On a freeway yesterday, I observed the use of variable speed limits. A great idea, to modulate traffic flow.…
On a freeway yesterday, I observed the use of variable speed limits. A great idea, to modulate traffic flow.
Except maybe only 5% of drivers pay any attention to them. It hasn’t occurred to us yet that societies that appear ‘authoritarian’ are usually just old societies. /1 https://t.co/cnftQp3bE4
Who have learned through centuries of bitter experience what happens when you don’t control social behaviour. When we use the word control, because we live in a teenage culture shorn of all past of future, we assume TOTAL control. Restriction. /2
Like being grounded. It’s how teenagers see any sort of restriction. But we control things, including peoples’ behaviours, to create *freedoms*. To restrict anti-social outcomes. We do the same with infections. Or used to. /3
We controlled infections, so that our lives weren’t full of sickness and death. But our 50-year old libertarian cultures, really just a flattering term for high school adolescent life, are one-dimensional. /4
Seeing all regulation and restriction and control as some sort of ‘authoritarian’ gulag. These aren’t analogies, societies are social. This is the direct result of high school culture taking over adult life, in history. /5
Removing the old institution-based adult life, where the institutions embodied centuries of brutal truths accumulated in history, to guide present-day life, and also did future-based planning.
Now all mostly gone, in favour of an eternal present of lifestyle living. /6
Adolescent life. Whole societies now on a permanent gap year, from reality. How dare we lecture ancient cultures about having strong social rules, with our pathetic, impotent teenage culture that even allows entire populations to be smashed by a pandemic? /7
That would rather the whole civilisation be incinerated by human pollution, than interrupt its precious recreational travel?
You won’t get any purchase with this. Teenagers will put their hands in their ears and say ‘blah blah’. That’s our whole culture now. /end