Meaning that there really aren’t horrible truths about society that are hidden from the ignorant masses but revealed to the brave and sufficiently cynical few; most people (even the “average” ones) do actually perceive all the information they might need about the society they live in, but cannot articulate and communicate it, so on some topics only a scrambled message of discontent and anger can be heard.
Lets begin with this. Do you take this argument seriously? Or is it just armament? I refuse to think you don’t have any clue as to how utterly devastating this argument is when applied to the left in the 20th century.
Let alone how this applies to the Dickian Gnosticism we talked about just a few days ago!
Let alone how this applies to the Dickian Gnosticism we talked about just a few days ago!
Okay, this joke’s totally on you! Dick (and some earlier Gnostics) essentially made the very same suggestion on metaphysical knowledge that I entertain here about social knowledge; it’s an unknown known that most people already happen to possess, but which must be brought to the forefront of consciousness via a revelation event he called “Anamnesis”.
Actually you are right, here I was doing the pattern matching.
I think this is because how I see Gnostic like beliefs working out in the world. Humans being social will tend to share them and such movements spiritual or otherwise consist in a large part of an enlightened guru with special gnosis telling you what you have “forgotten” and must learn relearn.
That leftists were wrong to force their propaganda, clever and logically superior as it might appear, upon the masses who wisely stuck to conservatism since forever and understood conservative wisdom on a gut level? Yeah, yeah, you’d say that it’s just as bad or worse than the modern “thoughtcrime” currents I mentioned—but I think there is a significant difference.
For the last 200 years, lots of revolutionary/populist left-wing movements, even non-Marxist ones (incl. ultimately triumphant ones like 1st/2nd-wave feminism or abolitionism), have been using variations on class consciousness as a theoretical foundation for their agitation and rabble-rousing. And at least their official descriptions of “consciousness-raising” have been much like what I mean—and what I assume Zizek means—by “articulating the unknown knowns”.
Of course, reality is messy and politics fucks shit up, but ultimately I feel that the idea of consciousness-raising is not a clever trick, a deception of the masses who know better but are led astray. In the right hands it can serve as social psychoanalysis of sorts, to resolve deep-seated exploitation and oppression by dragging them from the collective unconscious into the light. A good example is how Western countries are practically at the end of homophobia. It was first systematically opposed by the Left’s critical theory and Freudo-Marxism; now it’s vanishing even on the right. Of course, there have been failures, which naturally resound louder—such as the reckless politics of “national liberation” leading to rivers of blood and zero liberty in the decolonized countries.
But here, before you say: “Aha, so you admit that this radical meddling is irresponsible and unaccountable!”, I’d ask you to consider, what if the masses have always had a desire for emancipation, what if the ideas of left intellectuals could never have been so transformative without a mute but powerful demand for them?
Every revolution has a fundamentally real reason! It might not even be a “good” reason—see the “men’s rights movement” and their politics of bitterness—but a revolutionary trend cannot be kicked off with simply propaganda, mass psychosis or shallow moral fashion! This reason can stay deep and strong under a calm surface, dormant for ages. Slaves did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position in America; women did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position before feminism. This fundamental psychosocial reality of oppression is what the oft-derided Marxist Historical Materialism is clear-headed about, and what can lead a right-wing thinker to denial (e.g. Moldbug on the Russian revolution) or biting bullets (e.g. Chesterton on the French one).
And, like Gramsci said, the oppressed masses can and do generate their own intellectuals who are driven to become a voice for the voiceless—by their origins, not by whim or ethical abstractions. Who taught racial equality or feminism to Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave (who must’ve simply got a jackpot in the genetic lottery)? Evil power-hungry Northern abolitionists?
No, it must be the same process by which a black PUA-practicing guy commenting on a men’s issues blog can realize how his struggle is very similar to that of women, despite all the public hostility between feminists and PUAs. When he articulates the prejudice and oppression that have been a personal concern in his life, he can’t help but notice that other groups face very similar oppression. Grassroots leftism!
You ever notice that the most strident voices about “The decline of Western civilization” and supporters of the “Send their asses back to the kitchen” type of rhetoric are mainly white males between the ages of 30-50? [Censored], [censored], [censored], just to name a few...
