When one starts thinking about the organization of society, it is useful to have some kind of system to organize one’s thought and ideas. In some respects such a system is necessary, since without it the growing number of separate ideas will quickly lead to an inconsistent and entangled mess.
To develop a consistent vision on society, or even a part of it, is a difficult job on any terms. Those who achieve it are justly glad and proud, even more so if the system becomes successful in that it gets support from others. If successful, the system is susceptible to getting the name and reputation of an ideal. An ideal differs from an ordinary thought system, a model, in that an ideal is an invariable ultimate goal, and an ordinary thinking system is nothing more, or less, than a way to organize a number of specific observations and rules or measures into a coherent and consistent whole.
The word “ideal” has a strongly positive connotation, as also becomes clear from its use above. In it is a strong component of “improvement of the world”, a sunny future for us all. In this sense, an ideal fits into the rational vision developed here, since this vision also strives to improve the state of affairs of the present and future world.
The notion of ideal also has a component that is worth discussing. This component is the invariability in it. In many cases, invariability is a property that is very desirable to many people and in many circumstances, since it offers something to get a hold on in a world that is very variable and erratic in a lot of ways. However, when applied to thinking systems, models of the real world, this property of an ideal is anathema, just because the world is so variable. Every invariable model will sooner or later become incorrect and eventually counter-productive.
To the creator of the model of society its supposed invariability is rather an attractive property that will make him hold on to it the more intensely. It makes it difficult for him to take a distance from it, even if only partly; often creation and creator become one. Much of the unproductive infighting between scientists goes back to this phenomenon. And this fight becomes fiercer if the facts within the science become less clear, with the fiercest fights being those between theologians, sociologists etc. However, the most damaging are the ideals without any rationality, like the religious ones. In this field the fights are not limited to the creators of the ideas, but their followers also join in. The number of these followers and the fierceness of the fights mean that the number of victims runs into tens and maybe hundreds of millions.
This problem of the ideal is known to many. This has caused the emergence of a counter-movement of those who reject all forms of ideal or model. The counter-movement is even more dangerous than the ideal itself, since the rejection of the goal of a good future creates a fertile ground for all kinds of evil. This relation between movement and counter-movement is an example of the close relation between two opposites: the one maintains the other, and in this case neither of them is any good, just because they depend on two-valuedness: only the extremes exist.
The obvious method to circumvent the last problem is not to formulate any ideals, but to depend on general rules like the ones on the homepage as guidelines without absolute value. Competition may be desirable in many circumstances, even though this seems to violate the first rule. The validity of a rule is not hampered by a few exceptions, in fact, it is the rules without exceptions that are suspect, like "Anyone that is not a friend of mine, is an enemy". Next we will consider whether rules or models are applicable to our analysis of society
.
Go to Sociology list here
, all articles here
, site home here
.