[HN Gopher] Talkin' about a Revolution
___________________________________________________________________
Talkin' about a Revolution
Author : pepys
Score : 55 points
Date : 2025-03-28 22:42 UTC (3 days ago)
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| worldsayshi wrote:
| > frightened into rationality
|
| An oxymoron if I ever heard one. To become rational means letting
| go of fears (to a large extent). I fear that one reason we fail
| to act is that we are guided by fear. Fear makes us focus on the
| wrong things. And I fear that in a civilized society fear becomes
| a self fulfilling prophecy. Fear makes us obsess about the
| problem and how to avoid it in the very narrow and short term. It
| doesn't make us very good at long term planning and execution.
| It's an instinct that is evolved for animals that want to avoid
| predators, not for civilization builders.
|
| Building a civilization requires vision, big plans and the
| feeling that we can afford bold ideas. We need to take risks. But
| how can we take more risks when we're constantly afraid of the
| future? How can we build a better future when all we do all day
| is imagining the worst possible future? If our minds are
| constantly occupied by dystopia we can't plan for anything else.
| So that's what we build.
| hmmmhmmm wrote:
| I'm in the same camp, and I go step further and avoid places
| where fear is the main tune.
| lynx97 wrote:
| I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-
| death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I
| will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has
| gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the
| fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
| mola wrote:
| As I see it, Optimism is usually unrational but drives change
| and Fear kills optimism.
|
| Trust is not purely rational its emotional. Fear kills trust,
| making you more rational in the sense that you assume other
| players are rationally adversarial.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| As I see it, pessimism is as "unrational" as optimism.
| There's a big span of uncertainty about the future that is
| filled by our intentions and beliefs. If we commit to a
| pessimistic worldview we are likely to make some decisions
| that lead towards such a world. If we commit to an optimistic
| worldview we are likely to get exploited by bad actors.
|
| We have to be able to juggle both realities. That is
| rational.
|
| (But I think we are essentially saying the same thing here.)
| absolutelastone wrote:
| I'd argue we evolved to think rationally in order to
| specifically advance our instinctive drives, rather than the
| "Triume brain" view of the neocortex and lizard brain fighting
| for dominance. Immediate and extreme danger enforces a
| realistic and calculating view of reality, when otherwise
| people tend to avoid thinking about or dealing with a danger.
|
| Courage is the ability to choose an alternative besides first
| choice of fear. But it isn't necessarily rational either, more
| likely a different instinctive motivation winning out. A
| completely emotionless person, meanwhile, would probably be
| completely nonfunctional.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Hegel writings gave birth to some of the most murderous,
| nihilistic and deviant thoughts. They made possible the thinking
| of Engels, Lenin, Mao, Jean Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Gilles
| Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Max
| Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcus.
|
| Most thinkers and ideologues that represent what is rotten in
| modern society have to thank Hegel.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This tired old contention that some great historical thinker is
| somehow single-handedly responsible for the fall of
| civilisation is nothing more than railing against intellect
| itself.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| My conjecture isn't Hegel is single-handedly responsible for
| the fall of civilisation. After all I don't have a reason to
| think he intended that, nor do I think civilisation will
| necasarily fall. Most villains of the thought, ideologues and
| philosophers are basing their operas on Hegel's.
|
| All I am saying Hegel established a framework which eased the
| works of some scum.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You might enjoy Rick Roderick's "Masters of Suspicion"
| where he talks about the influence (and perceived
| influence) of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and some other
| individuals credited with "changing the world".
| "You notice I haven't given an analysis of the
| Enlightenment but of modernity, of modernisation, of
| the advance of capital, because four pedants don't
| make an age. And two or three weird philosophers
| don't give birth to a century of unreason. You know,
| Nietzsche didn't, you know, from his drawing room
| give birth to a century of cannonade, slaughter,
| concentration camps, CIA subterfuge, the raping and
| the murdering of nuns, the bombing of continents, the
| despoiling of beaches and the ruin of a planet! Four or
| five pedants do not have that much power, and never
| have. That's just a sort of bugbear. They didn't
| 'unleash unreason on the world' Jesus... how crazy
| can some people get. I mean, even in the postmodern
| world you shouldn't be that crazy, to say that three or
| four pedants invented this stuff. " -- R. Roderick
| Nietzsche's Progeny (1991)
| cess11 wrote:
| Most likely they won't, since Roderick openly and
| efficiently argues against "paleoconservatives" and the
| like.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| This is likely a use of "pedant" in the more precise pre-
| vulgarization sense, probably, with a stronger suggestion
| of "school teacherly" or "insularly academic" than "nit-
| picking know-it-all". Might help readers follow it.
| username332211 wrote:
| It is precisely the opposite.
|
| A world where Karl Marx isn't responsible for millions of
| deaths is a world where the existence of intellectuals is
| ultimately pointless. There, a wise potentate could send
| philosophers into labor camps and he'd only benefit from the
| elimination of waste.
|
| If you believe that ideas matter, then you should allow for
| spectacularly bad ideas to have spectacularly bad real world
| consequences.
| facile3232 wrote:
| > If ideas matter, then spectacularly bad ideas should have
| spectacularly bad real world consequences.
|
| to me this seems to imply ideas don't matter, or we
| wouldn't be living in a market-oriented society. I suppose
| there's still room for global warming to demonstrate your
| point.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Of course ideas matter and have consequences. The mistake
| is to identify them with individual responsibility. Do you
| blame Newton every time a vase falls off a shelf?
| ourmandave wrote:
| In hindsight, naming my cat Newton may have been a bad
| idea.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Newton is not responsible for gravity because he didn't
| create it.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Nevertheless, as an entity with mass Isaac Newton was
| complicit in contributing towards gravity's tyrannical
| effects. In fact, his corpse continues to exert a
| gravitational pull to this day. /s
| vintermann wrote:
| Aha, _wise potentates_.
|
| Any accounting scheme which assigns Marx blame for the
| consequences of his poorer ideas, has to assign far more to
| "wise potentate" believers. Or even people who unironically
| use words like "wise potentate" at all.
| js8 wrote:
| Karl Marx isn't responsible for anything that happened in
| the 20th century. People have individual responsibility for
| their actions, it doesn't matter where you got the idea
| from. Ascribing e.g. crimes of stalinism to Marx is
| actually terrible idea, it absolves the people who did
| these crimes of their own moral agency. Ideas do matter (as
| Gramsci has shown by example), but the moral responsibility
| is on the implementors.
|
| But just out of curiosity, what exactly Marx said that you
| deem so dangerous? Can you show some quotes?
| sepositus wrote:
| > Everything that exists deserves to perish.
|
| Well, we can start with this problematic statement. Taken
| to its literal conclusion, it's not surprising to think
| it could end up with mass graves. Granted, it originated
| from Mephistopheles, but Marx wasn't being poetic in his
| recitations.
| js8 wrote:
| I am not really interested in a bad faith debate. I take
| it you're quoting this passage:
|
| The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic
| parties, the blue and red republicans, the heroes of
| Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet
| lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the
| political names and the intellectual reputations, the
| civil law and the penal code, liberte, egalite,
| fraternite, and the second Sunday in May, 1852 - all have
| vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man
| whom even his enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer.
| Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for the
| moment, so that with its own hand it may make its last
| will and testament before the eyes of all the world and
| declare in the name of the people itself: "All that
| exists deserves to perish." [From Goethe's Faust, Part
| One.]
|
| Can you explain, in your interpretation, what was Marx
| trying to say?
