Supervenience and Ideas

?By the time our founding fathers concretized what they believed to be an exemplary aggregation of ideas in the U.S. Constitution, consequently led us down a path we now call modern society. More so than slavery, discrimination, or callous treatment against foreigners, the highly developed society we live in today is under the predicate of these ideas our founding fathers formulated before us. To mention slavery against African Americans is ineluctable when conversing in depth about American history: both are intertwined, unfortunately. Acknowledging this fact, however, does not permit anyone the right to assert slavery alone is what built the modern world’s present condition. For that matter, deciding to reduce the development of modernity to one event is thinking indolently. Rather something as complex and unimaginably multifaceted as how our society functions now, to the extent that our predictions of the future can never be infallible due to an overabundant set of variables to analyze that which will always lead to unforeseeable events, necessitated numerous predicates that had or have the potential to manifest such properties. Such a phenomenon coins itself as supervenience: X will supervene Y if and only if some aspect or property of Y is necessary for any difference in X. For example, one cannot predict the development of social institutions with only a primordial set of beliefs, despite one not being possible without the other. “X,” in this case, are social institutions; “Y” is the primordial set of beliefs. “Y” (set of beliefs) had an (unforeseeable) property that led to a change in X, i.e., social institutions. Much of this process resembles the dynamics we have with ideas: Let Y represent the initial ideas of Facebook, that is, – strengthening human connection; let us denote X as strife online conflicts. Here, some unexamined property in Y caused an unintended consequence in X; that people could and did not predict at the time of creating Y. The same effect resides in the ideas of most, if not all, private and public companies, national decrees, and policies. Thus, since this pattern of supervenience lies within us whenever we apply our ideas serves as an indication to prepare for all unforeseen events in a fashion that mirrors our dietetical mechanism because of its perpetuity and shows how time itself exposes the necessity of revision.??

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?Supervenience does not only result in unfortunate outcomes, however. There are instances when some property in Y entailed the possibility for any positive difference in X, such as the same example of a set of beliefs allowing the idea of social institutions, presuming you believe the latter is beneficial. From this finding, we may infer that supervenience is a subsidiary, byproduct, or a deferred aftereffect within the “trial and error” of ideas phenomenon. Other effects apart from supervenience when experimenting with political ideas like inferences, reasoning from first principles, presuming, extrapolating, etc., have their own objectives. But regardless of how well each function may work, errors will remain inescapable because our evolutionary wires cannot process or even perceive all sets of data/information (e.g., we cannot see atoms, but more importantly, it is not possible to know the data or events from the future. If a reality where organizing people who were not endowed with inexplicable complexities but evolutionarily limited managed to live together without conflict through some other means that is not dialectical, then rigorously analyzing ideas (pragmatic ideation) would be unnecessary - if even conceptualized. But that is not our reality. Instead, we are complicated beings trying to extract ideal principles to lessen the degree of suffering in the world. Thus, a framework that is not only able to minimize suffering but also increases the rate of innovation while preserving peace within society is needed. Such a framework that I am proposing is fundamentally and necessarily dialectical.??

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?Using iteration to either improve or modify an idea will disclose how superficial they were during previous stages. Rather than using a noticeably improved scientific model like the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism - the history of political ideals is just as convertible, especially when a society reaches a point when adjustments are overdue. Take the idea of private property for instance: In its conception during primitive times, and therefore at its most immoral and underdeveloped state, and although not inherently evil - private property was conventional means to satisfy selfish ends, which in turn caused pernicious effects felt by the majority. The height of the few owning property came at the expense of the working class and the impoverished who either had to submit to work under the conditions of wage labor, which was unfairly settled by capitalists, or infrequently become a self-sustaining entrepreneur to survive. Entrepreneurship during these times, however, represented a small percentage of the minority. Feudalistic Europe and America during the 1700s were periods when upholding private property, in effect, entailed neglect of all inhumane working conditions that if humanized would threaten the rate of production and profit as was thought among employers. This resulted, in the case of 1700s America, brutal hand-crafted labor for low wages while being treated as dispensable bodies. As the rate of competition between capitalists increased, so did the mistreatment of workers wherein deaths occurred in numerous cases. Proceeding in this fashion came the industrial revolution, which gave rise to the preliminary stages of American capitalism and thus switched to relying on and producing materials using machinery systems. Although working conditions might have improved because of this transition to an arguably less strenuous method of production, capitalists reaped every other benefit as stipulations remained invariant for workers/laborers apart from working more efficiently. (With that said, one may hardly call this an improvement for workers since employers kept the same working conditions that best suited their interests, and knowing how much more efficient their workers are thanks to the implementation of machines, they, therefore, expected the rate of production to only increase.) In other words, this new means of production did not alleviate workers from any unscrupulous policies; instead, it added to the indecency while producing higher profits for their employers. Thus, the advent of the division of labor jobs where workers use machines to produce goods (Y) is a supervening event derived from the idea of private property (X).???

