History Rhymes

Putting Current Events into Historical Context, Looking at Historical Parallels

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Reality

One way to look at things is to lay out a concept of a perfect system, then compare existing systems to it and point out their flaws.  Another way is to look at existing systems, figure out where they are good, where they work well, where they are bad, how they work poorly, then look for ways to improve these.

And perhaps we can adopt the perfect system.  Or perhaps we can test variations on existing systems, discarding what is bad or poor, keeping what is good and extending it.

There is apparently no need to test the perfect system, adopt it straight away.  Create something new and untried.  Trial and error is slow, but this is how civilization has grown and progressed.  It is how evolution of plants and animals works.

Imagined utopias like Communism and Fascism have a bad track record.  Plodding American free democracy has a pretty good record.  Its flaws are worth putting up with compared to the perfect destruction that comes with the dream systems.