The End of the Western Metadiscourse?
Over the past decade, I've observed a notable shift in global sentimentespecially from my vantage point in the East. Not long agoperhaps 10 to 15 years backthere was a widespread admiration for the West in my country. The U.S. dollar was seen as unshakable. Western democracy was often cited as the highest political ideal. Western consumer goods were considered objectively superior. And the broader cultural narrativeacademic, technological, even moralwas clearly West-centric.
Today, however, that aura seems to be fading. I notice more and more skepticism toward Western values and narrativesnot just in my region, but even among some voices in the West itself. Mainstream media, especially in non-Western countries, now often portray inclusivity (gender ideology, LGBTQ+ rights, etc.) not as progress, but as decadence. Western foreign policy is increasingly criticized as hypocriticalespousing human rights while maintaining selective interventions and double standards. Theres a growing belief that the prosperity of the West has come at the expense of the Global South, and that the status quo must change.
I am not promoting these views, nor rejecting them. Im merely describing what I increasingly see and hearwhat I believe many people outside the West are beginning to think and feel.
So I would like to open the following discussion:
Are we truly entering an era of multipolarity? If so, what are the philosophical consequences of a world without a dominant cultural center?
Is the West prepared to coexist with ideological and civilizational alternatives that do not necessarily aspire to Western liberalism?
Could this shift lead to a new "Iron Curtain"a bifurcation of global norms, technologies, and values?
Does multipolarity inevitably increase the risk of global conflict, or could it usher in a more balanced, mutualist order?
Lets discuss not just the geopolitics, but the philosophy behind these transformations: What happens when a metanarrative breaks down? Can modernity survive without a universalist axis?
Today, however, that aura seems to be fading. I notice more and more skepticism toward Western values and narrativesnot just in my region, but even among some voices in the West itself. Mainstream media, especially in non-Western countries, now often portray inclusivity (gender ideology, LGBTQ+ rights, etc.) not as progress, but as decadence. Western foreign policy is increasingly criticized as hypocriticalespousing human rights while maintaining selective interventions and double standards. Theres a growing belief that the prosperity of the West has come at the expense of the Global South, and that the status quo must change.
I am not promoting these views, nor rejecting them. Im merely describing what I increasingly see and hearwhat I believe many people outside the West are beginning to think and feel.
So I would like to open the following discussion:
Are we truly entering an era of multipolarity? If so, what are the philosophical consequences of a world without a dominant cultural center?
Is the West prepared to coexist with ideological and civilizational alternatives that do not necessarily aspire to Western liberalism?
Could this shift lead to a new "Iron Curtain"a bifurcation of global norms, technologies, and values?
Does multipolarity inevitably increase the risk of global conflict, or could it usher in a more balanced, mutualist order?
Lets discuss not just the geopolitics, but the philosophy behind these transformations: What happens when a metanarrative breaks down? Can modernity survive without a universalist axis?
Comments (158)
Sure - provided theyre not imposed, but chosen by democratic means. The big parade in China today starred Xi Jin Pin, Modi, Putin and Kim Jong Un - only one of whom is a democratically-elected leader. Russia and China are both authoritarian dictatorships, as is North Korea. I dont see them as any kind of alternative.
Of course it is also true, and tragic, that America of all nations is now hurtling towards totalitarianism, but that is not the fault of Western Liberalism except insofar as it has thus far been able to prevent it.
It seems quite possible to me that China will eclipse the USA as the dominant world hegemon in the near future but that gives me no joy.
I once witnessed a girl who was a guest asking a local girl why she wore a hijab, explaining that it infringed on her rights, her freedom to express herself. To which the second girl replied that this was her way of expressing herself. What if the dictatorships of the global south are what the inhabitants of the global south want?
Interesting. Ive noticed a self-criticism within the West that has become more rancid over time. It used to be just a leftist posture but now seems to be broad-based. Liberalism has always celebrated pluralism and voices of criticism and dissent. They now seem to be the loudest voices. My perception is that this has been the case for about 20 years, with the signs already prominent 40 years ago.
I think powerful interest groups benefit from the idea that politics is a sham and that all institutions are corrupt or dysfunctional. This means they can be dismantled with little resistance. Possibly the best way to dispatch democracy is not to take it on directly but to undermine its relevance and prestige.
I do not see anything like this in Vietnam. My experience in SE Asia has been more like the opposite. Western ideals are placed on a pedestal. There have been more nationalistic tendencies pushed by certain regimes here and there though (thinking of Philippines in particular), but overall I would say the eyes are still very much drawn to 'The West'.
Quoting Astorre
It has to or it is not really framing the 'Western' ideal (which is not wholly 'Western' anyway). I think out of all the areas on Earth where nationalism has held sway over political dynamics, and caused all kinds of problems, Europe has seen the true damage of fast advancement; abuse inflicted on others and self; and managed to still keep in place a large enough slice of liberalism to keep its head above water.
Freedom is always under threat. Nothing new there. I do not see power shifts effecting this because I believe true power comes through the adoption of liberal ideas not the rejection of them. If India or China rises they will only maintain influence if a good slice of their thinking involves liberal ideals.
I would paint a picture of three related themes. There is the death of the humanist dream of a single planetary civilisation. There is the emergence of a superorganism level relation between capital flows and entropy production. And there is an environmental omni-crisis that is crashing down on the whole civilisational adventure.
So the dream of a world order followed the two world wars. An international government would be set up - the UN, World Bank, IMF, and all the other globalist institutions. Free trade would foster peace and development. So on, and so forth.
Actually a rather inspiring project but always fragile with the Cold War and US dollar imperialism. As the institutions of globalism have been dismantled, the next best prospect was a step back to three general regions of economic integration. Europe, Asia and North America. Each would have enough in common to want to form stabilising relations. There could be still a global trade system but one more balanced both culturally and regionally.
Social media is obviously one driver of world identity and cultural polarisation. But imagine the change if each region runs its own platforms in its own ways. You could get back to a more localised feel to popular culture and morality.
Next is the superorganism story. We kind of expect humans to be in charge of their own destiny in terms the kind of political and economic choices I just describe. But international capital has become its own thing. And it plugs in rather directly to anything that accelerates the entropification of the planet. Anything that consumes energy and resources.
Just look at AI. Another Big Capital play whose main product is data centres so resource hungry that it wants to buy up any nuclear reactors or hydrodams left spare. The worlds money has been turned into a profit hunting flow. And that allows it to mainline on the worlds natural resources. In the US, the tech bros thought they were the green solution but have been sucked into being the entropification accelerationists. Vance is their stooge waiting in the wings to strip away the last restrictions that civilised society would wish to impose on the mindless amplification of consumption that capital demands.
So we have the global civilisation project being scaled back, and a renewed localism could make a lot of sense. Yet world capital has become its own thing and its interests arent aligned with human civilisation in any way we would want to recognise. It is now likely to run roughshod over anything us ordinary humans might like to have happen in our little neighbourhoods.
Then the number three dynamic is global warming and ecological collapse. The failure of the world governance project means that was one chance to put on the brakes that was let slip. The emergence of the capital-entropification superorganism has led to a pretty mindless creature that cant even respond to this threat. So things will likely run their course and civilisation, such as it survives, could be reset to any time point all the way back to the stone ages.
Within all this, humanism, modernism, multiculturalism, inclusivity, become shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. A fast fading dream of more hopeful times.
There are a lot of moving parts so what actually happens could be very different for different parts of the world.
Green Tech is a thing and North America has all the geographic advantages to come out of this as a functioning modern economy and the prevailing civilisational power.
Europe could be truly stuffed when the Gulf Stream packs up and everything contracts right back to basics. France has a defensible geography at least.
