So, as we discussed in my last article, I left Christianity in large part because its views simply conflicted with reality. The core of the fundamentalist Christian worldview comes down to faith in God and the inerrancy of the Bible above all else, and without that, the whole thing eventually shatters. And while my fundamentalist Christian school more or less tried to brainwash me into this extremist view of believing the world was 6000 years old and blah blah blah, it didn't stick because my experiences after leaving the school ultimately broke that worldview.
Of course, deconversion from a religion like Christianity is not an easy process, it is very, shall we say, psychologically taxing, and often involves a period in which someone who once had the Christian worldview ends up having to rewrite how they see the world from scratch. So, using David Noebel's worldview framework, I will now be outlining the worldview that came after Christianity for me.
Philosophy
Note how unlike Noebel's framework, which started with theology, as the Christian worldview's linchpin is unwavering belief in God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible, my own framework starts with a good hard look at what reality is, or at least what it seems to be.
I accept two major premises as axioms in my worldview. First, that I exist. As Rene Descartes would say, "I think, therefore I am." Something is thinking, something is having thoughts, and that thing is me. It exists. I exist.
The second major premise is SLIGHTLY more controversial, but still reasonable. The universe exists. I am clearly interacting with some sort of permanent environment. Some may doubt it's reality, claiming it's all a dream or we're all brains in a vat or that solipsism is valid, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that we can deduce that for all intents and purposes, this physical reality exists. This is not to say that this is the only reality, or the ultimate reality, but if something else exists, we kind of need evidence of it existing, and we need that evidence to be reliable. I'm not saying there can't be other existences outside of our own. We could be missing a lot by focusing on just the physical. But, the physical is what we know exists, and it's our most immediate reality and it's the one thing we can demonstrate. Until evidence is presented that this reality is false, I think that it is more reasonable to accept its existence.
From there, I will argue that not only does this reality exist, but that we can use various means of attaining knowledge in order to learn more about it. We can observe how reality works, and when done rigorously through the scientific method, we can derive truths about the world that seem to hold up in the sense that they are observable and repeatable. We can also use tools like logic and math to postulate new truths based on what we know, and assuming our methodology is accurate, we can go out there and test these truths and verify them via science. We might, for example, use math to deduce there is a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, and then observe the gravitational forces of such a black hole. So not all knowledge is direct observation, but I would argue that what is discovered via other means should hold up to direct observation. If an engineer uses math to argue for a new type of bridge construction, we should construct such a bridge and test it. If it holds up, cool, we just used math to discover something new and verified it scientifically. If it falls apart, then we find out what went wrong and adjust our worldviews accordingly.
Christians like to tout thir worldview as a relationship with God....I like to tout mine as a relationship with reality. Reality matters above all else, and unless we can verify something with what we already have, there often isn't a good reason to believe it.
Theology
I start from a perspective or agnostic or weak atheism here. Christians like to portray atheists as confident that a god does not exist, but most of them are not. The idea of being able to say with 100% confidence that a god or other realm of existence simply does not exist is foolish. You cant prove that unless you can look over every rock to ever exist and know everything about everything. And by then, would you not effectively be god yourself? We are always going to have some blind spots in our views, and we cannot simply account for every veriable possible. No one can claim absolute knowledge on this subject in the negative. This is not to say we can't come somewhat close and conclude things within reasonable confidence intervals, but we can always be wrong.
Agnostic atheism or weak atheism is the idea that maybe a god is out there, maybe we are just a brain in a vat, what have you, but we are going to operate under the principle that god does not exist, until we are reasonably certain they do. We are not simply going to assume it as part of our worldview, like everything else, we need evidence. Russell's teapot is a common analogy used to discuss the existence of god. Maybe there is a tea pot orbiting Jupiter. We cannot prove that there isn't, unless we can look at every object that orbits jupiter, it could always exist in the gaps in our knowledge, but at the same time, we are not going to claim that it is, until there is proper evidence for it. Claims need evidence to support them, and if theists cannot provide convincing evidence, then we should not believe their claims.
Many theists will make poor arguments like arguments from design in order to shoehorn their worldview into existence, but in my opinion these arguments are often flawed and not convincing. The fact is, we simply do not know enough about how, for example, the universe came into being in any way. Our event horizon is the big bang. It's possible that yes some sort of creator made it. It's also possible, due to the nature of time being relative, it has always existed and time is merely one's frame of reference. It's possible there is some larger cycle of births of universes within a larger metaverse we do not know about. We simply do not know. Not knowing doesn't mean "god", much less a specific version of god.
Which brings us to another issue. Even if we could conclude that god exists, which god? What is this god like? The Christian framework not only introduces the idea that a creator god exists, it claims many many things about its nature in the Bible. God could exist, but if the Bible is false, the actual god could be a much different kind of being than presented.
I would also argue that many claims made by Noebel in his book such as the mind-body problem are faulty. If we are going to appeal to supernatural ideas like souls or "ghosts in the machine" so to speak over natural processes, once again, what evidence do you have to make your claims? I'm not saying the mind body problem is not a problem, but with a worldview that starts off with naturalism and requires evidence to build off of it, Christians and other theists need to stop simply using gaps in our naturalistic knowledge to shoehorn the idea of a god or souls or whatever other agenda they have.
