John Rawls, liberalism and what it means to live a good life

Someone else put it a little more concisely: Work to create the world you would want to be born into if you didn't know in advance who you were going to be.

>If you, like me, are unchurched and don’t draw your values from a religion, then where do you get them from? From what broad tradition do you acquire your sense of what is good, normal and worthwhile in life, and – if I can put it this way – your general vibe too?

>When I’ve asked my non-religious friends, colleagues and students this question, they’re almost always stumped. Their impulse is to say one of three things: ‘from my experience’, ‘from friends and family’ or ‘from human nature’.

I'm non-religious and I'd say none of these three things. I derive my value system from empathy and (from what I strive to be) logical consistency.

> ‘What society-or-civilisation-sized thing can you point to as the source of your values? I’m talking about the kind of thing that, were you Christian, you’d just say: “Ah, the Bible,” or “Oh, my Church.’’’

None, but why should a society-or-civilisation-sized thing be any more valid as a source for your values than anything else? There is no intrinsic wisdom in society-and-civilisation-sized things (quite the opposite could be argued). Ultimately the author's conclusion is basically that you need a religion in order to have a value system, and that liberalism is a sort of quasi-religion that can offer that. In fact, it is entirely possible to have a coherent value system that is not based on a religion, quasi-religion or mass-movement of any kind.

Every complex adaptive system has needs for coming into existence, maintaining that existence, and adapting with the environment.

When two complex adaptive systems interact, a third one with new capabilities emerges with the two as components. This emergent system has needs for its existence, maintenance, and adaptability.

Most/all of life is complex adaptive systems interacting.

So there exists needs we all have on the specific level of each body, as well as collective needs emerging from our interactions.

One of those needs, for the sake of maintenance, is the moderation of meeting our needs.

In order to learn to moderate our needs, we need to oversatisfy and undersatisfy them so we can learn what it feels like to do so and when.

So our needs are nondual, in the sense that we need to fast/feast on each.

And then there's the needs related to maintaining our external environments.

If we choose to live and serve life, we need to learn to moderate the needs of the environments we live in.

The essay goes into much more detail on liberal ideas, but what's more interesting to me is how many different political models liberalism can actually fit into.

The author goes into some detail on liberal socialism. On the other end you can also have liberal anarchism though.

I've heard the term "voluntarism" being used to describe an anarchist approach where people choose to help their communities, though the rebranding mainly seems to be because "anarchy" is viewed with a lot of stigma today.

The point of the experiment is to show only that by rejecting the the possibility that such a thing could occur, you're exposing your implicit belief that you know the causal connections between equity, economics, technological advancement and human happiness, just like Rawls believed he did. But you don't know that system.

Rawls's thought experiment's real success is to smuggle into the conversation an exceedingly vast set of knowledge claims about how complex systems in the real world must behave.

It's a thought-terminating thought experiment.

Simple: Our constitution, our legal framework that (mostly) protects us from corruptive forces, our ability to trust that sellers can't sell us poison and lie to us about it, our ability to enter into transactions with total strangers without worry, our free elections, our freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom to be who we are.

People are stumped because they're not looking at it for what it is. There's no mysticism wrapped around our secular societies like there are around religions, so people tend to not notice it. But if you look at it - REALLY look at it - it's nothing short of miraculous what we've achieved. Life before we had these things was VERY, VERY different from the peace and prosperity we've enjoyed for almost a hundred years.

And it's unfortunate that people have become so entitled and myopic that they've lost sight of it to the point where they actually favor strongmen as heads of governments...

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.