You say you’ve got a real solution…

Well, you know,

We’d all love to see the plan.

“Revolution”, the Beatles

Jun 16 JDN 2460478


There are several different versions of the meme, but they all follow the same basic format: Rejecting the statement “the system is broken and must be fixed”, they endorse the statement “the system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed”.

This view is not just utterly wrong; it’s also incredibly dangerous.

First of all, it should be apparent to anyone who has ever worked in any large, complex organization—a corporation, a university, even a large nonprofit org—that no human system works exactly as intended. Some obviously function better than others, and most function reasonably well most of the time (probably because those that don’t fail and disappear, so there is a sort of natural selection process at work); but even with apparently simple goals and extensive resources, no complex organization will ever be able to coordinate its actions perfectly toward those goals.

But when we’re talking about “the system”, well, first of all:

What exactly is “the system”?

Is it government? Society as a whole? The whole culture, or some subculture? Is it local, national, or international? Are we talking about democracy, or maybe capitalism? The world isn’t just one system; it’s a complex network of interacting systems. So to be quite honest with you, I don’t even know what people are complaining about when they complain about “the system”. All I know is that there is some large institution that they don’t like.

Let’s suppose we can pin that down—say we’re talking about capitalism, for instance, or the US government. Then, there is still the obvious fact that any real-world implementation of a system is going to have failures. Particularly when millions of people are involved, no system is ever going to coordinate exactly toward achieving its goals as efficiently as possible. At best it’s going to coordinate reasonably well and achieve its goals most of the time.

But okay, let’s try to be as charitable as possible here.

What are people trying to say when they say this?

I think that fundamentally this is meant as an expression of Conflict Theory over Mistake Theory: The problems with the world aren’t due to well-intentioned people making honest mistakes, they are due to people being evil. The response isn’t to try to correct their mistakes; it’s to fight them (kill them?), because they are evil.

Well, it is certainly true that evil people exist. There are mass murderers and tyrants, rapists and serial killers. And though they may be less extreme, it is genuinely true that billionaires are disproportionately likely to be psychopaths and that those who aren’t typically share a lot of psychopathic traits.

But does this really look like the sort of system that was designed to optimize payoffs for a handful of psychopaths? Really? You can’t imagine any way that the world could be more optimized for that goal?

How about, say… feudalism?

Not that long ago, historically—less than a millennium—the world was literally ruled by those same sorts of uber-rich psychopaths, and they wielded absolute power over their subjects. In medieval times, your king could confiscate your wealth whenever he chose, or even have you executed on a whim. That system genuinely looks like it’s optimized for the power of a handful of evil people.

Democracy, on the other hand, actually looks like it’s trying to be better. Maybe sometimes it isn’t better—or at least isn’t enough better. But why would they even bother letting us vote, if they were building a system to optimize their own power over us? Why would we have these free speech protections—that allow you to post those memes without going to prison?

In fact, there are places today where near-absolute power really is concentrated in a handful of psychopaths, where authoritarian dictators still act very much like kings of yore. In North Korea or Russia or China, there really is a system in place that’s very well optimized to maximize the power of a few individuals over everyone else.

But in the United States, we don’t have that. Not yet, anyway. Our democracy is flawed and imperilled, but so far, it stands. It needs our constant vigilance to defend it, but so far, it stands.

This is precisely why these ideas are so dangerous.

If you tell people that the system is already as bad as it’s ever going to get, that the only hope now is to burn it all down and build something new, then those people aren’t going to stand up and defend what we still have. They aren’t going to fight to keep authoritarians out of office, because they don’t believe that their votes or donations or protests actually do anything to control who ends up in office.

In other words, they are acting exactly as the authoritarians want them to.

Short of your actual support, the best gift you can give your enemy is apathy.

If all the good people give up on democracy, then it will fail, and we will see something worse in its place. Your belief that the world can’t get any worse can make the world much, much worse.

I’m not saying our system of government couldn’t be radically improved. It absolutely could, even by relatively simple reforms, such as range voting and a universal basic income. But there are people who want to tear it all down, and if they succeed, what they put in its place is almost certainly going to be worse, not better.

That’s what happened in Communist countries, after all: They started with bad systems, they tore them down in the name of making something better—and then they didn’t make something better. They made something worse.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that Marxists are so often Conflict Theorists; Marx himself certainly was. Marx seemed convinced that all we needed to do was tear down the old system, and a new, better system would spontaneously emerge. But that isn’t how any of this works.

Good governance is actually really hard.

Life isn’t simple. People aren’t easy to coordinate. Conflicts of interest aren’t easy to resolve. Coordination failures are everywhere. If you tear down the best systems we have for solving these problems, with no vision at all of what you would replace them with, you’re not going to get something better.

Different people want different things. We have to resolve those disagreements somehow. There are lots of ways we could go about doing that. But so far, some variation on voting seems to be the best method we have for resolving disagreements fairly.

It’s true; some people out there are really just bad people. Some of what even good people want is ultimately not reasonable, or based on false presumptions. (Like people who want to “cut” foreign aid to 5% of the budget—when it is in fact about 1%.) Maybe there is some alternative system out there that could solve these problems better, ensure that only the reasonable voices with correct facts actually get heard.

If so, well, you know:

We’d all love to see the plan.

It’s not enough to recognize that our current system is flawed and posit that something better could exist. You need to actually have a clear vision of what that better system looks like. For if you go tearing down the current system without any idea of what to replace it with, you’re going to end up with something much worse.

Indeed, if you had a detailed plan of how to improve things, it’s quite possible you could convince enough people to get that plan implemented, without tearing down the whole system first.

We’ve done it before, after all:

We ended slavery, then racial segregation. We gave women the right to vote, then integrated them into the workforce. We removed the ban of homosexuality, and then legalized same-sex marriage.

We have a very clear track record of reform working. Things are getting better, on a lot of different fronts. (Maybe not all fronts, I admit.) When the moral case becomes overwhelming, we really can convince people to change their minds and then vote to change our policies.

We do not have such a track record when it comes to revolutions.

Yes, some revolutions have worked out well, such as the one that founded the United States. (But I really cannot emphasize this: they had a plan!) But plenty more have worked out very badly. Even France, which turned out okay in the end, had to go through a Napoleon phase first.

Overall, it seems like our odds are better when we treat the system as broken and try to fix it, than when we treat it as evil and try to tear it down.

The world could be a lot better than it is. But never forget: It could also be a lot worse.