As a black man anytime I hear things about how women should know their place, or that society is being ruined by women taking an active role in society, you know what I do? Take the word “women” out and insert “blacks”, or nowadays in SoCal where I live “Mexicans”. See where I’m going? They talk about the “good old days”. What good old days? Good for who? White men between 30 and 50? Why would I be interested in going back to the 50s? Or 30s? Or mid 1800s? Who does that benefit?
P.S.: Konkvistador asked if Nazism could count as a catastrophic and evil consequence of this sort of thing. The communist terror in China could, I think—but not Nazism. The Nazis killed and enslaved people under a wholly illusory cover of fighting an arbitrary Other. Their violence was not directed at the real social system.
A more compelling example of a social revolution causing catastrophic evil things would be the Red Terror and the Cultural Revolution in China. It was indeed mostly driven from below with encouragement from Mao; it was a part of sweeping systemic changes; it concluded decades of chaos and strife, and centuries of misery and exploitation; this still doesn’t justify an orgy of slaughter and cannibalism. I don’t know in what way to talk about it.
Overall this post has left me of mixed feelings. I liked it because it is exensive and gives insight into your chain of reasoning, making much of it explicit. I dislike it strongly because I don’t see any evidence that you have updated on the arguments I mad in our previous discussions here, here and here, which I think more or less defeat a crucial part of your reasoning here.
I’ll try to rephrase your argument to make sure I’m not failing at interpreting it:
Heuristics people evolved to deal with other humans are useful at detecting bad stuff happening in our social environment. Such feelings of distress can be repressed by socialization or overwhelmed by other feelings. This is bad because people’s instincts triggered by such heuristics still point in about the right direction to solving said bad stuff in society.
Since civilization is really screwed up on many levels lots of such alarms are going off in human brains and a good way to get political power is to harvest them. This solves the problem of right and might, as the responses that you call “unknwon knowns” are the strong nearly always winning force that advances advance “right”. The “might” that accompanies them and actually produces changes is just what you get when you unleash lots of humans on solving a problem.
Unleashing them via political means is thus mostly good.
Unleashing them via political means is thus mostly good.
Nah, I’d simply say that holding them back (via “political means”, yes, because all means of repression carry a political dimension due to the importance of their social function) is evil, really evil. The revolution/release itself is sometimes evil, always scary and usually involves violence. But that’s simply the kind of pent-up force that results from isolating, torturing and enslaving aspects of people’s selves.
This is bad because people’s instincts triggered by such heuristics still point in about the right direction to solving said bad stuff in society.
No no no. This is the basic new-left concept of negativity; we could listen to ourselves and understand how we are repressed, where we’re hurting, how it impacts our life—but we shouldn’t pretend that we know what to do! Trauma does not come wrapped with instructions on how to overcome it. State communism, in particular, has failed, and so has the alleviation of repression through unrestricted sexuality, and many other emancipatory projects too. Articulating the truth of our feelings is enormously important, but it can only tell us what’s broken; we can’t really see a path to a free, non-repressive and individuality-affirming society. (Or, rather, we might get a feeling as to where we’d want to go, but it’s not calibrated to the circumstances in any way, it’s only calibrated to our scream of pain! Good illustration: Zizek quoting Ayn Rand as to why money is good and abolishing markets led to disaster.)
Today’s Left can only offer palliatives, think hard, reflect, and act as a conservative force against political projects that rely on repression. Reasons for hope—Utopian hope—are few, but we must keep it alive. In particular, when in the links above you criticize me for supporting intervention in group conflict and identity politics, saying, essentially, that it’s better for anyone feeling oppressed to disarm and suffer quietly until the pain numbs them—and maybe there’ll be less social conflict overall then. There is an utilitarian logic to it; certain misery is better than certain misery plus group infighting.
Yet the logic of not giving up hope is, to me, different; if there’s a real honest chance to create a small segment of society, a small public space where people would really be able to exist, talk or think together, with radically less systemic oppression from each other and from the outside—say, LW in the example above, or a factory, or a classroom—then this is worth fighting for, and worth the usual risks.
And I don’t mean, like, formal enforced niceness, politeness, feminism police or such—I mean like what Zizek says about his atheist Christianity, a real love for the Other, under a shared universality that stops differences from being obstacles. A place and a circumstance where you wouldn’t just be “tolerated”, but accepted, and could accept yourself.