Theology (Cosmic Humanism)
So, that said, why do I believe anything supernatural at all? This is a relatively late development in my worldview, but I feel forced to accept this.
I would argue my spiritual views do come from a form of special revelation. Regarding some more personal stuff, which I won't discuss the details of, there was a situation that made me question my faith. It was the big stressor that really got the ball rolling and made the entire christian worldview collapse on me. I won't say that I lost my faith simply BECAUSE of it. As we know the seeds of destruction were there for years, but this was the big one that really pushed me to really take a hard look at everything and question it.
Ultimately, I looked at the issue from every possible angle, and I just ended up having to conclude god didn't exist. Unless there was something major that I was missing, I just couldn't see the outcome of the situation turn out any differently. If that makes any sense at all. As far as what that something major was, well, I did have ONE idea, but the problem was, it was an extreme long shot. I would say, roughly 10,000 to 1. Meaning I could be 99.99% certain of my conclusion.
However, one day, years later, I found myself in a situation to test that crazy theory of mine. I just did it in order to prove it couldn't have happened since it kept nagging me, but then when I did, I ended up proving my crazy theory right, against all of the odds. It screwed me up in the head so bad that I actually spent like the next half a year just thinking about it, analyzing it, and trying to do research on where I go from there. The conclusion I reached was that yeah, it was a real "miracle" of sorts, and that I had to accept it.
I mean, a lot of hardcore atheists will say, well if a million to one shot happens to you that's not a big deal because of the law of large numbers and 8 one in a million coincidences happen in NYC every day. Okay, fair enough. But, to counter that, first of all, this was a weird off the wall hypothesis of mine. It was not any random coincidence, it was the fact that it was a very specific coincidence that I could test that ended up doing it for me. And when you do tests in social science,in order to tell the difference between a coincidence and a genuine phenomenon, one uses statistical significance. If the result is what the hypothesis expects, and the odds of it happening by chance are low enough, then we can conclude the hypothesis is correct to a certain level of confidence. The lowest bar generally accepted is 95%, which is commonly used in social science. Here, I could be 99.99% confident, which far exceeds a reasonable confidence interval. So I am forced to accept the conclusion.
I recognize that this could be a matter of chance, there always is that chance. But as I like to say, going back to my axiom about the universe existing, we could all be brains in a vat. The chance of that is nonzero. The thing is, at some point you have to accept this conclusion as true. And my standard was met, so I'm going with it. If you just wave off all possible data as falling within the law of large numbers, you can't conclude much of anything. Any standard is going to have an error rate, a potential for the reasonable conclusion to be wrong, and I feel like I am on solid ground to accept the concept of a god on a personal level.
This is not to say that you have to reach the same conclusion. For the purposes of the rest of this worldview exercise, I am going to be assuming the agnostic atheist position and basing my views based on that. Quite frankly, I would not say my experience is sufficient evidence to convince other people, and you should do your own research and draw your own conclusions. Follow the evidence, is what I am going to say. I am just including this for the sake of transparency. It does not change the rest of my worldview for the most part, and I would argue based on what I've deduced into my research in the matter, my entire experience with leaving Christianity was designed to push me to the same conclusions I'm trying to push anyway. So I'm just going to do that.
Biology/History I
Going back to the secular worldview, what can we deduce via science about biology and the general cosmology of the world around us?
Well, we can deduce that 13 billion years ago, there was an event called the big bang, in which an infinitesimal speck expanded into what is the universe. We do not know what caused it, or if there even is a cause. We just know it happened, and from that everything that we know to exists exists. This big bang formed galaxies, and stars, including our sun, and planets, including earth. Life arose from a process that we do not quite understand, and began simply, eventually evolving into more complex life forms. Human beings are an exceptionally intelligent lifeform that exists in the animal kingdom. They ended up winning the evolution game of natural selection, at least for the moment, and have established domination over the planet earth, existing on six of the seven continents, and building massive civilizations. This is largely due to features like our overly large brains, and having appendages like hands with opposable thumbs that allow us to manipulate our environment into whatever we see fit.
Ethics
So, the Christian worldview mentioned ethics at this stage in their worldview development. I was going to hold off on this, because I want to discuss ethics more in detail later, perhaps before I really sort out the concept of law, but given I was going to open my psychology section about the concept of human nature, I feel like this section is better placed here.
In the Christian worldview, ethics come from God. God is seen as a huge cosmic dictator of sorts who tells people what is right and wrong, on the basis they they are smarter than us and all knowing. But, if we are going to assume a universe with an agnostic atheist perspective on God, I am just going to say it. There is no real reason to assume any inherent morality or purpose to the universe at all whatsoever. Whatever we call ethics and morality, are human made concepts. They do not exist in the state of nature, because the state of nature is defined by evolution and natural selection. There is also no inherent purpose to the universe or anything.
