> What bar would you judge a society by besides other societies? Idealized futuristic utopias?
Yes, obviously. You have an ideal of where you want to be, and you strive towards it, knowing that you may never get there, but that steps towards it are good. How else would we judge our infinite efforts as a citizen improving our country, and progress over time thereof? Criticizing others and sitting back and feeling good about ourselves for doing nothing but at least we're better off (for the moment) than some hypothetic far-off country that exists under different circumstances?
> I don't really agree we should be most critical of our own society. We should be critical of the society that deserves the most criticism.
I don't really agree that we should focus criticism on where it's unlikely to effect change. Criticism is, at best, a means to an end, and at worst, an attack aimed at others to distract and avoid change ourselves. If we aren't actively working towards that end, our criticism is useless or counterproductive. In the case of a country other than our own, actively working towards that end is unlikely, so the criticism being useless or counterproductive is likely.
> How else would you aim your infinite efforts as a citizen of your country?
The problem with aiming for utopia is you don’t understand the problems. People in 1100 couldn’t really conceive of an obesity epidemic and the founding fathers didn’t understand the issues with political parties or lifetime nomination to the Supreme Court.
Instead you can understand the local situation and aim for something slightly better. Rather than trying to have nationalized healthcare system what if we lower the age for social security eligibility to 60/55 or add kids under 18 etc.
> The problem with aiming for utopia is you don’t understand the problems.
I have never found that to be a "problem with aiming for utopia", so maybe it's purely a personal problem with your ability to aim. Achieving something slightly better is possible whether you're aiming for "something slightly better" or something more, so it's not like aiming high affects your ability to achieve low (it definitely doesn't).
As for understanding the situation, etc., that all comes with what I was saying before, which is that criticism should be aimed at where it can affect change. If you can't effect change with criticism, the criticism is counterproductive.
Politically revolutions are probably the best example where people fought really hard to improve things wholesale and then ended up with Mow, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.
Aiming for Utopia has a terrible track record because we don’t actually know how such societies would function under the hood just superficial details that seem like a good idea. What seems like perfection from far away is often premature optimization.
Smaller changes may not work, but they are much easier to roll back. This isn’t simply criticism for criticism’s sake there real lessons to be learned here and concrete steps we can take. See the constitutional amendment banning alcohol and then it’s repeal and then repeating those mistakes with the drug war. etc etc
I haven't found any of your claims to be true. Aiming for utopia is how we've achieved literally everything as humans from cavemen to now. Though you're cherry picking the worst of humanity, the best of humanity also came from aiming for utopia. Indeed, all the terrible rulers you mentioned could have been from people not aiming for utopia.
Larger aims may not be achievable, but they're how we get smaller changes. There is indeed criticism for criticism's sake (a lot of people use it to distract from improvement efforts). If we stick with that, we'd never have repealed prohibition because people would be worried about, "what if we repealed it the wrong way, we shouldn't aim for a utopia where alcohol prohibition is repealed, we should aim for something smaller, like 1% beer, repealing prohibition is just a utopia we'll never achieve".
Welp, turns out aiming for the utopia is how we repealed prohibition. We imagined the world we wanted, and we made a part of it happen, and none of it was due to criticizing other countries.
Let's just take as an example, a criticism you have of a different country. You can come up with the example. Just explain how your criticism has lead to making our own country better than it was. Remember: that's the only valid positive use of criticism: improving our reality.
> Aiming for utopia is how we’ve achieved literally everything as humans from cavemen to now.
That’s objectively false. Many advancements have come from people aiming for personal prestige, wealth, or a host of lesser goals. Even ugly things like coercion have played a major role in moving humanity forward. The raw materials for the Industrial Revolution were often sourced from less than ethical approaches.
Utopia just isn’t what motivates most people to do most things, it’s lesser goals like lunch or impressing some girl at a party. On the other hand Utopia is often sold as an excuse for people to do unpleasant things today for some future reward. Cults thrive on Utopia, society runs on more concrete objectives.
> Welp, turns out aiming for the utopia is how we repealed prohibition.
False.