So for a really lame, rambling summary: the left-wing “positive” vision here is essentially an utopia of non-repression; we don’t have the remotest idea of how to get there; it’s oriented towards individuality but is best described in terms of community and brotherhood, not the individual; it is fundamentally possible, and there are gleans of it here and there in daily life, which are worth fighting for and cherishing; -
yet the opposition to what’s repressive and cruel and loathsome in current reality is more basic, and we ought to keep it up; if we give up, we might well lose what little we have under liberal capitalism; there are no promises in walking away from Omelas.
Thanks. I feel that LW’s political landscape really needs a hard-left current that would be up to our standards of reasoning&debate. There’s been a lot of thought and passion put into various left-of-liberalism philosophies in the last century, and the community needs to engage and grapple with them like it does with alt-right contrarianism, getting past inferential distances.
People have been crying out for more ideological diversity on LW and against our discourse being dominated by mainstream liberal/progressive thought. I can see them trying to add such diversity from the right, but when I’m going for a far-left perspective (often in direct opposition to the local “Weird-Right”), I feel rather alone and divorced-from-context here.
Yes, pretty easy in this case, actually. After coming to power, they picked up a few Weimar social programs (including the Autobahns!) and tripled the hype; they didn’t nationalize much anything except stolen Jewish property, and even that was in practice mostly given away as loot; they worked with the old officer caste despite its frequent disloyalty and purged the SA when the stormtroopers wanted in on the influence and status; they kept a basically peacetime consumer-oriented economy until 1943, long after all other great powers introduced total-war central control; despite the Anti-Semitic propaganda, they couldn’t manage to get enough popular participation during the Kristallnacht, and Hitler cancelled further planned pogroms in favor of silent and secret repression...
Lots of propaganda, lots of killing, not too much change in society’s structures compared to e.g. 1914.
[Nazis] worked with the old officer caste despite its frequent disloyalty
I don’t think the historical record supports this assertion. The Prussian / Imperial military was a parallel institution to the post-1848 civilian government—both loyal to the Kaiser, but otherwise unrelated. (No, this isn’t a stable setup).
A substantial amount of the German army’s political maneuvering in Weimar period was an attempt to maintain independence from civilian government oversight even after there wasn’t really any German state separate from the civilian leadership.
Once Hitler took power, he broke the Army’s independence (eg the destruction of Generals Blomberg and Fritsch). In short, the Nazis were the first civilian government to place the German military in a subordinate position. “Working with the old officer class” is terribly misleading.
You’re still talking in terms of classes that shouldn’t exist. I don’t care about blacks, or women, or white males between 30-50. I think anyone “taking an active role in society” who doesn’t own land or a business has horrible consequences. I say this only to point out that your argument sounds like nesting dolls and some of us do bite the bullet and wish to unravel down to the base case.
And I think meritocracy is actively resisted by those who face the reality that in a society dominated by technology white/jewish/asian males currently have a huge advantage, regardless of whether that advantage is genetic/cultural/path dependent/oppression based.
I think anyone “taking an active role in society” who doesn’t own land or a business has horrible consequences.
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”? Would it apply to e.g. Martin Luther King? Eliezer Yudkowsky? Milton Friedman? George W. Bush? Donald Trump? Boris Berezovsky?
How would you rate the horribleness of the former three’s impact of society, given that none of them was ever a businessman or a landowner—no, not even Friedman? How would it measure against the impact of the latter three?
And I think meritocracy is actively resisted by those who face the reality that in a society dominated by technology white/jewish/asian males currently have a huge advantage, regardless of whether that advantage is genetic/cultural/path dependent/oppression based.
Um, what exactly is this “meritocracy” of yours? Does it include any moral claims? Or is it simply a part of the idea that we need more economic “productivity”—more cheap food and cars and iPads and UAVs and office blocks and hedge funds and mass-produced entertainment and generally all the stuff that we already manufacture? Would, say, a white guy who’s genetically predisposed to innovation, extraversion and risk-taking being born into an upper-class family, founding a fashion or advertizing agency, then making a fortune helping sell overpriced goods to affluent First World young people, be a decent example of “meritocracy”? “Productivity”?
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”?
explicit political power, implicit power should be made explicit wherever possible.
And yes, I’m specifically claiming that on net people like the latter three have a much larger negative impact than the positive impact of people like the former three.
