There comes times when the situation is outside of the navigator’s experience and training. In those times, the old navigator may be incapable of opening his mind to fully pay attention to what is actually happening. Some times call for a younger mind that is learning in real time, absorbing the recent observations with youthful wonderment. Those are usually times of the most severe crises.
This distinction of chores versus tasks has a corrupting influence on work. It is form of the corrupting influence of money because we tie compensation or continued employment to the progress made during tasks. This is different because money is not a factor. Greed is not the cause of the corruption. Instead, it is the corruption of having to justify one’s position. It is the corruption of being gainfully employed. To justify employment, we need to show the gain. Our work has to be important in some larger sense.
We were reliving the 1950s fall-out shelters, but where the shelter was the comfort of the usual home. Like the fall-out shelter, there was an acceptance that people will need to stay inside for a long while. I think the current neuroticism will last for a decade, similar to the peak of people’s attention toward building and stocking fall-out shelters. Eventually, people will decide that living and enjoying the present does not need to be sacrificed for this threat that remains as real as ever before. Courage is better than neuroticism.
The important thing is to keep the government in the business of solving problems it discovers. Government funded science is serving this need by providing the new problems to solve and the new solutions that would solve them. Meanwhile, there exists other science by concerned scientists who are not funded directly by government. If this outside science contradicts the government, then we dismiss that science as misinformation because it did not come from government.
I envision a distant time when a dedomenocracy has been operating for multiple generations so it has good data about human responses to crises. That data should tell the algorithm that humans are prone to fear reactions. It will also tell the algorithm that an over protected population lacks the experience of handing real fears.
A dedomenocracy fears nothing while a democracy fears everything. In this context, everything refers to the collective library of scientific knowledge. Nothing refers to the empty space that may harbor plans that we will can only learn by paying close attention to the present, allowing observations to contradict theories we accepted in the past.
There is a benefit to opening our processes to the possibility that the reality may be changing, where the changing is from an evolving intelligence or even from a plethora of competing intelligences that have transitions of power much like our political systems. Admitting dark data into our algorithms blinds us to this possibility, especially when we allow dark data to have priority over observations.
The failure of the modern democratic governments is that none of these fundamental perspectives of the population were debated democratically. The irony is that the democratic government of elected officials presiding over unelected bureaucrats imposed these answers on the population. Instead of assessing the population’s sentiments on these questions, the democratic government cajoled the population into following the science, and to listen to the doctors. The science may be correct, and the doctors may be wise, but they might be answering the wrong questions.
The real risk of the current universal imposition of restrictions and mandates for a medical issue is that will draw widespread attention to the current state of the medical practice itself. People will learn more about the downsides and the misdirected priorities of benefiting the elderly at the expense of the younger generations. At some point, they may decide that this is not a system they want to continue to support. The bubble will burst.
This immediate dismissal of even the potential of corruption in government indicates that we are no longer in a democracy. In particular, we reject the legitimacy of any objection from our fellow citizens. We presume that all objections have some corrupt political motive. Every objection gets attached to some political identity instead of being evaluated on its own merits. This reduces the population to mere spectators to the government, sitting on opposite sides of an allegorical stadium shouting at each other while the game proceeds on the field. Like those fans, we have no actual influence on the plays or the execution of the plays, but we will cheer if one side advances, or boo if the other side advances.
Hypothesis Discovery 