I would also argue that a god existing does not necessarily change anything either. Because of the euthyphro dilemma. The euthyphro dilemma asks if" the good and just is good and just because God wills it, or whether god wills it because it is good and just." Basically, is something moral because God says so, or if God says so because it is good and just. Essentially, this boils down to a test of whether morality is actually contingent on god or not. If something is good just because god says so, then that's problematic. We could say that eternally torturing people is good under those circumstances. heck, many christians would argue such a thing. But, this is problematic. If good really is contingent on what God says, then morality can be anything God wants it to be and it is arbitrary. But if morality is contingent on something else other than god, then that brings God to simply be a messenger of what is good and evil, rather than the source of it.
I know Christians, including Noebel, as he addressed this specifically in "Understanding the Times", will say that well it's not that God SAYS it's good, it's more that goodness is his nature, or something along those lines. But that's just....redefining that first prong of the dilemma. We are simply defining god as perfectly moral and then claiming whatever is good is good because it conforms with his character. What if God is an ###hole? Well, according to Christians, god can't be an ###hole, because he is inherently the good guy. So apparently all of those genocides in Joshua and all of those people burning in hell had it coming, simply because God deemed it so. It doesn't really change anything.
And for me, this is absurd. I would argue morality does depend more thoroughly on external principles that conform with our physical universe. And without a god to tell us what it is, we need to derive it ourselves. The concept is largely human made and human centered. What is good and what is evil? Goodness, I would say is that which generally provides pleasure or otherwise enhances our lives. Something is good if it makes us feel good, or makes us healthy, or makes us live longer and with a higher quality of life. Something is bad if it inflicts unnecessary suffering, death, unpleasantness, or otherwise causes the opposite of these things in the previous sentence.
The basis for these things being moral and immoral and ultimately up to the collective human consciousness. It is largely subjective, and humans often cannot agree on that which is moral and that which is immoral because varying systems have developed over the years that are based on fundamentally different principles.
Still, I would say any valid system would ultimately attempt to achieve some sort of utilitarian end that leads to human happiness, increased well being, and longer life with higher quality of life.
I would also say that there is no inherent purpose to anything, and no inherent source of right or wrong that does not come from ourselves. The universe is cold and does not give or crap. As I said, the universe is the environment that gave us natural selection where the weak die and the strong survive. It is humans who decide, within this environment, to practice ethics to make our existence on this planet better.
Psychology
I do not have a solid stance on human nature either way. Humans are capable of great good, and also great evil. We are also the ones who judge others for committing acts of good and evil. If we think that human nature sucks, it is not that we fail to meet God's standards, but our own. The same applies the other way, is it not humans who establish these high standards in the first place? We make these rules, laws, and ethical systems, and then we judge ourselves when we fail to meet them. We are our own worst enemy, but also our greatest ally.
If I had to give a further stance on human nature, I would say that we are mostly selfish. Everything we do is in our self interest, or the interest of whatever in group we see ourselves as a part of. We prefer ourselves, our families, or our country or tribe or identity, over others. Even if we concede our self interest in the near term, we seek it in the long term. Any time we commit a sacrificial act, we often do so for others who we care about. This is evolutionary. We seek our own self preservation, but also the preservation of our bloodlines, our families, our communities, etc.
I would generally accept the concept of Maslow's hierarchy of needs here. We generally prefer our basic needs fulfilled like air, water, food, shelter, etc. We prefer to have security in our lives. And then once those needs essential to our physical well being exist, we prefer to seek out higher needs like social acceptance and belonging, prestige and feelings of accomplishment, and self actualization. This is not to say that this hierarchy is strict. Arguably the different stages overlap with each other, and we may prefer things somewhat out of order, but I would say that basic needs like our physiological needs and security are more important than our higher needs, at least in the immediate term. One cannot care about their higher needs if their lower needs are not met.
I also would accept the existence of mental illnesses. Scientific explanations would show that many mental illnesses are real. Many of which can be associated with biology or such related defects. And sometimes they can be solved the way a physical illness can. For example, depression is often related to chemical imbalances in the brain and can be solved (or at least controlled) with medication.
On the other hand, some mental illnesses come from the environment. From a sociological point of view, mental illness often comes from failures of social systems to provide a positive environment for people. Take how the feeling of anomie, or a mismatch between the norms and values society claims to hold, and the reality of society, tends to create a lot of mental distress in people and drives them to suicide. Or take how experiences of war can cause PTSD. As such, sociology and psychology are not necessarily unrelated. Environment does influence the person.
For this reason, I will offer some criticism of the field of modern psychiatry. Sometimes what we define as mental illness is subjective, and sometimes rather than approach it from the environmental angle and solve the problem in that way, we often suggest people adapt to the harmful environment that causes the problems in the first place. We might just drug people down and gaslight them into accepting a bad environment related to the pitfalls of capitalism (see: my stance on economics), when their mental illness is directly caused by that adverse environment. So I do think that mental illnesses are real and often do need to be treated, sometimes what we call mental illness can be a healthy response to an unhealthy environment, and I believe people should recognize that more.