Your use of the word overpriced and affluent leads me to believe you attach moral significance to parting idiots with their money for baubles. Why? The average wealthy person has a larger positive impact than the average non-wealthy first worlder. I prefer concentrated wealth in the hands of those whose values I share. I have values more likely aligned with that of a tech company CEO than a randomly selected first world person.
And yes, I’m specifically claiming that on net people like the latter three have a much larger negative impact than the positive impact of people like the former three.
...Then I don’t understand how your words are at all an objection to my description of emancipatory/socially radical politics. You do understand that, for example, MLK was a radically minded avowed socialist who led a partial social revolution in the US without either violence or “explicit political power”? If you don’t find yourself “horrified” by this, then we don’t seem to have a problem.
Your use of the word overpriced and affluent leads me to believe you attach moral significance to parting idiots with their money for baubles. Why?
It’s not nearly so narrow; I see no point in manufacturing tons of useless shiny stuff and pushing fake desires onto people to sell it so that the cycle can continue—and this wasteful nonsense is a mandatory imperative for 1st world capitalism. If we could agree on a different mechanism of distribution (not necessarily state planning), we could be using our industrial might to kickstart poor countries instead—while 1st world people could be working less, consuming less, wasting less, draining less resources, enjoying more leisure and giving more attention to the non-monetary things in society.
Example: why the hell do we buy personal cars for driving in cities? What good does it do us at all? And have we even considered the myriad costs? How is this not a ridiculous failure of the “pragmatic” capitalist mode of distribution AND its ideology?
I’ve read this conversation, and I literally don’t understand what you are talking about. I agree with you that left-of-mainstream views would be valuable in this community. But I think you and RomeoStevens are only talking past each other. That’s not really a victory for rationalism.
If you don’t find yourself “horrified” by this, then we don’t seem to have a problem.
Wait so unless I’m horrified by it 100% of the time my point gets thrown out? There’s no room for saying something has plusses and minuses and the minuses outweigh the plusses?
I see no point in manufacturing tons of useless shiny stuff and pushing fake desires onto people to sell it
Sorry but you don’t get to decide which preferences are real. You are angry that more resources aren’t devoted towards things you value, welcome to the club.
I think anyone “taking an active role in society” who doesn’t own land or a business has horrible consequences.
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”? Would it apply to e.g. Martin Luther King? Eliezer Yudkowsky? Milton Friedman? George W. Bush? Donald Trump? Boris Berezovsky?
How would you rate the horribleness of the former three’s impact of society, given that none of them was ever a businessman or a landowner—no, not even Friedman? How would it measure against the impact of the latter three?
And I think meritocracy is actively resisted by those who face the reality that in a society dominated by technology white/jewish/asian males currently have a huge advantage, regardless of whether that advantage is genetic/cultural/path dependent/oppression based.
Um, what exactly is this “meritocracy” of yours? Does it include any moral claims? Or is it simply a part of the idea that we need more economic “productivity”? Would, say, a white guy who’s genetically predisposed to innovation, extraversion and risk-taking being born into an upper-class family, founding a fashion or advertizing agency, then making a fortune helping sell overpriced goods to affluent First World young people, be a decent example of “meritocracy”? “Productivity”?
Lets begin with this. Do you take this argument seriously? Or is it just armament? I refuse to think you don’t have any clue as to how utterly devastating this argument is when applied to the left in the 20th century.
Let alone how this applies to the Dickian Gnosticism we talked about just a few days ago!
Okay, this joke’s totally on you! Dick (and some earlier Gnostics) essentially made the very same suggestion on metaphysical knowledge that I entertain here about social knowledge; it’s an unknown known that most people already happen to possess, but which must be brought to the forefront of consciousness via a revelation event he called “Anamnesis”.
Actually you are right, here I was doing the pattern matching.
I think this is because how I see Gnostic like beliefs working out in the world. Humans being social will tend to share them and such movements spiritual or otherwise consist in a large part of an enlightened guru with special gnosis telling you what you have “forgotten” and must learn relearn.
I would like an answer to the tribal question I posed. Do you see how this argument applies to leftism?
That leftists were wrong to force their propaganda, clever and logically superior as it might appear, upon the masses who wisely stuck to conservatism since forever and understood conservative wisdom on a gut level? Yeah, yeah, you’d say that it’s just as bad or worse than the modern “thoughtcrime” currents I mentioned—but I think there is a significant difference.
