Hello,
Back in the days, I learned that we should not mix business with politics. That we should never discuss politics with customers, not even with colleagues.
That separation seemed to make sense, so we don't let political views stand in the way of working or doing business.
But now that I think of it, it was more of a tip or a rule than a fundamental principle. So today, I'm breaking that rule.
Human Wrongs
This weekend I realized how fast the extreme-right movements are growing - one thing is to see it the news, another is to realize they are just next door.
This got me thinking and discussing what can we do about it.
The communication techniques they use are not at our disposal as we are bound by principles of intellectual honesty, and we understand the limits of communication as manipulation. I have a feeling that they are playing a communication game that we can not win.
This leads me to first-principles:
What is fundamentally wrong with these extreme-right movements?
I think what is fundamentally wrong is what they preach doesn't follow the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In fact, UDHR covers many political and social topics we're discussing these days - equality, discrimination, nationalities, ...
A few examples:
Article 1. — All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 3. — Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 12. — No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
We should all re-read it and go back to it from time to time.
Either we agree on these first-principles and build on top of them, or it's clear that we don't want to live in the same society.
Forget specific policy proposals, what we should be asking everyone is:
Do you agree with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Not all change is good — pre-post fallacy
Why do they attract so many people? I suspect it’s a severe case of Pre-Post fallacy (concept inspired by Ken Wilber Pre-Trans fallacy) where people that want change confuse going backward from going forward - both are changes, but not all are welcomed.
In a world that needs change, some people are promoting change that is actually sending us backward, instead of exploring new possibilities to go forward.
IMHO, anything that goes against the Universal Human Rights is sending us backward.
Back to first-principles
The other day I read a proposal that stated that only people that pay taxes should vote (the proponent was referring to income taxes). The reasoning went that only those that put the money should choose how the money should be spent. Seems logical, defensible.
The problem is that we’re judging the proposal just by the arguments presented. And that's one of the tricks that we can fall prey. We need to go a bit deeper and understand if it fails to follow any first-principle.
What if I tell you that:
40% of the population doesn't pay income tax, so 40% will not vote.
They don't pay taxes because they don't earn enough to pay, meaning they are poor.
The logical conclusion is that the bottom 40% will not have a vote and will be subject to the will of the richer 60%. Does that sound like something democratic, fair, non-discriminatory? Is being poor a crime or do these people constitute a lower caste that doesn't have a voice?
A superficial sounding argument can hide a clear offense of first principles.
AAP - Analogy Assumption propagation
A lot of what we see around us is based on thinking by analogy - it is fast and can provide reasonable results for most things. Thinking by analogy means if it worked before or somewhere else, it should work fine now. Is using "best practices" and known frameworks. People in general feel comfortable with analogy because is something they understand, it worked before, is familiar.
But what we need to realize is that with an analogy comes a bunch of assumptions and beliefs - every assumption done on the first use, will carry over when is used as an analogy to another context. And this brings 2 problems at least:
the assumption was true before but doesn't hold in the new context
the assumption wasn't true before and will continue not to be true.
Either way, there's a risk that we're incorporating wrong assumptions into the new application. More, the new application has more wrong assumptions than the first. And only gets worse as you continue the analogysation of thought leading to Analogy Assumption Propagation (AAP)
In the end, there's a risk that you're applying an old model that doesn't work on a new context.
The alternative way is to think from first principles, and dive deep and ask fundamental questions. Why does it work like that? Why does it happen? Why do you/people feel like that? ...
If you train yourself to make these kinds of questions you’ll get to the core of the challenges and from there you can build an actual solution with a much bigger chance to have an impact.
(there’s a lot more to explore on this in a future episode)
Questions are the answers
What’s the principle that is most sacret to you? and why?
Thanks for reading and hit ❤️ so we both can get that gentle drop of oxytocin.
cheers
Hugo
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