
Posted in reply to the post by Dixon:
I don't intend to get caught up in this contentious discussion. I haven't the time for it. I haven't even read most of the posts, especially the lnger ones, and I'm not going to. So what I'm about to say is not particularly well-informed on the specific issues or arguments, and if I make a fool of myself--well, it wouldn't be the first time. But FWIW, I wanna say something about what looks to be the main psychological/social dynamic driving this dispute:
Most people in just about any population are about averagely intelligent. Half of the people in a population are of lower than average intelligence. Even most intelligent people don't have enough expertise in most areas of study to make very wise decisions, whether the area be medicine, fixing our cars, home repairs, or whatever. That's why we have experts to handle these things. Experts have their shortcomings, and some of them are inept or dishonest, but reliance on them is necessary in any society more complex than the Old Stone Age.
Reliance on people with expertise in public planning is more essential than ever in a world beset by huge, urgent, even unprecedented problems. Individual action, which is often shaped by ignorance, false beliefs, narrow self-interest and lack of foresight without the balancing factor of planning expertise is largely responsible for the multiple messes we as a species have created and must, unfortunately, be increasingly controlled in certain ways for the greater good, lest we continue to work at cross purposes and drag ourselves down to ultimate disaster. The American (and to some extent, global) way of life which includes astoundingly wasteful and destructive habits (habits which I need to change too) is simply not sustainable.
Are some rules wrongheaded, needlessly restrictive, even oppressive? Sure, but that doesn't refute the need for educated planning, nor the need for enforcement of the rules in the inevitable cases wherein people will resist. Rules which prevent us from killing each other through extreme levels of pollution (caused by single-family vehicles, spread-out communities, and other factors) are not essentially different from rules which prevent us from killing each other with knives or guns. But the destructiveness of, e.g., lifestyle factors which increase pollution is harder to see than the destructiveness of knives and guns, as is the need for rules to control such behaviors. This is especially true when our vision is blinkered by the distorting influence of narrow self-interest ("my property values will go down"), religious dogma, manipulation of public perceptions by entrenched industries, psychological defense mechanisms including denial, and the natural human inertia that makes it seemingly impossible to change deep-seated habits.
Does the necessary amount of social control increase the power of some factions of government at the expense of some of our freedoms? Yup. Does it increase the profits of some at the expense of others? Yup. Will that be abused in some cases? Yup. But it doesn't logically follow that the policies were primarily motivated by those intentions. If you think it does, your logic is simply fallacious.
When the main argument people make against something seems to be based on the assumption that anything which causes them to lose money or change how they live or experience much discomfort must be wrong, I see what the Critical Thinking community refers to as "egocentric and sociocentric thinking", i.e., self-centeredness. There is no moral or effective response to the huge crises we as a species face that doesn't involve lots of difficulty, lots of restraint (self- or otherwise) and, yes, lots of properties losing financial value. If you have specific criticisms of specific policies, fine, take that up as an issue. But if your position is that society (we as a group) doesn't have the right to enforce upon us necessary restrictions we don't like, it's time for you to evolve a little and look past your "rights" (which may not reasonably even be rights) to see what we need to do to secure a livable world for our grandkids. In other words, let's try to replace narrow self-interest with enlightened self-interest, which sees the common good as good for each individual.