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I have no idea how many of those giants Hegel actually
| influenced. The list covers so many famous intellectuals that I
| suppose the only 20th Century writer worth reading is Dale
| Carnegie; he's the only guy left!
| roenxi wrote:
| That seems a bit unfair to pin it on Hegel. Most of the damage
| could have been avoided if people like Mao were champions of
| liberal values - however the fact that he was in a position of
| power at all was because he came from a rather backwards
| society that didn't champion liberal values. It is a shame the
| Chinese Republicans didn't manage to take, but to say there was
| a lot going on in China at any given moment would be an
| understatement.
|
| At any point in the chain of events people could move towards
| liberalism and market economies, then become more prosperous.
| We've even got case studies where that was tried - the USSR -
| and a lot went wrong but it still went much better than most of
| the other experiments out of the 1900s. China too, eventually,
| where we can't really say what the end result is going to be
| but it has been an amazing journey so far.
|
| The issue wasn't with these thinkers, it looks a lot more like
| _any_ deviation from liberalism is a terrible mistake and it is
| really only a competition for who can be most liberal on the
| important issues (which, unfortunately, are only revealed with
| a little hindsight).
| thiagoharry wrote:
| > That seems a bit unfair to pin it on Hegel. Most of the
| damage could have been avoided if people like Mao were
| champions of liberal values. however the fact that he was in
| a position of power at all was because he came from a rather
| backwards society that didn't champion liberal values.
|
| Considering that the "liberal values" were the ideology upon
| which China was previously attacked and destroyed by western
| powers, and that the KMT, under more liberal values did the
| Shangai Massacre against the comunists, ending their
| alliance, this would be improbable. Yeah, history show how
| progressive is the liberal ideology and their champions...
| paganel wrote:
| Always interesting how the Anglo world never really got into
| Hegel, I guess it's their lack of real philosophical spirit
| that explains it. They never really got passed Hume's
| empiricist reflexes.
| keiferski wrote:
| They did get into Hegel for a bit, but the subsequent
| developments in math, language, etc. (what is now called
| Analytic Philosophy) kind of wiped out the interest in them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_idealism
|
| But yeah, you could probably argue that the empiricist
| approach never quite went away. Even today, analytic
| philosophy (which is predominantly an Anglo-American
| phenomenon) is notoriously uninterested in politics and "big
| society" questions.
| abathologist wrote:
| There are important exceptions, such as C.S. Peirce,
| Whitehead, and currently Robert Brandom.
|
| William Lawvere is also a post-hegelian.
| facile3232 wrote:
| on whom do you put the crimes of capital?
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Uhh, why someone like Sartre or Foucault is on this list, equal
| to Lenin or Mao? It's hard for me to see how they as
| existentialists were on par of them; and if so, ought we blame
| Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky too?
|
| I am asking genuinely on your stance because I don't see why
| you consider them to be evil.
| flr03 wrote:
| I don't think the list makes any sense. It's just part of
| movement where some try to blame all the evil of the world
| past and present on intellectual/philosophers, that would
| have perversed society and academics by their ideas. The root
| of evil being Hegel it seems and all figures that remotely
| connect to him. I think the reason here is Sartre was part of
| the communist party in France, for some time.
| grey-area wrote:
| Interested to know why you think Foucault or Lacan are
| 'deviants', do you mean that in the nazi sense, or something
| else?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Fully concur
|
| The fact that people still hang on to the outdated epistemology
| of the dialectic is absurd given the domination of empiricism
| in real world
| graemep wrote:
| The world gets both better and worse. it is something that I
| regularly get voted down for saying here, but IMO the west is
| unduly pessimist because it had a golden age from winning the
| cold war until the late 2000s, took an overly optimistic view of
| the future and the inevitability of progress (remember "the end
| of history") and cannot cope with things going back to normal.
|
| Things get better, sometimes they get worse. Generally people are
| better off materially than they have ever been, but people do not
| change all that much morally.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >and cannot cope with things going back to normal.
|
| how do we define "normal" for society?
| graemep wrote:
| Very loosely?
|
| There really is no normal - things change over time. It would
| be more accurate to say it was the end of an period of
| unusual stability and security.
| krapp wrote:
| Normal is what we're willing to accept in exchange for our
| comfort.
| jajko wrote:
| Well, WWIII or some other form of nuclear strikes may change
| that perception.
|
| I agree its dangerous to be overly positive and naive, we
| humans are still just a notch above beasts, are easy to
| manipulate (always via negative emotions like greed, envy,
| inferiority complex and so on), but things can absolutely go to
| utter shit, we have more capabilities than ever to spread it
| across globe. Not just nuclear - drone warfare is absolutely
| maddening. Imagine 10 millions of them, each with their target,
| each going with absolute precision and on its own - thats what
| current armies aim for and within a decade they will get it.
|
| What is (and always was) is that very few holds most of the
| decision power. Get one mental unstable vicious person there
| and it falls down like house of cards. Our current high tech
| civilization is pretty fragile to disruption. Sure, we can
| always revert to stone age, some would even be glad, but I
| strongly prefer not to.
| baxtr wrote:
| I talked to a history professor recently and asked him how he
| viewed the whole situation.
|
| He leaned back, thought for a bit and answered:
|
| It'll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will
| continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better
| lives.
|
| It's the next 30 years I'm worried about.
|
| PS: ofc, I have no clue if he's right or not. But I thought
| it's an interesting take to share.
| dataflow wrote:
| "Fine"? Did the history professor consider anything other
| than history or politics? The way global warming and our
| general destruction of nature is going (not just species or
| climate but also e.g. depletion of groundwater in a lot of
| heavily populated areas), I'm not sure democracy will be our
| biggest concern in 200 years' time.
| baxtr wrote:
| No, he did not consider things that have never happened
| before.
|
| He can only extrapolate from events that already happened.
