Engineering, society and politics

One question that has been around at least since the time of the ancient Greeks -- and still not answered -- is how best to organize society.   The Greeks decided that the best way is to find a good leader & let him make the decisions, but this is the problem of belling the cat.  How can a society continually produce such people, especially given that power corrupts?

 

I like the idea of using science to guide us, of understanding how the world works & then using that understanding to build systems that work.  However, the world is hugely complex.  How do we know what decisions are arbitrary, where we can decide based on what we like, and which are constrained by the laws of nature?

 

In engineering, the answers to these questions are more obvious, at least to some extent.  Gravity provides a known force, materials have more or less known properties -- if you want to build a bridge, you can figure out the forces and the available materials and have a good idea if the thing will stand up.   There are still many free choices, where the physics doesn't constrain the choice, but the engineer has a good idea of what they are.

 

In politics, I think there is a tendency to think that almost all choices are free, when in fact, there are many constraints.  Nature, both human and not, imposes limits, which de facto we obey, but we don't necessarily realize why things work out as they do.

 

For example, I think there is a centripetal force to power.   In the absence of countervailing forces, those that have power tend to accumulate more.    One of these brakes is that those that have power tend to accumulate more, but in the modern age, the main thing that has produced somewhat more flat societies is the frontier.   People have been literally able to get up & move away when the powerful step on them too badly.    We are running out of frontiers, so the centralization of power is accelerating again.