Think about governance as a spectrum, we need it to be more flatly distributed, from the smallest unit (neighborhood dealing with local issues) to the largest (United Nations dealing with collective threats)
But this precarious equilibrium is not technology independent. What works for blades and projectiles and missiles might not work for engineered viruses. If we don't find ways to quench this adversarial dynamic maybe our days are numbered...
you can't make a American seeking virus any more than yo can make a Chinese seeking virus. at that level we are all just bags of the same lipids proteins and ions. and all national boarders are porous and it will get through and kill your people.
viruses are in the same bucket of bad war ideas as mustard gas that we dont use because they kill everyone instead of who i point them at.
I mean, look at COVID response, Russia and China both have their own vaccines, what's to prevent them from sliding in something extra to prevent another disease which has been engineered?
To play devil's advocate:
This could be happening _right now_.
1) Create and release CoVid.
2) Engineer a vaccine, that also protects against a secondary, 100% deadly virus. (SinoVac?)
3) Vaccinate your own population.
4) Release the super-deadly, secret 2nd virus.
5) Profit.
> it is to big a project to not leak just based on everyone involved having to not tell anyone.
Yeah. This where it, and most of the other grand conspiracy theories, start to become unrealistic. It would be impossible to keep the secret from coming out.
But it would make a great plot for thriller novel.
This is what I would expect on any issue where there are large groups with strong feelings for and against intervention. Only if there is broad concensus or at least broad apathy would I expect uniform decision making.
It's certainly true that it's hard to make major interventions in such a decision making environment, but that's the system we set up. A benefit is that it's a lot easier to move to a different US state than to move to a different country if you don't like the government.
We can't avoid being subject to large-scale collective decisions. Humans can't live in hunter-gatherer bands any more. The individualist US, just like collectivist Sweden, spends large amounts on public goods via its government. Even in an anarcho-capitalist utopia, large firms and other collective bodies would emerge, and would have to coordinate upon collective decisions.
Haha I obviously didn't catch this. I guess then I missed your point. Between your essay and the parent comments, my takeaway is about the danger of enforcing collective decisions on everyone, because even if everyone says they agree, they can still all be delusional, or at least just too scared to speak out.
The problem is imagine if all the investment put into green energy was actually put into just making fossil fuels and their use far more efficient.
It might’ve had a far better impact on the environment, but it would’ve hurt the pocketbooks of the congressmen who have money invested in these specific solutions. (The other side pushing for more fossil fuels doesn’t actually care they just have their investments there).
An individual is still able to make the best decisions for themselves and the less you allow them to do this, the more danger and misuse of resources you’ll find.
Off-topic, but... this is Econ 101! I feel a bit like a programmer would feel when someone says "hey, our car is programmed using an HTML5 supercomputer". It alarms me that an argument which has been known for 250 years, and formalized for 60 years, still hasn't percolated to the educated general public. Markets can't magically work out the correct prices in the presence of externalities.
(To head off a nerdy counter-argument: yes, yes, Coase theorem, blah blah. If you think we can automatically negotiate to internalize all externalities, then fine - that seems wildly wrong to me but it's not a logically invalid argument. But if so, markets per se add nothing. Property rights plus individual contract law get you all you need.
Through human history, groupthink has led to lots of horrible things - maybe there are examples where individual rights have too, or maybe you could argue the benefits of collectivism outweigh the cases where it has led to trouble. It really depends on what you're trying to optimize for - which again depends on individual priorities.