The reason it spreads so well and can become so powerful in a democracy, well… consider how many of our politicians operate. They make telling people what they want to hear, into a science. Truth does not matter. What matters is popular will, wants, desires, preferences.
There is truth, though… sure, we don’t know ultimate truths, not the point. There are truths.
It is like these forums where they have up and down votes, and, at best, sometimes, ratings for “controversial” votes. Where the up votes push the most popular statements up to the top. And the down votes push the lesser popular votes down, to, even at times, removing them from view entirely.
This makes people tend to want to take the most popular viewpoint when posting, to tend to try and say what most people will believe, so your post will be most prominent.
It corrupts things like “critical thinking” and “regard for reasoning”, reasoning its’ self.
That is the problem with free systems, and the free model.
Unfree models, of course, are worse from the start… not saying otherwise. Except, that in unfree models, they do not get really good at their bad propaganda.
It corrupts the very weighting systems people use, internally, rewarding corrupted weights, and punishing fair weights.
© 2026 – SoulSequel
One response to “The Ironic Problem of Free Systems”
I think it follows the Biblical model of “flesh vs the spirit”.
The “flesh” has the most to do with our feelings. And people in the flesh tend to up-vote things that massage their feelings in the moment.
And while “the spirit” isn’t exactly “the intellect”, I think it has to do with seeing a bigger picture, seeing things clearly and exercising a kind of critical analysis that isn’t shanghaied by feelings.
Feelings are a part of us, even as “the flesh” in the Biblical context is a part of us. And operating in “the spirit” means that we can have the feelings . . . without the feelings having us.
Which makes us variably immune to those who are trying to get “our feelings to have us” . . . so they can better control us.