So, a treatise on why humans ****ing suck, but then why they don't:
So I play this game, Escape from Tarkov. It's possibly one of the most unique shooter concepts of this decade, basically it's a hardcore STALKER-esque online game. You shoot people, you take their stuff, they lose it. You die, you lose your stuff. Many more attempts at realism and a great atmosphere. Anyway, the game is still in active development. The developers communicate to the community and are responsive to ideas about when things are working or not working. I propose suggestions sometimes, and a couple of my ideas were even implemented.
This, in essence, becomes a public policy debate. The developers are kind of a government, the players are the subjects. Policy is decided through public discourse, in many respects. And this sucks.
People have a kind of problem dealing with any sort of effects that a change in-game might have. It's very, very hard to get anyone to see anything past the immediate effects of a change. Especially if the immediate effects are negative effects. Once that happens, reason is thrown out of the window and people become hostile, refusing to recognize the positive returns down the line.
Let me give you an example. In game, there's a secure container. What this means is, you have a small space to put items in, which you keep even when you die. This means that, whenever someone locates a valuable item, it immediately gets stowed away and no other player can touch it. This results in ways of playing the game that are toxic, namely deploying into the world with no gear, filling your secure container with as high value stuff as you can find until you either make it out or die. Since there's little consequence for doing this, it's considered kind of a scourge in the community.
What happens, though, if you suggest removing secure containers? How do people's minds process it? Well, they immediately hate the idea. Why? Because all that can be processed is the loss: "without my container, I will lose valuable items." But, what does reason suggest? Reason suggests that, actually, so long as you're an average player, the net effects of no containers will be nil. Because, just as often as you lose items which you would stow away, other players will lose items they would have stowed away as well. So you'll find more valuable items in addition to losing more, so it should average out.
But people can't reason this far to see how the long term effects of a policy would not actually effect this income. All they can see is the immediate loss, so their brain shuts off and they disagree.
It's the exact same with actual public policy, I feel. "Let's raise taxes to build up the infrastructure." Everyone says "**** no, I don't want to pay more". But what does "pay more" mean? I mean, if you piss the tax money away on funding the stock market, sure, you're paying more for nothing. But assuming the money is reasonably invested, do you really lose?
Possibly not. If the roads are more refined, you may get less wear on your car. More roads might mean commute times are shorter. Better infrastructure might mean more private investment, making your job more secure and bringing more business. Cleaner water and more diverse food access might mean less visits to the doctor later. Maybe you can't even explain exactly the causes, but maybe pure statistical reasoning shows the benefits either way.
But these things are an argument: they require reason, thought, something past first impulses. So long as people don't step back and reason through further consequences, such policies can't get off the ground. So humans ****ing suck.
But they don't. Humans in modern time have repeatedly educated themselves on economic issues and fought for them before. What's lacking is collective intellectual culture among common Americans. Such a thing has existed, in some places does exist, and in the future will exist. But what's required is the cultural backbone to grow this culture off of, in spite of efforts by some actors to defeat it.
Treatise done.