My desires are almost certainly incompatible with yours.
Politics is a process for distributing scarce resources. Brokering how, and when people can exert power to the detriment of others is an inescapable part of it. There are many bad actors who seek to do so - not as many as one might lead to believe, but they consistently find themselves at the top of the social food chain.
I'd also point out that those are strategies to achieve desires, not desires themselves. The associated desires might be something like financial security, a sense of importance, freedom etc.
Sometimes, though, compromise is impossible. If you say that 3+3=6, and I say that 3+3=10, you'd be a fool to compromise on 8. This is made all the more obvious when we consider which of us gets to frame the debate. If I really wanted 3+3 to be 10, I'd just demand that we make 3+3=14, and I'll get exactly what I want, once we split the difference.
Everyone wants freedom, and everyone wants agency, and everyone wants health and happiness. There's plenty of all of those things to go around. Many of us also want power, though, which is more likely to be a zero-sum game.
There's a lot of that happening...
When two cultures cannot agree, the only real solution is to segregate them, the US is too big, it needs to break down into several smaller countries where different cultures can go their own direction.
> The Cavaliers – the nobles who had fought and lost the English Civil War – fled to Virginia. Historians who cross-checking Virginian immigrant lists against English records find that of Virginians whose opinions on the War were known, 98% were royalists.
> These aristocrats didn’t want to do their own work, so they brought with them tens of thousands of indentured servants; more than 75% of all Virginian immigrants arrived in this position. Some of these people came willingly on a system where their master paid their passage over and they would be free after a certain number of years; others were sent by the courts as punishments; still others were just plain kidnapped. The gender ratio was 4:1 in favor of men, and there were entire English gangs dedicated to kidnapping women and sending them to Virginia, where they fetched a high price.
> The Virginians tried their best to oppress white people. Really, they did. The depths to which they sank in trying to oppress white people almost boggle the imagination. There was a rule that if a female indentured servant became pregnant, a few extra years were added on to their indenture, supposedly because they would be working less hard during their pregnancy and child-rearing so it wasn’t fair to the master. Virginian aristocrats would rape their own female servants, then add a penalty term on to their indenture for becoming pregnant. That is an impressive level of chutzpah. But despite these efforts, eventually all the white people either died, or became too sluggish to be useful, or worst of all just finished up their indentures and became legally free. The aristocrats started importing black slaves as per the model that had sprung up in the Caribbean, and so the stage was set for the antebellum South we read about in history classes.
> The Virginian Cavaliers had an obsession with liberty, but needless to say it was not exactly a sort of liberty of which the ACLU would approve. [...] No, they said, we wouldn’t be free if we had to work, therefore we insist upon not working. No, we wouldn’t be free if we were limited by poverty, therefore we insist upon being extremely rich. Needless to say, this conception of freedom required first indentured servitude and later slavery to make it work, but the Virginians never claimed that the servants or slaves were free. That wasn’t the point. Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank; nobles had as much as they wanted, the middle-class enough to get by on, and everyone else none at all. And a Virginian noble would have gone to his grave insisting that a civilization without slavery could never have citizens who were truly free.
From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...
Incidentally, the fact that we can't enter indentured servitude anymore is much maligned in some libertarian circles. (Mostly among people who think that they will be the masters, rather then the other way around.)
No doubt. You did posit it as the alternative, however. Mentioning the idea that some people are ok with indentured servitude (freedom to relinquish your freedom) and try to claim that liberty is the ultimate virtue of these same people seems quite odd.
No, he posted it as a snarky example of why you simply can't always find compatible beliefs. His point had nothing to do with feudalism or indentured servitude. He was simply making the point that when one group wants to oppress another, there are no compatible compromises to make when the oppressed don't want to be oppressed.
Live and let live only works when you don't try and control others but most of our conflict comes from those trying to control others and those others resisting.
Abortion would not be an issue if those who didn't like them didn't get them and left everyone else alone. Religion wouldn't be a problem if the religious didn't continually try and impose their morals on the non-religious; don't like gays, don't be gay, but trying to cure other people from gayness is trying to control others. This could go on and on, trying to control others leads to conflict and that's mostly what politics is about, resolving those conflicts.
You cannot ban guns and still make them freely available to people who want them.
You cannot combat global warming and still enable people to drive as they desire.
You cannot simultaneously allow trans people to use their preferred gender's bathroom while allowing the people who so desires to only have cis people of the same gender in the room.
You cannot simultaneously allow drugs and ban them.
Indeed, as the days go by I am becoming more and more convinced that the only solution is the one outlined in this essay: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-...
> How do you do that with abortion? (Just picking a controversial topic)
> there is _literally_ no common ground
The question then is where do people stake their claims on the line between those endpoints. Some people think if the fetus is old enough to be viable if born that early, then it should be illegal to abort it. Others, if the fetus has a developed enough brain and heart to conceivably feel pain. Others, if its implanted. Others if it's fertilized.
And, of course, it's not a straight line, but more like a space. Some fetuses, regardless of age, are not viable because of genetic deformities and people pick different regions in that space where they are comfortable with terminating. There is another axis in the space related to how the pregnancy occurred—rape, incest, etc.
Within this space, you can find regions and boundaries where many people do have agreement. This is how governing works. There are no perfect solutions or black and white problems. It's about finding consensus and compromise, and picking something that is the most acceptable to the most people.
The real problem, I believe, is that there are powerful people who want to deliberately sabotage that process to their own ends. They want to convince us that there is no common ground, and that those who have a different preference are evil people who cannot be tolerated, much less worked with. They've found that if you create an enemy for people, you can get them to show up for polls and keep people in power. That's the real goal. They don't give a shit about abortion. They care about tax law and gerrymandering and other legislation that keeps the powerful in power. But abortion gets them to the polls.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority
To pick an example: Why is gun control even an issue? It didn't used to be - therefore something has changed that makes people want to ban guns. What is that? Is banning guns the only solution?
You can use the same logic with most of these.
...it's not really that simple, though. It's not like you're picking two discrete options. Let's take a viewpoint like pro-choice/pro-life. A society that permits abortions doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to have one. A woman who thinks abortion is immoral is free to hold and practice that belief herself...the "lifestyle" of being pro-choice is not forced upon her. Contrast that with a society that bans abortion.
Yes, but the objecting individual is not fighting for his or her own rights. Pro-lifers consider themselves to be fighting for the rights of the unborn child.
Similarly, a society that permits slavery doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to own slaves.
The society is not forcing its lifestyle on the objecting individual, per se, but it's forcing its lifestyle on the slaves, whom the objecting individual is concerned about.
This would work well if the two sides lived on different planets on the opposite sides of the galaxy, each one outside of the other's light cone and causal domain.