Perfection

Given human instability and confusion, the goal of politics should not be a system which is perfect, but perfectible.  The goal should not be a static system capable of giving all people everything they are believed by the governing elite to want–or which they WOULD want, if they were not feckless, ungrateful wretches–but rather a system in which people decide, on as local a level as possible, what they want, and are allowed to do so.

Manifestly, the American system has shown itself to be perfectible, and this is its chief virtue.  It cannot be said that we rejected slavery 200 years ago, because we didn’t.  But we were one of the first nations in human history–going back over 2,000 years–to banish it, and perhaps the only nation ever to fight a bloody war over it, or at least largely over it.

All nations, all tribes, all confederations and leagues and city-states and fiefdoms and monarchic orders and every other form of government have been discriminatory for all of human history.  The Romans, for example, were quite fair by historical standards, but they always made Roman citizens legally better in all important respects.  They had rights which others did not.

Discrimination is the rule of history.  What is unique is fighting against it.  This is a feature which has evolved within our perfectible system.

What we should pursue is freedom, which is to say the protection by the government of what will ideally evolve into a pervasive pursuit of individual perfection, which is to say growth.

What we should reject with every ounce of strength and courage and resolution we have is the freezing of our government with ice nine into a static, unresponsive, unperfectible structure of death, desolation, and misery, which is what all Utopian projects–projects of perfection–devolve into invariably.

Utopianism, by definition I would argue, focuses on perfection OUT THERE.  It focuses on social arrangements, not on the content of that individual’s–that person spouting Utopian rhetoric–heart.  Utopianism is ice nine-ism is the pursuit of shared death by people unable to live on their own.

We preach what we cannot do.  We seek what we cannot find.  And we find what never needed to be sought.

Perhaps Taoism might be summarized as reliably finding what is there, and valuing it properly.  It is completing the circle without taking a step.  Just watch: here it comes again.  What fun!!!

OK: I will deopaque this slightly: If you can anticipate 20 steps in the future, and you are going to wind up where you already are, you can skip those twenty steps.  I could do on with this, but I just got lost myself.

Look out your window.  This is always a good rule of thumb.