| Human made global warming is a first time, so difficult to
| say what will happen from a historical perspective.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Human made global warming is a first time_
|
| Human-made global warming appears to go back to the
| advent of agriculture, though, so for all intents and
| purposes it has been a constant throughout the history of
| which we speak.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Ted was so right.
| badpun wrote:
| Given predicted decline i global population size, some of
| these effect will be partially offset by less pressure from
| the population.
| CalRobert wrote:
| "democracy will continue to increase its footprint"
|
| What was this based on?
| baxtr wrote:
| Extrapolation from what he knows about history.
|
| Things looked very bleak right after the French revolution
| for example.
|
| We see our history as a dot, because we live in it.
|
| But people in the future will take a more long-term view
| and might say: oh this was a difficult phase in history.
| rongrobert wrote:
| I just don't agree with any of this.
|
| This is a difficult time compared to what? The black
| plague? WW1?
|
| This is the easiest time ever to be alive.
|
| I would say on a 200 year time line though, the way the
| black plague broke the power of the Catholic Church, the
| internet has broke democracy.
|
| The idea democracy is ascendant is pretty delusional IMO.
|
| This professor is still living in the unipolar moment
| that has passed.
| graemep wrote:
| > the way the black plague broke the power of the
| Catholic Church
|
| I think it is more accurate to say it broke the power of
| the aristocracy by causing a labour shortage.
|
| The black death happened in the 14th century, the
| reformation in the 16th
| grumpy-de-sre wrote:
| The great news is we can break the internet if needed. It
| will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled
| gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo
| chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
| econ wrote:
| I'm optimistic, if you release enough bots into that
| ecosystem it is unlikely to survive. It is one of those
| things where effort is rewarded but also a condition for
| the game to function. YouTube is already full of videos
| that seem to have a single line prompt. Those can't
| generate enough rage to sustain the formula.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated
| walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait
| and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning
| society.
|
| I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with
| functioning democracy (or most other forms of government)
| for about a decade now.
|
| I figure our "great firewall" will be in the form of
| cryptographically origin-attributed routing, and making
| proxying while stripping that info illegal in most
| circumstances. Won't cut it to zero, but will make mass
| anonymous propaganda campaigns a hell of a lot harder.
| The protocols are already under development, as I
| understand it.
| grumpy-de-sre wrote:
| Definitely a great place to start!
|
| Do you have any links to any material/info on this topic?
| I'm sure some folks have begun talking about protocols.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| BGP route origin validation is already partially deployed
| in the wild, I believe. I recall reading about BGP
| replacement protocols years back that were being
| developed to include even stronger route-signing. Once
| you have that kind of thing in place, you basically have
| everything you need for a decentralized, origin-focused
| great firewall, it's just a matter of activating it.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> I 've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible
| with functioning democracy (or most other forms of
| government) for about a decade now._
|
| Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and
| we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is
| probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are
| more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Political scientists just call what we have democracy,
| same as everyone else. It's a common use of the term by
| experts in the field.
|
| I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our
| voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> It 's a common use of the term by experts in the
| field._
|
| Sure, but it's clearly something different than people
| assembling in the town square to flesh out their issues
| with each other, as democracy was originally seen.
| Semantic arguments are dumb.
|
| _In theory_ , which is why the name is as such, it need
| not be any different as the elected employees are only
| supposed to take the message from their local town square
| to a central meeting place where, with all the other town
| square results, things are compiled - to be tarred and
| feathered if the message changes in transit - but in
| practice nobody shows up in the local town square and
| leaves it upon the employee to make guesses about their
| wishes, thus becoming dictators out of necessity.
|
| _> I don 't really see how the Internet has changed how
| our voting works or the structure of our government,
| anyway._
|
| Why would it? As before, it has reminded us of why we
| resorted to picking (and maybe not even that) employees
| to tell us what to do in the first place.
| dachworker wrote:
| I do not think we have enough historical evidence for
| such an extrapolation. Human societies have been getting
| more and more complex, necessitating more and more
| complex governance. We are at a point of crisis, where
| the electorate is supposed to decide through voting, and
| our elected politicians are supposed to decide through
| legislation, on topics that neither the electorate, nor
| the elected are able to fully understand. It is not clear
| to me that democracy will triumph.
| hedora wrote:
| Sure we do. Go read H.G. Wells "The World Set Free". It's
| pre WWII, covers these exact topics, and could have been
| written yesterday. When it was written none of the
| problems were new.
|
| The book is a utopia, written in the hope that, with
| unlimited energy (and therefore, unlimited means of
| production), government upheaval would _finally_ let us
| transition to a post-scarcity society.
|
| Humanity has had the technology necessary to do that
| since the 1950s, but instead focused on things like using
| more fossil fuels, weaponizing food, spreading disease
| and ignorance, expanding poverty, etc. Both parties in
| the US have consistently supported all of the above for
| my entire life.
|
| We're seeing an acceleration of those things under the
| current administration.
|
| Hopefully, we'll get decent leadership soon. We're still
| a democracy.
| nradov wrote:
| The things that people really want will always be scarce.
| Even lower energy prices or better political leaders
| can't change that reality.
| nradov wrote:
| That's a non sequitur. Just because human societies have
| been getting more and more complex doesn't necessarily
| mean we need more and more complex governance. We might
| be better off with radically less governance, and just
| accept the consequences that sometimes bad things will
| happen due to lack of governance.
| sofixa wrote:
| > It'll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy
| will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead
| better lives.
|
| What could that be based on? Ask the people in Venezuela,
| South Africa for instance, things can definitely get much
| worse even for decently developed countries with democracy
| and a solid economic foundation.
|
| Combine with the growth of religiosness in young people
| across multiple growing countries, and broad (sometimes
| related, sometimes not) anti-democracy trends, I really
| wouldn't be that optimistic.
|
| What would make one think that e.g. the Coup Belt in
| Subsaharan Africa will some day get more democratic? The
| fundamentals aren't there - the populace is generally poor
| and poorly educated. Strongman rule over years/decades can
| erode the little civic society that existed, and then it's
| very very hard to get an effective democracy functioning.
| watwut wrote:
| To be fair, he was making wild guesses. He is professor of
| history, not a professor of omens. He can't read future, no
| more then anyone else.
| baxtr wrote:
| Yeah exactly. People read way too much into this
| eMPee584 wrote:
| Oh, coincidentally, that is just the time window of the
| technological singularity.. where we either ascend to a
| peace- & powerful interplanetary civilization - or
| accidentally eradicate ourselves out of a collective lack of
| wisdom and sense of connectedness. Let's play..
| facile3232 wrote:
| I think the "technological singularity" is just the rapture
| for people who listen to sam harris
| jddj wrote:
| Not to take anything away from this witty comment, but I
| think Harris is more on the doomer side?
|
| Maybe that's what you meant after all.
| facile3232 wrote:
| You're quite right; I think the "rationalists" tend to be
| a little more cynical (or realistic, as most would
| probably put it).