For the last 200 years, lots of revolutionary/populist left-wing movements, even non-Marxist ones (incl. ultimately triumphant ones like 1st/2nd-wave feminism or abolitionism), have been using variations on class consciousness as a theoretical foundation for their agitation and rabble-rousing. And at least their official descriptions of “consciousness-raising” have been much like what I mean—and what I assume Zizek means—by “articulating the unknown knowns”.
Of course, reality is messy and politics fucks shit up, but ultimately I feel that the idea of consciousness-raising is not a clever trick, a deception of the masses who know better but are led astray. In the right hands it can serve as social psychoanalysis of sorts, to resolve deep-seated exploitation and oppression by dragging them from the collective unconscious into the light. A good example is how Western countries are practically at the end of homophobia. It was first systematically opposed by the Left’s critical theory and Freudo-Marxism; now it’s vanishing even on the right. Of course, there have been failures, which naturally resound louder—such as the reckless politics of “national liberation” leading to rivers of blood and zero liberty in the decolonized countries.
But here, before you say: “Aha, so you admit that this radical meddling is irresponsible and unaccountable!”, I’d ask you to consider, what if the masses have always had a desire for emancipation, what if the ideas of left intellectuals could never have been so transformative without a mute but powerful demand for them?
Every revolution has a fundamentally real reason! It might not even be a “good” reason—see the “men’s rights movement” and their politics of bitterness—but a revolutionary trend cannot be kicked off with simply propaganda, mass psychosis or shallow moral fashion! This reason can stay deep and strong under a calm surface, dormant for ages. Slaves did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position in America; women did have fundamental overwhelming discontent about their position before feminism. This fundamental psychosocial reality of oppression is what the oft-derided Marxist Historical Materialism is clear-headed about, and what can lead a right-wing thinker to denial (e.g. Moldbug on the Russian revolution) or biting bullets (e.g. Chesterton on the French one).
And, like Gramsci said, the oppressed masses can and do generate their own intellectuals who are driven to become a voice for the voiceless—by their origins, not by whim or ethical abstractions. Who taught racial equality or feminism to Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave (who must’ve simply got a jackpot in the genetic lottery)? Evil power-hungry Northern abolitionists?
No, it must be the same process by which a black PUA-practicing guy commenting on a men’s issues blog can realize how his struggle is very similar to that of women, despite all the public hostility between feminists and PUAs. When he articulates the prejudice and oppression that have been a personal concern in his life, he can’t help but notice that other groups face very similar oppression. Grassroots leftism!
P.S.: Konkvistador asked if Nazism could count as a catastrophic and evil consequence of this sort of thing. The communist terror in China could, I think—but not Nazism. The Nazis killed and enslaved people under a wholly illusory cover of fighting an arbitrary Other. Their violence was not directed at the real social system.
A more compelling example of a social revolution causing catastrophic evil things would be the Red Terror and the Cultural Revolution in China. It was indeed mostly driven from below with encouragement from Mao; it was a part of sweeping systemic changes; it concluded decades of chaos and strife, and centuries of misery and exploitation; this still doesn’t justify an orgy of slaughter and cannibalism. I don’t know in what way to talk about it.
Overall this post has left me of mixed feelings. I liked it because it is exensive and gives insight into your chain of reasoning, making much of it explicit. I dislike it strongly because I don’t see any evidence that you have updated on the arguments I mad in our previous discussions here, here and here, which I think more or less defeat a crucial part of your reasoning here.
I’ll try to rephrase your argument to make sure I’m not failing at interpreting it:
Heuristics people evolved to deal with other humans are useful at detecting bad stuff happening in our social environment. Such feelings of distress can be repressed by socialization or overwhelmed by other feelings. This is bad because people’s instincts triggered by such heuristics still point in about the right direction to solving said bad stuff in society.
Since civilization is really screwed up on many levels lots of such alarms are going off in human brains and a good way to get political power is to harvest them. This solves the problem of right and might, as the responses that you call “unknwon knowns” are the strong nearly always winning force that advances advance “right”. The “might” that accompanies them and actually produces changes is just what you get when you unleash lots of humans on solving a problem.
Unleashing them via political means is thus mostly good.
Nah, I’d simply say that holding them back (via “political means”, yes, because all means of repression carry a political dimension due to the importance of their social function) is evil, really evil. The revolution/release itself is sometimes evil, always scary and usually involves violence. But that’s simply the kind of pent-up force that results from isolating, torturing and enslaving aspects of people’s selves.
