Uh, the only instance of which I’m aware that anybody has ever “had to get a tattoo right now” was in Nazi concentration camps (and the like,) and they were not given a choice of subject matter. As I can’t imagine the scenario in which I had no say in having something etched on my body, but I could choose what was depicted, I don’t think it’s a meaningful question.
I am. I wish my country the best, am pained to see ailments of what have always been the country’s greatest strengths (the government being limited and at the command of the people and the law [rather than the other way around] and the courage to boldly lead by building the new technologies and adapting to the world that came to be,) and will not stop bitching about it unless and until the situation rights itself. When I was a young man, I served in the military and waved flags. Now, as an old man, I’m not eager to see America go gently into that good night.
I realize that may sound excessively Pollyanna about America’s past and pessimistic about the present / future. I do realize that the country has always had its flaws, as humanity always does. (And loved it all the same.) There have been missteps and mass movements that would later come to be viewed as wrongheaded and self-defeating. But we always had checks and balances, an Enlightenment norm for tolerance, and a respect for decorum and gravitas in our leaders. Now, as I see the “Putin-Orban Manual for New Populist-Nationalist Dictators” being played out, I wonder if the shark hasn’t been jumped on all that was good, honorable, and impressive in the America in which I grew up.
If such a situation were to avail itself, I would make a law so that no one person — even a high elected official — could change the law unilaterally. (Administrative policies for the bureaucracy not being laws, said high elected official could go to town on them.) Why? Because one person being able to change law is an affront to democracy and to the very concept of rule of law, and if we make it the object of fantasy to be able to do so we are cooked.
We had such a law in the US. It was called the Constitution, and it was glorious. It said that only the legislature (a body consisting of many representatives) could make law, and only the judiciary could interpret and evaluate the legality of a law. And it was okay that the executive was the least democratic of branches because it was to stay in the lane of enforcing the laws as they were written (and shaped by judicial interpretation,) and if the executive started getting too big for his britches, the legislature would turn off the flow of money.
So, my great fantasy is not to be able to unilaterally change law, but to have three functioning branches of government who stay in their own lanes, applying checks as (and only as) described in the Constitution.
I’m far less intense in my belief, allowing more room for nuance. The biggest change is seeing the value in a dialectical competition of ideas that would benefit from all political parties being at their most competent and making their most sound arguments. Unfortunately, both political parties where I live are – each in its own way — complete and utter shit.
I must create a system
william blake; Jerusalem: The emanation of the great albion
or be enslaved by another man’s…
Saying Yoga exists to make one more flexible
Me
is like saying that it exists to wring farts out of one’s body,
both will happen — neither is the primary objective.
He that is without sin among you,
JESUS; John 8:7
let him first cast a stone at her…
The best government is that which governs least.
Henry david thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Gods always behave like the people who make them…
zora neale hurston; Tell my horse
The Activist: A Daoist Protest Manual by Daniel Fried
New Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese Science Fiction Novel by Jianren WuWhat are you most worried about for the future?
A global rise in governance by populist authoritarians in which people give up abstract conceptual benefits like checks and balances and rule of law in exchange for the more tangible bread and circuses.
I’m not so concerned about the demographic crises because I think those long-scale issues work themselves out, just as when Malthus predicted the human population was growing too fast and global famine was inevitable.
I’m also not so worried about [G]AI because if we make machines that can crush us, we deserve to be crushed to make way for the new. That said, I think we are at the beginning of a crisis of modernity that will reach its apex when machines can do all productive tasks better than can humans. But, I’m pretty sure I’ll outrun that, and by choosing to focus on the art of being human, it’s not so impactful, personally.
Live Like A Philosopher: What the Ancient Greeks and Romans Can Teach Us About Living a Happy Life by Gregory LopezOf the universe of all possible actions, one can choose to attempt any (or refrain from any) but those curtailed by a small number of laws intended to keep one from impinging upon the freedoms of others or imposing costs / burdens on them to which they did not consent, or by self-imposed limitations (e.g. one’s own ethical belief system or one’s physical / mental limitations.)
Often it is wrongly confused with comfort. A maximally free society is not maximally comfortable for anyone, because one has to accept that others will make all sorts of choices that one would not make oneself (and that it’s none of your business.)
Tiger Riding for Beginners 