This is getting more interesting now. To sum the history of things, you had this discussion with VoiceOfRa and you stressed primarily you want to save people from getting killed. I butted in and proposed you don't have to redesign the whole world to do that, it is possible in a traditional setup as well. Turned out we are optimizing for different things, I am trying to preserve older-time stuff while also changing them to the extent needed to address real, actual complaints of various people and work out compromises (calling it moderatism or moderate conservatism would be OK), while you are more interested in tearing things down and building them up. OK. But I think there are more interesting things here lurking under the surface.

An offer: retreat a few meta levels up, and get back to this object level later on.

IRL I discuss pretty much everything with people inside my age range (30-60), which means we rely not only on our intelligence and book knowledge (you obviously have immense amounts of both) but on our life experience as well. That is a difficult thing to convey because it is something that is not even learned in words (so there are no good books that sum it up, to my knowledge) but non-verbal pattern recognition. Yet it is pretty much this thing, this life experience that makes the difference between your meta level assumptions and mine. What can one do? I will try the impossible and try to translate it into words. Don't expect it to go very well, but maybe a glimpse will be transmitted. Also my tone will be uncomfortably personal and subjective because it is per definition something happening inside people's heads.

When I was 17 I assumed, expected and demanded the world to be logical and ethical. I vibrated between assuming it and angrily demanding it when I found it is not the case. University did not help - it was a very logical and sheltered environment.

When I started working (25) I had to realize how truly illogical the world is, and not because it was waiting for mr smart guy to reorganize it but because most people are plain simply idiots. I worked at implementing business software, like order processing, accounting and MRP. Still do. I had to face problems like when order processing employees did not know the price of an item, they just invoiced it at zero price. Gave away for free. The managers were no better, instead of doing something sensible (such as incentive pay or entering a price list for everything into the software and not letting the employees change them), they demanded us to make a technical solution like not allow a zero price, just give out an error message. From them on, the folks used a price of 1 currency when they did not know the correct price. The irony was really breath-taking - if there is one thing that is supposed to be efficient in this sorry world, it is corporations chasing profits: and they were incompetent at that very basic level of not giving away stuff for free. (They were selling fertilizers to farmers, in the kind of place where paved roads are rare.)

My first reaction was rage and complaining about humanity's idiocy. I was sort of similar to Reddit /r/atheism. Full of snark.

I would say the life experience part was not as much as learning the basic rule, namely that most folks are idiots, but really swallowing and digesting it, learning to resign myself to it, accept it, and see what can be done. That was what took long. I had to accept a Heideggerian "we are thrown into this shit and must cope, anyhow". This is my sorry species. These zombies are my peers. If I want to help people, I need to help them on their level.

First of all, I had to accept a change in my ethics: making most people happy is an impossible goal. The best I can do is supporting ideas that prevent the dumbass majority shooting themselves in the foot in the worst ways. Give a wild guess, will the majority those types of ideas be more often classified as "liberal" or "conservative" ?

Second, I had to realize that I was a selfish ass when I was young and "liberal". I wanted things to be logical, hence I wanted things to suit people who are logical. I wanted things to suit people like me. I wanted a world optimized for me and my folk, for intellectuals. That would be a horrible world for the vast majority of people who can't logic. They need really foolproof and dumbed-down systems that cut with the grain of their illogical instincts, not against it.

The corollary of this all was that I should support rules and systems that I hate and I would never obey them. I had to become a hypocrite e.g. to support keeping drugs illegal (because I saw fools i.e. normal people would only get more foolish from them) while being perfectly accepting and supporting of my intellectual friends who got great philosophical insights for them. The non-hypocritical solution would have been, of course, different rules for different people. Yes, that is actually one thing liberal democracy is not so good at making, so hypocrisy was the only way to deal with it.

It was during this, my rather horrified awakening process when I came accross as really unusual book, Theodore Dalrymple's Life At The Bottom. It is a book that probably would be classified "conservative", but it was refreshingly non-ideological, it was about the experiences collected by decades of working as a psychiatrist treating the underclass of Birmingham, UK. I was actually living there, attracted by the manufacturing prowess of the region, was good for me career-wise, and the book was actually able to explain the high levels of WTFery I experienced every day, such as I smoke a cig outside (I have my own idiotic side as well), a mother with a small kid in a pram and with an about 9 years old boy, and the boy walks up to me and asks for a cigarette. I look at the mom completely astonished. Blank face. WTF I do now? At any rate, Dalrymple said the basic issue is that intellectuals made rules that worked very well for themselves, such as atheism, sexual liberty and similar things. He was of course atheist too. But according to him this wrecked misery amongst the low-IQ underclass, they really needed their old churches and traditions and Gods Of The Copybook Headings to restrain their impulsivity and bad choices. Rules that work well for intellectuals ("liberal" rules) don't work well for everybody else, at all. Maybe if I wanted to offer a book that is life experience translated to words, even though it is not really possible, that is that book, I can only add it is not made up, I really saw these folks.I had to change my political and social views completely. I could no longer demand the kind of stuff that makes sense for ethical and intelligent people. I had to learn to demand stuff I would personally dislike.

I either have to demand really dumbing things down, or maybe designing things from the assumption of stupidity up. Which means either intellectuals sacrificing their own interests and accepting a world made of stupid, or publicly supporting rules but privately wiggling out of them (Victorian era) or different rules for different people (aristocracy). Cont. below