On Political Morality (Part 1): Why Does the Left Always Fail and the Right Always Appear Foolish?
The Left and the Right are almost always correct in their observations about reality: Palestinians are unfortunate, Palestinians are dangerous, the poor are unfortunate, the poor play the victim, animals are in danger, the Earth is in danger, rape is terrible, murder is horrific, criminals are dangerous, criminals are unfortunate, capitalism succeeds, capitalism fails. Each side invests a great deal of energy (and excitement!) in emphasizing its trivial observations, but the failure lies elsewhere: in the simplistic derivation of solutions, which fails to understand the existence of feedback loops in chaotic systems, and is disconnected from the only political solution that has worked in the last 500 years
The Earth is warming. The Earth is warming. Don't you notice that the Earth is warming? If the Earth continues to warm, the Earth will be boiling. Don't you understand that we must stop the warming of the Earth before it boils? The conclusion: Morality dictates that we must stop the warming through (trivial, non-economic means, contrary to agent behavior in game theory, and therefore ones that don't happen, and that contradict everything we know about systemic behavior and what has ever worked). I am moral - because I am against global warming. You are not moral! Shame on you.
In recent years, thanks to the external cultural change of global warming, we are witnessing the real-time intensification of a new left-wing political trend, and opposite it, a confrontational right-wing politics. This phenomenon allows us to examine closely the formation of the basic political failure that drives the world of current affairs, public consciousness, and the political arena, and renders them irrelevant and powerless - compared to the economy, technology, and even culture, which have become the true engines of the world. How did we reach a situation where sometimes even culture has more long-term influence on reality than politics and the public sphere?
The same structure of "political morality" will also work on the topic of vegetarianism (domesticated animals are in an unreasonable state. Conclusion: eating animals is contrary to morality. Shame on you!), or even on the minority status of (fill in your favorite minority here, or even the female majority or the middle class). Due to lack of interest to the public and the cat, we will only note that the same structure of turning a real problem into a moral issue, deriving a simplistic moral (and moralistic) solution from it, and turning political discussion into a moral one, can be applied to almost every contemporary public debate. Morality has become a mechanism of collective stupidity, not because it is foreign to us and we are "not moral," but because it is too natural to us, despite being a rather modern and completely failing construct.
Morality presents a completely failing model of human behavior, in its simplicity and linearity of cause and effect (and therefore, for example, sees the world as a mechanism for applying moral forces. Poor people? Give them more money! Simple, isn't it?), and mainly - morality has never solved any real and actual problem. And yet, broad publics (and the public sphere in general) tend to turn to it in a kind of automatic and lazy mechanism regarding any problem, and it seems to them as superior (morally! Superiority and morality have become almost synonymous) to any other direction. This is the Kantian fallacy, which connects intentions to results in the current consciousness, as in a physical category of cause and effect. And if the results are not good, then the intentions were not good enough. And therefore, educational and ritual work on intentions must always be invested. Shame on you.
What can we do, when in the vast majority of problems, intentions are good, the problems are known, and there is broad agreement about them, and only the means completely fail? And the means that do work, that have proven themselves for hundreds of years, are completely absent from the horizon of public thinking, because they are morally neutral, do not establish anyone's narcissistic superiority, are not related to intrigues and power struggles in the monkey community, and few people understand how they work (despite everyone benefiting from them).
After all, what is the real and reasonable solution to global warming (as one emerging and paradigmatic example)? Does anyone really believe that we will succeed in educating humanity, in its various countries, cultures, and approaches, to stop polluting, contrary to the clear and immediate economic interest? And contrary to any conclusion from game theory, where it is almost impossible to move multi-player systems from an equilibrium where everyone pollutes a little and benefits from it, to one where "let's all suddenly be good"? Is the moral solution logical?
In fact, all Earth advocates are aware of the only possible solution, but they repress it because they don't understand it, and all public discussion turns political, to the detriment of the matter. All the enormous energies and resources - public and private - invested in education, preaching, subsidies for renewable energies, environmental quality offices, recycling, growing vegetables on the roof, and any other action against economic interest (and therefore at enormous cost), responsible public discussion and an effective political sector should have channeled to only one place: an increase of several orders of magnitude (say a thousand times, or ten thousand times) in the budget for scientific research to address these problems, including basic research. But of course, this issue receives only marginal attention in public discussion, and consequently in resource allocation, because it does not serve to establish a moral claim, and therefore not moral superiority, and therefore not superiority, and therefore not a counter-reaction from the side on which superiority is condescending, and so on in the society of superior primates.
In every substantial problem, money should have been pouring into academia from the ears, attracting the greatest minds to deal with the problem (instead of dealing with exits), and still the costs would have been lower than any other action - and more effective than it. Because only when green energy becomes economically cheaper than polluting energy (and scientific research is definitely on the way there, for example in increasing the efficiency of solar panels and the efficiency of electricity storage in batteries) - then pollution will stop. Not for moral reasons, but economic ones. It will simply be cheaper. Just as the use of coal (the primary engine of the industrial revolution) was stopped, simply because oil is cheaper and more efficient (and therefore, not coincidentally - also less polluting). And as the use of oil is being phased out because gas is cheaper and more efficient (and in a case that is not a coincidence - also less polluting, because there is a correlation between pollution and inefficiency). Only when a non-polluting electric car becomes cheaper than a petrol car - then people will switch to a non-polluting car, and if it's also autonomous - pollution will decrease even more. Only when there is an efficient and cheap way to absorb carbon and perform effective climate engineering - then the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere will be reduced, and humans will move to control global weather as they control air conditioning.
Anyone even generally familiar with scientific research can easily point out at least ten different possible directions in basic science that will lead us there (for example, genetic engineering of carbon-absorbing plants. For example, nano-materials that will be efficient carbon absorbers). All are budgeted with amazing parsimony relative to their significance, and relative to the rate of progress that could have been achieved in them if funding had increased by orders of magnitude - because scientific funding does not answer the psychological need for someone's arrogance. True, recycling will never be a practical option that benefits the environment more than the damage it causes by wasting resources, until it is done autonomously (for example by robots that collect, sort, and process all the waste in the world - because raw materials are economically worthwhile!), but what is that compared to educating children about recycling so they can preach to their parents. Is that not positive? They will be able to grow up to be moralistic preachers like us, in an infantile public discourse. That's - education!
This is also the case with the issue of vegetarianism. The moment artificial steak (grown from culture, for example. And there are many other directions in research) becomes cheaper, and perhaps also healthier, but no less tasty, than real steak - a vast majority of meat consumption in the world will switch to it, and the agricultural meat industry will undergo a transformation to a truly automatic meat industry, simply because it will be cheaper and more economical. Those who continue to raise animals to grow meat (such an inefficient and archaic method!) will simply go bankrupt. But what percentage of the resources of the animal rights movement is invested in the direction of funding this research (which could accelerate it wonderfully), compared to other, moralistic directions? If every day is Auschwitz for animals, why not invest in the scientific-technological development of the weapons that will defeat the Germans, instead of trying to convince the Germans that they are not moral? After all, it is known that there is nothing that convinces a person to moral action more than calling them a Nazi.
Continued in Part 2: The Solution to Conflict, Poverty, Women's Status, and Idiocy