To Fix What’s Broken, Start Here.

I narrate key points in my post “How Do We Fix What’s Broken?”

It is an irony of power that codes and technocratic regulations are no substitute for a moral foundation, as self-interested oligarchs that command the political-legal structures of control can easily establish loopholes or simply ignore laws to gain their desired outcomes. As I often note, what’s legal is moral and what’s legal is for sale.

This brings us to waving the hammers of technological “solutions” and technocratic “policy tweaks” to the problem of cutting a board, i.e. re-establishing a moral foundation in a zeitgeist of moral rot so deep and so profound that it’s unnoticed. Everyone is selling hammers because self-interest is all that matters and indeed, all that exists in a system devoid of moral foundations.

When you mention moral decay or moral rot, the response is either the silence of incomprehension–what do you mean, moral rot? This is just the way the world works–or you get a frenzy of hammers being waved: here are 450 pages of AI-generated policy tweaks that would solve all the problems of the collapse of the moral foundations of our civilization by adding more codes and layers of compliance and enforcement.

Since moral foundations don’t exist in our belief structures about how the world works, we are currently incapable of “fixing what’s broken” because what’s broken is invisible to us. If we say moral foundations are like gravity, a power we cannot see, then our response is to demand instruments to measure the moral equivalent of gravitons that “explain” how moral foundations work in a technocratic flow chart that we can manipulate to our advantage–the exact opposite of an authentic moral foundation.

To fix what’s broken, we must first be able to see what’s broken. Until we can manage that, all our “solutions” are simply manifestations of civilizational psychosis. We are so lost we’re unaware we’re lost, and so we keep claiming pounding nails in things with a hammer is the solution when what we need is to saw boards.