Is Sci-Forums Really Scientific?

Obviously you're not either one, or you'd know that the two are not mutually exclusive. But then we all know you already and this is no surprise. You're not ambitious enough about education to become a scientist and you're too wrapped up in your own problems to be a socialist.

To answer the question, I am a former future scientist. I received a great deal of scientific education although I eventually changed majors and got a degree in accounting before becoming a computer programmer. I have not stopped learning about science and consider myself an amateur scientist. Perhaps a semi-professional biologist since my wife and I are successful and respected animal breeders.

I was never a socialist but I was a leftist in my youth. Once I realized that as a government grows larger it becomes too internally focused to provide any meaningful service I became a libertarian. People need to take care of themselves and the government needs to stay the fuck out of their way, neither suppressing them with morality laws nor stifling them with well-intentioned one-size-fits-all social programs that invariably cause more harm than good. The government is there to protect us from evildoers, not from ourselves.

 

As a libertarian I obviously regard Ayn Rand as one of our prophets. Nonetheless she was speaking hyperbolically and in disregard of historical context. If not simply being a bitch, trying so hard to be more masculine than the hard-nosed males in our movement.

The essence of socialism is that no one has the right to live in opulence while others are barely surviving. The difference from communism is that the mechanism for ensuring that equality is the redistribution of wealth through taxation, rather than total government control of the means of production. The flaw in both philosophies is their faith in government. They draw their evangelical anger from recognizing the corruption in individuals and in the societies they create, but they are naively, stupidly, infuriatingly blind to the obvious next step in that progression, which is that if governments are given enormous power they can and will become enormously more corrupt than mere individuals and societies.

To be more charitable, most of us aren't deliberately cruel to the unfortunate because we're corrupt, we're just inefficient and overly focused on our own welfare. And that's what happens to large governments: they become inefficient and overly focused on their own welfare.

Socialism arose at a time when democratic governments were still in the experimental stage, and it was assumed that humanity had finally worked all the bugs out of the artifact of "government" and it would henceforth be responsive and effective. I can forgive the early socialists for their naivete. I can't forgive people who, a century later, don't understand that a government is an organism, and that all organisms put a tremendous amount of their energy into protecting their own welfare.

They also don't understand the flaw in democracy: As democratic governments get larger and have more levels of administration, the only traits that help a person advance to the top are the ability to compete successfully and a lust for power. Competence in the art of governing gets left behind down at the level of town council elections.

I appreciate your good-heartedness and your earnest desire for an institution to exist that can accelerate the advance of human morality.

Fortunately that institution does exist and its name is "civilization," so you have every reason to be optimistic.

You see, humans are pack animals like our closest cousins the chimpanzees, bonobos and two species of gorillas. We're born with the instinct to trust and care about only a very small extended-family group, most of whom we've known intimately since birth.

But the history of civilization has been a 12,000-year triumph of our uniquely massive forebrain over our animal brain, a triumph of reasoned and learned behavior over instinctive behavior. Starting with the precursor to civilization, the Agricultural Revolution, when we invented the technology of growing food instead of chasing it, that technology both permitted and required us to stop being nomads and start living in permanent settlements. Suddenly we had to start living in harmony and cooperation with people who were not members of our extended family. People whom, for all of eternity previously, we had thought of as hated and feared competitors for scared resources, were now people we had to depend on and care about in order for our complicated farming and animal husbandry operation to be successful.

But the success of that operation was so astounding that it was worth overriding our pack-social instinct.

The next step was building cities. Now we had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers! We had to care about the well-being of people we hardly ever talked to--not out of altruism, but because their contribution to the city economy was necessary for our own well-being.

This increasing triumph of reason and learning over instinct continued through the subsequent advances of civilization: the state, the nation, and now the trans-national hegemony or union. Americans care about the welfare of the Japanese. Not because we're "moral," but because if something bad happens to them we won't have any cars!

It's in our own enlightened self-interest to care about people who are merely anonymous abstractions on the other side of the planet. Even though 12,000 years is not nearly long enough for evolution to equip us with a new instinct and deep down inside we're all cavemen with the pack-social instinct, we now live effectively as herd-social animals. And we do this not because of "morality," but because it makes the world a better place for everyone, including ourselves.

Consider the dominant issue in the upcoming presidential election in my country. It's not our economy, which is in the toilet. It's not global warming, which could cause many of our largest cities to be underwater. It's certainly not morality, at least in the traditional sense. This entire political campaign is focused on the best way to improve the welfare of the people in Iraq. Muslim, Arab people whom we don't even like very much! We feel that strongly about the structure of civilization. Of course few people would state it in those terms because they don't think about it consciously, but that's what it is.

You're expressing your own prejudices. A lot of "established culture and tradition" is nasty bullshit that we desperately need to outgrow! Racial prejudice, religious intolerance, subjugation of women, persecution of homosexuals, (not to mention war)... these are all "established culture and tradition" and the human race needs desperately to rid itself of them!

As for "family values," that is a holdover from the Stone Age, when family was all anybody had. My parents were irredeemable assholes and my life only began to take shape and have meaning when I was able to escape from their "loving care." Sure it's nice for every child to have two parents and a stable home and all that stuff, but so many children who have it grow up to be misfits and so many who don't grow up to be model citizens, that it's obviously not the most important ingredient for a successful civilization. Maybe it's not necessary at all. Maybe being raised by loving nannies and professional teachers and being in the company of a group of people selected because they all have something in common in their spirits (which my parents and I totally lacked) will raise even better citizens than the old way. After all, during the thousands of years when the traditional nuclear family was almost universal, so was war!

I hope you mean that rhetorically, because there's no way Darkie could ever be either one.

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If that includes unfortunate people who aren't members of your immediate "pack" or social group, that makes you a civilized human being instead of a caveman. If it includes people who are merely abstractions in some distant corner of the globe, that makes you a 21st Century civilized human being. Congratulations!

It has nothing to do with science or socialism.