The Sometimes-Useful-Things

We have run into the habit of calling practices and heuristics useful in of themselves. Manners, codes of conduct, systems of communication, social structures, law, everything seems to have brought us one step closer to the pinnacle of humanity we presume to have reached. (This might be true -- I am the last person to bother myself with subjective evaluations of whether we are greater for who we are or not). 

I contend the assumption that these 'advancements' are really advancements in of themselves. We tend to look at things in an additive manner. Law made things better than they were before it. Same goes for etiquette, family structures, democracy and what-not. I strongly believe that they do not have any inherent utility. They interact with each other in complex ways. Calling one of them innately useful is like calling one card in a House of Cards innately capable of holding weight if suspended in the air at 30 degrees. The universe's laws are apathetic to the human condition and these 'advancements' are therefore not designed upon any natural law. They just are. There is a very real Darwinian evolution of customs and ideologies. The victors are not inherently the fittest but only those most suited to survive.

I feel we need to divorce the inherent qualities of these entities from the utility they provide. Standing in a queue and maintaining order is an efficient solution when there is promise of receiving what you wait for. The same practice will be discarded without a second thought when rushing into city-gates as an invading army approaches. Consideration and empathy makes life better for all of us but the same emotional energy might be rationed in more trying times. I am obviously not commenting on what is right but simply what serves the purpose of a group when traced to an individual level. 

Being cognizant of this makes us humbler not only when judging objections against certain practices but also when looking at other cultures and our history.

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How do our ideologies evolve?

Living a life with a certain ideology is about figuring out how to best reach your goal. Even with the same goal (e.g. happiness) people will vehemently disagree on how to go about it. This is mostly because out of a superset of all factors (things that need you to make a conscious decision: outlook on money, sex, friends, etc.), a particular strategy focuses on a certain set of factors, usually closely linked with each other. Optimization means that advantaging these could disadvantage others (e.g. work hard for money, less time for yourself). What this helps us realize is that no one factor can be said to have an intrinsic need to be more or less which is what we inevitably keep doing when discussing things like love, jobs, ambition, family, etc.

This is why at no point in your life will you be suddenly aware of how wrong you are and immediately change on the basis of new data (which should logically happen because if something works, something works). The data that comes from others in form of their beliefs and philosophies and actions might seem completrly wrong right now and will be exactly what you do a few years from today. Why? Your net of variables and priorities currently did not  allow you to see the pattern that would emerge with another set of variables. You saw that 'd, 'm', and 'x' should be prioritized but your current strategy works on synthesis of 'a', 'b' and 'c' and the change would totally ruin the results you are getting with 'a', 'b' and 'c'.

You will fall and stumble and experiment until each set of variables and priorities is progressively more favourable to you. That is life.