To Be a Progressive

Progressives are not in charge of country. Do you know what a Progressive is? A Progressive is someone who sees the arc of human history and notices that while history never quite repeats itself, it does rhyme. And by that, I mean that history can be divided into organic and critical periods. In organic system, society function as according to the framework laid at the last generational cycle, which set the rules for this iteration of the social drama. In the critical period, the flaws of the old system have built up and are observed and corrected for in the next generational cycle, and it is in these periods of time that critical decisions are made in the course of history. These naturally happen at crises points, because of the inherent inertia, the inherent conservatism, of the human race--it is hard to move such a dis-unified collection of interests towards one goal. Over these cycles of history, society reproduces itself based upon a mold of the old with a synthesis of new stimuli and facts which have been learned about the world. We learn from what has been done in the past, and we build better and more beautiful things, but we also grow wiser. In critical periods of the history of civilization, the end of ancient slave based economies, the rise of feudalism, the subsequent overthrow of the feudal lords by the mercantile class, and the successive displacement and evolution of the mercantile class into the modern capital factor owning capitalist class of the modern economy. In every historical period, society is of course structured based upon the aggregate of interests, but naturally, reasonable, those who have the greatest power, i.e. those who own the means of economic production, exert the greatest influence upon this reproduction. As the externalities and inefficiencies of each system have piled, more and more we have learned the cost of our early mistakes. The cost and inefficiency of repressing our fellow man, and the destructiveness caused by selfish behavior. The benefits of specializiation and social cooperation. Yet, we have not learned all the lessons we might learn. And like all technology (or applications of knowledge), our social arrangements, the manner in which we reproduce the executioners of productive economic capacity and political leadership, and the determinant of our direction as a culture, are ongoing and have objective consequences. These consequences could be serving the greatest possible utility to the capacities of will of the greatest number of humans in our society, but they do not. They do not, because we are imperfect, and ever-improving in our communications technologies, and because of the deficiencies of our existing communications technologies (words have a limit to what they can express, and each person grasps their own apprehension of an event or object). Yet, the Progressive desires this end, desires the maximization of human capacity, and desires the social state and cycles necessary to attain it. He wishes to break society of the negative cycles, and wishes to create positive ones that will reinforce societies ability to reproduce changes that will ever onward produce an integral of increasing bounty towards an arrangement that, limit theory and trail-and-error evolutionary theory suggest, approaches the maximum possible utility to human capacities to actualize their respective wills. That is the intrinsic goals of all rational peoples, the reason and end to which society must logically be constructed, and the end to which Progressives want to orient the status quo system to evolve towards. The means to that end are incidental to the system as it exists in the contemporaneous