Africa could be decimated by famine but is also only a generation or so from the memory of subsistence living. It has a culture to revert to with a diminished population.
And so it goes on. The general theme there is that everyones politics, economics and civilisational values will wind back to the structures that worked for what ever scale of society still exists in their area.
Quoting Astorre
At the moment, this is a reasonable question. But Western liberalism - which was a highly rational project - itself could be said to have been too rapidly successful. It created aspirations larger than the planet could absorb at such a break neck pace.
The genie escaped the bottle even as we were building the planetary level of order that theoretically could have kept the plug in place.
So we could say right plan, rushed implementation. And one of the oversights was not paying enough attention to all the natural local differences that the planets geography makes. It breeds different mindsets and agendas for reasons obvious to historians. Liberal ideology overplayed the degree to which we could all become so easily aligned under the one humanist banner.
I suggest you look at the situation from a slightly different angle. Not because I want to convince you of the correctness of something, but because, in my opinion, something is better understood in its entirety under the condition of a comprehensive analysis and various approaches.
As an example, I would like to cite the North Korean ideology of Chu-Chhe. This is an illiberal ideology, Chu-Chhe literally translates as "subjectivity" or "originality", was developed by the founder of the DPRK Kim Il Sung.
Formally, this ideology grew out of Marxism-Leninism, it significantly modified its key provisions, adapting them to Korean realities and traditions. The main philosophical difference is the shift in emphasis from objective economic laws (as in classical Marxism) to the subjective factor - the consciousness and will of the masses, led by the leader. The central element of the ideology is the postulate "Man is the master of everything and decides everything." However, this "man" is not an individual, but a collective "mass of the people". At the same time, according to Juche, the masses cannot act spontaneously; to realize their historical mission, they need a wise leader the Leader. The main postulate of the idea is the desire for complete independence and autonomy.
Unlike liberalism, where each individual must independently search for the meaning of life, which can lead to confusion and anxiety, Juche offers a ready-made and understandable goal. The meaning of life is serving the nation, the leader and the collective. This relieves a person of the burden of individual choice and gives him a clear understanding of his place and purpose in a large, common cause.
I admit that this is undemocratic and illiberal. Citizens are brought up in isolation. They are forced to choose from 5-7 approved hairstyles and what their power gives them. But, they are who they are. They are forced to survive in isolation and somehow cope with it. In the end, these are just people who want to eat and have their place in the sun. Can the West just accept them as they are? What if we assume that they themselves simply like being who they are? Or do you see this as some kind of threat to liberalism?
Why would we assume that? They are given no choice at all in the matter. Its a complete totalitarian dictatorship with an appalling human rights record under the thumb of a dangerous megalomaniac who has nuclear weapons. I see nothing good about it whatever.
I have seen this for myself. Moreover, I am sure that you cannot simply come to someone and call them a democrat or a liberal. As Le Bon asserts, there is a certain soul of the nation that cannot be reoriented to other values ??at the snap of a finger. In addition, this or that regime has gone through several thousand years of trial and error before appearing before our eyes. It did not arise out of nowhere, but was always connected with the climate and the geographical and natural realities of the area where it was formed.
That's what I'm asking: why did we decide that they need this choice? They built a society where choice is not needed, they were moving towards it. Who are we to decide what they need?
They have nuclear weapons. This means that they have some power to reckon with. Many other states have nuclear weapons too. From the point of view of illiberal regimes, the possession of nuclear weapons by liberal states can also be seen as dangerous.
The idea of ??what I say is not to make a statement, but to try to do what philosophy does: to ask the ultimate question "why should something necessarily be this way and not another?"
I mean, if you can't honestly say you'd trust your young kid alone with one person picked at random from your society, how can you really say you trust in people to govern their own affairs. You can't.
Not to make it seem ordinary humans should be allowed monarchy, they absolutely should not. Bad genetics that lead to corruption. But that said, you should value an apple for all it is and not just because it looks or smells good, that is to say, defend it with substance and not just "oh at least it's not this or that."
But I did google life in North Korea from which:
Forced Labor:
Many North Koreans, including children, are forced to work on farms, in factories, and in political prison camps.
Food Insecurity:
Millions suffer from malnutrition and lack of adequate food, with prisoners sometimes eating insects and rats to survive.
Infrastructure:
Basic infrastructure, such as electricity and clean water, is underdeveloped, making daily tasks like washing and hygiene challenging.
Limited Information:
Access to the internet is restricted, and state-controlled TV channels are the only source of media.
I do not dispute this statement, but I go further: Why is it necessary to think differently at all and the ability to do so is a good thing?
Regarding hunger and cold. Recently I read a note about studies of cortisol in the teeth of fossilized individuals (for example, "Desperately seeking stress: A pilot study of cortisol in archaeological tooth structures" 2020). According to this study, it was found that ancient individuals, despite hunger, cold and shortage, experienced less stress than you and me.
From this I formulated a philosophical question: What if progress does not necessarily lead to human happiness?
Quoting Wayfarer
I do not dispute everything you found about the DPRK. Moreover, according to my data, many people are dying there due to mass starvation. But for the domestic consumer, the authorities explain this as a consequence of the West isolating their country. In this regard, I have the following question: Is it humane to isolate and impose sanctions? Is this a manifestation of liberalism or an ordinary will to power?
By the way, Saudi Arabia is not famous for its developed democratic or liberal institutions either, but that doesn't stop it from being considered a friend. Coincidentally, they have a lot of oil.
The average person needs to be governed.
If people did a good job in doing so on their own without "authority", people would trust their most valuable possession (which for most is one's child) with any random member of said society. Yet few people (basically nobody) in any democracy does. That's what I'm talking about.
I feel you're being more ideological or sentimental than logical in your reply, considering you seem to be a fair amount more intelligent than I, which is fine. But for anybody else, the logical observation stands unopposed.
As I said, people are naturally flawed and so should not be allowed to unilaterally act as something they're not, that something being lords or forms of monarchy. That said, surely democracy has intrinsic value other than "well at least these horrible things happening over there aren't happening over here". I dunno. Just thought you'd address that first and foremost is all. No big deal.
While I'm not absolutely certain of every person in every situation, I'm fairly certain most citizens in places like Russia or China live there by choice. That is to say, provided they are not poor and have average means, can leave anytime to go anywhere. If I'm mistaken about that, I apologize. But in relation to the topic, well, to put it simply "different strokes for different folks." So again, a true supporter and believer of democracy ought be able to defend something they believe superior with something other than "well at least it's not like X, Y, or Z" without much effort, is all.
In my opinion, man is valuable in himself.
Your argument is close to the conservative critique of democracy (for example Edmund Burke or even Plato in the Republic), where the masses can be incompetent and the elites corrupt.
So you support the idea that liberalism does not equal good?
Quoting Outlander
I can assure you from my own experience of almost daily communication with citizens of both of these countries that this is exactly the case. They are free to move, free to invest or create a business. There are problems there, they complain about some things, but in general I have not heard from the residents of these countries that they do not like them.
I discern two main theses in the OP. First, there is an anti-Fukuyama argument. He famously claimed that with rise of liberal democracy around the world, we had reached the end of history, a Hegelian-like pinnacle of political and philosophical organization. But the recent global trends away from liberalism and toward various forms of autocracy and totalitarianism would seem to argue against the idea that history has been moving in the one direction Fukuyama described. The second argument seems to be a relativistic one. Not only are an increasing number of countries rejecting liberal democracy, but we have no ethical grounds for judging such choices to be incorrect, and to proclaim liberal democracy to be divinely sanctioned. There is no such thing as being on the wrong side of history, because the unique histories of different cultures around the world produce a diversity of political systems tailored to the particular values and needs of those communities.
