I am pretty useless when it comes to any political discussions It is very difficult to ascertain the facts amidst all the misinformation/confusion and I don’t find it particularly interesting either so I usually stay away.
What I will say though is that what is going on in the US (or the world at large) is nothing new, in the sense that humankind has never known actual peace and harmony. Furthermore that cycle which you have discovered in yourself - of sorrow followed by malice - cannot deliver the goods, it has been around for a long time now and still actual peace and harmony - rather than an uneasy truce - is nowhere to be found. You can see this at all levels of society too - relationships, families, groups, nations. You will find many ‘noble identities’ running around with their ‘justified anger’ and trying to ‘do good’.
It’s so obvious that something new is needed, it looks like you are already allowing that this is the case. You are exposing the lie behind this ‘justified anger’ / ‘noble hatred’, I wish you success in locating the third alternative here The great thing is that it will also free you of your self induced hurt, it is painful to be sorrowful and malicious, even when it is noble. This ‘noble sorrow/malice’ is just like tightly grasping a hot piece of coal in your hands, and even defending your right to do so!
I do wonder at times if things are shifting already. Me and Sonya were watching a show called “Married at first sight” yesterday. At one point during a heated exchange a woman was charged with that old accusation of “If you are not arguing in a relationship then it is not healthy”, I was surprised that she replied with something to the effect of - “no that is not true, we do not have to argue, we can communicate”, I was quite amazed! It’s like people are realising that peace and harmony cannot be arrived at through sorrow and malice.
Just wanted to voice my support also for keeping your hands in your pockets when "feelings of intense anger and hatred" arise, and attempting to research both sides of the issues and looking for what the underlying facts are, if you are so inclined – and if you aren’t then I’d suggest putting it all on a “I’m not really sure” basis and not feeling strongly one way or another[1], unless you have seen for yourself what the facts are. This will make it far easier to enjoy and appreciate being alive on a continuous basis!
Whenever I do the factual investigation, my conclusion is usually the same: there is some grain of fact somewhere, which is underemphasized by one side and overemphasized by another. Or in other words, there’s usually more to the opposite viewpoint than it seems looking at it just from one side, but less than the more zealous from the opposite side make it out to be[2].
Just as an example, let’s consider the “deregulating businesses” topic. It is certainly true that businesses are run by feeling-beings, who nurse malice and sorrow to their very bosom, and of course are capable of exploitation, pollution, taking actions to the vast detriment of their fellow human beings, etc. However it is also true that governments and regulatory bodies equally are run by feeling-beings which suffer from the same afflictions. In other words, the regulators are not automatically correct – they can make mistakes too. And even if they act in what they earnestly believe is in the best public interest, it’s always possible for them to over-regulate, indeed the incentive structure is aligned so they will tend to err more on the side of trying to control too much rather than too little.
Just to get a sense of the situation, we can count the number of pages in the CFR, the Code of Federal Regulations in the United States (source):
There’s 18 times as many pages of regulations, an additional 170,000 pages, in 2020 as there were in 1950! In other words they keep growing and rarely do they shrink. This is in the nature of the system: it takes effort to review old rules and remove them, so this happens less often than adding new ones.
But what’s the point, does it even matter? So what if businesses have to do a little more work to ensure they don’t “extort, manipulate, and poison our population and environment”?
First we have to step back and observe that not all of the 180,000 pages of the registry address such egregious acts as poisoning the water supply. I took a random example and found multiple paragraphs on the precise ways varieties of menu items have to have their calorie counts listed (source):
This is just one part of one section of regulation part 101.11 … and all establishments that this applies to have to follow all of these or risk fines or worse!
The point is that now if you wanted to start a restaurant or fast food stand or what-not, you have to put time, effort, and money into complying with all of this, and if you don’t your business is at risk. The regulations do not come “for free”… and does it really matter so much in what precise ways the calorie counts have to be shown? The world would not end if there was more flexibility here, and it would be slightly easier to run a business.