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Millenarianism is evergreen.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I have no comment on what your professor said, but reading
| the replies here just confirms to me that cynicism, pessimism
| and doomerism are certainly the mood of the current
| zeitgeist. Optimistic outlooks are too often met with a kind
| of reflexive dismissal or despair in a "I feel like things
| are really bad right now, have never been this bad before,
| and thus can never improve" diatribe.
|
| There's a pervasive sense in online discussions these days
| that if it's cynical, dark or depressing, it has to be the
| truth. It's like Occam's razor for today's modern doomer: the
| bleakest explanation must be the correct one. And I'm not
| saying that things are easy or that democracy is guaranteed,
| but I am saying that pessimism isn't inherently more
| realistic than optimism.
|
| Cynicism sells in the 21st century.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Meh.
|
| It's not really cynicism.
|
| It's just that people today only care about the next 20 or
| 30 years. They don't really care if, over the course of the
| next 200 years, two nations can rebuild from annihilating
| each other in a nuclear exchange. The nuclear exchange is a
| lot more pressing concern for them.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I'm at the age where 30 years may well be the rest of my
| life (even assuming a fairly normal old-age sort of
| death) and 50 almost certainly is, so while I do care
| about what happens after for my kids, _they 'll_ also be
| quite old by then, so "the whole rest of your life during
| which you're still significantly active, plus all of your
| kids' lives up to as late as late-middle-age, by which
| time they're firmly set on their life courses and family
| planning and such, will suck" is... pretty bad.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > rebuild from annihilating each other in a nuclear
| exchange. The nuclear exchange is a lot more pressing
| concern for them.
|
| Maybe this was your intention or maybe not, but this is
| kinda what I'm talking about. It presupposes that there
| will be nuclear exchanges and annihilation in the first
| place, because, well, why wouldn't there be? Life is
| shit, tensions are high, and that's the grim dark end we
| all see coming anyway?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Peace and prosperity in 200yr won't help my retirement in
| 30.
| Centigonal wrote:
| _A society grows great when old men plant trees whose
| shade they know they shall never sit in._
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I love a low effort circle jerk as much as the next
| worthless online commentor but let's be real here, nobody
| who's worried about stuff lower down the pyramid of needs
| can afford the luxury of donating resources to a
| hypothetical future.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> but reading the replies here just confirms to me that
| cynicism, pessimism and doomerism are certainly the mood of
| the current zeitgeist._
|
| Isn't that the human condition? Historically, it was no
| doubt an evolutionary advantage to always think that a lion
| is about to pounce, so to speak. That doesn't just go away.
| The instincts still need something to work with even after
| all the real threats are gone.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| > cynicism,
|
| The cynicism comes from the fact that many people
| (including me) have decided to check out from what is going
| on in the world and instead focus on what we can control in
| our daily lives.
|
| It also comes from the fact that in many countries the
| social contract is broken.
|
| You are still expected to pay your taxes but the services
| provided are increasingly of bad quality such as
| schools,hospitals, judicial system and so on.
|
| So much so in fact that it seems to me that this
| relationship that the people have with the state is
| becoming more and more one sided. Like in an abusive
| relationship of some sort.
|
| Look at the number of people who don't bother to vote
| anymore because at the end of the day it does not make much
| difference to their lives.
|
| There is profound sense of injustice in the world at the
| moment but it is being swept under the carpet.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| There is a problem with this though. It is the price paid in
| exchange for democracy. Take Syria for example. It took huge
| human loss to free itself from Assad, Iran and Russian
| influence. Is the price justified? Of course in the long run
| autocracies fail. The lifespan of the ruler is one duration
| we can associate (Putin is on the verge of death). But the
| damage can often be very significant and take generation to
| undo. Just to be clear, I was very much in favor of removing
| those murderers. I just wonder if there were ways to mitigate
| this (here, EU and US should have stepped in, which they
| failed to do. However, they are doing it in Ukraine, which is
| great)
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| > Take Syria for example. It took huge human loss to free
| itself from Assad, Iran and Russian influence.
|
| And then it fell in the hands of radical islamists. Is this
| the outcome that everyone was hoping for?
| MPSFounder wrote:
| I disagree with that assessment. It is currently led by
| someone widely popular in Syria. Ultimately, the people
| are free to elect whoever they choose. The point is it is
| unequivocal most of them rejected Iranian and Russian
| influence and a barbarous Assad regime. Of course
| rebuilding will take time, and there might be some
| extreme factions (religious or leftovers from the Assad
| regime). But freedom prevailed. Your response is that of
| a coward that would rather live as a slave under a
| foreign occupation, instead of rebelling at the cost of
| their own lives.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| > I disagree with that assessment.
|
| This is not an assessment. It's the truth. Jolani is a
| former al-Qaeda member whose organization is still
| considered a terrorist organization. The US even had a
| prize on his head.
|
| > Your response is that of a coward that would rather
| live as a slave under a foreign occupation, instead of
| rebelling at the cost of their own lives.
|
| You response to an opinion that is different than yours
| is to insult someone who is willing to engage with you.
| If you are not interested in debating, no point in
| commenting.
| davedx wrote:
| > People do not change all that much morally
|
| This is debatable. In fact, the US culture war is absolutely
| about what American "morality" should be. It's what a lot of
| the Project 2025 Manifesto is about:
|
| "The document spans a wide range of policy areas, but when it
| comes to culture, family, and morality, it emphasizes a return
| to traditional values, a rollback of progressive social
| policies, and an assertive use of federal power to reshape
| American culture"
|
| There's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a Culture
| Mild Disagreement.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _There 's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a
| Culture Mild Disagreement._
|
| Culture war at this point is more than a decade old. It did
| not start with Project 2025. It started on the Internet.
|
| Also, GP said _people_ do not change all that much morally.
| That much is true. _Organizations_ change fast. Societies
| change slower. The acted on rules are a combination of three,
| but it 's important to be aware of the distinctions and the
| dynamics.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Frankly, the culture war started in earnest in the late
| 60s.
| freeopinion wrote:
| So you weren't around for the 20s? The last 20s?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| As old as I am, I wasn't here for the 60s either, though
| both would have been a total _blast_
| camgunz wrote:
| Eh I remember the culture wars from the 90s [0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#:~:text=1991
| %E2%80...
| davedx wrote:
| I'm not sure that makes sense to me; how do society's moral
| rules change (slowly) but peoples' moral rules don't/change
| little? I mean I can think of some isolated examples like
| pirating video content, but generally a society's moral
| rules reflect its constituents; where else do those rules
| come from, if not its people?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Culture. Humans have pretty stable moral intuitions about
| the basics - fairness, reciprocity, value of life; AFAIK
| they're consistent throughout time and space as far as
| history goes[0], and form a common base from which more
| complex morality stems.