Many people who worked to repeal prohibition still thought the world would be better without alcohol, you can read people who actually argued this, they just didn’t know how to make it work. By giving up on perfection they achieved a beneficial change.
Again society is really complex. It’s likely some rule to be part of a perfect society and doing the opposite to be an improvement today. Euthanasia wouldn’t be part of a perfect society because there wouldn’t be pain or suffering in a perfect society. It’s a compromise and an important one.
> Let's just take as an example, a criticism you have of a different country. You can come up with the example. Just explain how your criticism has lead to making our own country better than it was. Remember: that's the only valid positive use of criticism: improving our reality.
I don’t run things. But if you want a real example of a criticism benefiting the USA, how about giving women the right to vote.
> Many advancements have come from people aiming for personal prestige, wealth, or a host of lesser goals
Those are all personal utopias of the people involved. Beyond that, many advancements have come from people aiming for explicitly societal utopias.
> Many people who worked to repeal prohibition still thought the world would be better without alcohol, you can read people who actually argued this, they just didn’t know how to make it work. By giving up on perfection they achieved a beneficial change.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Many people believed the utopia of a repealed prohibition was unachievable. It was only by ignoring these "utopia shunners" that we achieved that aspect of the utopia we set out to achieve, with prohibition repealed.
Again, society is truly complex. It's only by aiming for the better that we get better. Just take, for example, your inability to cite an example of how criticizing another country has led to you improving yours. That just proves my point: it likely hasn't, because it usually doesn't.
Indeed, we've completely abandoned that claim, and are now reduced to a claim about utopian vs subutopian goals, entirely omitting anything about other countries. By doing so, we're now discussing how to improve ours. QED.
Ah, but it is, regardless of your personal word gatekeeping!
> It’s not any improvement but actual perfection.
I'm not confident they preferred just "any improvement" over the ideal state, but rather they set out for the ideal, and what they achieved was just how far they got towards that ideal. They would have preferred the ideal, if it was possible, obviously. What's another word for ideal end state? Utopia.
In any case, your inability to cite an example of how _you_ criticizing another country has led to _you_ improving _yours_, seems to prove my point: it likely hasn't, because it usually doesn't. You hit the nail on the head: We The People don't run things in another country, we run them in ours, which is why criticizing other countries isn't very useful for improving ours.
Indeed, we've completely abandoned that claim, and are now reduced to a claim about utopian vs subutopian goals, entirely omitting anything about other countries. By doing so, we're now discussing how to improve ours. QED.
Suggesting any improvement is aiming for utopia is simply false. Sentencing someone to life imprisonment absolutely guarantees that you aren’t going to live in a utopia while they are alive. Therefore it isn’t aiming for utopia but an imperfect compromise. There’s no gatekeeping involved simply the actual meaning of the word.
As to your suggestion I am backtracking, I am an individual not a country. I can point to cases where my critique of other people improved myself but suggesting I changed the US is kind of silly. Abstractly, I could say my voting habits have been impacted by analyzing failures of other countries. However, having never actually changed any election outcomes such a statement is in effect meaningless.
On a tiny scale I there thousands of minor actions which I think are a net positive but I don’t know. Witnessing the repeated failures associated with exporting plastic recycling, I realized it’s better for the environment to throw plastic into the trash bin than attempting to recycle it. But, while it’s true that’s a net positive for the US and the world it isn’t a meaningful difference.
Yes, obviously. You have an ideal of where you want to be, and you strive towards it, knowing that you may never get there, but that steps towards it are good. How else would we judge our infinite efforts as a citizen improving our country, and progress over time thereof? Criticizing others and sitting back and feeling good about ourselves for doing nothing but at least we're better off (for the moment) than some hypothetic far-off country that exists under different circumstances?
> I don't really agree we should be most critical of our own society. We should be critical of the society that deserves the most criticism.
I don't really agree that we should focus criticism on where it's unlikely to effect change. Criticism is, at best, a means to an end, and at worst, an attack aimed at others to distract and avoid change ourselves. If we aren't actively working towards that end, our criticism is useless or counterproductive. In the case of a country other than our own, actively working towards that end is unlikely, so the criticism being useless or counterproductive is likely.