Most people are open-minded when it comes to the natural world. There is some, but relatively minor, public controversy regarding, for example, the laws of physics. However, as soon as the topic turns to society or politics, people’s minds tend to narrow, and they tend to be certain beyond reasonable doubt that their views are correct.
In politics, people tend to be confident when they ought not to be. As such, they are similar to the medieval mapmakers who used to fill in the blanks of uncharted territories. “Let’s put a dragon over here… and a sea monster over here… and aha! If you sail west from Portugal, you will end up in India. No question about it!”.
What revolutionized the world was the ability to acknowledge what we do not know. This prevented us from jumping to conclusions and encouraged us to carefully investigate. Instead of speculating and making things up, acknowledging our ignorance made us go out there and actually look. Doing so initiated the scientific revolution: we left our dogmatism behind, and the world has not been the same ever since.
Just as we took a step back in cartography, we should also take a step back in our quest to understand society. Do we really know all there is to know? Have we visited and carefully mapped every part of the societal “world”? How many dragons do we have on our map?
“Societal world? Map of society? What are you talking about?” What I mean is this. Imagine the set of all possible social systems. It contains every system that we can imagine and conceive. Examples include the hunter-gatherer system, the tribal system, feudalism, empires, markets, the employer-employee relationship, slavery, ownership, capitalism, state capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, resource-based economies, democracy, and fascism. It contains all the systems that ever were, are, and will be. It also includes all the systems that will never be and those we will never think of.
This is an enormous set. So far, we have only tried a handful of what’s possible — the majority remains unexplored — like the cosmos and medieval Earth. There may be entire continents out there that we don’t know about.
Looking at this behemoth, who could confidently say that we have explored all there is to explore? Or worse, who could, with conviction, say that “this system here is the best possible system!” The amount of evidence required to substantiate such a claim is almost unfathomable. Despite this, most people fill in the blanks: claiming to know what we don’t know.
Consider what it would take to really explore the social realm. We would need something similar to the Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan project, or the Apollo program. We would need huge dedicated land areas to experiment with new social and economic systems, thousands of scientific minds to perform those experiments and tens of thousands of volunteers. As far as I know, nothing like this has ever been done. And without doing so, what do we have to show for making our map? We have barely even set sail yet confidently fill in the blanks.
I suspect that partly what makes us do so is that our lives depend on politics and society. In other areas, we tend to let ideas be what they are since they are unlikely to worsen our lives. The workings of an electron don’t bother us since we don’t see how it could affect us. But, when it comes to society, ideas can be dangerous. We may find our lives worsened due to ideas implemented on a political level. Political views can harm us in ways that other ideas cannot, so we try to steer the ship best we can — even though we may not know where to go.
“So, what are you saying? Are you asking me not to care? Or to not touch the steering wheel?” No. I simply want to remind you that there are things we don’t know, with the hope of making you more open-minded. This does not mean we should go headlong into the abyss or eagerly start driving down the highway to hell. It would, for example, be unwise to remove the institution of money or the government rapidly on a Monday morning to see what happens. Instead, we need to have a careful scientific approach. Create theories and ratify them with experiments. Once we have some promising ideas, we don’t have to start by plunging entire nations into the experiment. We can start small with some local communities or individuals who volunteer. Similar to what is being tried and has been tried with, for example, Universal Basic Income. Try it small before trying it big, and if small looks good, we can try a bit bigger.
Acknowledging our ignorance allows us to see things from new perspectives, even if they don’t fully align with our preconceived political or societal views. Let’s acknowledge the dragons in the room and ask what we truly know about society: empirically and theoretically. In the worst case, we can always re-paint the dragons.