|
| In short: "theft is bad" is something people are born
| with[1]; "pirating media is bad" isn't; the former will
| be universal wherever you go, the latter depends strongly
| on who you ask[2]; the former is constant throughout
| history, the latter can change within months or years.
|
| On a more general point, human society is the poster
| child of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" -
| there's a lot of ideas and institutions in our lives that
| are purely abstract, and exist _only_ in the shared,
| social sphere. Things like money, rule of law, countries
| or corporations - they exist as long as people expect
| them to exist, but ultimately they can disappear
| overnight - unlike the more fundamental concepts like
| self-preservation or reciprocity, which are anchored in
| our selves.
|
| --
|
| [0] - If it weren't, we would have much more trouble
| understanding or relating to the past; the saying is that
| the past is a foreign country, not that it's an alien
| species!
|
| [1] - Or at least it's as close to innate as we can get.
|
| [2] - And, of course, the progress of science and
| technologies that made this question meaningful in the
| first place.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| My experience is there's also a fundamentally inborn
| notion of "fair price" and "fair pay" that people are
| born with, that they have to be educated out of to
| operate successfully in the modern economy. It's one way
| in which our system is kinda anti-human--it assumes a
| kind of game-playing that's seen as _wrong_ by people,
| naturally, and you _have to_ play that game or you can 't
| succeed. "What the market will bear" doesn't feel fair to
| people until they're _made to_ see it as fair.
| nradov wrote:
| Price is just a symptom or manifestation. People
| naturally see it as unfair to take advantage of someone
| based on a power imbalance or information asymmetry. So
| charging an excessive price or paying a starvation wage
| is just one way to take advantage, but there are other
| non-monetary ways as well. Attempts to impose "fair"
| price or wage controls by legislative fiat or cultural
| norms are doomed to fail because they don't resolve the
| underlying cause.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| "AFAIK they're consistent throughout time and space as
| far as history goes[0], and form a common base from which
| more complex morality stems."
|
| Not even close! Universalized morality (e.g., "stealing
| is wrong") is a product of the last couple thousand
| years, and it's only present in some modern humans. It is
| the foundation of WEIRD (Western, Educated,
| Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology.
|
| If you're curious about what other kinds of human
| experience can be like, I recommend checking out some
| ethnographies. Here's a summary of one:
| https://peacefulsocieties.uncg.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/2015/1...
| ckemere wrote:
| I think you missed "in group" vs "out group" in this
| comment?
| TroubledTrumpet wrote:
| I would think that the distinction lies in the time it
| takes to reach consensus. An individual person's moral
| values may change rapidly without the need for external
| validation. A book club may take a few weeks of debate
| over a heavily philosophical book to modify the perceived
| moral values of the group as a whole. But stretching
| large moral shifts across an entire populace would
| probably take more time and a more concerted effort to
| accomplish. New ideas or values need time to be sorted,
| whether they be picked up into the mainstream view or
| dropped into unfavourability.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Honestly, the way I see it: The people behind the 2025 stuff
| etc have been on the "losing" side of the culture war since
| 1969.
|
| And they're sick of it, they're desperate, and now are just
| laying their cards on the table.
|
| I grew up in an evangelical church in the 80s-- albeit in
| Canada -- attending "Focus on the Family" events, Bible
| studies, etc. that promulgated heavy socially conservative
| ethos -- so I feel like I have seen this narrative play out
| over a few decades ...
|
| After the legalization of gay marriage they just collectively
| lost their shit. They see the stakes as being incredibly
| high. They see abortion as straight up murder. Winning the
| 2016 Trump presidency and taking over the US supreme court
| gave them a taste of blood, and a sense that they can finally
| reverse what they see as a profound descent into degeneracy.
| The trans rights stuff over the last few years has them
| totally incensed, as its a full-on assault (to them) on the
| ontological reality of family, body, identity, etc. that they
| consider intrinsic and holy and fundamental.
|
| I think they're full of shit, but that's I think how this
| world view shakes down. It's a war because they feel the
| stakes are incredibly high.
|
| People on the right or in boardrooms of various companies
| that are aligning themselves with these people for what they
| see are strategic ends are playing with fire.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| As someone who grew up in an evangelical environment, this
| is exactly my read as well. The problem is they might still
| be able to "win" via a sufficient application of violence,
| aka state power, despite being wrong and in the minority.
| grumpy-de-sre wrote:
| I mean are we talking about the USA here or Iran?
| aaaja wrote:
| The pushback against trans rights advocacy is quite
| interesting because unlike with same-sex marriage, there
| are several distinct groups opposing it for fundamentally
| different reasons. Religious conservatives are one group.
| Radical feminists, female athletes, medical whistleblowers
| are others. And almost everyone draws a firm line against
| accepting gender identity beliefs in their romantic and
| sexual lives.
|
| Trying to redefine "woman" and "man", "female" and "male",
| "homosexual" and "heterosexual" - and then reengineering
| society by decree based on these controversial
| redefinitions - is going to get opposition across the
| board.
|
| I think this is why it's become such a hot "culture war"
| topic, because it undermines the deeply-held views of many,
| many more people than just religious conservatives.
|
| Take gay marriage for instance - this was fought both for
| and against on the basis of it being a same-sex union. But
| from the perspective of gender identity believers, if, for
| example, someone female merely identifies as male, then
| marries a male (who also identifies as male), then this is
| a "gay marriage" too. Despite this actually being a
| heterosexual pairing.
|
| On top of this, where these beliefs have been forced into
| law and policy, it has caused actual physical harms. Women
| being raped and impregnated by male prisoners who
| identified their way into the female prison estate is
| amongst the worst of these. But lawmakers in states that
| have enabled this will claim it's progressive policy,
| somehow. Even though it's regressing back to over a century
| ago when mixed-sex prisons where commonplace and
| incarcerated women were at constant risk of sexual violence
| and exploitation from the men they were locked up with.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think trans advocacy is interesting and different from
| gay rights because it goes beyond "live and let live" and
| is also an ontological battle. That is to say, it is a
| battle not just for equal rights, but over what people
| think, believe, and desire.
|
| It ask is not just for the right to exist, but to be
| placed within the gender heterosexuals are attracted to
| and accepted as no different. In this way, it lacks the
| libertarian arguments of gay rights.
