RE: Steemit and the Fractal Society
"We cannot build a new society by cloning the old one" is potentially a very grave mistake and is what I indirectly warn against in this message. In 7000 years we have seen that there is a very big number of rotten, horrible societies. We generally progressed and it would be absurd to say that any of the past social arrangements were better than what we have today.
That doesn't mean that our current society is perfect or even simply "good". It means that it's the best of all those we've tried (and discarded) for 7 millenia.
Therefore assuming that we are now going to throw away all the lessons of those 7 millenia, start from scratch and, by miracle, get it right, is totally ridiculous.
What I believe is that we should look carefully at what works well and what doesn't in our current society and try to precisely "clone" those aspects. And only change carefully, at the margin, tweak some aspects slightly in order to not break what is working.
Because the risk of breaking something that we got right (after so many centuries of experiments) is higher than the probability of getting our hunches confirmed by a change that seems good on paper.
Clearly, we do not have to waste our past experiences. It would mean trying every time to "reinvent the wheel."
But we can not even integrally clone what we have now, waiting for different results.
I do not think we have to demolish everything so we can build something. I said earlier that total decentralization is basically anarchy. But some things have to be changed forever.
Difficulties start when we try to come to an agreement as to "what" has to change :-)
"Take away all the privileges of the others but do not touch my privileges!" is such a typically human reaction ! :-)
Any change that does not take into account human nature will end in the trash of history. All the revolutions have begun by withdrawing the privileges of a social class that were previously considered intangible.
At the same time, the biggest problem of any revolution is that it has to put something as fast as possible instead of what it destroys and here appear the first abuses of the new society. Like you said "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes"...