Making Nobody Happy

Discrimination is the primary function of intelligence. Sponges have almost no discrimination and simply let everything pass through them. It’s all the same to them. They lack selectivity, they lack discrimination. They just sit there and let the current do the work, bringing them whatever it brings them.

The higher up the chain of intelligence you go, the greater the powers of discrimination get. Cows have a little discrimination. They can recognize and avoid danger, but with little detail. They tend to get freaked out and confused by anything unfamiliar. And they spend most of their time just munching away at whatever looks like it’s edible that’s put in front of them.

Predators are far more intelligent, making careful choices about how to use their energy and how to manage their risks. They could die if they choose the wrong target. Not only from injuries, but simply from wasted energy and opportunity. They have to be clever.

Humans are even more capable because we are able to abstract experience into the past and future. We are able to discriminate so cleverly that we can even choose to avoid things that seem, on the surface or in the short term to be to our benefit, in order to achieve a larger or longer term benefit or realize a more complex and developed strategy.

So we may as well forget about getting rid of discrimination. It’s literally responsible for every element of our survival and everything we’ve achieved. We have goals, therefore we have values. Therefore we make choices designed to help us realize those goals.

All of that, every bit, is discrimination. From what kind of food you eat to who you’re friends with to where you live to what you like on television, it’s all discrimination. Who you date, how you do your hair, what clothes you buy, who you vote for, what sports you play, what temperature you like your shower, what deodorant and toothpaste you use, how you speak, what you like to talk about, where you go on vacation, what news outlets your follow, who you hire, what jobs you apply for, it’s all discrimination. You have a value hierarchy, you can tell the difference between things, and you choose those things that align with your value heirarchy and are most likely to realize your goals.

So what do we mean when we say that discrimination is bad, when it’s the basis for everything we do? Perhaps what we mean is, unjustified discrimination is bad. Well, what does that mean? If people are different, and have differing value hierarchies and goals and strategies for pursuing those goals (the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness), then not everyone is going to agree on what is and isn’t justified. Value systems and the resulting choices people make aren’t arbitrary. And if you talk to someone you’ll find out that they have their reasons for preferring and pursuing all the things they pursue.

So, to a degree, what we really mean by saying that we’re against discrimination, is that we’re against discrimination that we don’t agree with. Fair enough. So, since you can’t outlaw discrimination as such, can you, or should you, be allowed to outlaw discrimination that you don’t agree with? In other words, can you or should you be able to outlaw disagreement and mandate a certain set of values, or outlaw a certain set of values, make them legally compulsory, along with their supporting strategies?

Well, obviously we do outlaw certain things. Some things fall right outside the limits of acceptable values and strategies, even in a liberal society. Ownership of certain kinds of substances, certain kinds of weapons, actions that directly infringe on the property rights and essential freedom, of others.

For the sake of protecting those liberties for some, we take them away from others. We take away your right to possess certain things, perhaps we even take away your right to associate and to act freely, through imprisonment, restraining orders, etc.

So let’s have no illusions, we do have a system that is in the business of adjudicating rights and upholding the freedoms of some while taking away the exercise of freedom of others. Particularly those whose values or actions are seen as endangering the rights of everyone else. The main question is where your bias lies. Who do you agree with or disagree with? Which values are you going to forbid and penalize and which are you going to protect? And this is where the system of rights protections comes in, the bill of rights in particular.

Rights give you legal status to assert the privilege of your values and your strategies against the values and strategies of someone else. They’re fundamentally for someone and against someone else. And they’re based around a theory that there are some rights, some values, that are fundamentally better for people (and others that are worse, or dangerous) and that it is upon those values that this particular society (for there are other societies founded on different values) is founded. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of the press, freedom of local governance. These are all positive freedoms, things you’re fundamentally allowed to do in America.