But yeah, I would sum up my psychological perspective of human nature is neither good nor bad, but selfish. Humans try to meet both lower physical needs and higher psychological needs. And ultimately, mental illness does exist and should be treated as science, medicine, and also sociology tend to allow. However, I would like to see more focus on how bad sociological environments create more mental illness and rather than just treating people by making them conform to a bad environment, we work on changing the environment to reduce the incidence of mental illness in the first place. I will likely be addressing this further when we get to economics.
Sociology
Whereas psychology generally tends to study people on an individual level, sociology studies people on a society level. The discipline broadly looks at how society structures itself, and things like the norms and values it holds, and the social structures it has. Relative to Christianity, it is very open minded with how society can structure itself. While Christianity offers a prescriptive idea of what society should be, separating it into "god ordained institutions", no institutions are really god ordained and people can live in a variety of ways.
There are generally three major lenses through with society and its structures are observed.
Conflict theory- This theory is based on the works of people like Karl Marx and Max Weber, and focus on how different parts of society may conflict with each other. It may look at how values, norms, and social structures may unfairly benefit one group at the expense of others. It may, for example, look at how the economy is structured to benefit the very rich over the poor, or how our policing system tends treat African Americans unfairly. While this lens is interpreted very critically and negative by conservative elements like the Christian worldview, who tends to lean into things like "personal responsibility" and free will more, this paradigm actually does have a lot of evidence to back it up and is very useful at examining how certain social structures may unfairly advantage some over others.
Structural functionalism- Structural functionalism is the general idea of looking at how a certain norm, value, or social structure contributes to society "working". After all, a dysfunctional society is one that tends to fail. We don't want society to fail, after all. A conflict theorist might look at the work environment, and see how it unfairly benefits bosses and employers over workers. However, a structural functionalist may argue that we need someone giving orders and someone else following them and if we didn't we would have chaos. Both lenses have their own advantages and disadvantages. Conservatives, such as fundamental Christians, default to certain kinds of social structures based on structural functionalism. David Noebel argued that capitalism is preferable over socialism because capitalism works and socialism doesn't. He also argues that marriage works and sexual liberation doesn't. However, conservatives generally lean in to functionalist arguments too much, often claiming if we don't do things a certain way that things just won't work, but then sociologists might observe people doing things another way, such as tribal systems for raising children in Africa and stuff like that, and note that it works in their society. Again, real sociology is a lot more open minded than Christians who have the "this is the one single wayTM to do things and anything else will lead to disaster."
Symbolic interactionism- This particular paradigm tends to approach things from a more subjective direction. It might look at the value that different societies give to their culture, and things like the values and norms, which go beyond just who benefits from such ideas (conflict theory) and whether such ideas contribute to a functioning society (functionalism). I would argue that a lot of sentiments about say, the value of a job, are a form of symbolic interactionism. Joe Biden once argued that "a job is about a lot more than just a paycheck. It's about dignity. it's about respect. It's about being able to look your kid in the eye and say everything will be okay. Too many people today can't do that, and it's got to change." Now, people who are long time followers of mine will know what I think about this subject, because I come at this subject from a much more "conflict" oriented perspective. But, when doing sociology, one cannot ignore the subjective value that our culture places on work, and sociology via symbolic interactionism is going to look at such a viewpoint without judgment, letting people in society speak to the social value of this institution.
While I understand and respect all three of these paradigms, I generally tend to lean more heavily into conflict theory and structural functionalism. When I propose ideas for how to improve society, I generally support disregarding things such as the subjective value we might give certain social structures to some extent (such as the idea of a job). Rather, I tend to view such things from a different lens, focusing more on things like the conflict side of it, and in proposing my solutions, I highly value maintaining a functioning society. My views are no good to everyone if they make society fall apart, you know?
So I will tend to look at things mostly from a lens of who benefits from this, and also "does this work". And I largely try to make society better through those two lenses. The reason I don't lean into symbolic interactionism as much is because I am more interested in making my own values, than just parroting the values society imposes on me, because as I'm trying to argue in my ethics section, ethics does have some level of subjectivity to it and I will quite frankly disagree with these mainstream interpretations of the values of our institutions, instead arguing my own case for my own policies. That is my entire purpose of performing this exercise, to encourage people to throw aside their existing assumptions about society, and to start looking at things more objectively. There is a lot of crap in peoples' existing worldviews in my opinion, and the point of me writing this is to break that down and make people realize that there are better ways to do things.
Beyond that, as far as what else I would like to argue here in this section...well, I would like to say that yes, the entire field of sociology operates on the assumptions that society can be observed scientifically, and that some societal structures can have effects on individuals. I argued this to some extent in the psychology section. Yes, having a society in which we promise one thing, and deliver something else, is a cause of a lot of mental anguish, and this anguish can even translate to negative things like suicide (as Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology discovered). Yes, certain policies that lead to things like economic insecurity can lead to higher crime, and that's bad. These correlations are observable from a scientific perspective just as you would expect from a hard science. While conclusions often come with lower confidence intervals due to the sheer complexity of the subject and how many intermingling variables there are, it's still a scientific discipline backed up by the scientific method and statistics, and to refuse to acknowledge this field of study like conservatives and fundamentalist Christians do is just sticking your head in the sand and denying reality. When Christians say that society doesn't influence individuals, they do it because they fear the conclusions that will have for free will and the rest of their worldview. But from a secular perspective, science is science, evidence is evidence, and that should be respected.
