Designing the ideal society is an old puzzle. Many ideas were generated over time, and some have even been put into practise. We have tried many different ways to organize society: everything from monarchy to democracy to communism. Yet none of these systems have yet stood the test of time. Ideas that look great on paper often fail in practise.
I think that this is because when we design an ideal society, we allow ourselves to also design the citizens of that society. We allow our society to dictate how a human being should behave, and assume that they will behave as expected. For example, a communist society assumes that its citizens would give their best in return for others' best, and have all citizens' needs met together; that its citizens are willing to stand by the mantra: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
But it's difficult, if not impossible, to convince every person to behave in a certain way. Nobody is perfect, and certainly there will be people whose interests conflict with that of society. Indeed some people will do anything they can to game whatever system that is in place.
So perhaps an ideal society is not what we need, because we are not ideal people. Perhaps we have been considering the wrong question all along. Instead of designing the ideal society, perhaps we should be designing a robust society. By “robust” I actually mean two things: First, that the society should still function if certain assumptions about the nature of its citizens are violated. Second, that the "locally optimal" behaviour for an individual should also be optimal for the society. (This is akin to the idea of evolutionary stability in "The Selfish Gene".)
As an example, we can see that communism fails at robustness: the "locally optimal" behaviour for a person would be to produce less and consume more, which is not optimal for society; and if a few people decide not to give their best, this game would become quite unfair to those who play by the rules, and so others are likely to also cheat.
Declaring that we have designed an ideal society when we take the liberty to design its citizens seems like a rather strange exercise. If we can decide how people would think and act, wouldn't any reasonable society we create be an ideal society? Design a society where citizens are required to give up their own children and raise a random person's, but design the citizens so that they understand why this is done (equal opportunity, perhaps?), and you have an “ideal” society.
... and yet we’ve only gone in circles. Tautologies are tautological.
End of Entry
2 comments:
Nice post. After reading it, I ended up making analogies to computer systems to complement why robustness is necessary.
One thing to note is that many software systems makes pessimistic assumptions about the participating members. Operating system thinks that user processes are always trying to attack the system and monopolize available resources. For public web services, the world is full of spammers, crackers, and abusers.
However, in those systems, there are at least two classes of participating members, where one has strictly more power than the other. For example, OS kernel code has more privileges than user processes, and admins of the web services can always pull the plug and attempt to restore the order if the system is compromised. Thus, it is relatively easy to maintain the "ideal" state of the system under those systems.
In real societies, multiple things can occur. Anarchists may argue that any type of class distinction is unnecessary in an ideal society. On the other hand, if a government exists, the society will have at least two classes - rulers and ruled.
in my opinion, many political systems in the past has failed due to unrealistic assumptions on the ruled. Oligarchy, monarchy, and even dictatorship all assumes that ruling class is ideal. When those assumptions actually hold, then the society runs smooth and sound. There are plenty of examples in history that shows those optimal cases, such as Roman Republic during the Punic Wars, or Five Good Emperors. However, if the ideal assumptions imposed on the rulers fail (by having incompetent or corrupt ruling class), then there's no way for the society to restore balance because it's not robust as you suggest.
Communism is similar, but both the ruling and ruled failed to behave ideally. Ruling class became corrupt and grew incompetent, and ruled individuals greedy "locally optimal" behavior damaged the society in the long run.
In that sense, democracy is the most robust (or should I say, least un-robust) system present to date, because the system permits replacement of ruling class if they turned out to be less than optimal.
Finally, if I go back to the software systems example, robustness is not strictly required for the ideal systems. Most of the times, idealistic assumptions placed on the privileged class turns out to be realistic. For example, It's perfectly safe to assume that OS kernel code is going to maintain its sanity and isn't going to attack the system.
In conclusion, software systems can maintain its view of the ideal system by having pessimistic assumption towards the unprivileged and optimistic but still realistic assumptions towards the privileged. However, this approach does not work in real societies.
That's an interesting analogy. I think the reason it works for an OS but not in real life is that designers of an OS gets to actually write the kernel code, so they can make whatever assumptions they want about it, so long as they implement it.
I disagree about democracy though. It's probably too early to tell whether democracy is going to work out. Democracy is weird in that there isn't really a clear distinction between the "ruler" and the "ruled" as you described, and so failure of assumptions about "the people" can have worse effects than in other systems. And yes, some assumptions democracy makes on its citizens are definitely failing: democracy requires that its citizens participate in society (by voting or otherwise), but it is "locally optimal" for a person to let his neighbours do the thinking ("How Rich Countries Die" touches upon this). And so in the US for example, people like Bush and Hank Johnston (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001611-38.html) gets elected, and congressmen allows the PATRIOT act to be passed (this is over 1000 pages of legislation that was passed in one week -- one has to ask: "How could they even write so fast?!?!" and "Did ANYONE actually read through the entire text?"
Post a Comment