This Needs Fixin'

Even if you ignore the “convincing everyone else to go along with it” part.

Which is frankly the hardest bit.

The easy part is identifying something you don’t like about the world as it is.

And it’s not really that hard to come up with a description of a world without that thing you don’t like, though trying to describe a viable world can be complicated. You have to identify any side-effects for the changes you propose, for example, and even small tweaks to how things work can have large effects over time.

But trying to connect the world as it is to your description of how it could be better with a path that could actually be followed can be really hard.

Which is why a lot of folks don’t bother.

Trump, for example, has a lot of things he doesn’t like about the current world. I won’t get into the weeds on what I personally think about those things, but it’s clear he has a lot of them.

And he has, in his own glib absolutely-no-details way, spent a lot of time mentioning if not actually describing the world as he wants it to be.

But he seems to have put no effort at all into coming up with a path to connect the two.

Partially, that’s because he’s a committed authoritarian (as long as he gets to be the authority, which is how that usually goes), so how the changes he wants to make would affect other people isn’t really a consideration for him. When the world you want includes a dictatorship, there’s not really any moral contradiction in just forcing the changes you want to make regardless.

When the world you’re after is one where each person can freely live the life they want without interference, then you’re more constrained in thinking about how to get there.

At least, you should be; the whole “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “withering away of the State” dodge that Lenin tried for this problem didn’t work out very well. Dictatorships are bad at “temporary”.

But it’s also because it’s just really hard.

And these are some of the most intellectually lazy people in the world.

(Which is not surprising; when your approach to the world is that belief is more important than facts and that will and power are more important than knowledge, intellectual rigor is not really high on your priorities. Or values.)

So the approach they’ve chosen is basically just “Hulk smash!” and let the pieces fall where they may.

And then to rule the rubble from their gilded towers.

This makes it extra challenging when you’re trying to figure out how to get from here to a world that works for more than just a small cadre of wealthy owners.

It may very well not be possible to come up with a realistic path forward that avoids an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression; we may be looking at an unavoidable and extended period of economic chaos just to get the U.S. economy back to where we were in early January. Depending on how long Musk’s crew get to keep chopping away uninterrupted, it wouldn’t surprise me if “the U.S. economy” ceased to be a thing in any meaningful way.

Which is why it’s a good time to look to building parallel non-State organizations for the things that will still need to be done.

And maybe plant a bigger garden this spring.

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