Original Post: https://kjworldsong.wordpress.com/2019/03/21/the-fight-between-the-practical-and-the-ideal/
My back is quite sore from working on my pond yesterday. Not so much from lifting heavy rocks, but from simply being bent over. I'm a natural back-bender, not a front-bender as most people are, but no-one seems to understand that. All the yoga in the world has not helped me touch my toes, but I can bend myself in half the other way and view the world upside down. I brought this up because the world is already upside down, as far as I'm concerned, and I think I've finally figured out why.
I am an artist, but I am trained as an engineer, so I think more like an engineer than an artist. Specifically, I am a manufacturing engineer, so I think in terms of how to make products practical and systems efficient. Bureaucracy is the enemy of efficiency, and the long-standing joke in the United States is that the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) must have been purposely designed to waste people's time. Well, maybe in your town, but where I live, a trip to the DMV is never very long because the area isn't densely populated. In fact, it takes me longer to get to the DMV than I'm usually there for. If I had to guess, it's because people who live in rural areas tend to be practical, and have not had their capacity to use their brains obliterated by big city noise. Most of my neighbours are formally from New York City, so I didn't just pull this conclusion out of thin air.
Cities are great for some things. In fact, I'm taking a trip to Moscow at the end of the summer, and I plan on getting as much as I can out of it, though I highly doubt I'll get the chance to visit the Kubinka Tank Museum or eat at the Turandot Restaurant - at least not this time. That being said, I would never want to live in Moscow. The outskirts of St. Petersburg are a different story, as is much of the city itself. One reason I don't like cities is because I need my space. That's purely my own personal preference. However, the other reason I don't like cities is because they are breeding grounds for ideologues. Ideologues need not be extremists, but they usually act based on emotion, rather than reason. I covered the emotional appeal of anarcho-communism in my previous opinion piece, and now I'm going to try to get to the root of the problem. Bear with me, as I have a mind of metal and thus don't understand people.
Link to the aforementioned opinion piece: https://kjworldsong.wordpress.com/2019/02/27/more-bad-ideas-that-wont-die-the-allure-of-anarcho-communism/
Everyone is an idealist as a child, and I was no exception. However, when one learns just how the world works, those ideals tend to get shattered with the realisation that they can't work. This is why I'm no longer a communist. Unfortunately, when I look around, all I see are people who don't know how or why it can't work, with one or two exceptions. The typical urbanite has no idea what goes on beneath their feet to provide the life that they enjoy. Modern infrastructure is extremely complicated, requires tremendous amounts of human and natural resources to construct and maintain, and someone has to pay for all of that. People living in cities usually don't need to worry about maintaining the building in which they live, the way that people who live in rural areas typically do. Living in relative luxury allows one to forget - no, I'll rephrase that. Living in relative luxury allows one to indulge in one's incurious ignorance. Now, read that sentence again, but shift the stress on the word "ignorance" from the first to the second syllable. Ignorance isn't simply what one doesn't know, it's also what one doesn't care about, what one ignores. This lets people nurture ideals that are entirely inconsiderate to the system that perpetuates their existence, as if the ivory tower is held up entirely by songbirds - when the tower shakes after you drop a cat out the window, you have no-one to blame but yourself. If that metaphor was a bit much, you may want to stop reading, because it's only going to get worse.
Africa is a beacon for unrealistically compassionate idealistic adult children. For some people, the highest calling is to flood the world with free drinking water. I roll my eyes every time I see another dumb crowdfunding project for getting water out of thin air. It's such a lofty ideal that not even MIT, once upon a time, the most prestigious technical school on the planet, can refuse to work on re-inventing the dehumidifier on the basis of practicality. "Why, Mr. Anderson, why, why do you persist?!" For others, the highest calling is to cure diseases, so that these people, who multiply like rabbits, aren't also dying like flies at the same time. India has the same story, only one chapter ahead. The story goes like this: some third-world country is a horrible place to live, with famine, disease, and overcrowding. There isn't enough food, so the teary-eyed missionary gives them food. Now, there are no longer people starving to death, and the overcrowding gets worse, and disease spreads faster. The teary-eyed missionary gives them vaccines, so now people aren't dying of disease anymore and the overcrowding gets worse, and now people are beating each other to death because there isn't enough food. At no point, however, are education and contraception considered as things to provide, because no-one wants to admit that the real problem is too many people. Anyone who has ever tended to farm or lab animals knows that growing populations need to be culled before they become unmanageable and all die off at once from starvation and/or disease. Now, if you think that I'm an advocate for genocide, then you must have a very low opinion of nature as well - roughly 99% of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct. As George Carlin once pointed out, "we didn't kill them all." Compassion is a great ideal, but it's paradoxical in nature.
Sometimes, one must do cruel things in order to be kind. Sometimes, one must be intolerant in order to promote tolerance. Do we (i.e. humanity as a whole, not any specific group) not punish those who try to oppress people? Do we not execute murderers? Are either of these things moral? Doing the right thing in order to maintain the "moral high ground" is a nice idea, but life's choices are rarely so black-and-white. Besides, you can be right - you can be dead right. Is use of deadly force in the defense of oneself or others the right thing to do? Which is worse, killing an attacker, or doing nothing and condemning yourself or others to death? WHO CARES?! Someone dies either way, and it's your fault. Nature doesn't care about the moral high ground, otherwise there would be no predators. Therefore, I would say that these moral questions are completely pointless. Self-defense is practical: after all, if you let the attacker have his way, then you won't be his only victim. If you kill him, then he won't victimise anyone else. The moral high ground is irrelevant, and I hold the position that arguments on the subject are a waste of time.
The point of all this is that I've seen plenty of nice ideas thrown around, some of which appeal to me (like anarcho-communism), but I always have to stop and ask "let's be practical, how would this be implemented?" If there is no way of implementing an idea given the tools (and people) one has at their disposal, then the idea must be either discarded or revised. With any system of government, in particular, then in practicality, the more people there are, the fewer liberties each can have in order for everyone to get along. Living in a society with no laws is a nice idea, but in a crowded city, it doesn't work. If you enjoy liberty, go live in the middle of nowhere. If you enjoy an orderly life of sophistication and luxury, go to the city. The choice is yours. I've already made mine.