There's a certain kind of smug asshole whose life changed when they heard of the concept of “revealed preference”, and has never been able to shut up about it since…
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I think the “revealed preference” fetish just comes down to liberalism. All these arguments boil down to something equivalent to:
> The revealed preference of Humanity is to be miserable. (Therefore, we should be in favour of all immiserating practices.)
Our “revealed preference” is to have intrusive ads slapped onto everything. Our “revealed preference” is to have toxic dating practices that reduce the probability of having children during the biologically safe window to near zero. Our “revealed preference” is to be ruled by kleptocrats. Our “revealed preference” is to torture 80 billion land animals to death per year.
Do you see the problem? Because under modern liberalism, responsibility is atomised to the individual, and so one can draw no conclusion (within this frame) except that any fact of life that an individual cannot realistically change is actually their preference. Only a frame that takes social responsibility seriously, one that would be dismissed as “paternalistic” or “totalitarian”, is capable of answering the questions raised by the manifest iniquity of the human way of life.
I recently saw and re-posted these amazing and inspiring words of Ursula K. Le Guin:
> Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal
I am a “realist of a larger reality”: one in which the preferences of humanity are different from those we know, because preference emanates from conditions, and the conditions of humanity are mostly made by humanity.