On the topic of free will, I am rather agnostic on the subject. I do not embrace a full on Christian "free will is everything" perspective, but tend to bounce between determinism, ie, the idea that there is NO free will, and that sociological and biological influences influence ALL of our behavior, or compatibilism which tends to recognize that some level of free will can still exist despite sociological influences, and that we still have a choice. From a secular perspective, I always tended to struggle with the subject and would go back and forth about whether free will exists at all. From a more spiritual perspective, I lean toward compatibilism more.
One thing worth mentioning is in my experience, criminology ultimately cedes that free will exists. It has to, because going back to structural functionalism, if it does not, the entire idea of the justice system falls apart. How can you hold people accountable for their behavior if you do not assume some level of choice to commit crimes or not? And ironically, even from a deterministic perspective, the assumption of free will can in and of itself influence how people act, and the very idea of the justice system could deter some from committing crimes. So even if there are societal influences that determine large extents of one's behavior, we tend to just assume free will exists as a matter of making our system functional.
But then we also have to at times hold society accountable for implementing bad social structures that, for example, increase crime. Capitalism with no safety nets, for example, might drive people to commit crimes of desperation, and punishing people in such situations seems kind of cruel at times. Should we really send people to prison for stealing bread to feed a starving child, for example? No. But at the same time, if we do not, aren't we just legitimizing stealing? These are questions that really deserve some level of consideration. And if you have been following this blog for a while, you may already be familiar with some of my answers to these questions. Or if you read on you will know some of my answers to these questions.
Law
After looking at ethics, psychology, and sociology, it is probably best that I outline my theory of law.
Ultimately, humans originally existed in a state of nature, an amoral "survival of the fittest" environment, in which life is considered "nasty, brutish, and short" to make a reference to Hobbes. Humans come together and form communities as a survival strategy to enhance their lifespans, their well being, and their happiness. I won't say that the modern nation state is the only way we can do this, as anthropology would show that tribal systems were common throughout human history. However, human history has shown that tribal systems have generally speaking been systematically eliminated and replaced by the nation state over time, and now the nation state is the only entity capable of providing common defense and governance in this modern world. Tribal societies produce stick and spears, industrial societies organized by nation states produce guns and bombs. It's very one sided.
As you can tell, my worldview here is very cynical. The nation state has, over time, been a force for great evil. Most of them arose around the leadership of an autocratic ruler, and were often enforced by...well...force. However, over time, the nation state, at least in Western culture, has moderated and become more of a force for good in my opinion. Enlightenment ideals shifted them from being based around monarchies based on divine right, with few or no rights or protections for the common person, to implementing concepts like the social contract, in which we generally speaking "consent" to be governed, and in exchange the nation state works for us. Modern Western nation states also have introduced concepts like democracy, voting, separation of powers, checks and balances, constitutions, rights, separation of church and state, etc. These concepts are all positive and provide functional improvements upon the nation state to make it more fair and just. It is better, after all, to have a government by and for the people, and with constraints to protect human well being, than it is to just have a tyrant governing by force.
To discuss them more in detail, democracy is good because it puts power in the hands of those who are governed and impacted by the decisions, rather than simply in the hands of autocratic rulers who have no accountability to the people they rule over.
Separation of powers and checks and balances are good because it avoids power being concentrated among too few people, and stops it from being misused.
Constitutions and rights within them are good because they provide hard limits on what governments can do, and often protect the people from them as a result. For example, a right to free speech stops the government from persecuting people for their political views or religion. Separation of church and state protects both religion, and the state, from each other, correcting a major problem that plagued European governments up to that point. The right to bear arms gives people the ability to protect themselves and puts an additional check on the government. The right to privacy stops the government from intruding on peoples' lives. The right to a fair trial stops people from being persecuted unjustly, once again fixing problems with the justice system in Europe at the time. A right against cruel and unusual punishment stops the government from torturing people. All of these rights have some sort of function and were created to solve some sort of problem that arose from governments in the past. Further rights did stuff like ban slavery, give equal rights to all, and things like that. As you can tell, I see governments as a work in progress, and ultimately many governmental structures we took for granted arose out of the problems of the past. And ideally, governments will continue to improve into the future to become more just, more fair, and to fix the problems that arise within modern society, ideally without creating new ones.
Politics
Similar to the Christian worldview, I also believe in some level of limited government. I support the western model of government based on democracy, separation of powers, and constitutional rights. Unlike Christians, however, my reasoning here is a lot different than they are.
Ultimately, I am a humanist. I believe human institutions are made by and for people, and that they ultimately should serve us. I believe in a government for and by the people, and that our politicians are supposed to serve us, not the other way around.
