentive to action and guard rails to prevent/minimize negative externalities you have created a situation that will garner both parties what they want. Add in competition and now you have iterative, continuous improvements.
Institutions that I believe in the potential of, but have currently lost their way:
Family. Families are the individual bricks that society is built with, but a combination of factors (it's no longer feasible for most families to thrive off a single income, having kids is an economic drag on the parents instead of a boon, a surge in fatherlessness and also people who believe that is a totally acceptable way of raising children) has meant the destruction of traditional families. It should be a surprise to precisely no one that the rise in fat, weak, unskilled NEET men perfectly corresponds to the rise in fatherlessness in the western world. This is not to say that fatherless children are incapable of success, obviously, but at population level the trends are undeniable. Fixing modern families requires a lot of difficult conversations that both wings of society are simply not ready for.
Religion. People have questions in their hearts that cannot be answered by science in data. This will always be true of the human condition. Having some sort of unifying force around which society can unify has been critical throughout human history - it cannot be a coincidence that literally every successful society had some sort of religious practice. Doesn't even have to be a god fearing type thing, something akin to a guiding philosophy that gives people purpose and aids in answering their problems (think: Confucianism) must come back in order for society to mend itself.
The validity and methodology of the democratic process. The Founding Fathers catch a lot of shit for not giving universal suffrage from the start, but the older I get the less convinced I become that
everyone should vote. Politicians aim for the lowest common denominator so by having extremely low quality voters, you inevitably end up with extremely low quality politicians. I am of course opposed to allowing/disallowing voting based on sex, skin color, education level, etc., but I think that making it easier and easier to vote and turning elections into media spectacles instead of serious events, we encourage the worst of society to have a say over how things should run. If people are too fucking lazy to get off their asses once every 2 years, I really don't think their opinion should matter in governing the country.
Maybe I'm just too far gone, idk, go ahead and roast me on that Orlando, I really wanna give you the benefit of the doubt, but I dont see how pointing at dusty old stats as reference for a turning point, and then expecting a mythical legal answer 50 years later to restore faith in the institutions is at all possible.
I'm not going to roast you. I've certainly gone through my own dark phases and questioned whether any of it is capable of saving, and if so, worth saving. But what I always come back to is the belief that if you don't
try to make things better, they never will be better. It's exceptionally rare (though not unheard of) for revolution to be the answer and I'm not writing that off completely, but I think we're still a far ways from there. It's my view that a certain generation just needs to fucking die off already and take their decades old philosophies with them, allowing for literally every other generation to take the reins and institute the changes required for their success. Because that's the real secret, boomer theories
actually worked and were
actually necessary in the 80's. But we don't live in the 80's and haven't for a very long time, so it needs to go. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water as you institute the required changes and upgrades.
I prefer capitalism, but what is currently practiced is not ideal. The system in place promotes socialism for the bankers, and spreading the debt amongst the rest of us. I don't get the impression that this is the ideal John Locke envisioned. Did John Locke imagine a future where the working class demographics of their homelands were systematically wiped out with mass imported foreign labor dependent on feds for gibs?
You're getting close here, but not quite there. Currently we do not even have capitalism as Locke (or any other classical liberal) envisioned, so when people blame [current issue] on capitalism, all they're doing is displaying their own ignorance to anyone who is economically literate. The problem, as I alluded to in another comment, is the corporate financialization of literally everything in our lives. The problem with billionaires isn't that they have money, it's increasingly
how they got it. Whatever you may think of Gates', Musk's and Bezos' personal opinions and politics, there is no denying the fact that they generated value for society through the creation of goods (Tesla) and services (Microsoft, Amazon). But for every one of them, there are something like ~10 billionaires who made their money through hedge funds and VC. Which is to say that for every one of them who hit pay dirt through ingenuity and entrepreneurship, there are 10 who made their money via gaming the system and being in the right place at the right time. But saying "the problem is the current financial structure, not the free exchange of goods and services" is an opinion that requires some degree of academic and/or experiential education. As a rule, the "burn it down" types (e.g., Occupy) have virtually no economic education.
I would be happy to go on about this at great length, but I'm starting to ramble. The short version is: there's more regulation on production than there is on finance, which is backwards. No shit that once you make it insanely difficult to produce anything the type of people who are motivated to make money will largely stop being producers and start being financiers. I'm not asking anyone to disbelieve their eyes - it is definitely tough out there and tougher than it used to be. But
think harder about what the secondary, tertiary, and fourth order consequences of destruction would be. There is quite a lot that the middle class westerners who attend these protests take for granted and would stand to lose if they actually got their way.
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www.theverge.com
The bobos were wrong yet again
