> Not because I’m an anarchist or iconoclast, but because systems built upon illusions are less stable than systems built upon truths.

be careful with that one. if you dig far enough there may not be enough truths upon which to build something cohesive. if you believe the individual in a secular society already creates illusions for themselves in order to get by (e.g. purpose/meaning), maybe similar illusions are necessary for even the smallest of social systems.

I get it.

Maybe rephrase as "systems built upon unnecessary illusions" is better.

Finding forbidden love across religious or ethnic lines is a triumph of the truth of our shared humanity over the illusion of group differences. Finding meaning in the face of heat death, well that's an illusion we all have to play along with.

I think it's far easier to strip away illusions that suck than it is to build a worldview from scratch. Thankfully the former seems to be our modus operandi so most people never have to try the second option.

forgive me if i’m overstating things you already know, but these are lesser explored concepts for me. property/ownership is an illusion. rights (human/animal/etc) are an illusion. the clean division between child and adult (legally responsible for their actions, granted voting power), or between unborn human and legal citizen with above rights, is an illusion.

achieving coherence across these illusions is what authority does. this authority creates a new illusion — the rule of law — to enforce coherence across individual variations along these illusions of rights/etc. some structure (courts, penal system, representative democracy, …) appear as apparatus to better define/protect the base illusions.

but which of these illusions are “necessary”? can a society flourish without believing in property? can it flourish if it doesn’t believe that humans are exceptional when it comes to the issue of rights? can it flourish if it doesn’t believe rule of law is the way to define these illusions?

these illusions are necessary to today’s state-based societies. some of them were considered unnecessary as recently as when the West was being settled, and many are outright contradictory to tribal or nomadic lifestyles of the past.

if societies built upon fewer “unnecessary illusions” are to be better, more stable, then where does that put us? initially it seems at odds with historical developments, though the illusions i highlighted probably exaggerate that.

What signs do you see that we’re headed toward a new, stable equilibrium, instead of just catastrophically destabilizing?

The emergence of a shared global culture, especially online, and especially spoken in one language, is momentous historically. After thousands of years of separation by geography, which produced cultural differentiation and foreignness, we are now starting to come together with one culture and one language. This is a stable equilibrium because it's global rather than local.

That's the view from the cockpit. My view from the ground also suggests it's not catastrophic. I'm an early digital native. Twenty-five years after access to the internet, I now have a spouse whom I met online and two children. I work remotely and spend most of my waking time online. I have no friends outside family, which could be better but it's not catastrophic as shown by my ability to create a family and carve out some life for myself. I've adapted.

Maybe I am just an optimist. Really the status quo ante was untenable and we must move forward and make the best of what we have.

Man you really haven't visited much of the internet, it's communitarianism land. We all agree on fluffy cats and rick rolls but that's no culture, once you start digging it's the wild west, if not the crusades

And if anything most of it is extremely US centric. I think you're in a bubble inside of a bubble and are completely oblivious to most of what's outside of these bubbles, and that's a feature of internet as we built it, a personalised content distributor that mostly show you what you want to be shown

The collapse of old systems isn't creating a new more global and encompassing system, it's creating very highly individualistic groups/tribes mentality, as, if not more, fragmented than before

> I work remotely and spend most of my waking time online. I have no friends outside family

If this is the future you're trying to sell us... how bleak

There is no shared global culture forming online. It’s deeply fractured multicultures that have very little in common with each other. You assume everyone is in your bubble but everyone has their own bubble and the cultures are in direct opposition.

There is a large online community that participates in English across many nationalities, but there are also many vibrant online communities that do not use English and are compromised of a smaller subset of nationalities. It seems like these are really hidden away from monolingual English speakers.

For those who speak English or want to learn it is a great opportunity to reach across national identities, but , at the same time, I don't really foresee the other communities disappearing.

It's always peculiar to encounter a Westerner who is suddenly woke to how they of all countries are being lied to by their governments.

Two questions:

1. What are the sources of information that convinced you that your authorities were always lying double-dealers?

2. What prevents you, living in a democracy, from using your freedom of political speech to convey the above to others and convince them to vote for authorities who are not always lying or for laws that punish lying? (Since you are not an anarchist, you must assume non-lying authorities are possible)

I will answer in good faith, cautiously.

1. The fallout from the Iraq War. As to why Vietnam or Watergate did not do the same, well I wasn't alive then and children are credulous.

2. It's not about choosing the right authority. It's about first, creating a trusting culture backed by truths so the trust is well-placed, and second, about designing institutions that are fail-safe given what I now know about the nature of power and the people it attracts.

Thanks, this is reasonable. Sometimes people respond in ways that make it clear they are pushing someone's agenda or conspiracy theorizing.

Yes, the problem with power is that even in many democracies it seems too easily convertible to money and attracts greedy people.

I suspect such greed is a psychological pathology, but in addition to treating it the system could somehow make power inconvenient and unprofitable to attract "irrational" people who are crazy in the right way to want to actually make things better rather than turn a profit. This does probably sound quite un-American and I don't know how it could be implemented.

I am somewhat hazy on the politics of the Iraq war but I'll look it up.

I'm not the person you replied to, but just wanted to add something to help answer Q2. Communicating information to a large fraction of the populace is generally pretty hard because there are so many memes competing for attention, and true information doesn't necessarily spread faster than false information. Even so, it's pretty much common knowledge that the Iraq war was based on a falsehood, so communication does work well enough at least some of the time. Okay, so suppose we now collectively know that most politicians are liars and will have no issue with lying when it's convenient for them and they expect to get away with it. I think it's very common to find people who think this in western countries, actually.

Now how do we vote in such a way as to make sure we elect non-liars? Being a liar is not always visible, but maybe we can determine it by looking at whether the candidate lied while holding previous offices, and whether or not they get caught in any lies while on the campaign trail. We may also be able to make some judgment of a person's honesty based on how they make arguments, i.e. how they use statistics, and how often they omit relevant information that would look bad for them.

So suppose that everyone could perfectly identify who was a liar and who was honest. Would the electorate then vote only for honest politicians? Nope. A voter finds other things valuable in a politician besides just honesty, for example agreement on policy issues, or allocating tax money in a way that benefits the voter. Even if the candidate for party A is found out to be a no-good stinking liar, that still might not be enough to induce a party A voter to vote for the party B candidate instead. After all, party B is terrible. And there can be no party C that adopts the policy stances of party A but is staffed by honest politicians. Because of vote splitting in first-past-the-post electoral systems, two parties tend to dominate with outsiders having no chance of getting elected, even if the electorate prefers the outsiders. This is why we'd ideally want to use a more sane electoral system like score voting.

I actually upvoted you, but to answer your question - any sports team. It's an environment where you can't get away with "muh opinion is da truth :DDD" type bikeshedding you find when discussing large political issues (eg abortion, immigration, etc). You can try to lie, but if something doesn't work, it becomes obvious.

I think also any team of programmers would qualify - at the end of the day, you can empirically verifiy claims.

On a broader level, you could argue that since modern society is basically built on the laws of physics - our bureacracy and infrastructure is only possible because Maxwell's Equations are "true" in the sense that they accurately predict things about reality [0] - we are living in a system built on truth, and when we communicate on Hacker News, that is only possible because of all those before us who have sought out and shared true things about the universe.

[0] - you can probably use a definition of "truth" different than "accurately models reality", but it's the one I use, and I think most people will accept it as good enough.