| It’s easy to see what’s wrong with this if you apply it to others. Did the Soviets really believe in Marxism or did they just want to take over in place of the Tsars? Do the Iranian Mullahs believe in Islam or are they just making up excuses too? Did the Pharoahs believe in their mortuary cult or did they just make that stuff up to con people into stacking up big rocks? One thing I’ve learned in my time around here is that most people actually do believe what they say they believe and if you listen they will tell you who they are. The British mostly did believe that their great empire was destined to civilize the world, and the Americans believed they were creating a new Atlantis and that what they were doing to the natives wasn’t actually as bad as it was. They thought they were bringing them the light and saving their souls. Made perfect sense to them at the time given their beliefs. Pharaoh really thought a big pile of rocks would make him immortal. The problem isn’t that we are all sociopaths making up fake motives to justify crimes. Some people do that, but most don’t. The real problem is that a whole lot of what we believe is deeply flawed and we aren’t smart or experienced or objective enough to see it. We get caught up in self reinforcing ideologies and in systems that become ends in themselves. We also get ridden around by our brain stems and driven by emotions and urges that we rationalize so well we con ourselves. Hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Conspiratorial models of history are comforting. It’s more comforting to believe it’s all just evil sociopathy since that suggests that if we can just get good people in there they can give us some kind of utopia. The reality is that if we get good people in there they will fuck up, be corrupted by power, or delude themselves. We know this because we’ve already tried many times. We are just not that smart. Most car accidents are not the result of homicidal maniacs trying to run people down. Most of them happen because we are bad at driving cars. We are even worse at setting grand historical visions to create utopias. This is why the best systems we’ve come up with are full of checks and balances and are designed to be deliberative and cautious. It’s a way of protecting us from ourselves. Getting back to US foreign policy, the real problem is that while our country’s founders did a good job creating such a system for domestic affairs they left foreign policy under specified. This left it as a domain where “good” people high on their own supply could embark on adventures without appropriate peer review. Government of all things with its monopoly on force should be as boring and bureaucratic as possible. Adventuring should be allowed in limited consensual domains only. |
Who cares? Your example has no relevance to my assertion. The difference is that the soviets and mullahs started out as marxists and muslims. The british empire didn't start off 'to civilize the world'? For hundreds of years, the brits were stealing land, transporting african slaves, invading countries before they started peddling the 'civilize the world' propaganda.
> The British mostly did believe that their great empire was destined to civilize the world
No they didn't. They made that up that nonsense in order to justify or rationalize their barbarity. Stealing is bad. Killing is bad. Even the brits understood that. It's only after a few hundred years of murder and theft that the brits invented the 'civilize the world' or 'white man's burden' nonsense.
> and the Americans believed they were creating a new Atlantis and that what they were doing to the natives wasn’t actually as bad as it was.
Nope. We never believed that nonsense. The city on a hill nonsense is justification to hide our own greed and imperialism. We knew what we were doing to the natives. Just like we knew what we were doing to the slaves was bad. We did it anyway because of our selfish interests.
> The problem isn’t that we are all sociopaths making up fake motives to justify crimes
No. It's not that we are sociopaths. It's that we are greedy. It's all too human and it's all too mundane.
> Hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
That's the point. There was never any good intentions. You act like the brits started their empire to do good in the world. No. The british empire, for the first 200 years, was looting, stealing land and transporting african slaves. It was all greed. It's hundreds of years into their empire(s) that the brits invented the 'white man's burden' nonsense.