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by angelzen
1671 days ago
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Liberal market based societies / economies have many failings, and would be a very interesting conversation to explore some of these. To refocus on the UC situation, and at the risk of putting words in your mouth, the general idea is that UC is exploring a set of policies, which may or maynot work for them, worst case they fail and some of the other XXX universities in this country will raise to the occasion and take their place. What's the big deal? The SU slow moving disaster is relevant insomuch there are moral systems out there that have a mind of their own and are impervious to feedback, if not downright feeding on failure. They are so self evidently righteous that no cost is too high and no institution can afford to not implement them. With no control group left to highlight failures and moderate excesses, the whole society tailspins and the only hope becomes, tragically, total collapse. The extent to which SU story is relevant to current UC / US situation, anybody's guess. My only job here is to be a witness for past errors. |
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On an absolute basis maybe, but on a relative basis I'd say they've been very effective. But as you said that's a different conversation (which if you want to have off HN, my email is in my profile!).
> worst case they fail and some of the other XXX universities in this country will raise to the occasion and take their place. What's the big deal?
> They are so self evidently righteous that no cost is too high
> the only hope becomes, tragically, total collapse.
Well, I didn't mean to minimize it exactly, just that mass de-industrialization and 3rd world status is probably going too far.
One of the hallmarks of extremism is the view you refer to that "no cost is too high". Sometimes this is about boosting the general welfare, but more often it is about a (perceived or real) threat. If every win by the right is a slippery slope to fascism, deplatforming becomes easily justified. And if every win by the left is a slippery slope to communism, it becomes easier to tolerate public undermining of the traditional checks on power, that depend on public support to be effective, like elections / the courts / legislature / (even the same side) media, etc.
The problem is as extremism increases, the threat to the other party becomes, increasingly, real. And the case for further authoritarian measures or undermining the existing system becomes more logical.
I have two issues with this accelerationist scenario. One is that the escalation is inevitably bi-directional in the end, and it is difficult to predict which faction (if any) will win, only that they are more likely to be authoritarian.
The second is that I don't see crisis as something that necessarily leads eventually to positive reforms. I think it is fully possible to have a crisis, then have things be poorly functioning for quite some time. Crisis aided the Soviet Union's fall but it also aided its rise.
In the US, the process of escalation seems to be well on its way, and to me seems more likely to lead to crisis in the medium term than incremental reforms (in any direction).