I also believe that freedom is essential to a good life. My secularism has established a moral framework that separates the idea of public and private ethics. While people can believe and live however they want as long as they do not harm others, I believe we have a duty to stay out of peoples' way. I believe that people are happiest and most fulfilled when they can live the life they want to live, and as such, I do not believe that anyone has a right to impose their subjective ethics on others. Much like John Stuart Mill, I believe that the government should only intervene to prevent harm to others, whether in body, or in respect to their freedom.
Unlike Christians, however, I believe in the concept of progress. I do not believe that ethics are absolute, and that I believe that human society and ethics have a history trial and error where they have improved over time, and that they still have room to improve. The ultimate end is increased human well being, fulfillment, and happiness.
I do not have the anti utopian mentality of the Christians. While I do understand their reservations with some government actions, fearing it will lead to tyranny and disaster akin to that which was experienced in the USSR, I understand enough from political science and public policy to understand that these risks can be mitigated and overblown. The fact is, the creation of public policy is...a science. We define a problem, we research solutions to the problems, we implement the solution we think is best, we evaluate whether the policy has done its job without creating more negative side effects, and then we course correct from here. The problem with the USSR and communism is that they implemented their ideas by conducting a violent revolution, killing their opposition, and then established an unchecked and tyrannical government that ran their entire society and economy, often badly, with zero checks and balances, and ended up creating a dystopian hellholes for themselves in the process. I largely want to work within the institutions we have, implementing policies via reforms, with all of the normal checks and balances you would normally have in a free and democratic state.
Ultimately though, I do believe that to some extent that state action is a tradeoff between freedom and security. In the calculus for any policy proposed, we should look at what it imposes on the citizens and what the benefits to those citizens are, and ask if the tradeoff is worth it. Ideally, we trade just a little freedom, for a lot of security. We ideally won't trade large amounts of freedom for a little security.
In some ways, I feel like freedom and security can work together. By having a safer and more secure environment, people can sometimes be more free to life a fulfilling life than they would be if they lived in the state of nature in which people struggle to survive. Ultimately, in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the government should focus on guaranteeing stability for the first two rungs of the hierarchy (physiological needs and security) while leaving the higher, more psychological needs for people to fulfill themselves. In this sense, we can have both freedom and security.
Now, some people might ask, but wait, you want to secure physiological needs like food, water, and shelter? Isn't that exactly like communism? Uh, no. And I will actually outline my plans for how to get there in the economics section. Long time followers of this blog will already have a good idea what I am going to say here, although I won't really go into a ton of policy details on the plans, as I've already discussed these topics in great details in other posts, but I will provide more philosophical arguments in defense of my ideas.
Ultimately, I would consider my political ideology to be "social libertarian". On the libertarian-authoritarian axis of the political compass, I would say I'm somewhat near the center, but definitely lean more authoritarian. On the left/right axis, where you put me depends entirely on how you define it. Internationally, I would consider myself near the center, similar to social democracy but with a more libertarian bend. I want a capitalist economy with heavy amounts of interventionism to protect people from the excesses of that. Within the spectrum of capitalist countries, I definitely lean left. Keep in mind, I'm both a progressive, and a libertarian. I am both, and I combine the two to great effect in my own ideology.
Now, before I move on, I do want to address one final topic, and that is foreign policy. Let's go over a few things. The nation state is the unit of governance in this world. Without it, there is chaos. Foreign relations is tricky, and to be perfectly honest, the only reason that the US and other western powers are so dominant is because they won the major wars and conflicts in the past, and maintain their geopolitical advantage via a large and expansive military. Ultimately, I do believe, on the international stage, might makes right, and if you support the western way of life and the freedom and prosperity that it provides, you need to protect it. That said, I do generally speaking support the US as the hegemonic power in the world, with all of its warts and flaws. Many competitive states like Russia and China do not share our values, and are often much more authoritarian in their outlook, and their citizens arguably live much lower quality of life both objectively and subjectively. That said, I will support whatever decisions generally help us maintain our advantage internationally. While I would prefer to use soft power to achieve our goals, such as leveraging money and relationships, I am not opposed to using hard power as necessary.
However, I do believe in generally speaking conserving our use of force. I do not support actively intervening in the rest of the world if it is not in our interest, I do not believe in nation building or "spreading democracy" to those who are unwilling to accept it, and I believe we should stay out of conflicts as necessary. However, we do need to protect ourselves and our allies, and should do everything necessary in order to do so.
Economics
My economics, like everything else, are based on humanist principles. You could even say that they are "human centered". Yes, that is a reference to Yang and his "human centered capitalism." For Yang, his core principles were:
1) Humans are more important than money
2) the unit of a human capitalist economy is each person, not each dollar
3) Markets exist to serve our common goals and values.
I would GENERALLY agree with this. However, my own ideas of humanistic capitalism predate Yang's. While Yang beat me to the punch in being the first to express the idea, he is not the first to think of it. These ideas have been around on the internet since at least 2013 when I ended up discovering them, with them in academia for far longer.