|
| The movement is is inherently cultural and poorly suited
| for adjudication the legal/political sphere. Courts and
| laws can't make people love, accept, or believe someone
| is a given gender.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Maybe you're too young to remember when "gay rights" was
| also an "ontological battle" ? -- a huge a fight over
| whether such an "identity" was anything other than a
| fundamental deviance, and a lot of rhetoric to the effect
| that it violates "natural order." It wasn't just
| theological thing from Christians, it came from the
| mainstream of society.
|
| Some people still speak this way in North America but it
| is fringe. It wasn't fringe when I was a kid. It was the
| expected way of thinking about sexuality.
|
| In the early 80s at least there was only two "mainstream"
| ways to talk about homosexuality, as far as I can recall:
|
| 1. what happens in people's bedrooms is none of my
| business, just don't talk about it in public and expect
| tolerance, or
|
| 2. this is total deviance and a mental illness and needs
| to be cured. (Oh, and they _deserve_ HIV for such
| unnatural behaviour.)
|
| That changed, but only in the 90s/2000s, to an
| understanding that homosexuality itself is "natural"
| ("born this way"), and the so-called iron-clad laws of
| natural behaviour were "allowed" to include
| homosexuality. And even gay marriage.
|
| Appeals to laws of nature and assumptions about what is
| natural mask ideology, and often look completely
| ridiculous 50 years later.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I dunno man, "citation needed" about a lot of your
| screed.
|
| On the whole the freaking out about "trans" stuff is
| mostly a red herring or strawman used for strategic
| propagandistic purposes more than it is reflecting any
| real world problematic.
|
| Making outlandish claims about how liberals are trying to
| do X, Y, and Z to their children's education or sports
| forces liberals onto the defensive forcing them to defend
| hormone therapy for 12 year olds or whatever when the
| actual number of real world incidents of this is
| vanishingly small.
|
| I don't personally carry any kind of radical gender
| identity theory, but I care about the rights of
| minorities and it's none of my business what other people
| do and I see no problem with the public and corporate
| sphere accomodate pronoun usages or even bathroom
| accomodations, it's unlikely to cause harms and it
| doesn't hurt me in the slightest.
|
| It's also somewhat ... interesting ... to bring up
| defense of female prisoner's rights and their conditions
| as some kind of demarcation point.
|
| Is the socially conservative right concerned about humane
| prisons now?
|
| Because that would be great. But unlikely.
| recursive wrote:
| > Is the socially conservative right concerned about
| humane prisons now?
|
| > Because that would be great. But unlikely.
|
| I don't know where I'm at on this, but this is ad
| hominem. You can't discredit an argument based on who's
| making it. If you're opposed to humane prisons, just say
| so. But that's not what I'm getting.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Ditto.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| The evangelicals believe that anyone who doesn't believe in
| their god will be tortured by their god for eternity.
| There's nothing worse than eternal torture, so they see it
| as their moral obligation to do _anything at all_ to
| prevent others from being tortured for eternity by their
| god. Nothing they do to others can possibly be worse than
| that, so as long as they 're focused on saving others any
| actions they take are justified (to them).
|
| Their god considers gay sex a crime worthy of eternal
| torture. So anything they do to prevent people from having
| homosexual encounters is morally acceptable, up to and
| including torture & occasional execution via "conversion
| therapy".
|
| Anyone who truly believes in hell is either morally
| bankrupt & willing to allow others to suffer for eternity,
| or a dangerous monster who will stop at nothing to prevent
| others from what they see as sinning.
|
| Many of them don't go to the extremes they would if they
| actually believed they were saving others from hell.
| They're full of shit. But some of them do, and they're
| _fucking terrifying_.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Your quoted sentence is an example of a group of people who
| have no idea of how to run a country. They are using the
| uneducated voter to support an agenda that is mostly
| unconstitutional. We Americans, just like other countries
| with a rule of law, determine our own culture within those
| laws.
|
| To use federal power to reshape our culture is both arrogant
| and, since Project 2025 is how they want to do the reshaping,
| is against the New Testament principle of "live and let
| live". (another way to state this principle is: "Christian,
| mind your own business and stay in your lane.")
| kelipso wrote:
| This doesn't really make sense. The Democrats mainly, but
| also Republicans, have been reshaping our culture using
| federal funding for many many years now, using rules
| associated with federal funding, decisions for where
| federal funding goes to (one clear example being museum and
| arts funding), policies handed down from Department of
| Education and other federal organizations and departments,
| etc etc.
|
| I guess more people notice it now that Republicans are
| doing this so openly but the use of federal power to
| reshape our culture is a well established process.
|
| Also what does live and let live get them, especially with
| the other side pushing so hard? A slippery slope to an
| immoral society.
| jack_h wrote:
| Just to add a bit more credence to this post, I'd point
| to Thomas Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed" which is
| 30 years old and discusses the intrusion of the federal
| government in shaping culture from the perspective of the
| right over many decades.
|
| I've noticed that left leaning individuals tend to view
| their philosophies as neutral and when the federal
| government exerts its power in continuance of these
| philosophies it is viewed as a neutral application of the
| constitution. The right currently sees what they are
| doing in exactly the same way, a neutral application of
| the constitution.
|
| I actually think we have two conflicting constitutions at
| this point. The rigid written one we are all familiar
| with, and a more flexible unwritten one that is based on
| precedent, regulation, and legislation. The right tends
| to prefer the former, the left the latter. As an example
| I think Roe v. Wade, ended up being a part of this
| unwritten constitution which conflicted with the written
| constitution. You then saw this culminate in the Dobbs
| decision where the left thinks a right has been taken
| away and the right thinks it was never a right according
| to the constitution.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| What you call an "unwritten constitution" is the
| fundamental idea behind common law, which is basically
| the default in majority-English-speaking countries.
| Outside the Anglosphere[0] the standard is "civil law",
| which means that the law is _only_ the stuff that was
| actually written down and decided upon by the
| parliamentary body. Everything else is optional; you aren
| 't forced to "obey precedent", but may "follow
| jurisprudence" if such rulings provide relevant
| argumentation to the facts of the case.
|
| This isn't a left/right thing, it's a British/French
| thing. And being a former British colony, America is very
| strictly a common law country. That's why we even have to
| care about the Supreme Court _at all_. The Constitution
| merely says that there _is_ a thing called a "Supreme
| Court", and that Congress can make more courts if it
| wants to. In the early days of America, SCOTUS got handed
| to them a constitutional crisis, squinted at the
| Constitution, remembered how common law precedent
| actually works, and said, "well, that means we have the
| power of judicial review".
|
| So naturally, the Constitution _always_ has an unwritten
| component; to get rid of that would be effectively making
| a new Constitution. What people are squabbling over is
| what should and shouldn 't be in the unwritten component,
| not whether or not it exists. Originalism and textualism
| deny the unwritten component, but nobody is actually an
| Originalist or textualist. There's no historical
| justification for the people who wrote the Constitution
| to want a civil law interpretation of it. Remember, they
| were all British lawyers and politicians. What
| Originalists and textualists are actually doing is using
| their ideology as an excuse to overturn precedent they
| don't like. If they were _really_ Originalists, they 'd
| be shutting SCOTUS down.