These are the backbone of what being American means, in a practical sense. There aren’t any guarantees about what results you’ll get from your particular speech or association. Maybe you’ll speak in a way that makes people think you’re a jerk, maybe you’ll hang out with idiots and fools that get you into constant trouble, maybe your local government will make an ass of itself, maybe you’ll join a religion that makes you act in a very silly manner. You have the freedom to do all of that, because our society and our constitution value open opportunity more than they value mandating any particular choice or outcome.

In America you’re free to be your own brand of idiot (or genius), if that’s what you want. That’s all up to you and your choices. The government won’t mandate your essential value choices for you, and there are few choices deeper and more divergent than speech, religion, local government, and who you associate with. Freedom of thought is assumed, since it underlies all these practical expressions. We don’t generally know what people are thinking inside their heads, though, so our regulations are designed around protecting the visible expression of those assumed internal realities.

There are doubtless going to be some bad outcomes, but you have a right to those bad outcomes. And there’s a deep-seated belief that there’s a value in protecting that right to succeed or fail according to your own strategies. And that the society as a whole will benefit from that process. It’s a very optimistic but risky conception of humanity. And that’s why it also has various safeguards built into it, to prevent that amount of freedom from letting things get too crazy.

There are also some freedoms from, things that other people can’t demand of you. And they’re pretty limited. You’ve got freedom from being legally condemned without due process (trial by jury), as well as freedom from excessive government demands (unjustified search and seizure, as well as having government agents and soldiers stationed in your home, and excessive and nonsensical legal punishments).

These are all ways to limit the power of the government to interfere in your private life, since we are granting the government some power to do so. Your values and strategies can be selected against and punished. We are allowing lawsuits, criminal suits, criminal penalties, and are allowing government to set up rules for the public sphere. Of course back then the power of the government was much smaller, especially the federal government. And a large amount of the work the constitution does of restraining the power of the federal government is vested in the powers and rights granted to the individual states (as well as individual localities and individual people). So the further you go up the ladder of governmental power, the more checks on that power there are. In part simply because individual states, towns, and people have been made so strong.

So the original bill of rights was pretty minimalist. It mostly focused on keeping government intervention out of your affairs and letting nature (or society) have its way, as much as possible. That’s what being American means. You can rise or fall by your own choice. You have a right to your success, if you can swing it, and you have a right to your failure, if you earn that. There is a minimalist predetermined value structure. You get all kinds of freedoms, but no guarantees, because guaranteeing a set of uniform outcomes would require abridging individual freedoms.

Feedback mechanisms and the assignment of responsibility for the results of your values and actions take place at the most localized level. If your municipality wants to spend 90% of their budget on a bridge to nowhere, they have a right to do it. And the consequences will be accrued and observed, and responsibility assigned and responded to, at the local and immediate and personal level. If your experiment goes great, people will see the results and enjoy them and continue further down that strategic line. And if it’s a total boondoggle, people will see and respond to that too. Your rights protect your freedom to fail and suffer just as much as they protect your right to succeed and prosper. And society benefits from both.

One advantage of protecting freedom more and more as the scale gets smaller is that allows experimentation with containment. Individuals may differ in the extreme, but because they only hold a tyrannical mandate over their own life and set of values and actions, not those of others, such wildly divergent experiments can be done fairly safely, without endangering on imposing on everyone.

The main exceptions to what you can do with your freedom have to do with when your exercise of your freedoms impinge on the private spaces of other people. Individual property rights, in particular, get a lot of protection, as well as what you do with your mind, your time, your money, your home, and your speech. You can mostly do what you want, so long as it stays fairly contained to your own sphere and doesn’t adversely or intrusively impinge on others.

Speech is actually an exception. Obviously, no one has to listen to what anyone else has to say, so in a sense people can say whatever they want and it doesn’t matter. But speech has been and is accorded great importance in human society. It is powerful. It is dangerous. So why do we protect it so vigorously? Why not regulate it as an intrusion into the private spaces of others, the same as actions?

