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Comment by startling | Hacker News Reader

Seriously. My education was nothing like the grandparent describes.

Mine education was like that: We're evil for taking the land away from native Americans and also go around screwing up the rest of the world with military interventionism. Oh the founding fathers were fucking hypocrites for allowing slavery. This was in a DC suburb ironically.

Over time I grew to find the mindset counterproductive. Free thinking is good to a point. But it's institutions, not individuals, that get us to the moon. It's bad when the pendulum swings too far in the other direction and we give up on our institutions.

But it's institutions, not individuals, that get us to the moon. It's bad when the pendulum swings too far in the other direction and we give up on our institutions.

I agree with this, but I think it is often the case that institutions deserve to be given up on. I don't think we've figured out how to make them resilient against the internal politics of the institution becoming the primary activity of the institution.

Sometimes I think we need to figure out how to rip and replace institutions quickly and efficiently. Every human collective or institution seems to have a shelf life beyond which it gets strangled by its own bureaucracy.

Why is free thinking incompatible (or at least in the oppose side of a pendulum) with having institutions?

> But it's institutions, not individuals, that get us to the moon.

At what cost to our liberty? In the absence of something eery (e.g. communists seeking world domination) this becomes harder and harder to justify. If something can't be achieved voluntarily, maybe it just shouldn't be done.

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