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Not sure if this is the right forum, but its a rough philosophical question. Even though I admittedly present it as a bit of a diatribe.
There is a popular sentiment on this forum that I strongly question. That is the idea that everyone can make their own best personal decisions and that relying on expertise or experienced judgment is somehow an affront to human dignity.
While it is true that nobody knows your situation like you, the idea of a person knowing the best solution to their own problems is simply not demonstrated in practice. If it were true, then we would all know how to be rich, have an adonis like body, have no personal or emotional issues, have simply the most amazing friends, find the perfect mate, and be as perfectly healthy as our genes would allow us to be. In my experience so far in this life, i know of exactly 0 people in this situation, so we need to seriously rethink this position.
The simple truth is that everyone has a ton of problems that they don't know what to do about. The other simple truth is that what is hard for one person to do might be trivial for another. For example, I very much doubt I could successfully engineer optimal traffic patterns for stop lights in even a small town without significant training. Right now I am dealing with a health issue that its taken me six months just to figure out what might be wrong. I am constantly trying to devise ways to increase my income, while some are great at it. Etc. We all live in a world where there are people around all of us that simply know better than us on any number of subjects.
So what's wrong with leveraging this expertise? What is so offensive about the idea that you might have to yield to greater experience or ability? We do it all the time. I am good with people, but my boss is GREAT at managing people and I rely on him a lot for example. I am somewhat organized but my SO is extremely organized. Simply being human is not an affront to dignity, its simply recognizing that a single person is finite and usually extremely limited (we can maybe do 1% or 1% of all possible things in our current society well) and as a group we can leverage another's expertise and ability.
Given this, there is nothing wrong with being in a society that is regulated, so long as those regulations are sensible and open enough that we don't have to all march to the same drummer, which can very much stifle positive group and individual dynamics. This is actually a positive because together we can do much much more. And a society that creates rules (and yes the enforcement of those rules) based on past experiences is an ok thing for the same reasons. Sure it means we might have to give up a few things that might not meet our ideal, but again because we are limited and we don't always know best for ourselves, we typically gain more then we lose.
There is something to be said for being part of a society that isn't a minarchy, we gain a lot from it and strengthen our individual weaknesses in ways I don't think many people care to realize.
There is a popular sentiment on this forum that I strongly question. That is the idea that everyone can make their own best personal decisions and that relying on expertise or experienced judgment is somehow an affront to human dignity.
While it is true that nobody knows your situation like you, the idea of a person knowing the best solution to their own problems is simply not demonstrated in practice. If it were true, then we would all know how to be rich, have an adonis like body, have no personal or emotional issues, have simply the most amazing friends, find the perfect mate, and be as perfectly healthy as our genes would allow us to be. In my experience so far in this life, i know of exactly 0 people in this situation, so we need to seriously rethink this position.
The simple truth is that everyone has a ton of problems that they don't know what to do about. The other simple truth is that what is hard for one person to do might be trivial for another. For example, I very much doubt I could successfully engineer optimal traffic patterns for stop lights in even a small town without significant training. Right now I am dealing with a health issue that its taken me six months just to figure out what might be wrong. I am constantly trying to devise ways to increase my income, while some are great at it. Etc. We all live in a world where there are people around all of us that simply know better than us on any number of subjects.
So what's wrong with leveraging this expertise? What is so offensive about the idea that you might have to yield to greater experience or ability? We do it all the time. I am good with people, but my boss is GREAT at managing people and I rely on him a lot for example. I am somewhat organized but my SO is extremely organized. Simply being human is not an affront to dignity, its simply recognizing that a single person is finite and usually extremely limited (we can maybe do 1% or 1% of all possible things in our current society well) and as a group we can leverage another's expertise and ability.
Given this, there is nothing wrong with being in a society that is regulated, so long as those regulations are sensible and open enough that we don't have to all march to the same drummer, which can very much stifle positive group and individual dynamics. This is actually a positive because together we can do much much more. And a society that creates rules (and yes the enforcement of those rules) based on past experiences is an ok thing for the same reasons. Sure it means we might have to give up a few things that might not meet our ideal, but again because we are limited and we don't always know best for ourselves, we typically gain more then we lose.
There is something to be said for being part of a society that isn't a minarchy, we gain a lot from it and strengthen our individual weaknesses in ways I don't think many people care to realize.
