I think an ideal society has rich disagreement and a wide diversity of thoughts and opinions. With that diversity comes conflict which provides us all with opportunities to more deeply reflect on our own beliefs.
I think an ideal society has rich disagreement and a wide diversity of thoughts and opinions. With that diversity comes conflict which provides us all with opportunities to more deeply reflect on our own beliefs.
Someone liking to dress in a cowboy hat, underwear, and playing a guitar in Times Square? Not my cup of tea, but sure, go for it.
You can't simply beat your chest and claim superiority and thus we need competition of ideas. E.g. the most prosperous happy places on earth tend to have social contracts that look out for groups such as women, homosexuals, etc.
You can't simply prove an idea is better by appealing to your own sense of morals/justice and if there's no evidence that some ideals are better than others, how would you reach consensus anyways?
In order to make everyone share the same social contract you either have evidence based progress or authoritarianism and historically the evidence suggests authoritarianism doesn't pan out all that great.
So at some point there is also a line that has to be drawn. The Holocaust is one of those lines, and I pray that I would had the strength to stand up to my peers and say, no this isn't right,and go to whatever lengths I thought I could do to make change. In a lot of ways, I think the civil rights movement was a lot of chest beating and I think that actually helped.
It's not really clear to me that "most prosperous happy places on earth tend to have social contracts that look out for groups such as women, homosexuals, etc." Certainly, when you look at economic prosperity and I don't know how you'd measure happiness.