Well, first, there seems to be a tacit assumption that words aren’t actions. They’re words. They’re articulated concepts, an abstraction, a representation. They are not an embodied token, they may not even reflect the embodied reality. And there’s a meaningful difference between the two. And so there needs to be a meaningful difference in how you treat and regulate them. Humans think, that’s our whole big thing that gives us power. And speech is how we express that thought, even to ourselves. So freedom of speech protects the most central and fundamental power for adaptation and survival that our species possesses. But, at the same time, thought isn’t action. If it was, we would all be hung. Who among us hasn’t thought something that, had we acted on it, would have ruined us?

There seems to be an underlying belief in our constitution that there’s just something so important about words that there is no good way of regulating them. Possibly the amount of power that would be required to regulate them was considered too much power to grant to the government. Or perhaps they were considered so valuable, that freedom in this area was so important for navigating the challenges of life, that it was essential to protect them at all costs. Some things are considered so sacred, so important, so valuable, that they’re beyond the scope of governmental control. Speech, for America, is part of that.

And there are both dangers and benefits to this. Free speech allows the free exchange of ideas. It allows experimentation and adaptation. It allows issues to be talked out and negotiated. It allows freedom of individual thought. It allows values to be articulated and actions to be made intelligible. And for America that’s something worth preserving in the extreme, because the consequences of attempting to regulate it are, on balance, far more dangerous and far less valuable than the benefits and dangers of freedom.

So, all of this theory runs into some problems when it comes to laws that proscribe discrimination and that put legal restrictions and penalties on speech. You’re not really preventing or outlawing discrimination, that’s impossible; what you’re actually doing is outlawing someone else’s value system. You’re abridging freedom of thought and freedom of values and life strategies. You’re denying that there is any valid disagreement or discussion or difference in values and life strategies and deciding the matter by legal mandate. You’re saying that there isn’t any room for that kind of freedom or that kind of voice here.

And we do do that with some matters. The question is, how justified is this restriction, and how settled are those questions, that there is no use for or room for any more discussion? Generally, America has only assigned that kind of unquestionable authority to the private matters within people’s own lives, or in matters of near-universal agreement. For example, you can’t just take someone else’s stuff, or kill them, or force your way onto their private property, or force people to say certain things (although some modern thinkers have questioned those assertions lately, for various reasons thinking that it is, in fact, justified and not an essential offense).

In general our system is designed around preserving an enormous amount of discrimination, because that’s what human activity is. That’s what thought and freedom are. Everything that matters, everything that means something to us, are the subjects of discrimination, because discrimination and value are inextricably tied. We only perceive it as “discrimination” in the pejorative sense when it’s something we don’t agree with. And we uphold that discrimination is perfectly fine, no matter how actually discriminatory it is, if we agree with it.

So it’s silly to say that any person is pro or anti discrimination. There is just a disagreement about what the appropriate value systems are. And about what things are assumed and what things are compulsory and which are up for discussion. But the restrictions we place have been firmly centered, traditionally, around actions, not speech or thoughts, so the discussion can still take place, even if we are cautious about what actions we let people (including ourselves) take. It’s not good to act on every thought, but it is valuable to think everything through. Everyone has a perspective on value systems and strategies, but we can’t even know they are or understand them if we won’t let people think or talk about them.

Freedom of speech exists so these things can be freely discussed and tested and negotiated. And this is why enacting restrictions on freedom of speech in particular, in connection to matters of discrimination, is so dangerous. It doesn’t just fix the game, it prevents it, and so preempts the entire American enterprise. It brings the process of negotiation to an end and eliminates the fundamental basis for the existence and value of American freedom. It violates its whole reason to exist.

And let’s be clear, the system is dangerous. It can be, at the very least, unpleasant. Allowing others the freedom to think differently and say different things than what you think is aggravating and disorienting and often upsetting. Lord knows I’ve experienced it, even within my own family and friends. But belief in the idea of America is largely about belief that the benefits outweigh the danger, and that value is to be found in the relationship and the negotiation and the process of discussion. And also we recognize that the potential dangers of a tyrannical mandate over speech, especially one administered by the government, are far greater than the potential discomfort of hearing something I don’t like or agree with.

