The goal is generalized felicity: life at a rock bottom minimum; liberty up to the point of interfering with that of others; and an order organized around the pursuit of happiness, which was understood largely in moral terms.
The means is generalized accurate connection of means and ends; efficiency; accurate, actionable information, and the will do act on it. As I have said before, the three elements in getting things done are good information, motivation, and physical capacity.
The essence of the Liberal creed is the self organizing system. The most basic perceptual self organizing system is the individual human consciousness. What we want, then, is as many individuals as possible to be well informed, motivated, and empowered.
Imagine waves of something undefinable sweeping over a landscape–motion plus time–and leaving patterns in its wake. The extent of the qualitative landscape, the latent order, will be revealed by how complex and rich the patterns are. The extent of the possible development of latent order is a function of freedom, of the possibility of doing things in many different ways, according to individual considerations.
What socialism does is block self organization. It blocks generalized individual perceptions. It blocks progress. Now, to be clear, charity is not socialism. Having groups and entities devoted to helping back up those who fall is not socialism.
One might term socialism, of say the North European sort, an oligarchy of experts. In Sweden, say, it seems to me the reality of Global Warming is taken for granted. The benevolence of the UN is taken for granted. The absolute truth of materialistic evolution is largely taken for granted. This is because their system teaches two things: reverence for the religion of science, whose apostles have Ph.D’s, and content developed by these apostles.
Education provides two things: motivation and information. Since these are HUGELY important in social self organization, homogenization of content makes for less rich structures, and less accurate perception, in my view. This is why in our own system the Federal Government was very consciously left with NO say in education. It is abundantly clear to me that they considered it self evident that God would be mentioned in most classrooms, and considered this beneficial.
Oi. I’m not quite pulling this all together. Consider this an essay fragment,