The four Rs

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.

George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913)


A core frustration of political debate centres around systems. Political activists are system-driven but all human systems are corruptible so the person who knows this is saddled with a permanent disadvantage when it comes to political debates.

The disadvantage shows itself when trying to demonstrate a contrast between freedom under the law and political systems which constrain that freedom in pursuit of a claimed social improvement. More laws they demand – always more laws.

There are always reasons to constrain freedom because freedom is always abused and there always appear to be ways in which the abuse could have been prevented. If systems were not abused we wouldn’t be human. Unfortunately political activists have the advantage of claiming their system will cure abuses as against a more tolerant position where abuses are merely constrained. Snake oil still sells.

To take an imaginary but plausible example –

We could suggest that reading, writing, arithmetic and roots are to be the four Rs of early education, roots being history, why we are where we are. To my mind this is as important as the other three because modern people appear to have no idea of how we arrived at the modern world and within this lack of knowledge political fantasy spins its slimy web.

Wouldn’t work though would it? History would turn out to be a woke version of history. Any system may be corrupted. There is no point devising a system and expecting the system itself to do the heavy lifting. Not an easy angle to take with system fans though.