There is social science and there is social engineering. Social science is the careful study and analysis of people and their behavior. Social engineering is the clumsy attempt to force human behavior into a mold. Democracy is social science. Fascism is social engineering.
The problem with social engineering is that people form a complex system. In fact, the dynamics tend to change over time. Social science has not developed a sufficiently accurate predictive model of human behavior. Instead of influence, the social engineering method requires force and punishment to keep the population in line. Social engineering is highly inefficient and harms the people who live under it.
In many ways, this country is seen as an experiment in democracy. We are the United States of America because we are a collection of individual states with different histories and attitudes. Each governs a little differently. A few are commonwealths. Ideally, each state could experiment with its own form of democracy and the people would be free to move to the place of their choosing.
Over the decades, the country has become more centralized. A national legislature and court have decided to federalize more of what were state issues. That democracy has been replaced with uniformity. Some of those changes have added to the common good, others have tried to engineer society into someone else’s image.
Now we face a central government obsessed with social engineering. As we learned from the economic disaster of the last 2 years, behavior models are too much in flux to accurately manipulate them. Instead of improving general oversight, the Federal government seeks to specifically dictate and micromanage every aspect of society. How can this lead to anything but failure when the government can’t effectively macromanage the country?
I disagree with many of the plans of the current administration. Others may agree with more of them. The question is this. When the social engineering fails to yield the expected results, what force will be applied to make it work?