As to the first argument, my response to the claim that there has been a massive worldwide flight from liberal democracy is that we must be careful to separate political trends from changes in philosophy. Let me use the rise of MAGA in the U.S. as an example. What do we make of the supporters of Trump who applaud his authoritarian tendencies, many of whom once were loyal members of the Democratic party with its liberal agenda? Have they changed philosophies? Did they used to be liberal concerning issues like climate, covid science, gender, authoritarianism, multiculturalism and immigration and suddenly decided to change their minds and reject their former liberal views?
I suggest they always held traditionalistic, conservative beliefs about these issues, but maintained their allegiance to liberal parties only as long as those parties benefited them economically. I believe there has been a significant overestimation of the percentage of the population in the U.S. and Europe who ever supported liberal democracy for philosophical rather than just reasons of economic self-interest, because the ranks of liberal political parties were for a long time inflated with voters who were in fact philosophically anti-liberal, and who have now organized right-wing populist parties like MAGA that more purely reflect their anti-liberalism. Rural people in countries around the world have followed a pattern similar to MAGA , reorganizing their political parties in a rightward direction politically to reflect the traditionalism and conservatism they have always believed in.
If anything, I would argue that the actual parentage of the worldwide population that supports liberal democratic philosophies has grown steadily over the past 100 years. But this fact is being obscured by the reshuffling of the political parties.
As to the second argument of the OP, should we maintain a relativistic stance toward the type of social and political
organization a culture adopts? To a certain extent, yes. I think in many places it is both true that authoritarian regimes maintain a ruthless hold over their populations, and that those populations historically gravitate toward strong leadership. For instance, El Salvadorian dictator Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in Latin America.
But I do think that liberal democracy has advantages over more authoritarian political systems that can be described in pragmatic rather than in abstract ethical terms. If one thinks of political organization as a complex dynamical system, we may say that such systems tend toward their own evolution. As they become more complex they become more stable. The enlightened self-interest of individuals will steer them towards modes of social
organization which foster communication, commerce and creativity rather than stifle it. This parallels and expresses a philosophical evolution which increasingly favors experimentation, innovation and symbiosis over static stability. So while I think we can find many who now still prefer some degree of authoritarianism over liberalism, the longer term trends favor the evolution of more complex forms of social organization, which may even at some point shift from liberal democracy to some kind of loosely organized anarchy. With its economic liberalization into a Capitalist-technocracy, China is likely halfway to a more full-fledged political liberalization that may take another 50 years or more.
The US is declining, China is rising. It would be fair to say we're headed toward multipolarity. On the one hand, two superpowers make the world safer than one. On the other, it's unfortunate that that safety comes at the price of wasted energy (undermining one another) when the species now has an opportunity to take control of its energy needs to avoid climate change.
On the other hand, war, even cold war, has a tendency to drive innovation. I believe there were Romans who claimed it was a mistake to destroy Carthage because without an enemy, Rome would become weak. I think this is true. Existence becomes pointless for a superpower.
I guess the philosophical issues I see are:
1. That conflict makes us more innovative.
2. Conflict creates meaning and identity.
Quoting Astorre
I don't see a big rift in terms of values. It will be more a competition for influence. Is there really a big difference in the values of the US and China? I mean fundamentally? Russia is a different animal. It's kind of inexplicable, but hasn't it always been?
Also it could be that liberalism as a philosophy gets a little messy when we apply it both as a social theory and an economic theory. The two should go together, but also they can grow apart and be in competition.
What even is liberalism? Obviously it is something about liberating the individual from the constraints of the old existing hierarchical order. Maximising personal freedoms. Creating unconstrained choice. But inevitably, the individual must begin rebuilding some social hierarchy from that new point of departure. A social order has to be recreated. And the desire is that it be in every way better.
The Enlightenment tried to imagine the ideal citizen who could be set free and would then interact with other free citizens to construct some such rational utopia. A planet organised by open rational markets and open rational government, all based on citizens living rationally ordered lives.
But the Enlightenment brought its own Romantic backlash. If humans ought to be rational, the reality was they were emotional as well. If tradition was to be consigned to the scrap heap of history, then that was a brave new direction to be challenged by the past now having its own focused claim to an increasingly contested reality.
And also the Enlightenment was handmaiden to the Industrial Revolution. It was the unleashing of capital to harness the limitless cheap energy of buried fossil fuel. An algorithmic economics that was the birth of a new planetary super-organism. Quite quickly, human scale notions of a well-lived civilised and libertarian life were swept up in someone elses agenda. The Romantic reaction spoke to that new unstoppable force too.
So jump forward to the current moment. Liberalism as philosophy - an attempt to impose self-consciously rational structure on life - has failed to deliver what it looked to promise. It certainly delivered a lot in terms of human health and prosperity, creative freedom and progressive attitudes. But now it is faltering at the point where the economic sphere is putting itself outside of any human control, and where politics can only regulate the cultural sphere which is rejecting rationality in favour of Romantic emotionalism.
Might becomes right when the tolerance that rational democracy demands is being left behind. Woke and MAGA are both authoritarian political responses. One just harnesses the power of the cancel culture mob while the other rallies behind an elected dictator. Both sides rely on their alternative facts so that the real facts produced by rationality dont interrupt the direct path to their pre-chosen conclusions.
So liberalism was always itself a partial story. It did not really incorporate the degree to which humanity is a social construction, rationality was ultimately an embodied practice, and society as a whole is an entropic super-organism. Like all life, its imperative is to blindly grow until it fills its Petrie dish, and suffer the consequences thereof.
If politics had kept pace, we would have had liberal democracy, social democracy and then a planetary Noosphere. Perhaps the kind of enlightened technocratic authoritarianism of Lee Kuan Yews Singapore, First the liberation from traditional constraint on the individual, then some kind of economic engineering to fix the economic distortions that had already developed, and then some level of planetary rationality sufficient to put the brakes on runaway capitalism and its consumption of the planet.
So liberalism was never a complete model of the human condition. Its view of rationality was transcendentally ideal rather than pragmatically embodied. As a philosophy it was flawed. But then also, as a practice it was largely pragmatically implemented. It became the best thing going around for a long time.
Now it is being torn in different directions by its own success in terms of rampant economic growth and rampant self-actualisation aspirations. Both could only be a good thing when they were tied into each other as the freedom we could afford to claim. The liberal ideal continuing to be pragmatically embodied in a way that could self-consciously see into its own future as well as know of the true value in jettisoning the various constraints of its various tradition-bound pasts
Quoting apokrisis
This is a very important binary opposition that is often overlooked. Many theorists have a certain conviction that first an ideology (a set of ideals) is invented, which is then integrated into society and we all live happily ever after. In a descriptive sense, the idea of ??Marx and Engels, expressed by them in "The German Ideology", that it is not consciousness that determines being, but being that determines consciousness, looks very interesting.
In the Marxist perspective, society is divided into a base (production relations, means of production) and a superstructure (ideology, politics, culture). The base is primary: changes in the economy (for example, the transition from feudalism to capitalism) give rise to new ideologies that justify or disguise these relations.
It follows from this that it is impossible to "invent" an ideology and impose it as the "pinnacle of evolution" - it will collide with the reality of the base.
The most interesting thing is that their own brainchild, communism, has proven exactly this in practice: in the USSR, Lenin's Marxism-Leninism was an adaptation to industrialization (the basis: the transition from an agrarian economy to a planned one), but when the economy stagnated in the 1980s (due to isolation and inefficiency), the ideology began to "slow down reality", leading to perestroika and collapse. Similarly, attempts to export communism to countries without an industrial base (like Pol Pot's Kampuchea) failed catastrophically. On the other hand, we have China, which was able to adapt Marxism and today shows good results.