My own interation of this idea, as you can tell, calls back to the rest of the worldview that I had built up to this point, the idea that all human institutions essentially exist to serve human goals. If I were to create my own iteration of this idea, it would be this:
1) The economy exists for people, not people for the economy
2) Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself
This does not mean I disagree with Yang's ideas. If anything I appreciate him expanding it to some degree, and I would agree with his overall ends. However, my own iteration of this idea also has significantly different origins and conclusions.
While capitalism is, for better or worse, the most functional economic system out there (I'm not a fan of socialism or communism), I cannot disagree with Marx's analyses of the economy which tend to put it in a less favorable light.
Profit motives under capitalism are insatiable, and while this motive is what ultimately makes capitalism work, it kind of strips people of their humanity in the process. As I was taught in economics, the primary purpose of all corporations is profit. And the labor market is one governed by supply and demand. In these interactions, employers have a vested interest in ensuring that people do the most work for them for the least amount of money. And while workers have a vested interest in doing the last amount of work for the most money, the way the economy is set up favors employers. Workers don't often have the ability to say no to work, because they start out in a state of propertylessness and desperation, in which they are effectively coerced into the labor force in order to survive. This insecurity puts prospective workers in a servile state in which they will bend over backwards for employers in exchange for a meager existence.
It gets even worse when looking at the macro perspective of the economy. The economy will never ever produce a job for everyone, let alone a job that pays good wages and is fulfilling to do. Unemployment is a fact of life under capitalism. If we did not have unemployment, we would have massive inflation as workers keep demanding more money, and employers give it to them, driving up their costs and making everything more expensive. The federal reserve effectively is the pacemaker of the economy and sets interest rates to balance unemployment with inflation, generally favoring higher unemployment with lower inflation in the process. "Full employment" generally means somewhere in the ball park of 4% unemployment, meaning for every 100 people looking for jobs, 4 cannot find one. Take note that this figure does not include people who stopped looking for work, or people who are underemployed and in jobs that are part time, do not pay enough, aren't a good fit, etc. Poverty has remained around 15% since the "war on poverty" and structurally it cannot be abated more by normal methods. Raising the minimum wage has not ended poverty, as that generally, if anything, makes jobs harder to find in economic terms (although the reality is more complex and I'd argue it leads to more inflation due to the inelasticity of the labor market). Regulations alleviate some of the worst of the employer-employee dynamic without solving the problem. Same with unions, which see in a rather disadvantaged position in the modern US. Socialism, or economic democracy sounds nice on paper, but socialism has a logistical problem of "how do we set this up?" State control of the economy actually has horrifying results in practice and leads to an inefficient, tyranical dystopia, not the utopia we are looking for. Sure, market socialism isn't as bad, but is economic democracy really the answer here? What if people don't want to participate at all?
I would argue we need a solution that gives people more liberty. After careful consideration and research on the solution, the core solution to the nature of the economy is a universal basic income. For me, the core problem with the economy is the fixation on jobs, and the fact that jobs are the end all be all of meeting one's needs. Let's think about why jobs exist. It's because we need products and services. We shouldn't glorify the idea of a job, or force people into the work force unnecessarily, especially when the jobs aren't there. Even if the jobs are there, we once again need to remember my premise: does the economy exist to serve people, or do we exist to serve the economy? With an economy with de facto compulsory work, it feels like the latter. Also, work exists as a means to an end, not an end in itself. The process of working is not something that should be glorified. it's an unpleasant fact of life, that I believe we should strive to minimize. We worry about jobs being automated in the future. I say, good, if we automate jobs, maybe we shouldnt have to work so much. if you think about it, our economy is insanely productive, with GDP now up to like $76k per capita this year. That's an insane amount. But, workers often don't make $76k, if anything, many make far less than that. And income inequality has been at a record high for a while. Why do we work? Who are we working for? Are we even really benefitting from this? I really do believe that people in our modern economy are akin to slaves. I know that's a controversial statement, people often think that it's insulting to compare the state of wage labor under capitalism to actual slavery, but there actually is a historical argument for it. Essentially, it's the equivalent of renting a person rather than buying them outright. Literal slavery, or owning another person, is illegal. But people sell themselves out for hours of their life just to survive, and it's kind of a brutish existence. Shouldn't we do better in a society that is as prosperous as ours?
A universal basic income would solve poverty in a more direct way than any other policy we can propose. it would give everyone an income of at least poverty level, and then give them more freedom to choose whether to work or not. People might ask, why would people work if they have a UBI? And I argue many would. because even if the UBI is high enough to meet their physiological needs, it might not meet their higher psychological needs, and most people want to do something with their life anyway. Some people might choose not to work, but as long as the numbers aren't great enough to crash the economy and cause problems with society functioning, why should I care? I don't glorify this idea of work as an obligation that people have to do. I value people being free to live as they want to the greatest possible extent. And perhaps if we can automate jobs in the future and work less, we could raise the UBI higher than it would be otherwise. I support a UBI at the highest possible amount.