There is a fundamental belief behind our laws that having to hear and respond, to think, to listen, to speak, to discuss, even having to be discomforted, are actually good for us. They force us to articulate and test and elaborate and understand and challenge and make intelligible what we and others think and do. They have an essential benefit that is greater than the cost of unpleasantness that freedom imposes by exposing us to uncontrolled speech.

So, by and large, there is enormous danger in trying to legally regulate speech, especially in the interest of fighting discrimination. It’s a game-breaking act, so far as American society goes. That doesn’t mean that speech doesn’t have consequences. In fact the whole idea in America is to allow speech, as well as actions and the lives of individuals, to have the consequences that are appropriate to them, and for people to see and experience them and learn from them and grow from the process.

But take away the freedom, rig the game, and you take away the possibility of personal growth and development and articulation of your values. It all becomes pre-determined, mandated, a structural factor external to you, something you depend on instead of something you produce. You lose the ability to learn or adapt or test or develop. Without legitimate challenge, you lose legitimate maturity and growth and remain an infant under the care of a controlling parent. You escape the cost of the game, but you lose its rewards.

So speech is, I think, one area where it is profoundly un-American and illiberal to introduce legal restrictions and penalties. It goes against the whole project. If you don’t have a right to free speech then you don’t have the right to freedom of thought or individuality (for better or worse, however you use it). And that’s tyrannical. It’s exactly the kind of thing America was founded to get away from. We wanted to try out what could be achieved by allowing a more complex kind of relationship between people of different kinds, one of constant competition and cooperation and negotiation and success and failure. And it’s been costly, and risky and unstable, but it’s also been a smashing success by many measures. It has unlocked human potential.

OK, that was a long discussion and this is a great time to bow out. But if you want to keep going, let’s take things just a bit further. To what degree, then, when we go beyond speech, do people have a fundamental right to disagree with one another about essential values and strategies? This bring us into the realm of belief and practice. And so I think this question falls under the heading of freedom of religion. A religion is simply a highly articulated system of values and practice. It contains ideas about what people are, what would be best and most valuable to them, theories of human flourishing, and practical prescriptions to help one reach those ends. Ideologies, including political ideologies, are religious in nature, they reflect a certain conception of humanity and its good, as well as strategies to secure it. They may be more or less developed, but all grand narratives of value and action are religious in nature.

It’s a central pillar of American society to try to minimize the degree to which government mandates religious matters (or can control them in your individual and private life). Government can reflect the prevailing religious value systems of a society, in fact you should expect it to. As differing religious narratives rise and fall and gain supremacy, you may even see some gain dominance that conflict with the fundamental premises behind the American project, including its essential freedoms.

That’s all to be expected. But in general the government doesn’t get to tell you that you can’t believe in or discuss Our Lord Cthulhu. We try, so far as we can, to minimize the degree to which those religious narratives are built into the structure of the government and its regulations themselves. Partly this is achieved by minimalism, partly (where it arises naturally through conveyance and representation) this is made more palatable through localization instead of federalism.

You only enshrine the absolute minimum, that allows the most freedom in the system, that can be agreed upon by the largest number, at the highest level, as law, in the overarching structure. You rely on relationships and societies of association to do most of the work at the lower levels (at the level of state, town, neighborhood, workplace, friend group, and family), to hand out appropriate punishments and rewards in the context of those more intimate relationships and social structures and ahred values.

You may be a Jew, I may be a Sikh, your sister may be an Epicurean. But there are probably some basic ground rules we can all agree on, so we can each play the game of life in our own way with a minimum of interference from one another. So the fundamental question becomes, what things are there allowed to be disagreements about? What things do people have a right to discuss and question and differ about? What things does the government have the right to say you can or cannot value differently? And what should be baked into the system as an enforcement of value, and what should be baked into the system as protection against the enforcement of values to protect their individual free practice?