|
| [0] Sharia Law and Mao-style "We won't tell you what the
| law is" bullshit notwithstanding
| jack_h wrote:
| My abortion example may have muddied my point more than
| it helped, sorry about that. Let me try to articulate it
| more clearly. I'm (mostly) not discussing common law as I
| am focusing on the federal level. Common law tends to be
| more of a state concept (except Louisiana). As the
| Supreme Court held in Erie:
|
| "Except in matters governed by the Federal Constitution
| or by Acts of Congress, the law to be applied in any case
| is the law of the State. And whether the law of the State
| shall be declared by its Legislature in a statute or by
| its highest court in a decision is not a matter of
| federal concern. _There is no federal general common
| law_. Congress has no power to declare substantive rules
| of common law applicable in a State, whether they be
| local in their nature or "general," be they commercial
| law or a part of the law of torts. And no clause in the
| Constitution purports to confer such a power upon the
| federal courts."
|
| There are matters of common law at the federal level, but
| they're not central to my broader point. When I say
| "unwritten constitution" I am referring to a set of laws,
| statutes, customs, and judicial decisions which together
| form an unwritten constitution that are non-binding to
| future legislative efforts. The Magna Carta and the 1689
| English Bill of Rights still make up a part of the
| unwritten constitution of the UK, although the former is
| mostly symbolic at this point. However, no parliament can
| bind a future parliament in the UK. So if they wanted to
| repeal the 1689 Bill of Rights they could do so
| legislatively right now. The major advancement of the
| founding generation was the idea of a written
| constitution, one that could bind future legislators -
| and technically the other branches - so that the
| constitution itself had to be changed through a separate
| process. In other words Congress cannot repeal our Bill
| of Rights right now, it would have to go through the
| arduous amendment process. So when I speak of an
| unwritten constitution I am referring specifically to the
| non-binding nature of the laws and statutes that make up
| a set of foundational rules for a society. The phrases
| "unwritten constitution" and "written constitution" are
| fairly old and unfortunately are a bit of a misnomer in
| what they actually mean.
|
| > The Constitution merely says that there is a thing
| called a "Supreme Court", and that Congress can make more
| courts if it wants to.
|
| That's actually a good place to start for an example.
| Chief Justice Roberts stated recently that "[f]or more
| than two centuries, it has been established that
| impeachment is not an appropriate response to
| disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal
| appellate review process exists for that purpose." This
| highlights my point fairly well. The written
| constitution, the one that cannot be changed through
| normal legislative means, makes no such determination as
| to what is or is not appropriate and merely grants
| Congress the power of impeachment without even defining
| what high crimes or misdemeanors means. What I would
| argue has become a part of our unwritten constitution is
| as Roberts describes, a set of appellate courts with
| specific jurisdiction where the appropriate course of
| action for an unfavorable opinion is to appeal. However,
| Congress can add or remove inferior courts and determine
| their procedural rules and jurisdiction pretty much at
| will. In other words this set of courts, laws and customs
| developed by the legislator does not bar a future
| legislator from changing it to something wholly different
| if they so desire.
|
| Another example would be independent agencies under the
| executive which has become a hot button topic lately.
| Article 2 Section 1 states that "[t]he executive Power
| shall be vested in a President of the United States of
| America." However, for a long time now we have had
| independent agencies which were created legislatively
| with a certain degree of insulation from Presidential
| control. I would argue that this is another example of a
| part of an unwritten constitution that does not bind any
| future legislator. It's also an area of extreme friction
| between the written one and the set of laws, customs, and
| precedent that we have developed over many decades.
|
| Hopefully those two examples are more informative as
| neither are really central to common law.
|
| > In the early days of America, SCOTUS got handed to them
| a constitutional crisis, squinted at the Constitution,
| remembered how common law precedent actually works, and
| said, "well, that means we have the power of judicial
| review".
|
| That deserves a reply far longer than I can provide here.
| In general while I see the utility of judicial review I
| would argue it doesn't make sense when it comes to
| disputes between the federal government and a state, i.e.
| the federal government via the judiciary gets to have the
| final word over what is constitutional when a state
| challenges the federal government over the
| constitutionality of some federal action. I would also
| argue that Marbury v. Madison was one of the first bricks
| of an unwritten constitution being constructed as for the
| most part everyone just passively accepted it, but it is
| not explicitly called out in Article 3. However, there
| are good arguments against this.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| As always, much of the conflict comes down to what
| constitutes "your lane".
|
| The government we have is far from a libertarian "live and
| let live", regulating nearly every aspect of life and
| taxing one person to give to another.
|
| It decides what children are taught, who can work jobs,
| what is a crime, and who pays for different services.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > and cannot cope with things going back to normal.
|
| I would argue that we worked our way to the post cold-war
| golden age, and then destroyed it with greed, which led to
| financial pain, which led to political nonsense, which led to
| the rubbish we are in right now.
|
| So the period we are in right now is not the "back to normal"
| phase, but an actual decrease of human evolution. Not
| dissimilar to things that happened in the past, for example
| with the collapse of the roman empire.
| 127 wrote:
| I would add pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.
| (CatGPT did a pretty good job: https://dpaste.com/HTS9DWRNZ-
| preview)
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Wait tell me more about CatGPT
| bckr wrote:
| I prefer Clawed
| layer8 wrote:
| The French claim that it farts.
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| "Cat I farted" in French, fwiw
| goatlover wrote:
| Woe, Frolic, Dread, Malice - world needs to be severed.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "People do not change that much morally."
|
| Greed is part of what humans are. It's part of what destroys
| societies. Building a society that can survive human nature
| long term is an unsolved problem.
|
| You sound like you expected that, after the end of the Cold
| War, we had a perfect society, and then we fell from a state
| of grace and ruined it. No, after the end of the Cold War,
| the pressure was removed that had been keeping us from acting
| on our worst impulses. Turns out that many of us were worse
| than we expected.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yeah, we need a better take on society and education --- see
| the discussion of Ursula K. LeGuin's essay "The Child and the
| Shadow":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525079
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _The world gets both better and worse._
|
| It doesn't _have_ to get worse. Conversely, it doesn 't have to
| get better, either, but at this point, we've got a lot of
| history that shows us what has and hasn't worked. I think the
| measure of how people are doing worth focusing on is how much
| of their potential they've fulfilled. I'm not really interested
| in how generally well off someone is today compared to someone
| in some random point in history because there are too many
| outliers on both ends of that one.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > cannot cope with things going back to normal.
