How The "Culture War" Can Exist

The Mainstream Media is unreliable, we get nuggets of facts without proper context, at BEST, and complete propaganda (usually corporate, but sometimes government) on the regular. The "alternative" is usually Social Media, which has a few truth tellers... but mainly a mix of corporate censorship/social manipulation, self-inflicted Echo Chambers, propaganda, and lots of ego. Take all of this together and we get a world where the public has no reliable source of facts... so what is left to inform our decisions, to prioritize actions on... feelings. When facts become too hard to access, the world becomes a "choose your own adventure" of beliefs, conspiracies, and heavily biased/manufactured priorities. Nothing and everything is real.

So what do we do?

1) We need News/Media that is Publicly Funded and has no profit motive.

2) We need a new "Public Square", it can be digital but it must be free from Big Tech censorship/manipulation. We must create a space where robust discussions can take place with a focus on actual Problem Solving, not virtue signalling, not manufactured crises, not selling clicks.

3) As a Civilization, we must prioritize Scientific Consensus. We are always in a state of learning, but we must go on the BEST data/evidence, the HIGHEST state of understanding we have access to. We must all adopt a Bayesian Worldview, learning to live with uncertainty, but accepting that some things are more likely than others.

Evolutionary Law

We live in an age of Constitutional law. While it improved upon prior systems, we are now seeing the problems that arise from static and somewhat arbitrary proclamations. The contexts in which those laws were written are often completely different from modern concerns. Also, laws then and now are arbitrarily decided by powerful people with no requirement of true justification of why they need to be laws (although I will say the federalists and anti-federalist papers were a fairly robust discussion at the time of the creation of the Constitution, but it's rare at best). Couple all this with the fact that change is coming ever more swiftly as time passes, and we find ourselves in need of a modified/different system.

I suggest we layout the more static parts as our broad aspirations... health, freedom, safety, sustainability, reduction of suffering... or whatever we agree upon, and the rest of the laws must serve those ends, our Premises and Aspirations. As for the more everyday/practical laws, I think they need to 1) be justifiable to some level of standard we create (and perhaps sunset when no longer needed), 2) be adaptable to the variety of ways one could interact with the law, 3) be in alignment with science and evidence; that is they must be proven necessary, be context aware, and be in alignment with reality. Laws have always been interpreted, and to some degree will continue to be, but we need to ground as much of it as we can in reality, science, and public good. Laws might also need to be compounding; for instance if certain patterns of criminality are expressed, we adapt the sentencing accordingly. Let me be clear, I use the term "adaptable" in regards to the categorization and contextualization of the crime, the enforcement must be clearly pre-defined and unambiguous.

We cannot continue to let religions, corporations, and nefarious organizations use the law as simply a tool to give themselves undue advantage. Laws must be a part of a system; a discussed, debated, evidence-driven, and reasoned system... not arbitrary rules created by power-hungry authoritarians. It must become a science itself, evolving, improving our lives and itself with each iteration.