This approach has its descriptive power, but I would supplement it with Le Bon's ideas, expressed in his book "Psychology of Peoples and Masses". As a result of such dialectics, the approach of Marx and Engels can be clarified: the basis is not only economic relations but also historical, cultural, geographical features that form the so-called (according to Le Bon) "Soul of the Nation"
I consider liberalism not as a set of ideals, striving for which we will certainly build paradise, but as a system for searching for a certain point of compromise of aspirations. From the moment of the formulation of the ideas of liberalism until today, it has coped well with challenges in the long term. And, it must be said, this is not some great invention of mankind, but a tracing of the structure of nature: It is not the strongest/dexterous/fastest that survives, but the most adaptable. Authoritarianism is bad (not to mention totalitarianism) not because it violates human rights, but because it is less flexible than liberalism in the long term. As a temporary solution, authoritarianism is very good and much more effective than liberalism (provided that it is sovereign authoritarianism)
At the same time, if we constitute an ideal, instead of constantly searching for points of compromise and adaptability, we will get a great brake that will lead to decline.
This is where, in my opinion, today's problem arises: Liberalism has ceased to moderately seek this compromise, has ceased to adapt sensitively, its strengths have taken on some extreme form, and the ideas themselves have become dogmatized, instead of working dynamically.
Speaking about today's China (and as I see many who have spoken here agree with this), this state has first of all managed to create an economic miracle, which was facilitated by many reasons, including ideology is not in the first place. Today, speaking about the power of China, we first of all mean its economic potential, and not its ideological one.
Quoting frank
Since it so happened that I am connected (by personal and family ties) with China and the countries of the former USSR and the USA, I can say for myself with a high degree of confidence that the former USSR and the USA were not so different states in the mentality of their citizens (which may sound like wildness now), which I cannot say about the closeness of the Chinese and American mentalities. It is difficult to prove theoretically, but if you have been to these places, you will immediately understand what I am talking about.
Yes, we are, but I would point to the driving force being climate change and to a lesser extent, competition for rapidly depleted resources.
Big corporations and oligarchs have realised that the climate change will have a big impact and soon. So they are scrambling to get in the limited number of lifeboats (metaphorically speaking) before it gets too bad. This was triggered by the financial crisis of 2008. When the cracks began to show in the capitalist order. I expect that in 50 years from now there will be three power bases, in no particular order, the U.S. ( including Canada, possibly Mexico), Europe (including Ukraine, Belarus etc) and China (including Japan Korea etc, possibly even India). The rest of the world will have to fend for itself, although, I think Australasia will be able to hold together in some form.
They will have no choice.
It will definitely reduce the risk, as easy power block will be struggling to survive and feed its population.
They're similar in that they're both given to apocalypticism. They're both looking for signs of the end of the world. Over-simplified, the Cold War was two cultures seeing each other as the anti-Christ. Is that what you mean?
Former USSR and the USA folks are both more liberal thinking (even individualistic) than average Chinese folk, in wildly broad terms.
Well, the core of Fukuyama's thesis isn't that every country will soon become a liberal democracy, nor that no liberal democracies will cease to be so, but that no ideological challenge to liberal democracy will emerge to rival liberalism for legitimacy (the way communism, fascism, and reactionary monarchism once did). So far, I would say he has been proven right on this over three and a half decades.
The liberal backsliding since 2008 isn't actually out of line with his core thesis, although it does run against the general optimism of the 1989 article and 1992 book. Illiberal leaders in previously liberal countries do not justify their authoritarianism or interventions in opposition to liberalism. In general, they position themselves as saviors of liberalism. On both the right and the left, the need for norm breaking interventions is justified in terms of the need to secure liberalism against opposing "illiberal forces." That is certainly how Trump positions himself for instance. He is saving liberal democracy from illiberal "woke mobs" and "elites" and his economic interventions aren't positioned against free enterprise and capitalism per se, but against bad state actors who are "ripping us off" by not abiding by true free market principles. He sells his policies in liberal terms.
Likewise, dictators across the world still feel the need to have rump legislatures, to hold votes on reforms, etc. They still feel the need to hold sham elections. Even Assad did this during the civil war. They still go by "president" or "prime minister" instead of "king," "emperor," "emyr" or "shah." When they attack the West, they normally do so while tacitly accepting the values of liberalism. They deride the West as not being truly democratic, as having become an oligarchy, or just as often, as having fallen into a sort of technocratic socialism. Such criticisms accept liberal values however. When they attack "Western values" such a LGBT issues, they do so using the same language used by conservative liberals within the West, speaking to "freedom to differ" and "freedom of religion" or "freedom for traditions."
Yet they decidedly do not recommend some sort of alternative ideology the way the Soviet Union did. China occasionally positions itself as a sort of alternative position, but not in any coherent way. They aren't evangelical about their form of state-capitalism, trying to force it on their allies, or trying to boost it internationally as a popular movement.
The one standout counter-example is Islamism. Obviously, the Iranian supreme leader does have an alternative title (although many of the trappings of liberalism are still embraced). The caliphs of the Islamic State are a more obvious counterexample. Yet this isn't really a good counterexample because such a movement can never have global appeal (and seems potentially in decline).
I think this is worth pointing this out because, to 's question, it makes it incredibly hard to predict what will come next. There is no coherent replacement ideology to rival neoliberalism, just neoliberalism destroying itself due to its own internal contradictions. When states fall away from liberalism, it isn't towards some new ideology, but merely towards a sort of degraded, more oligarchic liberalism. I don't think this trend will reverse though because the issues that drive it are endemic to liberalism itself and the solution for liberalism's problems proposed within the West are almost always "more liberalism!" (just of conservative or progressive varieties). Maybe China represents an alternative model with ideological appeal. It is not clear to me that Russia does. Russia seems more like the far end of degraded liberalism, a liberal constitution with an oligarchic dictatorship in practice.
I am also a bit skeptical of any real multi-polar reversal any time soon. Iran and it's "Axis of Resistance's" military embarrassment and Russia's performance in Ukraine suggest that no real military rebalance has taken place. It would be foolish to assume that China's military reforms and technological efforts would prove quite as inept and ineffective, but it also wouldn't be very surprising if they were (e.g. scandals like their missiles being filled with water instead of fuel, etc.). Unless China can get into the export game with comparable hardware and promises of assistance, there won't be a security rebalance.
Yep. As a pragmatic ideal as opposed to a transcendent belief in "human goodness" it does see life as a balance. A trade off.
It recognised the actual structure of society, which is the balancing of the forces of competition and cooperation. Local individual freedoms and global collective constraints.
All societies have to balance this dynamic. But until Greek philosophy and then the Enlightenment, it wasn't expressed as something that could be formally debated.
So that is certainly what liberalism ought to be. The public conversation that recognises competition and cooperation must exist as a cleverly nurtured balance. Individual freedom doesn't even mean anything unless it is shaped within some global context of collective restraint. And likewise, the global structure of a society's constraints have to be all about producing the right kind of citizens to ensure the flourishing of that larger established social order.
The theory is simple enough. Society arises out of this reciprocal logic. But the implementation gets tricky.
How much should we rip up the past, which always at least must have been its own success in terms of creating a balanced dynamic a way of life that suited the more local circumstances of the time.
And as the move to a self-conscious pragmatism is made, the question becomes how fast can it be allowed to grow and spread? And are all its parts synchronised to some general idea of this optimal growth rate?
Mistakes are always going to get made in implementing the theory. Or rather, growth itself always produces the unexpected in Nature. Reach a certain point and the system wants to rearrange. It wants to go through a phase transition or some topological shift in structure.
Do we fight these things or discover how to flow with them? What should be our philosophy as we encounter the unpredicted consequences of our own previously effective habits?
