Why MOR effort?
Gotta try harder...
Nature is not fair. But a human society can be. And in a fair human society the unfairness of Nature can be somewhat mitigated. That’s where I want to live: in a fair society, where people treat each other with compassion, generosity, and tenderness, and with respect for each other’s differences and spaces.
A fair society is possible.
The peoples of the West have already proved this. Because the West began its journey in History with the worst societies on the planet, full of war, slavery, misogyny, and racism, and yet, over the course of many centuries, through the evolution—and lately, revolution—of our ideologies, with resulting reforms to our institutions, we have constructed a social world that, though wanting for many improvements, is still vastly superior, in its fairness, to every ‘civilized’ world that our ancestors had to suffer through.
We can do better, go further on the path opened by the European Enlightenment—and earlier by the Bible—to a society that is ever fairer. But Westerners must first survive the present Great Challenge as a collection of modern, peaceful, democratic peoples. And so, first, We The People must take back our democratic societies.
This will require a New Enlightenment: Westerners must open their eyes, of a sudden, to the onslaught now unleashed against any possibility that we will live in democratic societies.
And if the West is in trouble, the whole world is too. Because the WEIRD idea of individual sovereignty—from which liberty, human rights, and democratic government—is a modern export from the West, where it has flourished most.
Lots of people in the West, I believe, wish to rebuild a forward path for institutional evolution that protects freedom and justice for all. But can we succeed without understanding the system?
Robert Lustig, author of The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains, says no.
“You can’t pull yourself out of the ditch until you figure out how you drove into it … We have to understand these problems in order to unravel them.”1
That’s a fair point.
We can’t know what specifically to fight for unless we have grokked the structure of the system. The peoples of the West can pull this off—we can ditch this ditch. But we must first bootstrap, and quick, a process to make us leap forward in the development of our anthropological, psychological, and political consciousness—so that we may understand the structure of the system that is trying to enslave us. Then we may rival (or even surpass?) the sudden progress our recent ancestors made during the European Enlightenment, when the largest-ever and most effective collective Western struggle for freedom began.
They did it. We can too.