Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili is thinking about religion:
Hili: Lack of God causes complications.
A: What kind of complications?
Hili: It disperses responsibility.
Hili: Brak Boga powoduje komplikacje.
Ja: Jakiego rodzaju?
Hili: Rozprasza odpowiedzialność.
Ja: Jakiego rodzaju?
Hili: Rozprasza odpowiedzialność.
That face! Who but Hili would be qualified for the job opening?
Yes! It disperses responsibility to the individual. Well said, Hili.
Dear Hili, you are right but there are times when we are better off with complications than without. This is one of them.
Hili looks very thoughtful. 🐈🐈🐈
Humph! is Hili…
the Sweden “experiment” indicates a lack of gods promotes a collective responsibility and seemingly no individual loss of morality.
Whilst also recognizing humans are far from perfect, we have testing complicated times ahead, as I’ve heard before “lets hope we use the time wisely”.
As a matter of fact, Hili is a bit sarcastic. She means lack of God causes complication for people who prefer to blame somebody else and are not willing to accept personal responsibility. They, poor souls, cannot say “It’s God’s will”.
Novella stopped being a skeptic years ago and is a pastor in the new religion.
Hili has a good point. I’d say: “NO GOD!? Then who is responsible for this mess??”
We are responsible for the mess, we are unwilling to take responsibility, and we look for outside causes to pin it onto. That’s why some people can’t live with climate change being our fault. They don’t understand COLLECTIVE fault. It has to be SOMEONE (obviously not them so who?)
This contradiction goes back a long way – this consciousness of (bold added)
“the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being
[…]
it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man [..] between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”
-Karl Marx
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
I don’t find collective fault particularly helpful. People understand the concept perfectly well. They just resent it. If their government tries to punish them for collective fault, they won’t change their ways. But they will change their government. The only fix, then, seems to be to prevent the people from changing their government.
The language of collective action problems is more fruitful than fault, guilt, or blame formulations but unfortunately it leads to an understanding that collective action problems are intractable even if no one is at fault. Each player seeks his own rational self-interest — no moralizing involved — but in the aggregate the limits of the finite resource are breached and all the individuals are individually made worse off. “Collective” here is just a metaphor. In reality it’s a large number of individuals making individual decisions often without any knowledge of what every other individual is doing. Only if the collective was being directed by a sovereign would there be true collective action, and that is the only way a collective action problem can be solved: a sovereign who can dictate to all players backed up with violence.
A handy way to decide what problems are worth worrying about (as opposed to being just facts of life) is to check for features of a collective-action problem. If it’s a CAP without a sovereign rule enforcer, ignore it and don’t play.