I would say that democracy isn't inherently liberal, and liberalism isn't coherent,* and we are seeing these two facts work themselves out. For example, what is happening in many places is that liberalism is being checked by democracy and because of this those in power are becoming increasingly anti-democratic. The West has lost authority because it is beginning to cannibalize itself.
* If liberalism were coherent then I think it would be more significant that opponents both appeal to it.
Hypocrisy is a universal trait (even if it is undesirable) among all humans and all human institutions. It's just easier to see in other people, other nations.
Quoting Astorre
a) Is an 'unshakable dollar' a measure of the western ideal?
b) Why wouldn't 'western democracy' remain the highest IDEAL, even if, in reality, it is less than ideal?
c) Are objectively superior consumer goods, nice as they are, a measure of western ideals?
d) The 'broader cultural narrative' isn't accepted by all western academics.
Many Americans (liberals in the best meaning of liberal) find unsatisfactory a good deal of what is going on in the US, the west in general, and the east in general. So, it's not surprising that people elsewhere -- seeing anti-liberal trends in US political behavior -- would have doubts. However, IF liberal values were good 10 or 15 years ago, they ought to still be good.
Quoting Astorre
Within the last 125 years, various regimes have arisen whose focus was decidedly unliberal and unwestern. One of them, the PRC, remains. It's been a going concern since October 1, 1949. It has not been without some really major difficulties (famine, cultural revolutions, glorious rich-getting, etc.) There is a large batch of smaller illiberal and/or un-western regimes which have come to the fore locally. Just to name a few, Saudi Arabia; Iran; Spain; South Africa; Serbia; Cuba; Argentina; Chile; and quite a few others. Some of these regimes, like Fascist Spain, have reformed. Argentina and Chile eventually got rid of their generals.
The US has had better and worse period of western democratic performance, and is currently in one of its worst-performing periods, with Trump at the helm. The big question for me is how long this dispiriting episode will last.
Quoting Astorre
Well, liberalism has had its evangelical moments. Revolutionary France initially began by setting up "sister republics" everywhere it could. In the early to mid-20th century Superman could, with no sense of irony, be a hero fighting for "truth, justice, and the American way." Even the early phase of neo-liberalism often framed its aims in fairly utopian terms, with the whole of humanity being lifted out of want and oppression to participate in a techno-optimist vision where things would be "getting better all the time."
I'd agree though that a key theoretical component of liberalism has involved eschewing any strong interpretation of the human good or human purpose, and privatizing all appeals to transcendent ends (booting the relevant religious and philosophical ideas from politics). It also tends to dissolve most traditional forms of identity (the capitalist component does a lot of the work here). I am just saying that the theory on this front often wasn't put into practice. Also, when most of the population was Christian there was a strong cultural pull towards a particular conception of ultimate ends and value that helped align the public, but that is no longer the case.
I'd argue that what we're seeing now though is that liberalism, without these deviations, isn't actually "adaptive." Civilizations require the pursuit of arduous goods. They require heroism and self-sacrifice, and a capacity to resist serious temptations (since liberalism is always prone to slipping towards oligarchy or dictatorship). Sans any strong ordering ends, any vision of what we are defending liberalism to "adapt towards" why don't self-interested utility maximizers (which is what liberalism tells us we are) with power take advantage of their ability to direct the system towards their own ends?
Fukuyama, a champion of liberalism, allows that its anthropology is too thin. It focuses almost wholly on the goods of epithumiabodily pleasure, safety (and so wealth), etc. He tries to reintroduce some notion of thymos, of the desire for recognition, honor, etc., something people used to get from community membership and religion (things liberalism tends to erode). People have tended to focus on his "End of History" thesis, but it's the "Last Man" thesis that has proven most prescient. This is the idea that people will rebel against being reduced to bovine worker/consumers, at becoming Nietzsche's Last Men, and so seek to destroy the very system they live under in a quest for recognition. This phenomena is certainly hard at work on the far right.
For some reason Fukuyama never gets around to logos, the desire for truth, and to do what one thinks is "truly best" (morally, etc.). The thread in liberalism you outline seems to actively undermine these desires, or at least their consistent ordering, but they are arguably the most powerful, being the desires that lead monks to renounce all wealth and sex, or which lead athiest Marxist revolutionaries to nonetheless embrace painful, anonymous deaths in pursuit of what is "truly best." When these appetites (thymos and logos) have no direction, and no positive education, they don't cease to exist. Often, they end up turning against liberalism. The sort of procedural, safety focused politics of Rawls, etc. might appeal to the sort of people who become academics, but they probably should be tested at martial arts gyms and churches, where I would imagine they might not do as well.
While "Why Nations Fail" is a flawed book, it does also do a good job laying out why it is in elite's self-interest (economically construed) to subvert liberalism, even at the cost of lowering their own national military and economic power. Given this incentive structure, a society with no bias towards any particular final end, which only justifies liberalism in terms of its ability to allow "the most people to reach whatever ends they happen to find attractive" would seem to be inherently unstable because liberalism simply doesn't make sense for those who have the power to subvert and take control of it.
(Just one data point on thymos might be the very low percentage of people in the wealthiest liberal states who say they would be willing to defend their country if it was attacked when compared to the rest of the world.)
Nope. What has changed is that liberal democracy has given up on its commitment to pragmatic realism. Citizens have been empowered to invent their own alternative facts. The essential institutions of fact checking have been undermined to the point that widespread illusion takes hold.
Trump is possible because US society believes it is living in a reality show. And Trump spent 14 years mastering reality shows on the Apprentice, not to mention his connection to wrestling. He is a narcissist rather than an authoritarian. To the degree he has become an authoritarian, it is of the reality show kind and not the real world kind.
So the West allowed the general demise of its ability to reality-check. Its citizen's became players in ever more unreal social media psychodramas.
Democracy hasn't been voting for dictators. It has been voting for influencers.
Liberalism could still be the social structure that works best in the real world. But democracy has become detached from the real world and absorbed into its own reality show version of life.
In Trump, this might have resulted in an autocratic figure, but one that is quite fake and incompetent in comparison to the real autocrats like Putin, Xi, etc.
So the proper connection between democracy and liberalism is that it speaks to society as a dynamic community of institutions. People are free to collectivise around any common interest that appears to have a useful end. This was always the case for societies. But liberalism puts it on the democratic basis where the resulting institutions can all contest for their fair share of the total social pie. Funding becomes a global capital flow that can be piped into any social function according to political will.
The design is commonsense. Let everyone organise on any scale. But the total of the activity has to produce the surplus that gets parcelled out accordingly. And realism is about being able to tie the two sides of the social bargain together in an empirically determined way.
This realism about what the actual facts are what people really want and the scale of the surplus that exists to be shared is basic to liberal democracy working as a coherent system. And it is the realism that has fallen apart in a big way. Voters are now entrained to the various brands of cultural make-believe.
This is an interesting take.
Quoting apokrisis
Do you see this as a phase or the beginning of catastrophe?
Liberalism is about freedom of association. Democracy is about the wishes of the people. It is all about recognising that a complex society has to be structured as a hierarchy of institutions. Interest groups free to form over all scales. And the "strong ordering end" is what emerges from having forged a robust collection of institutions. The collective view is what emerges in fractal fashion from democratic action over every possible scale.
The system is coherent when no interest is so small that it is ignored, and also every interest is served to the degree that the collective good can afford that cost in terms of its economic or social capital.
Quoting Astorre
What does "global south" mean in your usage. Can you define this?
Many commentators have said the US has had these kinds of convulsions regularly. The old always has its fossilising tensions. The system must appear to be dissolving itself so as to be reborn in some new more functional alignment.
