A Train To Somewhere

I read a blog by James Wells Our country is broke (in more ways than one), so how do we fix it?  

I find this train of thought frustrating. It creates a false idea that we can manipulate the society to be better just because we want and when we want, that we can shift the priorities, and do some tweaking to make it better. The problem is that the minute we know what the People should do to fix a system, which so far proved the best working social system in the history of the world, it is not going to make it better, but it has a potential to destroy what we have.

When I was 15-16 and wanted to change the world, I was a staunch supporter of quick fixes, and at that timid age I thought I knew what to do. I wrote to my genius older brother. Instead of coming back to me with a critique that I expected from him, he told me a story to illustrate something that I was missing. 

My brother asked me if I knew that the last car on a train was the most unstable and the faster the speed, the bumpier the ride. I sure knew it very well. So, let's cut off the 15th car, the last, the bad car... Now the ride in the 14th is crap. So, let's cut off the 14th car... Eventually all you have is a locomotive, which... what a surprise... is even less comfortable than the last car, but there is nothing else to cut.

Virtues and vices are going together. You can be conscientious about it, you can mitigate the affects of it, but you can't just cut it off. You can't make life good and fair by a decree at the moment you feel like that. If you have an advanced stage of diabetes, and you lose a limb, you do not lose diabetes.

When Bolsheviks (literally translation is "the majority") usurped power in Russia in 1917, their ideologue Vladimir Lenin basically stated that capitalism has its virtues (which we all know), and also has vice. And they were appalling. So, the idea was to keep the good part of capitalism, but to surgically remove the bad. And, because it takes long to educate masses so that they appreciate and want the changes, it is OK to do it forcefully at the beginning, to expedite the  changes which will bring good life much faster than in the normal course of History. Like in surgery, pain preceeds the recovery.

Isn't that a great idea, that is still warming up so many even in the United States?

Dualism is in declaring that democracy is the virtue but capitalism is not. Guys, there is no democracy where there is no capitalism. Can we all understand this? And democracy may be a terrible thing, it is just that there is nothing better, and the World has tried many. Democracy is when people are free, and free people are only in a developed capitalist society.

The moral of the story is: Things that look simple are rarely simple. Social systems are complex systems and changing something even with t he best intentions can have disastrous results. Attempts to expedite history, or make short cuts with civilization have ALWAYS proven disastrous.

And yet we still have a line of not even "know-what-to-do-crowd", but "know-how-to-change-the-system" crowd. 

The last time I remember seeing one, who I liked, was a little boy, who asked his dad why he could not just take money from the bank so that the family had enough. Really, why not? How it is different from "know-how-to-change" everything crowd wants?