And that is where discrimination laws (which are really an embodiment of a codified, approved formula of value, of active systemic discrimination) come into being. This is also why their justification is almost always couched in terms of things like “systemic racism” or some other form of systemic discrimination, because your solution is itself a kind of active systemic discrimination. And the best justification for enacting systemic discrimination is that that’s the thing you’re responding to. Humans have an innate instinct for equivalent responses (plus a little bonus on top). You respond in kind. You punched me, so I can punch you. So if you want to advance a position and justify making something systemic, you need your enemy to be recognized as having made an equivalent move.

So anti-discrimination laws lie at the front lines of disputes over acceptable thoughts and actions. We have decided that there are some things you are not allowed to have certain opinions about (maybe; you can think them but you might be restricted in saying them), some values you aren’t allowed to take action on (definitely), some strategies based on them that simply aren’t allowed (absolutely). And we grant the government power to rule over these areas and limit them. What are the de minimus limits?

The first thing to realize is how terribly dangerous this question really is, and why people were so cautious at the founding of our country (and so failed to regulate many things) and mostly just let things run their course out in society). People were not remotely in universal accord with one another in 1776. There were bitter disagreements and fear, and much that people wanted to enshrine in the structure of our nation had to be set aside for the sake of keeping it together and winning our independence. Agreement and peace was precious, tenuous, and uncertain.

So the founding fathers, as we call them, understood that they were playing with fire by even addressing this problem, and that the available solutions had a very difficult history. So they erred on the side of minimalism. There was also, possibly, a theory they were upholding (against more continental theories) that you can’t make people good with government dictates. You can’t make people better with the law. You can put fences up around the arena. But the real work takes place inside. It’s a big deal when you decide “you don’t have freedom of choice or thought about this. You can’t value this differently or act differently. You don’t get a choice about that.”

In this sense, all anti-discrimination laws will always be in tension with laws about religious freedom. Because mandating positions on discrimination is a kind of religious mandate. It’s codifying a particular religious answer into law and forbidding dissent. Maybe it’s something as simple as “thou shalt not steal” (and even that one which was once so unquestionable is now up for debate in many places, which is a concerning sign of growing divisions and lack of even the most basic agreement).

Maybe the question something more debatable. No doubt whoever advocates for their own position receiving legal mandates sees their own position as perfectly unquestionable. But one of the facts of democracy, and also of a system that puts limits on federal power and protects religious freedom and freedom of speech, is that those systems are open to a wide array of disagreement.

Of course in all such systems quite a lot ultimately gets ignored. You can’t give equal weight and enforcement to positions and opinions and values held by only a handful among millions. You can’t expect the lives and conditions of 350 million people to be dictated by a handful of Cthulhu worshippers or followers of Flippism. And you can’t give unchecked mandate to the majority either. At the least, they need to be open to criticism and discussion. There needs to be, at minimum, freedom of speech. Not only for the sake of the dissenters, but for the sake of the majority, who may benefit from the process of discussion, challenge, competition, articulation, and negotiation. You may end up with a better, or at least better understood, version of your viewpoint. It promotes continuous update.

At the moment, the temptation is to add more and more things to the list of “things you can’t have a differing opinion on”. Things you can’t act differently on, value differently, understand differently, or even speak about differently. And unfortunately a lot of the things getting added to the list are questions that are far from settled or matters of universal accord. What are the causes of differing outcomes of all kinds? Do racial differences exist? Should you be allowed to believe in them, notice them, or even act on them?

If the answer is no, then that’s actually a problem for concepts such as diversity, as it wipes out the potential benefits it could confer and precludes the possibility that you might have any particular cultural identity or have anything to learn from anyone else. It’s a conundrum. There is an unresolved tension there. But it’s at least not completely obvious that there are no differences between races and cultures, and you should not be allowed to notice or believe in or make judgements about them. If you answer “yes” to the above questions, you’ve opened a whole other can of worms. Now you’re obligated to treating people as members of a group in a primary sense before the law and society. And that can be a problem, no matter who does it. Clearly it’s a matter that requires some thought and discussion.

