2021-06-22
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I've been reading Jonathan Rauch's "Kindly Inquisitors". It's a 
defence of the scientific inquiry. He defines the scientific
method as:

   1) No final say
   2) No personal authority

This means that no concept can be above criticism
and no person should be valued more as a contributor.
This sounds a lot like what I think of as anarchism.

It makes me think of the specific ways that the flow of
criticism is blocked in many (all?) institutions. I am not sure
if I can get into it at this moment, but it seems to me that
Rauch's definition is quite handy in thinking about how the
criticism is kept from helping to steer the progress of 
different entities.

I am thinking of one specific dual problem at the moment:
The algorithmic recommendation systems and the hunger for
participating in the discussion. The second part of course
is not a problem itself, but it shows that people are actively
kept out of the conversation. If they had a say in their
democracy, why would they be yelling on Facebook all the
time? The first part of the problem is infernal. It actually 
gets in between the two rules of scientific method so deeply
that it becomes hard to see how the fruits of the scientific
thinking (like democracy and the market) can be kept from
being somehow overwhelmed on a very deep structural level.

A random addition:
I would also guess that there is something about how people's
memory works that has a lot to do with their authoritarian vs
anarchistic tendencies. I personally am almost completely
unable to remember arbitrary rules if they are not attached
to a logic. I can't understand law, I can't understand taxes.
And it's not that I can't understand, it's that I can't remember
the rules. Only when law is tied to bigger concepts like
the human rights and the logical principles like "you can't
collect evidence for a negative statement" any of it starts
to click to something in my mind.

Note to self:
Read about tight and loose cultures by Michele Gelfand.

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