The new one's about the failures of individualism, yeah?
There've been a ton of "what if meritocracy is bad?" takes lately too. I'm in full support of people re-investigating bedrock principles of our society every time we hit a crisis. The world changes. Rules get established and people forget why they exist.
Chesterton's fence: you better damn well figure out
why something exists before you tear it down.
Still, in trying to envision these alternate worlds, you have a
local vs global maxima problem though that is
really really hard to make heads or tails on. You have to suspend too many givens from your assumption frame, you have to entertain too many complex hypotheticals.
At the end of the day, actual social experimentation (including scaling problems) are the only way to actually figure out whether these bedrock principles or good or bad. And at the end of the day, you don't wanna fuck around
on master.
This is why seasteading and other
exit-voice-loyalty libertarian dreams are Actually Good. The USA used to and still sorta does have the "states are the laboratory of democracy" mindset—The Fed's way bigger and stronger than in Ye Olde Days, but recent innovations from the states lab include gay marriage and cannabis legalization. You try it locally, and if it works, other states can freely adopt it. Top-down imposition, so that the entire country fails as some poorly laid plan is implemented nationally, not so hot.
I've heard arguments that in a big population, you have people who flourish and prefer liberal, consequentialist, individualist, consent-based moral regimes, and people who flourish and prefer societies with more deontological and traditional ethics, with operationalized
disgust & sacredness, etc. If you're not gonna get all dogmatic on this carving, and claim your preferred social model is Just Objectively The Best One For Everyone, this seems like a pretty reasonable idea. It does run into
invisible veil problems though—genetics isn't destiny, and you'll have offspring in one society that would do better in another