For example, you might have a higher order set of interacting beliefs, that there are in fact differences between races as there are between families, but that the most important differences are between individuals, and so legal systems should be attuned around that locus, not around lower order and more variable and less stable differences (either positively or negatively). That’s a complex position, and not one you could express or explore by mandating a basic set of simplistic answers at a universal regulatory level. Figuring out what it means and how to apply it would require a certain amount of freedom of thought and practice. It would require engagement and risk.

Sex is another question. Should the government be able to mandate that the only acceptable position is that men and women are exactly the same? Not merely equal before the law (which they aren’t, as family courts prove) but actually the same, with all that that implies for differential outcomes. Or with regard to gender, should rhe government be able to decide once and for all that it is purely a matter of social construction and personal choice and is as variable and malleable as your own feelings on the subject? And should the government have or be given the power to remove and correct all the potential consequences of violation of this belief system, demanding that the responses and outcomes and values of all must track this conception through to its complete execution? How much power over individual citizens would it need to have to be able to do that?

Does the government have the right, or even the power, to enforce these answers to these sorts of questions that are so fundamental to our individual rights and roles in society? Does it have the right or power to decide that everyone will have completely similar outcomes regardless of their beliefs, whether they adhere to a stable biological and not purely contructionist and individualistic conception of gender or whether they adhere to a purely social constructivist vision of gender? Can government mandate equal outcomes for people who take racially divergent outcomes based in their beliefs about rheee most basic elements of human identity and development?

Is equality an outcome and an ideology and system of discrimination you have a right to mandate and enforce? Should you (or society in some sense) be able to be accused of (illegitimate) discrimination and blamed if someone who is gender fluid has difficulty in the dating game, and some part of it is because some people can’t deal with the complexity and want something simpler and more consistent? Is it right to say that people are wrong and morally unacceptable in society for making those judgements and having those values? Or that someone else is wrong to accrue them? Does no one on either side have a right to their own diverse outcomes? Have we decided them all in advance by regulatory fiat?

What about sexual behaviors? Is the government in the position to tell people what they’re not allowed to value, as if there were no differences in how people behave along this very important axis of life? Can the government tell you you’re not allowed to value healthy or beautiful mates, or successful mates, or mates who could give you children, or who reaffirm your own status? Is it right for the government to regulate people’s thoughts, instincts, and feelings about it because it’s so trivial or because it’s so deadly serious?

That question especially seems very unclear lately, even when you’re listening to just a single perspective. Should sex be deregulated and non-moral, or highly regulated and super-moral? Should people be allowed to do whatever they want because sex is just an innate, uncontrollable urge that exists purely for personal pleasure that we should be universally positive and accepting about, or is it a massive locus of problems and exploitation where the slightest misstep is an infringement on the deepest and most important aspect of my identity and personal sovereignty and which requires enormous education and the acceptance of responsibility? Surely it can’t be both.

There certainly seems to be a big difference in people’s values in this arena. There’s a lot to talk about. There are some genuine disagreements about what the purpose of sex is, what flourishing in this area means, how it can be best achieved, all kinds of things, right down to the most basic questions. They’re pretty serious disagreements. And people have some very strong feelings about them. The question is, how involved should the government be in mandating the answers to these questions and arbitrating and adjusting the outcomes? How much is it the government’s job to tell us, under penalty of law, what we are and aren’t allowed to have good or bad feelings about and positive and negative reactions to? How much is it the government’s job to tell us what to value and how to live? How much of our underlying theory of value and belief about what sex is and what it is for and how we should integrate it into our lives is the government supposed to dictate to us?