No no no. This is the basic new-left concept of negativity; we could listen to ourselves and understand how we are repressed, where we’re hurting, how it impacts our life—but we shouldn’t pretend that we know what to do! Trauma does not come wrapped with instructions on how to overcome it. State communism, in particular, has failed, and so has the alleviation of repression through unrestricted sexuality, and many other emancipatory projects too. Articulating the truth of our feelings is enormously important, but it can only tell us what’s broken; we can’t really see a path to a free, non-repressive and individuality-affirming society.
(Or, rather, we might get a feeling as to where we’d want to go, but it’s not calibrated to the circumstances in any way, it’s only calibrated to our scream of pain! Good illustration: Zizek quoting Ayn Rand as to why money is good and abolishing markets led to disaster.)
Today’s Left can only offer palliatives, think hard, reflect, and act as a conservative force against political projects that rely on repression. Reasons for hope—Utopian hope—are few, but we must keep it alive. In particular, when in the links above you criticize me for supporting intervention in group conflict and identity politics, saying, essentially, that it’s better for anyone feeling oppressed to disarm and suffer quietly until the pain numbs them—and maybe there’ll be less social conflict overall then. There is an utilitarian logic to it; certain misery is better than certain misery plus group infighting.
Yet the logic of not giving up hope is, to me, different; if there’s a real honest chance to create a small segment of society, a small public space where people would really be able to exist, talk or think together, with radically less systemic oppression from each other and from the outside—say, LW in the example above, or a factory, or a classroom—then this is worth fighting for, and worth the usual risks.
And I don’t mean, like, formal enforced niceness, politeness, feminism police or such—I mean like what Zizek says about his atheist Christianity, a real love for the Other, under a shared universality that stops differences from being obstacles. A place and a circumstance where you wouldn’t just be “tolerated”, but accepted, and could accept yourself.
So for a really lame, rambling summary: the left-wing “positive” vision here is essentially an utopia of non-repression; we don’t have the remotest idea of how to get there; it’s oriented towards individuality but is best described in terms of community and brotherhood, not the individual; it is fundamentally possible, and there are gleans of it here and there in daily life, which are worth fighting for and cherishing; -
yet the opposition to what’s repressive and cruel and loathsome in current reality is more basic, and we ought to keep it up; if we give up, we might well lose what little we have under liberal capitalism; there are no promises in walking away from Omelas.
This may the most Marxian post I’ve ever given a thumbs-up to. Coherent analysis, even if I disagree with some of the claims.
Thanks. I feel that LW’s political landscape really needs a hard-left current that would be up to our standards of reasoning&debate. There’s been a lot of thought and passion put into various left-of-liberalism philosophies in the last century, and the community needs to engage and grapple with them like it does with alt-right contrarianism, getting past inferential distances.
People have been crying out for more ideological diversity on LW and against our discourse being dominated by mainstream liberal/progressive thought. I can see them trying to add such diversity from the right, but when I’m going for a far-left perspective (often in direct opposition to the local “Weird-Right”), I feel rather alone and divorced-from-context here.
How convenient that this is so easy to tell apart.
Yes, pretty easy in this case, actually. After coming to power, they picked up a few Weimar social programs (including the Autobahns!) and tripled the hype;
they didn’t nationalize much anything except stolen Jewish property, and even that was in practice mostly given away as loot;
they worked with the old officer caste despite its frequent disloyalty and purged the SA when the stormtroopers wanted in on the influence and status;
they kept a basically peacetime consumer-oriented economy until 1943, long after all other great powers introduced total-war central control;
despite the Anti-Semitic propaganda, they couldn’t manage to get enough popular participation during the Kristallnacht, and Hitler cancelled further planned pogroms in favor of silent and secret repression...
Lots of propaganda, lots of killing, not too much change in society’s structures compared to e.g. 1914.
I don’t think the historical record supports this assertion. The Prussian / Imperial military was a parallel institution to the post-1848 civilian government—both loyal to the Kaiser, but otherwise unrelated. (No, this isn’t a stable setup).
A substantial amount of the German army’s political maneuvering in Weimar period was an attempt to maintain independence from civilian government oversight even after there wasn’t really any German state separate from the civilian leadership.