??Brutal supervening conditions succeeded by persuading our leaders to rethink how we should fuse private property in society. Here is proof: the abolition of slavery enforced by the 13th amendment with varying intensity depending on a state’s political leanings; effectuating socialistic and governmental support programs for underrepresented people, namely those that suffer from preexisting conditions, people who were born into disadvantageous starting points, including those who are in irredeemable circumstances by no fault of their own. Continuously reproaching our policies in this fashion by our leaders are responses to circumvent uprising societal issues, all of which are examples of either revising or counter-attacking an idea’s supervening effect.??????

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?Presently, in America’s capitalistic system, other than adding regulations and support programs to annul the negative consequences of private property, instead, create new incentives among employers to prioritize the well-being of their workers and not perceive them as mere exploitative subjects. Moreover, this new incentive results in happier workers, which leads to better business. Hence the saying: “good ethics is good business.” Here is when the employer mindset of - exhausting your workers for subsistent compensation to reap as much of the total profit as possible shifts to – ensuring workers are accommodated and optimally positioned such that the quality of production is skyrocketing, thereby driving higher revenues. After all, most tech and other companies nowadays would not dare to underpay their engineering, marketing, and design teams, considering how much value they produce for them. Examples of such companies that are fully compensating their workers and booming because of it are the ones owned by Elon Musk, most technology-focused companies, and more. Unfortunately, other companies do not operate ethically (e.g., Amazon). The discrepancies between a company’s working environment lie in the fact that the workplace is not a democracy. Instead, it rests on the employer’s discretion, as he/ she owns the property, along with a board of directors, that determines policy.

?However, if a company intends to grow and continue as such, then the employer should prioritize the well-being of the workers (the customers second) for long-term success. Companies that do not operate by this rule face worker riots, lawsuits, and thus a bad reputation, which can lessen the number of future candidate employees. As these consequences become more pronounced, more people are willing to find another company to work for that treats their employees better. So, this phenomenon incentivizes employers to abolish the outdated way of perceiving their workers.??

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?Thus, it is not so much that private property itself causes negative consequences towards social classes, namely income and inequality, - more so than how individuals/employers use it. Similar stipulations for another political idea are that of free markets. Just as with private property, free market economies, that is, – with minimal government regulation, gradually iterated themselves from their early (unvirtuous) implementations to now. However, going past its history of implementations across societies shows that it is arguably the most consequential of all political ideas, mainly because its supervening effect is the most momentous but also contingent upon other conditions remaining the same (and indeed they did).??

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?Part of the reason there are socialistic programs, e.g., social security, in our State capitalistic economy had much to do with the revolutionary response against the Tsarist regime in Russia. What followed due to the exploitative characteristics of Tsarist Autocracy, in which the nobility class unjustly owned all the land, was the belligerent “hammer and sickle” communist response. And insofar as America adopted functions from this ideology accounts for why I call it a supervening effect of free markets.??

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?While the neighboring countries around Tsarist Russia, including the West, were accumulating more wealth via imperialism (“the highest stage of capitalism”) and monopolization, consequently left Russia at a deficit in the worldwide race to modernization. This is because Russia at the time had many intrinsic issues. One was inhospitable terrain: much of the Russian land was barren and unsuitable for development. Secondly, the weather commonly reached subzero temperatures making it difficult to advance transport and grow agriculture. As problematic as these issues were, they did not result in Russia’s demise. That will have to attribute to their rigid autocracy and the unwillingness of the Tsar, coupled with his henchmen, to join the rest of the world in modernization. Because doing so meant the relinquishment of capital owned by the enriched; a remodeling of government, both of which, would create a new world order unfavorable to those who benefited from the exploitative traits within the prior system.?