|
| Interesting take on "normal" by Canadian physician Gabor Mate.
|
| https://drgabormate.com/book/the-myth-of-normal/
| keiferski wrote:
| Good article. The point about contemporary philosophers not
| having grand theories is something that comes up frequently in
| philosophy spaces (i.e., /r/academicphilosophy or
| https://dailynous.com).
|
| The problem is that the academic system is really not designed to
| select such individuals, instead optimizing for specialized
| publications, pedigree, etc. The average philosopher has zero
| incentive for constructing grand theories and indeed is typically
| ridiculed for even attempting to do so.
|
| And so instead the best "public intellectuals" the world of
| philosophy can offer are either obsessively focused on particular
| issues rather than the field as a whole, (e.g., Peter Singer) or
| are entirely philosophically-uneducated charlatans who want to
| sell books and make money, not discover truth (e.g. Sam Harris,
| talking heads on Twitter, Substack, etc.) that unfortunately get
| an audience. The closest we get are probably Charles Taylor (big
| scope, but unfortunately too verbose and abstruse) or Zizek (too
| niche and far into his own entertainment career.)
|
| I'm not sure what the solution is, but it probably involves a
| brilliant (and credentialed) philosopher that is also savvy with
| YouTube and willing to disregard the academic philosophy social
| milieu.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The problem is not limited to philosophy. All of academia is
| broken this way. Sadly, we think the only alternative is
| "industry", an equally broken set of incentives. That limits
| fronts of human progress to two types. We either get committee-
| driven institutional science leveraging huge resources,
| supercomputers, particle accelerators - blighted by cutthroat
| competition, opaque "publishing" and fraud - or radical
| populist individuals and small unaffiliated groups of thinkers
| able to operate without material resources. The Goldilocks zone
| of quiet, contemplative science, of whimsical, "high-risk"
| enquiry reminiscent of the Enlightenment, is gone in the 21st
| century.
| keiferski wrote:
| Agreed and that is a really good, but simple, point that I
| didn't realize as clearly before: there is no real
| alternative to the academia vs. industry dichotomy. What is
| needed might be a third option that allows for exploration
| without the pressures of profits or publications.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Your third option sounds suspiciously similar to golden-age
| DARPA, which had been created in response to the launch of
| Sputnik in 1957?
| 20after4 wrote:
| The traditional 3rd option was the patronage by a rich
| benefactor. The modern version is patreon. It's imperfect
| but seems to work pretty well for some.
| keiferski wrote:
| Patreon is still dependent on the creator caring about
| what their audience wants, what the market wants, etc.
| This is a distinctly "populist" approach, which does have
| its downsides: specifically if there is important work
| that doesn't have a wide audience, or takes years to get
| any results.
| econ wrote:
| I won't call it a grand theory but I like this solution to the
| puzzle.
|
| https://gaby.wordpress.com/2025/03/20/wilde-democracy/
| judahmeek wrote:
| I would like the idea of voting diplomas, but ensuring that
| such gate-keeping can evolve over time without being gamed to
| slowly strip a larger & larger fraction of the population of
| representation over time is a really tricky problem.
|
| Thus, I think that the freedom to vote & to hold office
| should be enshrined in the constitution for everyone,
| regardless of criminal history or citizenship.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The key argument I read here is that, due to specialisation,
| academic philosophy is currently unfit to apprehend today's
| problems. It is no longer capable of incorporating politics, and
| politics itself has escaped rational discourse. Historians are
| enjoying some new limelight, and popular value-revisionism is in
| the air, at least if Lucy Worsley's BBC series is anything to go
| by.
|
| The question is: "What is progress, really?"
| hawkjo wrote:
| Nice article, but framing it around the doomsday clock felt like
| the author just needed to express his angst on whatever page was
| in front of him
| benzayb wrote:
| "Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the
| certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid,
| nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of
| audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest
| mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as
| immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as
| such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of
| admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of
| spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in
| power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a
| whole generation."
|
| -- Schopenhauer
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Schopenhauer! He's one of the guys in the quotes of the big
| time jerks article!
|
| https://medium.com/luminasticity/quotes-of-the-big-time-jerk...
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| Excellent book on the theme using Zambia in the 70s as a case
| study:
|
| Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural
| responses to a prolonged period of sharp economic decline. [1]
|
| "From now on, it's just down, down, down..." sighed one informant
| (p. 13). As Ferguson argues, "Zambia's recent crisis is not only
| an economic crisis but a crisis of meaning, in which the way
| people are able to understand their experi- ence and imbue it
| with significance and dignity has (for many) been dramatical- ly
| eroded" (p.15). [2]
|
| Not that long afterwards there was a revolution.
|
| [1] https://www.ucpress.edu/books/expectations-of-
| modernity/pape...
|
| [2]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002190960303800...
| dachworker wrote:
| What strikes me is how much of these current geopolitical events
| are driven by singular individuals whose current inclinations
| were shaped by their very arbitrary past encounters. For example,
| if you take the current US administration's hostility towards
| Europe. That might just be the result of the Vice President being
| at Yale and encountering a few snobby children of European old
| money, and they might have been a bit too mean to him, and that
| might be the sole reason he has so much antipathy towards the
| whole of Europe.
| _rm wrote:
| All a bunch of narcissists who's whole MO is showing off how
| smart they can be with words, with net negative to society.
|
| Literally if all the morally righteous smartarses from Marx to
| Hegel to whichever modern university-produced cretins had done
| the world a favour and died nice and young the world would be a
| far better place.
| api wrote:
| It's a story of the unfolding of human progress told by an idiot,
| full of sound and fury that signifies nothing if you pay
| attention to what the idiot thinks is important.
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| History stopped being useful and became a meaningless recreation
| when it moved away from the fact that facts are absolute, not
| relative to the observer.
| vintermann wrote:
| Find me an absolute point, and I'll move the world.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| You're relying on something that's not a fact, to make this
| post.
| farts_mckensy wrote:
| Idealism sucks ass.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Ideally, it sucks the most ass of all.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > China, Russia and the United States are all spending huge sums
| to expand or modernise their nuclear arsenals, adding to the
| ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or
| miscalculation.
|
| An annoyance of mine is that this person is from Europe and seems
| to ignore that the UK[0] and France[1] are modernizing and, at
| least in the UK's case, expanding their stockpiles.
|
| There seems to be a continental myopia towards the European role
| in adding to the problems of the world.
|
| EDIT: You can downvote me all you want, it doesn't make me wrong.
|
| [0]https://fas.org/publication/delays-deferment-and-
| continuous-...
|
| [1]https://thebulletin.org/premium/2023-07/nuclear-notebook-
| fre...
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