Amerika

Back when the internet was new, people first became introduced to the problem of “spam,” which means unsolicited commercial messages sent without regard for whether the recipient wants them. Spam hits everyone with the same message in order to snare a few unwary customers.

Up rose a group that said they were going to “fight spam.” Many of us pointed out that this path was going to lead to misery because the only way to fight spam is to introduce a type of censorship and, worse, create a bureaucracy to support it.

Of course those concerns were seen as trivial. Spam was a big problem, right then! Something must be done. Someone must do something. Now is no time for being soft on this really big problem, the dragon must be slain, and off we go, and so on.

Thirty years on, spam is still a fact of life everywhere. Not just on your phone, but in your email, and even on social media. The war on spam has failed, but left in its place lots of little rules that slow down actual conversations.

In fact, these days, you are more likely to have a legitimate message blocked than an illegitimate one filtered out. Again: spam won the war on spam.

This shows us the nature of bureaucratic society. It does not fix problems, it manages problems, which means subsidizing and perpetuating them instead of cutting them back to the minimum and accepting them as facts of life.

Michel Houellebecq famously said that 90% of what we do at offices is unnecessary. He is probably right; while we are familiar with the Pareto formula of 80% of the results being achieved by 20% of the participants, it probably does not apply to make-work.

Fighting spam is make-work. The only way for it to work is for everyone to get so pissed about spam that they all delete it and it stops being profitable. Spam persists because it works, and the more we cut down on it partially, the less innoculated people are against spam.

The same can be said of drugs, poverty, child abuse, and anything else the government crusades against. They set up a bureau, the bureau generates paperwork activity, and everyone assumes the problem is sorted while it rages on behind the scenes.

We are heading into a value-for-money era where people are going to be more critical about what government does because they recognize that most problems cannot be solved except by natural selection. The sick, weak, insane, and selfish die out and the rest of us keep going.

Basically, in dying societies, socializing is based on denial of Darwin: everyone is welcome, everyone is important, we are united by a vague universalistic generic love or something, and so you can stop worrying about not screwing up.

But in the future, since we want to stop dying and start living, we are going to be looking at the individual as having paired duties/privileges. They have a duty to take care of themselves and get their minds right, and if they cannot or will not, they do not belong among us.

Government can stop trying to save people from themselves. Human rights went too far; we assume the man hit by a car crossing the street in the middle is an innocent victim instead of seeing him as an incompetent who was too lazy to walk to the crosswalk.

We do not need more rules against jaywalking. We need indemnity for drivers. If they hit someone who is in the street without a reason to be, we should assume that the “victim” was simply incompetent and this was natural selection at work.

We do not need a massive crusade to end poverty, subsidize healthcare, ban drugs and smoking, keep alcohol from teens, and make the races equal. These are symbols, not reality, and government cannot do this anyway.

In the new era, we want government that handles a few basic functions that return value to everyone, and we will not be interested in wealth transfer to make equality. That ship has now sailed. The future belongs to the competent.

Tags: age of symbolism, egalitarianism, jaywalking