Comment by hypfer
5 days ago
While not wrong, this quote assumes a healthy self-regulating society that isn't being actively driven off a cliff by algorithms optimizing everything for short-term benefits.
Meaning that it might actually be that the assholes one runs into all day are in fact assholes.
Even more so when we consider that one during a normal day does not run into a representative sample of society, but tiny tiny bubbles. We made sure to atomize everyone into that and separate the social classes from each other.
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We can of course not expect our quotes like that to serialize all the assumed preconditions into their writing, but we should remember that those exist when replicating them.
Following aphorisms like the quote are part of how we achieve such a self regulating society.
No. Following stuff like that quote is how you run a self-regulated society and keep it self-regulating.
If however the baseline already moved into chaos, the quote just leads to tying your own hands and complacency.
It is the right prescription for the wrong disease, essentially. We need chemotherapy/surgery and not mild cough syrup.