Some people might ask, but I work so hard, why should I have to work to pay for someone else's UBI? Well, because UBI is a right of citizenship, and everyone gets it. You're not working and paying someone else for your labor generally, unless you're very well off, you get a UBI too, and economic prosperity is so unequal UBI is generally a transfer from the top 20-25% to the bottom 70-80%. Under my UBI plan, anyone making under $80k individually would benefit in net, and that scales with the number of people in a household. So only those who can be said to be well off would get it. And if we were to follow a modified version of Rawls' veil of influence, as told by the likes of Karl Widerquist or Phillippe Van Parijs, generally speaking this provides a bottom for the worst off in society, while asking those with the most to pay for it.
Some might argue that taxation is theft, but theft implies an unjust or illegal taking of property. Where do property rights come from? For many people who make this argument, they believe property is a natural right given to us by a deity, whereas I believe property is a social convention that can be modified at any time. Property as a system actually imposes a lot of problematic obligations on the poor, and the fact that the poor dont own any property in any way to be able to be self sufficient is what causes this problem in the first place. UBI is just redistributing income to allow everyone some level of self sufficiency, so that they can't be forced to work for another for their survival. I honestly believe that taxation is a much lesser evil than de facto forced servitude is. As it turns out, more economic security gives everyone more freedom in this sense and allows the model of the free market to work more like it would in an econ textbook, where people can choose their working conditions, their pay, etc. without being strong armed into the deal. And if the amount is sufficient, people wouldnt be forced to participate in the first place.
I could go on and on arguing for a justification for a UBI, and perhaps if I were to write a book I would, but if I did it here, I would just to on and on. I've written many articles on this subject on this blog, and my views should be rather apparent.
To discuss other things related to the economy, despite my lofty ideals, i would still support much of the liberal regulatory state as it's better than nothing, and even if UBI is implemented, theory might not match reality. Remember what I said about public policy cycles. You define the problem, implement solutions, and then you evaluate the effects of the solutions and course correct from there. Just because in theory something should happen doesn't mean it will, and effects on the ground should continue to be monitored to ensure it's implemented optimally.
I do believe some industries like healthcare and education serve severe market failures where it would be better for the government to run them. This is not communism in the sense that I'm not imposing this on the entire economy. Just key industries where markets dont seem to work. This also enhances freedom since no one has to worry about medical care or going in crippling debt to pay for healthcare or an education, and fixes a lot of the most immediate problems with the economy.
Housing requires more complex solutions. I've outlined them before. I'd target a land value tax specifically at landlords and those who seek to profit off of land ownership to try to discourage excessive concentration of ownership of land. Land is a scarce resource and while I believe everyone should have a right to own a home, I also do believe that we should punish scalpers for trying to exploit others.
All in all, the future is ours to make. If we keep trying the same solutions, just keep expecting the same problems to exist. All of our problems are systemic, and while the solutions may be complex at times, they do exist. We can make our lives better. I would encourage people to adapt a UBI and a system in which capitalism serves human needs, not the needs of the rich and their profits. While the profit motive is necessary to some extent for capitalism to function, none of my ideas would eliminate it and the system should still work. But the outcomes should be far better.
History
Honestly, we're getting near the end of my worldview, and I don't really know what to write here as I wouldnt say my worldview has a common history, but if I had to summarize it, it's this.
The world came into existence a long time ago for reasons that we are not sure of. Humans have evolved from simpler organisms on this planet we call earth and became the dominant species on this planet due to their massive intelligence and opposable thumbs. However, we haven't always been nice to one another. The state of nature was nasty, brutish, and short, and the first societies were so unjust and authoritarian but they were not any better. But, over time, things have improved. Our ethics, our systems of law, our politics, and economics have improved. History should be interpreted with the bend of progress in mind. We have gone from dictatorships to democracies, from systems with slavery to systems with capitalism. Not all experiments to another stage of societal evolution have been good. Communism for example sucked. So did nazism. But, progress is possible, and I believe we, in the United States, can do much better today. We aren't even the most socially advanced country on the planet. We might have the biggest military and economy, but our country does not serve human needs as well as some others do, such as those in Europe with multiparty democracies, and better safety nets. I believe my ideas would allow us to exceed them. We would combined the American fixation on freedom with a progressive economic system allowing us to experience the best of all worlds. We would be collectivist enough to ensure that no one goes without, while being individualist enough to ensure that people are still free to live as they want without encroaching on each others' freedom. We can do better, we should do better. Hopefully we will do better.
Conclusion
This has been an attempt to outline my worldview as if I were doing it for the book idea. I admit, I'm not sure if the book as I plan it if I continue it is good. The worldview stuff and the economic stuff are nice, and my economics does come from my worldview, but I feel like I was forced to very much gloss over the economics for the sake of readability and expediency. Perhaps if I go for a book, I should lean more heavily into exploring the economic ideas, as I feel like my post on that was all over the place. I attempted to provide a basic summary, but I just had so many topics to discuss it seemed very rambly and I really dont think I set up the cause well enough. The fact is, I need an entire book just to be able to set up my arguments for UBI and the economy, and the rest of the world view stuff I just kinda glossed over in comparison. Still, it was a good idea, and this exercise is worth doing. It should help bridge the gap in how I think about the world and where to go from here.
