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What makes our society run?  Where does one begin?

Devon Eriksen tackles that question in a though provoking and I think useful way.  During his discussion of this topic the concept of a Chesterson’s Fence is made several times and to understand Eriksen’s thinking you need to know what a Chesterson’s Fence is.

The concept of a Chesterson Fence is the notion that we need to engage in second order thinking when evaluating a problem or situation.  Or to use the original analogy:

“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”

“Fences are built by people who carefully planned them out and “had some reason for thinking [the fence] would be a good thing for somebody.” Until we establish that reason, we have no business taking an ax to it. The reason might not be a good or relevant one; we just need to be aware of what the reason is. Otherwise, we may end up with unintended consequences: second- and third-order effects we don’t want, spreading like ripples on a pond and causing damage for years.”

So, we can already observe we’ll be tackling some second and even third order thinking in Eriksen’s work.

“It’s time we all admitted it.

Intolerance in pre-1900s western civilization was a load-bearing structure.

  It stopped certain groups from doing certain anti-civilization things that they kinda wanted to do, because they were too busy trying to fit it, look harmless, and be accepted as normal.

  Which people? What things?

   Well, lots of people have opinions on that, but we’re not actually connected to any unbroken line of generational knowledge on the subject. Because somewhere along the line, some people learned to hack western civilization by pointing out that stereotyping, behavioral enforcement, and gatekeeping, are cruel.

  Well, duh.

   What these people are trying very hard to keep the rest of us from noticing is that civilization requires cruelty.

 Civilization is an unnatural state. It is an bubble of peace and plenty, rising through a vast dark ocean of poverty and war.

  That bubble is fragile. In order to prevent it from bursting, we have to prevent certain things from happening inside it.

  Which means we have to tell the people inside that they can’t do certain things they want to do, even though they will be sad when they don’t get to do them.

  Which is mean.

  And it means we have to keep people outside the bubble if they won’t stop doing those things, even though they will be sad if they don’t get to come there, or stay.

Which is mean.

You cannot have civilization unless you are willing to be mean and make certain people sad.

   But here’s the important question… which cruelties are load-bearing, and which are pointless and unnecessary?

  Well, we don’t know.

   And for this, I blame traditionalists. Every time they put up Chesterton’s Fence, they neglected to top it with Chesterton’s Signpost, explaining why the fence was there and what it was intended to do.

  Instead, they stamped it with one of their two rubber stamps “we’ve always done it this way”, and “the will of {insert local deity here}”.

  This makes it extremely difficult to defend the fence, and all but impossible to know which fences are load-bearing and need defending.

[Individual on twitter] appears to think that all the anti-traditionalist things she wants to do are okay, and forbidding or even disparaging them is pointless cruelty, but anti-traditionalist things she doesn’t want to do are horrific acts of civilizational destruction.

  This is, of course, selfish and hypocritical, but what I’m noticing is that everyone else is, too.

  All the way from tradcath freaks who want to ban IVF, forbid premarital sex, and kill all the Protestants, to tranny freaks who want to take your children away and sterilize them, everyone thinks their precise type and level of deviance is complete fine, and anything one step beyond what they personally want to do is anathema.

  None of this is the least bit informative about which of the rules of the old world are actually load-bearing, and right now, we are all having such fun finding out the hard way.

  If western civilization doesn’t survive, then neither does humanity, because the second world isn’t going to get us off this single fragile rock, and neither is the third.

   Which means we have some serious house-cleaning to do. We’re going to have to derive civilization-preserving rules from first principles again, because every goddamned fence the Chestertons of the world put up in the past is labelled with unhelpful bullshit explanations, and not only are some of them necessary and some of them not, but a further some of them are so obsoleted by technological advancement that they are actually now anti-civilizational forces in and of themselves.

   But what are these first principles?

   I’m sure the comments are going to contain lots of answers where people suggest their favorite thing, be it liberty, or their version of morality, or their favorite religion, but most of the things that people think of as ends are actually means.

  The end is preserving and advancing human civilization.

  To that end, I can think of three first principles off the top of my head, things that civilization cannot exist without. There may be more that will occur to me later.

   They are:

1. Investment.

   Human civilization requires people to invest effort in things. People will not do this if the results of that effort can be taken from them more easily than they can be created. This means property rights. Any civilization which does not vigorously defend both individual and collective investment will fail.

2. Fertility.

   This one is unique to humans. Our reproductive cycle is uniquely fragile, pushed to its extreme limits by evolutionary pressure to produce infants with giant heads. Women’s fertile years are such a small fraction of their total lifespan, pregnancy is so taxing and resource-intensive, and infants and children so helpless and vulnerable for so long, that the slightest interference, seemingly innocuous, can destroy a population’s ability to replace itself. Or, worse yet, it can selectively destroy the ability to replace the small sub-population of highly effective humans that drive civilization forward.

3. Innovation.

  This is the whole point. This is how humans survive, and without it, we won’t. The whole evolutionary strategy of humanity is to use those huge brains which we pay such a fertility cost to obtain — use them to understand the universe, and leverage that understanding to control it. But tech innovation relies on many factors, which is why so few civilizations are able to get their shit together to consistently do it, and show up on the beach with sailing ships, guns, and steel while the natives are still hunting deer with stone-tipped arrows.

  That’s my basic idea: for everything we forbid, and everything we permit, we need to understand how it impacts investment, fertility, and innovation.

   Because those are the things we actually need.

 […]”

I think that Investment, Fertility, an Innovation are worthy contenders as first principles of civilization, but there are more that deserve to be on the list. :)