George Friedman, ex-Stratfor, is a good example of those who think Trump is the useful buffoon fronting for the realists behind the scenes. The Project 2025 manifesto was at least some people's blueprint. And US political realists generally agreed the US ought to let go the larger world and rebuild within its own North American continental fortress. Absorb Canada and Mexico for their resources and cheap manufacturing. Just live within that comfy gated community and dump the whole failed world liberalism project.
So there are real forces at work behind Trump with a perfectly pragmatic socioeconomic vision. The problem was these forces couldn't quite believe just how incompetent Trump would be. And how many other incompetents he would appoint when he got a second term.
Say Vance takes over. Say the geopolitical realities of US self-interest get competently implemented. There is no reason the current mess couldn't crystalise into a new liberal order. The reality show of woke and MAGA concerns would still linger a long time. But the US could become reunited under a socioeconomic compact that is recognisably realist and competently run.
The big problems would still exist. You would have Europe aging out, despot regimes everywhere you looked, climate change ratcheting up the pressures, nukes still poised for launch in a last moment of madness.
But no. We can't actually live life as a reality show. And liberal democracy has proven its robust adaptiveness beyond doubt.
There is every chance of catastrophe. Nukes, climate, pandemics, famine. But also every chance that the US emerges from the current moment to forge a new plan around circling the wagons to create Fortress North America. That is an economic and military objective that makes its own obvious geopolitical sense. And Canada, US and Mexico can be a trio that also makes equal sociocultural sense.
The stability of nations depends on having defensible borders around required resources. Coupled to a national identity that owns that space. North America just happens to have the most of everything as a geopolitical region. Minerals, water, energy, agriculture, population. And its impossible to invade.
Compare that to Russia with its wide open steppes that force it to want to push into even Poland to find a defensible boundary some natural barrier like a mountain pass.
So I think geopolitical realism will show through. Trump was already meant to be speaking those lines and indeed his first administration started the ball rolling as the realists behind the scenes got their guys into the top jobs. Biden as another figurehead then quietly kept the project going. Vance could be the next puppet in line, or some real leader could emerge with a broader sociocultural angle on the same geopolitical agenda.
The part that isn't so clear is what happens to the US dollar and world capital. There is still an internationalist level of superorganismic order that is its own thing. The Davos, drug cartel, petrodollar, tech bro, oligarch, private equity, cryptocurrency level of planetary society that floats above mere geopolitics. It has its own rather undemocratic and illiberal view of what suits its continued existence.
Does that sphere of unplaced power have its own philosophies that go beyond liberal democracy and the wealth of nations? Is a figure like Curtis Yarvin its Adam Smith or Karl Marx? A guy with the plan?
I jest. But most of the actual wealth of the world has been sucked up into this global realm that is its own gated community wherever it sets down foot on real ground. The Davos era version was trying to implement some workable global version of liberal democracy, just as Bretton Woods did in 1944. But who can tell us what political understanding it will come to in its need to organise itself heading into the next 50 years or so.
That seems the much more interesting question of the moment from the political philosophy or history of social structure point of view.
If the elite can't be taxed, seen, regulated kept within the community of nations level of world organisation then how is that new world going to regard us ordinary folk? Are we the healthy foundation to its own existence. Or does it even need us as an exploitable resource anymore?
Quoting Fire Ologist
Quoting Astorre
Well, the answer to this question is not obvious and it is not so easy to answer it. In this case, we are talking about the mindset of citizens. The idea is that both nations considered their ideology to be a kind of embodiment of truth on earth, because it is their idea that is correct, as opposed to the other. Both states were at some point the most powerful in all respects (military, sports, cultural, ideological) and saw their path as correct, which is probably where this similarity comes from. But both of these states are the embodiment of the ideas of European thinkers who grew up in the Christian society of enlightenment
But I would like to say something else here. Imagine that today you live in a state whose ideology claims to be the universal truth, and tomorrow you suddenly wake up in a state that has completely abandoned this in favor of the opposite ideology. Overnight, your entire internal structure, system of ideals and values, turned out to be a fake. Purely humanly, this is very difficult to experience. Many people lose faith in any idea against this background. Others accept the ideology of the victors (liberalism). Others insist that not everything was so bad, and that politicians are to blame (similar to how everyone now blames Trump, while at that time Gorbachev was blamed). This is not very simple. Almost 35 years have passed since then, but to this day, in my opinion, the countries of the former USSR are searching for themselves, trying to understand their place in the world. What is happening in Ukraine is one of the manifestations of this search and development.
This is exactly what I wrote about:
Quoting Astorre
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The ideologies of the USSR and the USA functioned like secular religions. They demanded faith, had their "prophets" (the Founding Fathers, Marx/Lenin), "sacred texts" (the Constitution, Capital), and were ready to wage "crusades" for their ideals. China, by contrast, is a state-civilization. Its governance model and philosophy (a mixture of Confucianism, Legalism, and adapted Marxism) do not claim to be universal. Beijing is not trying to make a copy of China out of Nigeria or Brazil. It exports goods and infrastructure projects, not ideological revolution.
They seem to say: we do not claim the truth of our views and do not dispute yours. Believe in whatever you want, but drive our cars, wear our clothes, use our smartphones. It may not be the most advanced yet, but it is cheaper, more practical and simpler.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I was talking about the idea growing on the basis of the base (economic, social, cultural) and not the base growing on the basis of the idea:
Quoting Astorre
Quoting Astorre
Humanity can come up with any construct, any set of slogans, any religion, belief, ideology, ontological approach - but all this is a description of the basis. All this works only insofar as the basis has not changed. The basis changes - any idea crumbles.
In my opinion, the problem with idealism is that in their opinion, an idea is born first, and only then, strictly following it, everything falls into place. Hence this exploitation by politicians "we will bring back liberalism." Maybe they will bring it back for a moment, but this is the creation of a new construct that will lead to decline.
In the 70s in the USSR, everyone measured their own truthfulness of reading Marxism-Leninism, everyone sought the most correct meaning of what was written. In the same way, believing that the idea is primary. Well, we all know what this led to.
I also do not dispute your statement that it is necessary to understand what to start from in order to act. That is true. But the rigidity of prejudices is as evil as their absence.
For harmonious development, constant adaptation, including ideas, is required.
If the idea is not adapted, nothing good will come of it.
One of the questions I asked at the beginning was whether the West will accept illiberal regimes as equals or will another cold war follow?
If it does, that will be great. We will be able to develop by enriching each other. If it does not, another iron curtain and eternal proof of the fidelity of our ideals await us.
I will try to explain what all this means, as descriptively as possible, without emotions and personal prejudices.
It is no secret that the US uses soft power to export its ideology. Enormous resources of US taxpayers are spent on this. What does this look like in post-Soviet states? Grants are allocated for the media, for strengthening national languages, traditions or cultures, the essence of which is to undermine the confidence of citizens in the course chosen by the Russian Federation and the entire Soviet legacy. For example, you turn on the TV where it is stated: "Look - we live well in the West, our currency is a model of stability, our goods are the best (iPhone, Macrosoft, etc.), our achievements in observing human rights are the best, our courts are the fairest. And the Russians, the Chinese are all villains, authoritarians, their regimes do not observe human rights. And do you know why all this? Because we have liberalism and all these benefits are a consequence of liberalism. Therefore, think like a liberal, reject everything sinister (especially Iranian, Chinese, Russian). Reject the Soviet past in favor of your language, your identity, because the Soviets suppressed all this in you, build liberalism, and even better, allow us to place our military bases in your country so that you can be protected." It looks like a "successful business coach" telling his students: "I am rich, happy and successful because I think differently. If you think like me, you will become rich. Change your thinking right now."
