But the world’s most technologically advanced civilization was built by politics and institutions that killed and displaced the native Americans then glorified that effort in movies and television. The guys who built the moon rocket and silicon valley grew up playing cowboys and indians.
Nothing is pure. You are ignoring quite a lot, and quite a lot that distinguishes that society and its peers different from than the others, far less accomplished.
The question is not purity, but facing our own faults, personal and societal, do we give up and indulge them or do we keep our vision and confidence and keep improving?
You're moving the goalposts. You made a good point earlier: "for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers."
We know what "politics and institutions" created the CO2 scrubbers (i.e. our present technologically advanced and prosperous society). It was the ones that displaced and killed the native americans and celebrated it in movies. By your own logic, we should be teaching how to maintain those politics and institutions, so we maintain our prosperity. Insofar as there is any point in learning about history, surely it is learning about what has worked?
This is silly. The 'society' has done very, very many things over the centuries (including other awful ones - slavery, Japanese-American internment, segregation, oppression in Latin America and elsewhere, climate change, etc etc). To pick one and say it's necessary to CO2 scrubbers is just a rhetorical/philosophical game.
That can be fun - we're on HN after all - and even informative to explore, but is not tied to reality.
The point I’m trying to get at is that you seem to be trying to smuggle “liberty and justice” in under the cover of CO2 scrubbers. But the same “politics and institutions” that created our technologically advanced, prosperous society, also did those other things. Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approach that has made the U.S. successful. So why fix what isn’t broken?
Thanks for clarifying - I didn't know what you were after.
> Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approach that has made the U.S. successful. So why fix what isn’t broken?
To say taking away people's freedoms and lives "isn't broken" is obviously part of the philosophical game.
If you mean to posit the old Faustian choice: If doing such things is required for power, should we do them? Do the ends justify the means? It's a challenging hypothetical, of course, but these days it's extremely overdone, widely used by bad people as a propaganda assault in order to seize power, and now some fools take them seriously. I'm bored with it, and taking them seriously is obviously ridiculous and dangerous.
The interesting part gets little discussion, and is far more interesting because it applies to reality: How do we take care of all of people's needs: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for all? Cutting the specs down to 'my needs' or 'many people's needs but destroy the rest' is just the corruption of power.
Some of the answer is low-hanging fruit, provided by generations before us, especially in our free democracy. Some needs to be discussed. Shall we start?
