> I'd been a typical HN-reading, Ayn Rand-quoting, John Galt aspiring-libertarian. Slowly, I began to realize the role of luck and circumstance. I used to look down on the poor, writing them all off as lazy and not willing to work. "How dare they be poor and have a TV!", I used to think.
Wow. I've come to expect a certain level of hypocrisy from a lot of libertarians, but this is a pretty stark example of it. By all rights, you qualified as one of the "moochers," yet you were perfectly happy to denounce those like you.
I've come to expect hypocrisy from anyone with a strongly held value set. Progressives touting 'diversity' while living in the suburbs and paying exorbitant amounts to send their kids to all-white private schools, conservatives railing about government overreach while trying to enact 'morality' laws, libertarians looking down on moochers while living under a different safety net.
This happens because we hold values. The easiest way not to be a hypocrite is not to have any. I find it's better to have values, get called out on violating them, and try to improve, than it is to have none. YMMV.
>> I've come to expect hypocrisy from anyone with a strongly held value set.
I think that succinctly sums it up.
The problem with "values" is that they are an excuse to never have to think critically. Something comes up, you just tag it with a "value" and act accordingly. It simple, it works, and you never have to think!
I don't understand what part of thinking is so taxing that you can't take a couple minutes to make up your mind on each issue vs using big blanket statements to run your life.
I get where you are coming from on this, but honestly sometimes things are just subclasses (in the programming sense) of something that you have thought a lot about and ultimately completely rejected.
For example: "The government should sometimes run things that private industry can run and compete upon" is the super class of "the government should run envelope delivery" so why should I not just dismiss the second statement immediately if I firmly dismiss the first?
Sometimes edge cases pop up, but why waste the time to go through the cycles of reiterating all the same points?
Because firmly dismissing such a broad statement is rarely correct. Life is full of subtlety and ambiguity. There are no concrete laws of life like there are laws of physics. To simply state that something so general is treu or false is to refuse to consider that individual situations won't fit within such clean theoretical lines.
There's nothing wrong with values and principles. It's almost impossible to reason through everything in life completely, since everything is so complex. Values and principles give you something to fall back on when reason runs out. The trouble comes when people use values and principles as an excuse to not even bother trying to reason through things, as you are advocating here. Values and principles are simply heuristics. They can work decently in some cases, but when something better than a basic heuristic is available, you want to use it.
Glad to share it. And don't make me quote Francisco's Money Speech! :)
>By all rights, you qualified as one of the "moochers," yet you were perfectly happy to denounce those like you.
This is one of the things that worries me the most about human nature. Luckily, I've stumbled upon LessWrong which has dramatically improved my thinking. But I constantly have to ask myself, "Where are my blind spots?"
Wow. I've come to expect a certain level of hypocrisy from a lot of libertarians, but this is a pretty stark example of it. By all rights, you qualified as one of the "moochers," yet you were perfectly happy to denounce those like you.
Thanks for sharing your story.