Routine Revelations

I am reading this interview of Dan Wang by Russ Douthat of the New York Times and find it fascinating how Wang describes the difference between China in terms of engineers and lawyers. Wang says the current China is founded by engineers, who in my experience put great value on efficiency. I think Elon Musk’s DODGE was/is very much a rise of engineers in the United States who believe they know better about running a country than lawyers. Whenever you have a group of people who are dominated by ego to think they alone are the smart people and therefore know all the answers to all the problems, you have a high potential for tyranny. Democracy and liberty is not about efficiency, it’s about peaceful co-existence. If one insists upon efficiency you end up being like the other countries, such as the old USSR and China, who likewise make efficiency a prime directive.

Here is the money quote of Dan Wang in the article:

The game goes to he who outlasts the adversary. But what the Chinese want to do is to just keep things really, really stable and just wait for the Western countries to collapse.

China plays the long game while the U.S. plays the short game.

I listened to Dave’s podcast in which he starts to describe what he is doing with WordLand and FeedLand, and that sounds a lot like what I said that I want in practically my first post on micro.blog. Right now I am writing this using Drummer and it will be published to my Daynotes blog. If I want to also publish this on my micro.blog I need to copy and paste it in to another outline from which posts to micro.blog are published.

Copy and paste is a lot of work, what if for every post I could specify which publishing destination that post goes to simply by selecting the destination locations via a checkbox? What if I could later add a destination by simply going back to that post and checking another box, or clear a checkbox and it is removed. When I edit the item the changes are automatically re-published. BTW, the last item probably won’t work to social network destinations because they generally don’t allow editing.

The key is the per item control over the publishing destination and continual ability to edit the item. For now micro.blog’s ability to cross post items I publish to it to Mastodon and Bluesky come closest to my vision, but that is not on a per post basis, it’s all items published to my micro.blog that are published to those other destinations.

A question came to mind last night. Was the middle class in the United States intentionally created or simply the happy result of the post World War 2 reconstruction? I was raised in what I consider to be middle class and as Gen X I was taught how good the middle class was, but for all its importance I don’t think it was something intentionally created.

A problem today in the United States is that the middle class is eroding, and I think that is because it was never really intended to exist and thus there has been no real effort to retain it. The middle class is a target of our politics but not our policies.

I think the destruction of the middle class matters because it provides for two important societal concepts. One is the idea of enough, but which I mean having the means for a good life. The second is a reason for hope that one can have as good a life as their parents if not better. An important corollary to the idea of enough is that one does not have to be the wealthiest person in terms of money to have a good life.

Without realistic hope of a good life, everything feels pointless to the point that life doesn’t matter. If then in a search for an answer to why one’s life is pointless a person becomes convinced it is because of the other now there is a target for their rage that is amplified by the Internet.

I am sad about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I lament how in our society a non trivial number of people see violence as the means to react to their grievances. The only way such violence can be rationalized is through a self centered and intolerant world view. All of this violence in the Unites States is a symptom of and a reaction to much deeper problems. Putting the military on the streets or even putting more cops on the streets is just managing the symptoms and not addressing the root cause. I am not entirely sure of what is the root cause, there likely is no single thing to which there is a silver bullet, but from my personal theological perspective I think it might be idolatry. We are worshiping many idols in the United States: the second amendment, capitalism, power, wealth, and Western Christianity to name a few.

I think a step, not the only step, towards understanding the root cause of this violence in the United States is a serious discussion about liberty for the purpose of increasing a shared understanding of what it is. The enduring debate since the founding of the United States seems to be liberty versus equality and which is more important. I believe there are many in the United States who believe liberty cannot coexist in a world that prioritizes equality. Again, from my theological perspective the default view of liberty in the United States is “either/or” and the default view of equality is “both/and.”

We probably will never fully resolve the debate about liberty versus equality, but I think it would be helpful to at least agree on what is liberty and what is necessary for liberty. For me liberty comes down to personal autonomy, do I have complete control over what happens to my body? Do I have a choice on where my body goes, what goes in and what goes out? A test case of liberty is whether I can speak my mind without my body being put in jail or killed. For the test case to pass there must be a desire to co-exist and to not view other autonomous humans with contempt. It seems for the sake of liberty, liberty in the United State is being taken away because in the eyes of many liberty for me cannot mean liberty for all.

Ultimately, we need to decide what is the United States because in difference to what has been said, the United State truly is more about ideas than land. Ninety percent of us who inhabit the land of the United States are not ethnically native to the land, colonialism does not make one native. I learned in the government classes I took in my public education middle and high school, the teaching of which is the fundamental purpose of public education in the United States, that the United States is a melting pot. The original motto of the United States, which is still on seal of the United States and on our coins is E pluribus unum, Out Of Many, One. For the motto to be true we must not only co-exist with the other, we much see the other as a part of ourselves.

In all of the reading I have done of what Jesus taught and commanded, I never once come across him teaching about liberty. The idea of rights never exists at the time of Jesus. However, Jesus did speak about oneness and equality, and most importantly, love. Wouldn’t a nation that is supposed to be built upon the teaching of Jesus reflect such teaching? What of the fruits of the United States? Oh, you meant we are a Christian nation, you didn’t say anything about Jesus, to which I respond, your are absolutely correct and you make my point.