Business, Society - Written Wednesday, September 9, 2009 by Jeff DeChambeau - 4 Comments

Hegeling for the Economic Center of Society: The Internet vs. The Financial System

The idea that most captured my thinking while at school was Hegel’s process of History. Think of History as a marketplace of ideas that happens over time. At the highest level there are competing approaches to how society should be structured. The goal of History is to uncover a sustainable form of society that reconciles perfectly with some ideal conception of human freedom. World War II and the Cold War saw Enlightenment-era answers to this challenge vying for resources and adherents in the real world. Western Liberalism happened to win, but since History takes place over such long period that inconsistent approaches eventually fail it’s possible that there are inconsistencies at the heart of the way we live that make it unsustainable in the long term.

While the global battlefield showcased the fight between ideas like Communism, Fascism, and Western Liberalism, other ideas are pit against one another on smaller scales all the time. Take for instance the showdown between alternating current and direct current (AC and DC). Both are ideas about how to transfer electricity. DC ultimately lost because it wouldn’t work on a large scale; it wasn’t viable in the long term. Had Edison’s pro-DC publicity campaign been successful and DC became the dominant electricity model, it’s likely that we would have quickly hit the upper limit of usefulness and been abandoned in favor of AC anyway (or another, better technology).

This happens everywhere: Phrenology lost to Psychology; more trivially the curtsey lost to the handshake. Betamax was superior to VHS but lost the format war of the 70s. Either format would have been beaten handily by DVD but only VHS lived to see its own demise. Inconsistent (or suboptimal) approaches lose out over and over again. Continue…