My intuitions on economics/policy and whatever are strongly influenced by my understanding of evolution, in that I have this idea that a thriving nation should have a lot in common with a thriving body, and share the principles the body used to get to where it is and survive.
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Such that, the fundamental unit of evolution is extremely small, and everything is just emergent systems out of genes fighting hardest in their own self interest - and that a thriving nation must, above all, operate at the level of the individuals ability to pursue self interest.
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It is in the individuals own self interest to pursue prosocial things sometimes, but not always. Thus, I think a thriving nation must necessarily hold ongoing tension or conflict, on some level (though not all) This is a fundamental part of a thriving system.
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So when people talk about utopias as totally peaceful or refer to struggle as inherently bad, it just doesn't jive with me. It is good that an inefficient business should fail. It hurts, but it is good.
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I also distrust human ability to manually fix issues. The economy is stupidly complex, and fucking with one thing will have ripple effects. It doesn't matter how elegant and complicated a plan we can design, the natural systems that develop from small scale rules will be better.
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So instead of top-down organization, I prefer policies that allow bottom-up self direction, that treat the system like a body, and that views competition and the pain that results as not inherently bad.
THAT BEING SAID
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There's one thing I don't understand - do we see top down self modification in bodies? Why am I treating self modification (economic policies) as not organic? It seems like there's a spectrum of bottom up natural to top down unnatural and idk where I'm drawing the line
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The main top-down self-modification systems in the body are, I guess, the central nervous system, and the HPA axis en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothala
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My brain is trying to figure out if the cells are into getting topped or not
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Here's one way both could be true:
Maybe you think they're naturally-occurring but just not as effective as they claim to be.
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Elaborate? I know I was vague in my tweets so we might have to do some dissecting
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In some ways a better-fitting analogy is an ecosystem. A body has more cohesion than a country -- it makes you think of Hobbes's Leviathan.
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A body often regulates the actions and effects of its component genes 'top down' and genes collaborate in a body because the compromise that involves is better than going it alone. What emerges is the conscious self. Will society become conscious?
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It's more than an analogy! I literally just submitted an article on this. In short, both biological and economic evolution are about the growth of knowledge. As such, both are constrained by the same principles.
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Philosopher Michael Huemer makes a similar point in In Praise of Passivity. "Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society"
studiahumana.com/pliki/wydania/
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Have you read Antifragile, by N. Taleb? Your philosophy is echoed almost exactly by him in his book!