This is the essence of the message that is being broadcast, but in reality the influence is much more subtle and multifaceted. It comes not through a single direct selling text, but through a combination of news, films, educational exchange programs (like FLEX), pop culture, and NGO activities.
That's why I pointed out all these things in the original post.
Why did all this look so interesting, and liberalism is attractive? The average person is essentially indifferent to the value of an ideology as such. He looks at the advantages that are possible with this ideology and decides whether to join it or not. If a person sees hunger and decline, then any ideology is seen as wrong (for example, Chu-Chhe in North Korea). Thus, if we assume that the US suddenly becomes poor tomorrow, then liberalism will immediately end. But what if prosperity isn't just about ideology?
At some point, the "benefits" offered by the US turned out to be not such a blessing. And "success through following liberal ideas" was undermined by China. A person from a hypothetical Eastern state turns on the media sponsored by USAID and sees contradictions. And plus, there is also the inclusivity with LGBT, which was cultivated until recently - it is not at all suitable for traditional views in the East. From here, trends began to emerge offering alternative views. This is how all this talk about multipolarity appeared.
Quoting BC
Trump's election was a testament to this decline I'm talking about. He won by a large margin. That alone is a sign of the fatigue of most voters. But I couldn't believe my eyes when Trump started doing whatever he wanted and neither the Senate nor the court stopped him. The system of checks and balances stopped working? How did it happen that he can do almost whatever he wants? Isn't that a decline?
For me personally, it was a big disappointment: I've always been convinced that the US constitution is very well designed to prevent dictatorships. In general, I'm still convinced that US society will be able to regulate itself and resolve this crisis. But the longer it takes, the harder it will be to do so in the future.
These are very good philosophical questions.
It used to be simpler: you had some set of ideas that you could develop throughout your life, moving along a given course. This set of ideas was enough for your life. Today the world is so fast that in one five-year period you have to rethink something several times, so as not to simply fall out of life. Once in the 2000s, my friends and I thought that we were living in boring times: all theories are known, the boundaries are defined, medicine will save us, and what can happen anyway? How wrong we were then...
In my opinion, in today's world, the approach that turns out to be the most adaptive and not dogmatized will be the most effective
Not that large:
I feel you vastly and do I mean, vastly underestimate the laziness and complacency of the average American voter. No, I take that back. It's not subject, or rather limited, to an invented term that has no real meaning other than socially. It's the human condition. Maybe an off metaphor but, water takes the path of least resistance. Humans are 70% water. We evolved with a natural (many would argue healthy) sense of fear, which if acted upon and in unison can lead to such. But the mind always seeks homeostasis, or a sense of wellness even when there is no rational element to be found. We will learn to love, or at the very least become accepting toward, our bad choices and predicaments, as foolish and blatantly obviously poor as they are. See the hedonic treadmill. With a positive spin, it's the enduring human spirit to endeavor on. Otherwise, it's a sort of healthy delusion with evolutionary benefit. It's why we can never be happy, not for very long, unless we know there is someone or something unhappier or less fortunate than ourselves, we'll invent a system where such is so, often based on real and relevant enough premises. Or, we'll simply declare one outside of the reality of the situation altogether.
I was relying on Donald Trump receiving 312 electoral votes and Kamala Harris receiving 226 electoral votes out of a total of 538 electors. But your point is correct, since in the text I was talking about the "majority" of voters and not electors, the difference between which is really about 1.5 percent. I apologize for this inaccuracy.
You can imagine, then, how much bigger a disappointment it is for Americans who didn't vote for Trump and altogether disapprove of him and his policies.
Trump did not win the popular vote by a wide margin; it was Trump 49.8% and Harris 48.3%. The large margin was in the electoral college, which I don't want to discuss here.
The Senate and the House are both controlled by Republican majorities--not huge margins, but still a majority. This might change in the 2026 election, or maybe not. We'll see. Trump had the unfortunate opportunity to name 3 justices to the Supreme Court, tipping the balance strongly toward the conservative judicial view. With both legislative houses, the court, and the presidency all controlled by the same party, the republicans can expect to have many policy wins.
The BIG thing about Trump is that he is willing to flout legal precedent and ignore laws (and the constitution) which place limitations on his some of his overt policies and actions, and his party approves -- so far, anyway. From what source would powerful opposition come? Not from the House; not from the Senate; not from the Court. "We the people" won't have a chance to vote for House members and 1/3 of the Senate for 14 more months, and if an overwhelming majority of liberals were elected, they still wouldn't take office until 16 months (roughly) from now. That gives Trump a long time to continue on his rampage, and possibly abort an election where he would lose power.
We are in uncharted territory with a president who doesn't care what the court rules. The courts do not have an army to force him to do anything. The uncomfortable fact is this: You can't do business unless people are honest, and you can't have an effective law-abiding government if people (particularly in government) don't care about the law, facts, and reality.
An American has to be something of a rebel, a dissident, to perceive how propaganda and soft power operate on the home front -- never mind in countries where we don't travel a lot. Most Americans are not dissidents, not given to reading Marx or other socialists (real socialists, not the Democratic Socialists). Certainly the recipients of propaganda, soft power, and sometimes hard power have no difficulty seeing American foreign policy at work.
A previous administration used to conduct "secret wars". The New York Times reported on these "secret wars". Noam Chomsky, in blasting the NYT, asked "To whom are these wars secret? Certainly not the people who are being bombed! It's Americans from whom the wars are kept secret."
I'm a gay man, but I can understand how the western 'gay movement' does not translate well to some other societies. Health workers in Uganda, for instance, don't think that they need to worry about gay transmission of HIV because "there are no homosexuals in Uganda" -- or that was the view 25 years ago. Uganda is apparently virulently homophobic at this time--not a good time to start a gay liberation movement. I'm not sure which countries are open to some of the esoteric gender issues which we have been dealing with. "Gay liberation" can only happen in societies that are ready and willing.
I was not clear in my original post and have corrected myself above. I apologize.
Quoting BC
This is a very important remark. I would like to develop this idea a little. When American propaganda declares "In your country, dissent is prohibited, you are authoritarian" it always makes me laugh, because within America itself, dissent is of course allowed, but only within the liberal paradigm. I don't know if you will be patted on the back at home if you express support for Putin or Kim. At the same time, those same "independent" media, sponsored by the American government, tell us "stand up and cry for freedom."
Obviously, from the point of view of local regimes, this will not be okay. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between dissent "within the paradigm" and "outside the paradigm"
Indeed. I'm in Australia, and here, most people - a huge majority, in fact - are shocked, frightened and appalled by what's happening in America under Trump. There's some degree of cynicism about the US here, but probably much less than other places - my parents (who lived through WWII, one of my father's brothers died in the Pacific Theatre) never ceased to say that 'MacArthur saved us from invasion from the Japanese'. So in my household, America was always the 'light on the hill'. My mother wept bitter tears when Kennedy was assasinated (I was ten). So I've been extremely dissappointed by the Trump phenomenon, ever since it started - it is the victory (for now), of greed, of hatred and cynicism. Anyway this isn't the Trump thread but as the topic came up....
If I understand correctly, you think we have misinterpreted the fact that liberalism won (which is what Fokuyama's main idea was built on)? Well, your arguments cannot be argued with, in this regard his ideas seem idealistic.
Quoting Joshs
In that case, do you agree with these ideas:
Quoting Astorre
Contemporaries often use the term "global south" in the context of alternative associations like BRICS or G77. Although my understanding of the concept of "global south" is broader - it is "Developing countries", "periphery", "Third world"
Unfortunately, I don't know why they wear them or why others change their gender. To be honest, I haven't given much thought to these questions. Perhaps there is a rational explanation, or perhaps it's purely emotional. In any case, I am a simple existentialist and am not responsible for the decisions of others.
