I have a note here that today is the day this writing session should focus on writing with principles. At first this morning, I read that as writing with purpose. I was thinking that writing 3 paragraphs about writing with a purpose should be pretty easy. It took a few moments to realize that writing about principles is harder than writing about purpose. You have to sit down and try to grasp at the foundation of things to write about principles that matter. Maybe we would be better off if more time was spent trying to explain principles in the public square, news media, or just during internet based discussions. I could reduce the scope of this writing challenge and just focus on writing about economic principles. That would be one way to focus this effort on a few key principles. You could spend some time researching economic principles and that would be an interesting look down the rabbit hole of published and commonly shared research. 

One way to start digging into thinking about principles would be to try to figure out a few normative principles. That could start the journey on a road built around ethics. Maybe that is a harder place to start than a road built around economics, but it could be a lot more fun that way. Either way the concepts being covered within those fields seems to be secondary to the way people consume knowledge these days. Yesterday I read a note from somebody that argued within the media you can find coverage from whatever point of you are seeking. That made me think about the process of filing a story in a newsroom. It used to be that articles were filled and editors provided a real true curation and testing of the concepts and ideas being brought forward. Our news cycles were curated in a more thoughtful and less rushed fashion. Now being first within the never ending stream of media is the key defining element of the process instead of any type of curation or testing. The test for releasing things into the world seems to be speed instead of making a contribution to the academy of knowledge we share. That distinction is the key element of why learning principles and understanding the frameworks of complex philosophy gave way to situational decision making. Reactions to things have taken over for decision making and the normative ethics that should exist have given way as the normative game around us brokedown and were replaced by something deeply troubling. 

We have to accept some fundamental truths and build out some type of normative ethics to begin the journey together toward some type of working civil society. At the moment, I wonder if we have nothing to share but a stream of first in the pool articles being filed as news, social media utterances, and a fractured public square. Naturally I want to turn this set of arguments toward something inherently positive focused on how a return to principled action could benefit everybody, but I’m still trying to figure out what foundation is shared anymore than would be a basis for a shared understanding. It’s entirely possible that the public mind has become two more minds that need some type of deep conceptual bridge to facilitate communication between them to be built. That is the argument that scares me the most when I think about the future.