?????In summary, the absence of iteration and showing adaptability to a changing world around them, due to puritanical behavior toward a set of ideas, rendered Russia antiquated and thereafter face revolutionary attacks. These attacks, moreover, did not stop and were not only aimed at Tsarist Russia. It was an attack against a certain societal form of oppression, that is, - the lopsided relationship between social classes and the means of production: a dynamic in which society splits into two social classes - the oppressed and the oppressors/ the proletariat and bourgeoisie. The Russian revolution of 1917, led by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik party, overthrew the Tsarist regime to make this problem of oppression vanish. The main goals were to eliminate social classes altogether, money, and the centralized State, which kept an interdependent relationship with the Bourgeoisie that made it impossible to enact any change and to switch the ownership of production from privately owned to public. Amplifying this aim to spark revolutionary change, one can say it was under the mask of a hidden agenda of a new type of oppression. This is because what inevitably ensued was a communist dictatorship known as the Soviet Union instead of a promised utopia that replaced Russian Autocracy.??

??Observing neighboring nations abuse capitalism to further development meant free markets were front and center. Thus, free markets being a causation of the division of social classes played a catalytic role that not only contributed to class antagonisms but therefore inspired opposing forces to it. Since purely capitalistic free market societies have insufficient regulation control, any company or small business owner can and will find loopholes they will exploit incessantly to maximize profits, especially if there is a corrupt overseeing body or a lack thereof. If this scenario remains as such, then the people who act inequitably seize more capital than others who play by the rules rendering the so-called free market unstable. And if the means of production, in this case, free markets, becomes unstable, then there will be a greater discrepancy between people who gain and lose access to capital, thereby coincidingly intensifying class antagonisms to the point of incompatibility. Hence the saying: "the haves and the have-nots.” Sadly, this progression of free markets becoming more unstable within capitalistic societies is exactly what happened in Europe during the 19th century.??

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??Therefore, communism, the 1917 Russian revolution (perhaps even Karl Marx), and how America mixed socialistic programs into their capitalistic economy, thereby functioning as a hybrid system, are all supervening effects since there are unexamined properties in free markets that allowed the possibility of all these events. Extreme as this (supervening) response was, since the worldwide implementation of communism murdered nearly one hundred million people, it did illuminate the innate issue of pure capitalism in that insufficiently regulated free markets incites unethical behavior.??

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?That beggars a few questions: To what degree should the government intervene with privately owned business affairs? Should the government play a role more analogously to that of a “night watcher” or “referee?” Choosing one or the other simultaneously excludes some connotations absent in the other. Meaning, if one were to select “night watcher” as a more appropriate role for the government to play, then the connotations of harsher punishment, security, and minimal regulation are magnified. Additionally, a downfall to these connotations comes via observing that security personnel, including police officers, have a record of becoming corrupted. Whereas picking the “referee” role is free of this undertone of corruption and instead contains connotations of ensuring fair play; however, its downfall is too much regulation since, at least among sports, referees perpetually make wrong calls or mistakes that benefit one team at the expense of another. Which leads to a few more questions: Which negative connotation is more detrimental to society if manifested? Or are both consequentially equivalent???

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?Juxtaposing the consequences of whether our government should operate like a night watcher or referee to see which is ideal skips the possibility of finding a middle ground that can potentially contain all the benefits of both while removing their fallibilities. Therefore, an analogy that I will present as a better role for our government to play is that of a master/instructor of martial arts. Directing this vocational preference and wanting the government to mirror it does what both the “referee” and the “night watcher” can't: not becoming corrupt and overregulating. Generally speaking, most if not then all masters of martial arts are high-integrity people. In short, they have an impenetrable moral compass. Universally knowing this reduces the chances of our government succumbing to corruption slim to zero if they were to act like a master of martial arts. Acting as such also strips away the intimidating connotation of harsh punishment or abuse, but that does not mean businesses will act irrespective of what is ethical as a master of a martial art maintains a formidable connotation which will prevent unlawful acts from occurring; so much for the night watcher. Furthermore, just like referees, masters of martial arts have an in-depth understanding of how their domain operates. (One cannot become a master in jiujitsu without understanding the intricacies of using leverage in whichever body position therein.) But here is the catch: referees are circumscribed within and must respect a list of invariant rules, whereas a martial arts master knows the rules to such a great extent that they know when it is acceptable to bypass, revise, adhere to, and question them in certain situations. This is because not every business transaction, deal, or startup is the same in that stipulations and conditions differ widely: The governmental regulations that are fair to Tesla will not be to a storeowner, for instance. The point is that State officials who oversee the private sector should be competent enough to know when to act under the rules (law) while being conscientious that always doing so is insufficient in settling exceptional cases. Thus, conventional governmental regulation methods are limited to handling events that brought them into being - and since we live in a dynamically multifaceted society, it requires, at times, a plan of action that can adapt to such an environment.??