Once Hitler took power, he broke the Army’s independence (eg the destruction of Generals Blomberg and Fritsch). In short, the Nazis were the first civilian government to place the German military in a subordinate position. “Working with the old officer class” is terribly misleading.
You’re still talking in terms of classes that shouldn’t exist. I don’t care about blacks, or women, or white males between 30-50. I think anyone “taking an active role in society” who doesn’t own land or a business has horrible consequences. I say this only to point out that your argument sounds like nesting dolls and some of us do bite the bullet and wish to unravel down to the base case.
And I think meritocracy is actively resisted by those who face the reality that in a society dominated by technology white/jewish/asian males currently have a huge advantage, regardless of whether that advantage is genetic/cultural/path dependent/oppression based.
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”? Would it apply to e.g. Martin Luther King? Eliezer Yudkowsky? Milton Friedman? George W. Bush? Donald Trump? Boris Berezovsky?
How would you rate the horribleness of the former three’s impact of society, given that none of them was ever a businessman or a landowner—no, not even Friedman? How would it measure against the impact of the latter three?
Um, what exactly is this “meritocracy” of yours? Does it include any moral claims? Or is it simply a part of the idea that we need more economic “productivity”—more cheap food and cars and iPads and UAVs and office blocks and hedge funds and mass-produced entertainment and generally all the stuff that we already manufacture?
Would, say, a white guy who’s genetically predisposed to innovation, extraversion and risk-taking being born into an upper-class family, founding a fashion or advertizing agency, then making a fortune helping sell overpriced goods to affluent First World young people, be a decent example of “meritocracy”? “Productivity”?
explicit political power, implicit power should be made explicit wherever possible.
And yes, I’m specifically claiming that on net people like the latter three have a much larger negative impact than the positive impact of people like the former three.
Your use of the word overpriced and affluent leads me to believe you attach moral significance to parting idiots with their money for baubles. Why? The average wealthy person has a larger positive impact than the average non-wealthy first worlder. I prefer concentrated wealth in the hands of those whose values I share. I have values more likely aligned with that of a tech company CEO than a randomly selected first world person.
...Then I don’t understand how your words are at all an objection to my description of emancipatory/socially radical politics. You do understand that, for example, MLK was a radically minded avowed socialist who led a partial social revolution in the US without either violence or “explicit political power”? If you don’t find yourself “horrified” by this, then we don’t seem to have a problem.
It’s not nearly so narrow; I see no point in manufacturing tons of useless shiny stuff and pushing fake desires onto people to sell it so that the cycle can continue—and this wasteful nonsense is a mandatory imperative for 1st world capitalism. If we could agree on a different mechanism of distribution (not necessarily state planning), we could be using our industrial might to kickstart poor countries instead—while 1st world people could be working less, consuming less, wasting less, draining less resources, enjoying more leisure and giving more attention to the non-monetary things in society.
Example: why the hell do we buy personal cars for driving in cities? What good does it do us at all? And have we even considered the myriad costs? How is this not a ridiculous failure of the “pragmatic” capitalist mode of distribution AND its ideology?
Multi,
I’ve read this conversation, and I literally don’t understand what you are talking about. I agree with you that left-of-mainstream views would be valuable in this community. But I think you and RomeoStevens are only talking past each other. That’s not really a victory for rationalism.
Wait so unless I’m horrified by it 100% of the time my point gets thrown out? There’s no room for saying something has plusses and minuses and the minuses outweigh the plusses?
Sorry but you don’t get to decide which preferences are real. You are angry that more resources aren’t devoted towards things you value, welcome to the club.
How (narrowly) would you define “taking an active role in society”? Would it apply to e.g. Martin Luther King? Eliezer Yudkowsky? Milton Friedman? George W. Bush? Donald Trump? Boris Berezovsky?
How would you rate the horribleness of the former three’s impact of society, given that none of them was ever a businessman or a landowner—no, not even Friedman? How would it measure against the impact of the latter three?
Um, what exactly is this “meritocracy” of yours? Does it include any moral claims? Or is it simply a part of the idea that we need more economic “productivity”?
Would, say, a white guy who’s genetically predisposed to innovation, extraversion and risk-taking being born into an upper-class family, founding a fashion or advertizing agency, then making a fortune helping sell overpriced goods to affluent First World young people, be a decent example of “meritocracy”? “Productivity”?