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by boxed 823 days ago
I think it's universal among humans to see the flaw of existing systems and wanting to replace them and then are surprised at the following disaster. Communism, the French Revolution, Franco, the fall of the Roman Empire, every big software rewrite that failed spectacularly...
1 comments
hnbad 823 days ago
> Communism

Fun fact: prefiguration, a practice popular with anarchists, is essentially a form of refactoring rather than a rewrite.

Arguably the problem with Soviet/Maoist communism and the French Revolution also was that it merely replaced who's in charge rather than dismantling the system of someone being in charge (i.e. it focused on individuals, not systems). It's worth noting though that the French Revolution did end up creating a representative democracy eventually even if it took a detour of replacing the monarch with a number of different autocrats - much like Cromwell in the UK for that matter.

So I'd say the problem wasn't seeing flaws and wanting to replace the systems but thinking the flaws could be fixed without addressing the system in its entirety or looking at it from an actual systems theory point of view. Another fun fact: a lot of Nazis ended up back in positions of power in post-war Germany (both Germanies actually).

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boxed 822 days ago
> Arguably the problem with Soviet/Maoist communism and the French Revolution also was that it merely replaced who's in charge rather than dismantling the system of someone being in charge

I strongly disagree. They threw out way too much, not just who was in charge. "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater". In the case of Mao they made sweeping changes to agriculture several times. Each with the potential of causing massive famines, and together caused the largest man made disaster in history.

That's not just replacing who is in charge (which would have been MUCH BETTER), it's dismantling a thousand years of knowledge and tradition in favor of something they thought was better. Absolute disaster.

The French revolution, and USSR did quite similar things with disastrous consequences.

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