And that is the larger point, that the wealth and thus health and well-being of a country is very much affected by having 180,000 pages of detailed regulatory codes to follow. Any one rule may not seem a big deal, but taken in aggregate and it certainly has an impact on the economy.
As an example only, let’s say that all these regulations in aggregate “only” have an effect of slowing economic growth by 1%. The real GPD (i.e. in today’s dollars) in 1929 was $1.109 trillion. In 2022 it was $21.8 trillion (source). If you annualize this it means the economy grew at an average of 3.2% per year in this time period[3]. If instead the economy grew at an average of 2.2% per year in the period, then in 2022 the economy’s size would be a vastly smaller $8.57 trillion[4] – the level it was in 1986! In other words just 1% less growth per year would mean that today the USA would only be as wealthy as it was 40 years ago!
And this has meaningful impacts. In 1983 child mortality was 2.4x higher (source), life expectancy was ~5 years shorter (source), overall mortality rate was 1.3x higher (source), and 2.5% more of the population was living in poverty (source). These values are all correlated with GDP (source), so there is definitely some relation.
All this is to say that there is a reasonable (i.e. sensible) case to be made that it is a good idea to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses, and that this will directly actually make people’s lives better – and particularly the poorest (viz. those 2.5% no longer living in poverty that would otherwise have been).
So when an administration enacts policies such as requiring repealing 10 regulations for every new one proposed (source), and requiring every regulation to have an automatic “sunset” date at most 5 years into the future such that if it’s not actively renewed it expires (source), which has been demonstrated to effectively reduce amounts of regulation[5] – this does not automatically and inherently mean that the intention, goal, and outcome will be to give businesses “greater license to extort, manipulate, and poison our population and environment”. It may very well be that outdated/redundant regulations are reduced, only the most important/essential regulations will be kept, the net effect is the cost of business is lowered, and the people living in the country will ultimately be better off.
Of course this does not mean that some malicious and/or devious people won’t try to use it to their advantage, or it won’t always be perfect, etc. But it isn’t necessarily or overwhelmingly this.
This is not to be taken as an overall endorsement of what the administration is doing in every regard. It’s just one aspect of one of the points you mentioned. You can see the amount of effort it takes to get into the nitty gritty – and I find doing so has always lessened my emotional feelings towards the topic, as whatever prior feeling-based (and thus not fact-based) convictions I may have had are replaced by a better understanding of the topic.
This can be very fun to do also, and if you consistently have “feelings of intense anger and hatred” about these types of topics it may be very well worth digging into them in a similar manner!
Cheers,
Claudiu
It’s relevant to point out that the other side will also contain people with “feelings of intense anger and hatred” but towards your own side! Your side may just feel like they are bad people, but the other side just feels like your side are bad people! This is not conducive to actually resolving any of the underlying circumstances that bring about the divide in the first place. Viz.:
Note the idea here isn’t to just take both sides and ‘average’ it as in just grant that they are both somewhat reasonable without looking into it. It’s to see what the actual case is, what the actual facts underlying the situation is – sometimes one side is just completely wrong. ↩︎
94 years of growth at 3.2% means total growth multiplier 1.032^94 = 19.3, 1.109 * 19.3 = 21.4 which is about right. ↩︎
94 years of growth at 2.2% means total growth multiplier 1.022^94 = 7.73, 1.109 * 7.73 = 8.57 ↩︎
Idaho moved over to such a zero-based regulatory scheme in 2018, with palpable effects (source): ↩︎
It is very difficult to ascertain the facts amidst all the misinformation/confusion and I don’t find it particularly interesting either so I usually stay away.
The great thing is that it will also free you of your self induced hurt, it is painful to be sorrowful and malicious, even when it is noble. This ‘noble sorrow/malice’ is just like tightly grasping a hot piece of coal in your hands, and even defending your right to do so!