The answer, based on actual experience of what humans do in fact do, clearly isn’t none. And it probably also shouldn’t be all of it, since that hasn’t always gone well, or even a lot of it. So instead we need to protect our speech and talk about things. We need to protect the ability of discussion and society and individual choice and consequences to operate organically, outside the power of law. We can’t avoid dealing with these issues, they’re too important. But we also can’t trust the government to just settle it all and do all the work for us, again because it’s too important.

In particular, choosing to close discussion and forbid certain theories from any presence in public or academic spaces means (especially if you extend your efforts to restricting speech) forbidding a wide range of literature and philosophy and religion. If it is offensive and discriminatory to perpetuate any value theory that seriously contradicts and violates, for example, the current popular theory on gender, that it is not tied to biological sex, that is it malleable and constructed, that it depends on personal intuition for assignment and validation, then you would have to forbid the content of the majority of all religions and ideologies in the world, as well as the literature and philosophy of nearly the entirety of humanity, as fundamentally discriminatory. Because that has been the prevailing view of most cultures across most of history. You narrow down the acceptable intellectual input to a single moment. That doesn’t mean the theory isn’t right, but it does mean you’ve forbidden the mechanisms we possess as humans for figuring out whether something is right and for adding to and updating it. You may have succeeded in securing what you regard as a just outcome, but you’ve done it at the cost of subverting the mechanism by which you select and test outcomes.

And it simply seems to me that that’s a silly thing to do. Especially about really important matters. And that’s why our laws err in the side of protecting freedoms. They’re not trying to secure outcomes for us, that would be better served by interventionism and paternalism and authoritarianism. They’re attempting to secure opportunities for us to assume responsibility. Responsibility for the results of our beliefs and actions, good and bad, and the chance for everyone to see them. That is what American law really believes in, the power of responsibility.

When we close down the discussion, when there is nothing more to be learned, when no further growth or possible contradiction is possible nor desirable, and to contradict is the essence of immorality and antisocial behavior, when it is a danger to the very fabric of society, that is when we bring government to bear on an issue. It’s not a small matter.

Virtually all cultures have come to the conclusion that “thou shalt not steal”. That’s close to a human universal moral truth. “Your gender is whatever you feel that it is” does not make the grade as a human universal. So going to the tactical extreme of assigning legal penalties to speech that affirms a different viewpoint, and forbidding value systems that contradict it, is problematic. It’s hubristic and narrow minded and anachronistic.

It’s harder to make rules that everyone would be happy with than you would think. And insofar as a society is a kind of game, you need a playable game that most people can agree to and be included in and be reasonably happy with (or at least minimally unhappy). And there’s no way to guarantee that everybody wins and nobody loses, nor is that even a reasonable or desirable goal. In a world of choice and freedom and real agency, some things should win and some should lose.

The solution of America, in bringing in a lot of different players, was to try to keep the rules limited, mostly focused on maintaining boundaries and minimizing external interference, and maximizing freedom. That way the workable theories could flourish and survive and the unworkable theories could fail and perish, and the ecosystem could operate effectively to favor whatever worked and remove what didn’t. That’s how a flourishing ecosystem works.

The main contribution of America to philosophy was pragmatism, the theory of doing whatever works. If we worshipped anything in early America, it was competence. And we didn’t care that much who you were (especially compared to other cultures), only if you could get it done. If you could, then America was the place to do it. And so all kinds of people flocked to America to try out their theories and see if they could make it work.

The real wealth of America wasn’t in treasures or infrastructure, in those days. The Old World had far greater troves of wealth and architecture and craft and political and social systems than the new world. The wealth of America was in opportunity. And compared to virtually anywhere else, America had more of it than anywhere. In large part because of the structure and values of our system.

The shared religion of America was opportunity, responsibility, and consequences. We were a risk-taking, optimistic, creative, and courageous people. You had to be courageous, because you were assuming a risk. Safety was not guaranteed. Success could only be proved, nor mandated. But those times are past, and we have grown soft on our successes and started taking them for granted as a right. Time alone will tell what that will cost us.