Politics (5) -- (5) Creative Handling and Mitigation of Inevitable Human Misunderstandings & Dressing Up Imperfection for Convenience and Bearability & Symmetry of Externalities -- Literature Review of My Work on Politics and Freedom

Image credit. Spot Oscar.

 Continued from here.

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived. – Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's piece of wisdom need not push us into an abyss of despair. Though it does point to a gushing source of painful challenges a human finds herself confronted with during her live.

Epistemologically, I would argue, there is no reason to expect that seeking truth is necessarily the premier tool for survival. We are not bacteria living in the micro-cosmic realm, nor stars out there in the macro-cosmic far - rather, we must adapt to the meso-cosmos in which we live. What works in the meso-cosmos works, what does not, does not. Not only, are there countless obstacles to ever attaining truth on so many issues - after all, we may simply not be equipped to recognise certain truths. What is so unusual and surprising about that? Think of a fish trying to figure out a car wreckage at the bottom of the sea. The fish just is not equipped to get all parts of the car's story. We are in a similar position, I am sure, in innumerable cases. Similar to the fish diving through an incomprehensible car wreck, it is part of our situation to be ignorant of much of it, being cut off from a whole lot of truths. 

What is more, I am almost convinced that there are areas of life that are truth-free, in principle. It may actually be a precondition of advanced knowledge not to be able to establish truth as a final and incorrigible state of knowledge. Even in the "hard" sciences, we operate with mortal conjectures. And science is supposed to advance one funeral (of a defunct scientific hero) at a time. Our ability to doubt is certainly the impetus to human epistemic supremacy on earth. If we were not inclined to relentlessly question what we think we know, we would be philosophically and scientifically as advanced as the crocodile. 

What does this have to do with politics?

The impressions and facts that a person refers to when she speaks about her social environment are strongly related to her (a) personality and (b) position in life. Of course (a) and (b) are perfectly unique. So, every individual is processing data from a different world than any other individual. We can still come to similar conclusions and outlooks. However, the potential for incongruence is immense. Misunderstanding is inevitable. The uniqueness of a person's perception of life in all its aspects is both a source of creativity and progress as well as social confusion and tension.

Politics protects this source of creativity and progress and mitigates the collateral confusion and social tension. Again, this is the core of freedom: to enable mass dissension, on the one hand, and reduce the accompanying tension to a level that allows the release of the creativity and progress generated by mass dissension (which is the result of a high degree of personal autonomy.)

In politics, we appear to be deceiving one another. We even do manifestly deceive one another, occasionally or may be frequently. But what seems to be (or actually is deception) often stems from the positional incongruity of the actors. Without being aware of it, we make different assumptions, define terms differently, come up with incompatible conclusions - this alone accounts for much of what looks like deception. 

And then, there are strong incentives to cut corners inadvertently.

Now, I think, I eventually have worked my way back to the thought that triggered this post during a lovely walk on a sunny March day.

Trying to approximate the truth - especially if it involves self-correction - is a terribly slow and painful process which tends to require special circumstances before being embarked upon. One aspect of the politics-industry is to make it easier for people not to search for truth (concerning the complicated issues of political debate), and still feel to be doing the right thing and having good prospects of living in at least a passable world.

In the below post, I highlight a quote that has an important message, but is a little clumsy in expressing it.

Abstract principles could and should and will normally be involved in assessing conflicting accounts of externalities. I suppose, what the author meant to say is that there cannot be a general theory of (the correct assessment of) externalities, and thus there cannot be abstract principles that accomplish this task.

Contentious assessments concerning externalities are simply a case of what I have mentioned above:

... every individual is processing data from a different world than any other individual ...

In a world where this matters, we will find the paraphernalia of politics all over the place, and if these are well ordered we may even witness freedom.

★

P007 Why Politics Will Always Be with Us from 12/11/2012

Coase’s key insight is that all of these externality problems are fundamentally symmetric. The question is never “how do we stop A from harming B?” but instead “should we let A harm B, or should we let B harm A”? A consequence of that symmetry is that no abstract principle [...] can possibly be used to guide policy. Any purely abstract argument for preventing harm from A to B is an equally good argument for preventing harm from B to A.

[...]

Should we tax the man who comes out of the bar and passes out in the gutter? Maybe. But if your only argument is that the man should not be allowed to harm the rest of us at no cost to himself, then your argument also shows that we should not be allowed to harm the man (by taxing him) at no cost to ourselves. Should we tax the man who drives a gas guzzler? Maybe. But if your only argument is that gas guzzlers cause harm to others, you’ve got to face the fact that taxes also cause harm to others.

★

Continued here.