I was a firm believer of the notion that education is a possible way of solving most if not all problems persistent in the present world. Emphasis must be put on the word was. My basic premise was that if people were taught science and mathematics, they could follow logic to get to the correct course of action. When I say correct, I basically mean globally optimal to that person and others. This assumption in itself is so flawed that I do not need to explain it. But rest assured, I will. I also believed that even if people were not taught about science, but even the basic doctrines of religion (any one of them), they would learn rudimentary lessons like being nice to your neighbors and respecting others. I believe that religious teachings are also a valid part of education. Now allow me the freedom to assume that every religion has the aforementioned lessons somewhere in there.
Since I am reading/writing so many academic research papers, I can't compose a wholesome story in which all my points and digression sit perfectly (also I suck at writing essays). So I am just giving a point-wise explanation of everything I mentioned earlier.
Following logic (as defined by mathematics): Working towards local optimality, or your own/your family's personal gain will lead to a crazy world where everybody is completely selfish (and it might be one extreme form of capitalism). Trying to get to a global optimality would imply everybody donating money to the needy and never wasting it by going to GAP or NIKE stores. Obviously global optimality does imply that you yourself have enough for yourself (there has to some notion of enough - bare minimum and some conservative maximum after which you donate). So you wouldn't be suffering for others, but it might lead to a world where there might be people who might slack off because they know that others would help them. This is obviously against the logic of obtaining global optimum because if you are pursuing that, you would never slack off. So technically, the logic of trying to obtain global optimal appears to me to be sound. But it might appear to be an extreme form of socialism. But if everybody pursues global optimality, eventually everybody would have enough to live without any physical hardship (I am not claiming they would be happy, because human satisfaction and happiness evades any attempt of formalizing it with logic). So what I infer (or actually previously inferred) is that logic does solve a lot of the problem. But it wouldn't and I will explain that later.
Disclaimer: I am no economist, just took some economics in high school and that was more that 10 years ago.
Following religious teachings: I do not have much knowledge about any religion. I was born a Hindu but I do not claim to know much about Hinduism or any of the doctrines or traditions. So obviously I have no idea about the other religions. But for some reason I thought I could write about religion, but right now I am stumped. Whatever I was thinking of writing seems to be just my instinct and intuition, and have no empirical evidence to back them. So I shall just state my conjectures:
- The fact that any group of people decided on following some religion (here I am using the word religion in a way which is not common - I am also considering any doctrines and traditions any small tribe somewhere as religion too) implies that the set of rules (I am also simplifying religion to be a set of rules - the general case can tackled once I figure out what else encompasses what they call religion) would lead to overall good to the whole group - kind of a global optimal on which every body agrees upon. Obviously I am wrong when I say that some religion begins like that - and you have religions all around where the "keepers" of the religion end up bending the rules for their advantages. So here I ended up refuting myself.
- So I shall not talk about religion anymore, I can just hope that all religions begun with the notion of having a set of rules which would maintain order in a group of people and hence obtain some form of optimality.
- Obviously satisfying a smaller number of people is easier than satisfying a larger group. Classic optimization problem where adding more constraints generally makes the solution of the problem harder. So when some religions reach a much larger scale, more number of people are unsatisfied (since it is probably impossible to consider everybody's situation).
- This leads to people expressing their discontent in different ways, or completely submitting to the rules over their own satisfaction.
- But then, as I mentioned earlier, is the presence of the 'keepers' who might twist or misinterpret the rules for their own good.
- But my point is that even here, if everybody aimed towards the global optimal, the keepers would never be selfish, but rather change the rules to help out more people.
But after enough digression, I get an opportunity to say what I wanted to say all along. As long as people have choice, they can choose to not pursue the global optimum. They can choose to just do what's best for them (in the short run maybe) and not care about others. For example, education helps nothing, people still drink and drive - even the smartest and most educated of us. Generally the only reason people don't drink and drive is not because they think it is dangerous to them and others, but because they are afraid to get caught. I know this is a small thing, but this is just an example of people exercising choice over reason. If you think about it, there are many other examples you can spot happening all around you. But the problem here is that there is no way you can have a globally optimal world without people with free will.
Well I guess the only solution then is to change education in a way that everybody chooses to pursue the global optimum. Because even now there are a number of individuals who choose to pursue some form of the global optimum. Since choice goes both ways :-).