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?The supervening effects of ideas is a constantly growing occurrence that will never stop until our faculty of conceptualizing does too. Presently, the number of conflicts in society is manifold, one of them being mass shootings. When the 2nd amendment was written firearms were not as lethal: shots were fired one at a time after a minute of reloading. Modern-day handguns, nowadays, put the deadliest firearm back then to shame. AR-15s, M-16s, and other assault rifles can fire off dozens of rounds in less than 10 seconds. What is more absurd is that these weapons can be nonchalantly bought at a local Walmart as if buying them holds the same weight as a T.V. Clearly, something is wrong with that picture. As significant as this problem is, it is only half the equation of mass shootings. That other half is the increase in mental illness. It is no surprise that all the perpetrators of mass shootings have a mental illness. This 2nd half, I believe, is the true cause of mass shootings as the first half is a means of getting it done. Thus, resolving this epidemically American issue will necessitate all our efforts to the first and second half of the mass shooting equation.??

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Given that, mental illness is a relatively new and far more complicated phenomenon, since mass shootings in America are frequently occurring. Thus, the best response would be the most immediate one; (such is the case sometimes). Therefore, our course of action should be to tighten the process that it takes to purchase a firearm and disallow certain people altogether. The latter should not be seen as an attempt to strip people of their rights. Just as there are driving tests to determine if you are fit to control a car; military I.Q. examinations to ensure that you are smart enough to learn whatever the instructors must teach, so too it seems mandatory in creating tests that evaluate a person's mental condition who intends to buy a firearm, i.e., a weapon of war. Such a test would not only ask questions relevant to his/her mental state, but the criminal record, family relationships, career, purpose/s of purchasing a firearm, and more. Also, it is reasonable to ban gun clips containing over 30 rounds of ammo in particular jurisdictions unless proven otherwise.???????

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But since the incompatibility of worldviews between republicans and democrats is becoming more salient, the harder it is to reach compromises and be impartial. In this case, one side thinks the only solution resides in the first half of the mass shooting equation by strictly banning assault weapons, while the other side prioritizes the second half by adducing neurological imbalances and deformities. On whichever side you are on expect to either be vilified or labeled as a bigot by the constituents of the opposing party. For instance, if you give more awareness to mental illness as the sole causation of mass shootings, then a swarm of defamatory and vitriolic statements like “you are a heartless and selfish person who cannot let go of your guns even after a mass shooting because you think your rights are more important than the lives of children,” will be directed at you until you cannot voice your opinion. Likewise, if you were to acknowledge the gun control problem in such a way that it seems to dismiss mental illness. Outlandish statements from this side take the following form: “You communists just want to take my guns,” “guns don’t have brains,” etc. Both types of accusations are equally as destructive insofar as they are unproductive and meant to defame than provide any thoughtful solutions.??

??Rather than succumb to our primitive tribal instincts, i.e., bash other people for affiliating themselves to another (opposite) group, we should have crossover collaborations for the sake of arriving at solutions. Both republicans and democrats should each delve into what they think is the main problem of something, in this case, mass shootings, without disagreeing about which matter is paramount over the other so as to insist attention on that one at the exclusion of the other. If this actualizes it would not only send the message that republicans and democrats can work together but resolve issues at a faster and more efficient rate. It would also lessen the hostility between the constituents of both parties.?

?Anyhow, what makes mass shootings a supervening effect of the 2nd amendment is that at the time of concretizing it, no one imagined the chance that a U.S. civilian would buy a firearm to kill a dozen of innocent people. Nor did they imagine our weaponry advancing to this level of lethalness. Although the malicious intent to kill a massive amount of people did likely exist throughout history, presuming mental illness did too, it has become commonplace now due to three reasons: technological augmentation among our firearms, mental illness, and the 2nd amendment written as it is. Moreover, our founding fathers, thankfully, were not na?ve because all of them agreed to leave the ideas they implanted in the U.S constitution open for revision - the 2nd amendment now being overdue. Why this expectation of revision you may ask? Because it is subsumed in knowing that we do not know enough while living in a changing world.???

?To concur, we cannot know an idea’s supervening effect because faultlessly predicting the future is impossible, which is why embracing pragmatic ideation via our dialectical mechanism is necessary.