Good. My entire point is that such discussions—or, at least, certain “rationalist” arguments in them—must be suppressed outright. Certain political opinions must remain out of bounds. Trawling through so much of this on the internet, I wonder more and more whether Marcuse might’ve been right about “repressive tolerance”.
I strongly disagree with this statement, but truly hope that people continue to engage with it rather than downvote it—we actually need to have this conversation and understand that there actually are pros and cons, so that we can accurately weigh them.
My own objections to the idea of “repressive tolerance” is that humans aren’t very good at managing it responsibly—the decision of who to repress is just as much of a Hard Problem as the decision of who gets to make the decisions (in fact, they’re functionally equivalent at timescales of greater than a few months).
This is a concept that we need to perform research and experiment on, NOT a concept that we need to be implementing at this stage in our social development.
If you want to start deploying such weapons, suppressing people outright, it’s by no means certain you’ll win. The underlying argument of Marcuse’ piece, the thing he uses to secure necessity, is that propaganda works. If you start giving people the power to shut up those they disagree with, what makes you think they’ll come down on your side? People taught not to think, and to go with the populist pull all their lives, are not suddenly going to choose wisely and in the interests of, as M rather ironically put it considering your antipathy for utilitarians, ‘Freeing the Damned of the Earth.’
I don’t think this is a productive avenue for this discussion to go down.
Good. My entire point is that such discussions—or, at least, certain “rationalist” arguments in them—must be suppressed outright. Certain political opinions must remain out of bounds. Trawling through so much of this on the internet, I wonder more and more whether Marcuse might’ve been right about “repressive tolerance”.
I strongly disagree with this statement, but truly hope that people continue to engage with it rather than downvote it—we actually need to have this conversation and understand that there actually are pros and cons, so that we can accurately weigh them.
My own objections to the idea of “repressive tolerance” is that humans aren’t very good at managing it responsibly—the decision of who to repress is just as much of a Hard Problem as the decision of who gets to make the decisions (in fact, they’re functionally equivalent at timescales of greater than a few months).
This is a concept that we need to perform research and experiment on, NOT a concept that we need to be implementing at this stage in our social development.
If you want to start deploying such weapons, suppressing people outright, it’s by no means certain you’ll win. The underlying argument of Marcuse’ piece, the thing he uses to secure necessity, is that propaganda works. If you start giving people the power to shut up those they disagree with, what makes you think they’ll come down on your side? People taught not to think, and to go with the populist pull all their lives, are not suddenly going to choose wisely and in the interests of, as M rather ironically put it considering your antipathy for utilitarians, ‘Freeing the Damned of the Earth.’