The Illusion of Design

Given a philosophical choice between the systems of preformationism and epigenesis, I choose epigenesis every time. And the reason I do is because I have the entire larger universe empirically backing my choice, pretty much since the beginning of time itself.

Which is to say, practically everything in the Made World that is of good design... was not designed.

Inventions rarely have actual inventors, but evolve out of a flock of outcomes and developments that are in rapid florescence. The Internet was not designed. The mobile computer market was not designed. The telecomm, media, oil, coal, steamship, rail, road services were not designed. Social safety nets were not designed.

They all evolved from prior ratcheted systems that unfolded on their own, from the bottom up.

Keep in mind that the term evolve is originally from the Latin e- (out of ) volvere (to roll). The idea is to unfold, to unroll, like a scroll, or a leaf, or a flower.

Anyone who has been involved in design will tell you that 90% of anything designed (things and systems, networks, and institutions) are shit.

The ones that are not shit are designed taking advantage of, and from, an already evolved system.

If you think that our current system as a representative republic sucks? Blame James Madison, and the other Founding Fathers, because it was designed. This is not to denigrate Madison, who came up with a slick as snot design, based upon his own observations of the failures of past republics.

His answer to the problems of factionalism and the dreaded mob rule of direct democracy (knowing that the more local the control, the worse the dictatorship) was to borrow a Copernican system of satellite states revolving about a strong federal sun.

That system lasted all of four score and seven years.  The Madisonian solar system turned in the Lincolnian system - tweaked by turning up the dial of solar gravity and reigning in the wild horse packs of the states. In a classic arms race, the states, in turn, became loose agglomerations of regional orbiting worlds. Planets and moons, Trojan asteroid groups, if you will. And today, for example, we have the moon states of the southeast and the mid-atlantic orbiting about the Jupiter of Virginia. We have the southwest and northwest reluctantly in tow behind California. Regionalism is the response to a stronger federal sun.

So, evolved, in some sense, but still within the parameters of the designed Constitution. And the main purpose of the Constitution is to make it as hard as possible to govern. As a result, is it any wonder that things suck so badly, because everything takes forever to get done.

Is it any wonder that the two worst people in the world for the position of President of the United States of America have been given the presumptive nomination?

One rather wishes for demarchy, but that, too, if you are not careful, is a designed system...