The Importance of Humility & Staying Aware of Unintended Social Consequences in Prescribing Social Change
Today's feature topic is to read Toby Rogers' Substack today, particularly, his Thinking Points Memo section on "Sin".
Although this Substack is focused on post-pandemic changes, it’s important to stay humble in recommendations and realize the risk with any social change is that unintended consequences might cause worse outcomes. Seeking counterpoints and maintaining the humility to graciously welcome them is important. Toby Rogers’ Substack is great, I recommend subscribing to it.
There are some great books I’ve read that elaborate on examples of unintended consequences, particularly in the area of social welfare, education, and health insurance. One writer that focused on this a lot was the Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman. I’ll grow this piece as time goes by. Hopefully some comments will guide us. I wanted to get this on the Substack today.
https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/thinking-points-memo
Sin“It occurred to me today that the conservative Christian concept of sin is profound and revolutionary. They acknowledge the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that I MIGHT BE WRONG. A conservative will stand up in a group of people and say I AM A SINNER — often without anything in particular to atone for at the moment. There is a built in humility there that goes a long way toward acknowledging the world as it really is — a mixture of darkness and light within each and every person. The progressive worldview has nothing of the sort (I say this as someone who comes out of the progressive movement). The progressive worldview is that ‘I am getting better and better always’ — like the revenue chart of a profitable company. Sure, they’ll admit things privately to a licensed psychologist and are filled with self-loathing every time they compare themselves to the Joneses next door. But in public, the progressive is infallible. The problem is always THEM — whether that be oil companies, Trump supporters, or ‘those disease carrying anti-vaxxers’. It explains the total inability of progressive institutions — FDA, CDC, NIH — to ever admit that they were wrong. The entire concept of personal fallibility is anathema to the progressive mindset. So you can have revolutions (‘I am all light, they are all darkness’) but not Shakespeare, not MacBeth, not the turmoil of a man divided against himself. It’s why political correctness is so cartoonish and uninteresting — it ignores the richness and nuance of actual human experience.”