Organizing Diversity

Question: How do we organize a society in which individuals do not know each other (or the families from which they came) and have different beliefs and goals?


Assumptions:

1. Individuality is important.

2. This is a modern society, in which choice matters.


The classic answers to the problem:


1. Markets

This is the prototypical right-of-center answer to the question. Note that markets are different from actors within markets. One might think that corporations are the same as markets, but they are only particular kinds of actors in the market. Furthermore, neither markets nor corporations are the same as capitalism. There were markets before capitalism, and there are actors within capitalist markets other than corporation. This is a modified conservative position, sometimes seen as neo-conservatism.


2. Bureaucracies

This is the prototypical left-of-center answer to the question. Government organization was the expression of general will, and so for some the overall good of society must be finally supported by an explicitly established general will like this, in which bureaucratic structures are answerable to political structures. The government (or some other expression of collective will other than a market) decides on a rational structure for the public good and has the authority to require people to adhere to it.

3. Tradition

This may simply be the denial of modernity entirely, or it may be the recognition that we cannot reflect on everything at all times, so there are some things we just have to do because those before us did them. Change, then, must happen slowly and incrementally. This is the classic conservative position - it "conserves" the past. It does not mean that there is necessarily no modernity, just that there are aspects of the way we did things in the past that are not easily understood, and so we cannot just overturn it and replace it with a newly rationalized way of doing things. We have socially evolved structures that are beneficial, even if we don't recognize them at the moment.

4. Convince everyone to believe the same way:

There are many attempts to get people to believe the same way.

a. Utopias

b. Programs of conversion (religious conversion, religious conquest)

c. Totalitarian governments

d. Genocide/ethnic cleansing/apartheid