Attempting to come up with any set of universal and eternally valid rules is almost certainly futile.
There are a multitude of reasons for this, but clearly one of the most important is that everything is changing. In fact, technologically speaking change is occurring at ever increasingly changing rates.
We simply do not and cannot conduct our lives like our great grandparents, grandparents or even our parents. Nor will our children conduct their lives like ours.
It was commonly assumed at one time or another in World history that the earth was flat and that the Americas didn’t exist. It was once sacrilegious to believe that the Earth wasn’t the center of the Universe. However, and thankfully, every day scientists, medical experts and explorers in various disciplines discover something new that calls into question many things that we once took for granted. We are even experiencing new diseases. And if one needs more convincing just pick up a book on Quantum Mechanics if you really want to blow your mind about the true nature of reality. It simply defies everything the average man thinks he knows about reality.
We are no long hunter-gatherers or frontier farmers where each of us could hunt and/or harvest our own food and make and/or mend our own clothes. The vast majority of us now live in more populated urban and suburban regions, and we all now have a narrower skill set when it comes to day to day living.
Many of us don’t really even know how to cook, or certainly make our own clothes. We rely on others for virtually everything. Living in a world of increasing specialization may in fact make us more productive (and profitable) but it also makes us all much more vulnerable and dependent on one another. And this interdependency increasingly crosses national, religious, ethnic and racial boundaries—all of which adds an additional level of complexity and uncertainty in our lives. Who knows when the next international, racial or ethnic conflict will cause us to lose our jobs or worse?
We can now communicate with others across the planet instantaneously. Business is conducted internationally. Immigration and migration and the challenges associated therewith greatly influence the culture of every nation. Each of us are, simply put, exposed to many more influences than was true in the past. There can be a lot, probably too much, information to try to absorb and effectively use.
Simply put, science and our mathematicians contemplate things like the infinity of time, space and numbers (both large and small). If one thinks about anything that is infinite, then one begins to wonder if all things are possible, at least somewhere in some distant galaxy –or on some super-small quantum scale. In short, if all things are possible, at least to some infinitesimally small level of probability, then how can anyone come up with a set of rules that always apply under “every” set of circumstances everywhere all of the time? A huge problem of course, is that no one has lived under “every” set of circumstances, because everything that “could” happen has almost certainly not yet happened. And so, this leads to the question of the foreseeability of everything that can happen in the future.
But we don’t have to get too scientific or mathematical about all of this. We all know that we encounter people doing surprising things all of the time. People don’t always act rationally or as expected. We even amaze ourselves at times by what we do. But here again we see the impossibility of trying to come up with rules to cover every circumstance.
As an exercise try designing a truly effective and fair system of rules that dictate how a decision to launch nuclear weapons is properly made when someone at whatever the current version of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) is detects several mysterious launches of ballistic missiles that may or may not be incoming missiles with nuclear warheads. Should the final say so be the President’s alone? How about a new committee consisting of the President the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader? Would such a committee be Constitutional, or would the Constitution have to be amended? Is that even remotely politically possible?
What happens if warning times are reduced to zero because a foreign power can sneak a submarine up the Potomac and/or East Rivers and detonate a low yield nuclear weapon with no warning time?
The point is trying to figure out a good decision-making system under various catastrophic scenarios with little or no warning time is totally maddening and is probably impossible.
We don’t want to venture too far afield here, but suffice it to say that it seems to us that anyone who is rational and fair minded has to admit and accept that the ubiquitous presence of complexity and change in our existence forces one to realize that he/she cannot always assume that everything they’ve ever learned or been taught is or will always be true. Our assumptions are often false. And our beliefs are imperfect.
The foregoing should make all realize that we all need to be open to learning the facts of a situation, reassessing what we thought we knew and what our opinions are and realizing that we all make decisions based largely on imperfect information. How dare anyone, politician, political party or whomever, present themselves as having all the answers, or even a “system” that will always determine the correct policy decision. Yet this is precisely what political parties and most politicians pretend to do—especially when they demand or espouse ideological purity from their members.
A realist goes forth humbly, knowing all too well that he/she could be wrong. But secure in the belief that good ideas are good, bad ideas are bad—and that’s true regardless of the idea’s source. The real key is correctly determining the difference.
David Dixon Lentz March 20, 2022
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