I can't understand this form of classification. It classifies a bunch of dissimilar and unrelated things together in the same classification, as not-X. So you start with "Western values and narratives", then produce a category of exclusion, "non-Western", and place all others into that category. But there is no principles by which the "others" ought to be placed in the same category, except that you want to exclude them from being in the category of "Western". How is that an acceptable form of classification? What could be the intent of such a form of classification?
Yes, I use the concept of "everything that is not X" to describe Y, and vice versa. You require clarification, and this is philosophically justified, as we need to understand what we are talking about before we can discuss it. However, in this case, X+Y is not equal to infinity, but rather to around 200. Additionally, I have used the same language to describe Y as is used in state X. Furthermore, I perceive this as "excessive specificity," a rhetorical device that allows us to avoid direct answers (a common tactic used by politicians). However, the dichotomy between "developed countries" and "developing countries" seems quite accurate to me.
Quoting Astorre
My point is:
1) Many, including Fukuyama, explain the recent rise of rightwing populism and authoritarianism as a form of backsliding away from the ideal of liberalism.
2) My claim is this should not be interpreted as backsliding but rather as an overestimation of the percentage of the world population who embraced liberalism to begin with.
3)This does not mean liberalism lost. I agree with Fukuyama that the world has been and will continue to be to move in the direction of liberalism, but I find his ethical reasons to be less relevant than his pragmatic reasons (people will eventually find that liberalism works better for them). But this does not mean there cannot and will not at some point in the future be a post-liberalism that subsumes and exceeds the best of liberalism.
Quoting Astorre
I would move away from Marxs narrow definition of the base in terms of economic and class structures, in favor of epistemic and values-based norm-producing social structures which include but arent simply determined by the economic aspects of society. Rather than producing ideologies which justify or disguise the base social normative structures, these structures themselves instantiate and imply a certain constellation of philosophical-metaphysical stances. Every individual participating within a social structure contributes to the invention of these partially shared philosophical
worldviews, which include within themselves attitudes toward political and economic theory. Individuals neither simply march in lockstep with the social norms nor deviate wildly from them, since they are partially shared. A person who offers a new philosophical-economic-political perspective that they believe represents a pinnacle of evolution can influence others but not simply impose their vantage on the community unless that community is already receptive to such a perspective. There is a philosophical-economic-political evolution but the ground of its becoming is collective rather than strictly individual.
It seems to me that there are quite sensible accounts one can put together about what's happening in the world. It takes a decent amount of searching different people specialize in different domains (foreign policy, economy, domestic policy, international relations, tech, climate change, etc.), but one sees a picture emerging which is frankly very grim.
Now that's one thing, the other is to assume that one is capable of giving a single account of everything that is happening. I don't think any one person can do that, there are too many countries, too many complexities, to expect someone to be able to do this.
But I don't see why that is even necessary.
Most states are republics, either by name or by form, and whether those in power are liberal, communist, or fascist in their thinking. Heads of state, mixed constitutions, rule of law, representative governmentsthis enduring structure is largely the legacy of the interbellum establishment, not of any one ideology or political philosopher. And every statist, no matter their ideology, serves as its Praetorian Guard.
These structures and the resulting effects of their control over, and involvement in, the lives of every person ought to be at the forefront of the criticism of modernity. But as usual they miss the mark, end up achieving power, and we come to find that we were worse off than before.
I think the conventional wisdom among political scientists is that the US is in decline, so therefore China will continue to grow out of regional power status into super power status.
As for liberalism, everybody is capitalist. Everybody has fairly centralized authority. So the scene will be primitive social dominance, gorillas in the jungle.
Economically yes. Though they do have a looming population decline that is very very serious and that may change the outlook for them. But as of now yes, that is what is happening.
We are in dire need of good leaders in this "West". I see danger all over and escalating. Let's hope it doesn't spiral out of control.
It will eventually, but probably not in our lifetime.
Whether realism has to do with opposition to "social media psychodramas" or the strangeness of intersectionality, either way there is nothing connecting democracy or liberalism to this realism, and therefore deviation from this realism is not a deviation from democracy or liberalism.
Realism is great, but it isn't democracy or liberalism (per se) that gets you there. If one wants to use democracy or liberalism to achieve realism, then they need a particular flavor of democracy or liberalism. The flavor of liberalism has to do with a focus on the individual and inalienable rights. The flavor of democracy has to do with a relatively autonomous demos (which is probably no longer possible in our internet age).
What we see so often today is a population that says, "Democracy is good, my ideas are good, therefore my ideas are democratic," or, "Liberalism is good, my ideas are good, therefore my ideas are liberal." That's why it is so easy for opponents to wield the same terms. A culture with a hyper-specific concept of democracy and freedom has forgotten that their concept is hyper-specific; and they can no longer justify or even properly perceive what has come to be taken for granted.
Quoting apokrisis
Wouldn't you agree that freedom of association is always a subordinated value within liberalism, subject to various conditions?
I have the same feeling. China may eventually produce more GDP than the USA since it has a larger population. China, however, suffers from problems such as corruption, no freedom of speech, etc., so it will produce less GDP per capita.
I'm not confident that I will be dead before things spiral out of control, and I'm an old man.
I don't know much about the over-estimation of the world's liberalism, but that is certainly the case for the United States.
It might seem like liberals had super-majorities in congress during the Roosevelt administrations, and in some other decades, but only if one mistakenly equates "Democrat" with "Liberal". Democratic majorities were possible because the illiberal solid-south Democrats had pretty much complete control over southern state politics. It became more difficult for Democrats to control congress after the illiberal Democrats switched and became illiberal Republicans. That's one thing.
States in the midwest and west coast have always held strong conservative constituencies along side liberal districts (usually urban). Minnesota illustrates this well, sending a mixed conservative and liberal representation to Congress. Minnesota was a consistently religious place, with strong "family values". It less religious now, less traditionally family oriented, but still has about the same mix of conservative and liberal. California, the home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan et al, has had some remarkably illiberal episodes.
If you take a random sample of Americans, I would expect the majority to express a mix of values which can't be taken as resoundingly Liberal. That doesn't mean that the majority are on the edge of fascism, but far right leanings make up substantial group (the "MAGA base").
Pundits are saying the Democrats don't know what to do to win elections. I don't think that is true -- they know how as well as the Republicans. The problem with the presumably liberal Democrats is that their liberalism isn't deep or strong enough to motivate them, to the same extent that the far right Republicans are motivated. They seem to be having difficulty clearly articulating the liberal cause.
The failure to articulate and hold the liberal center allows for growing encroachment on the political center by far right wing thinking and 'left of liberal' thinking on the left side. MAGA and some of the so-called Democratic Socialists both pose problems for central liberalism, whether rounding up 10 million illegal immigrants or abolishing the police.
Have you ever known a time when things weren't on the verge of spiralling out of control?
I agree, excluding the occasional nuclear war.
People absolutely have to provoke one another to see if nuclear warheads will show up. They can't just sit there and act like they have some sense.
Einstein said that there is no end to human stupidity! I hope he is wrong.
So you dont see realism assumed as a foundation of the social package but rather an optional flavour? Institutions such as independent courts and a free press arent envisaged as basic?
I would say it is more correct that it is realism that gets you to democracy and liberalism. A public concern for the real facts, the real truth, is the precondition.
Of course we can have our sophisticated debates about the epistemic reality of realism given we are socially-constructed creatures. But that too rather proves the point.
Quoting BC
I agree with your overall analysis. I would say that in order for liberals to gain the ascendancy again in the U.S., what is needed isnt so much an articulation and holding of a liberal center but its creation. That is, a movement needs a critical mass in order to deserve the label of center. There simply isnt a large enough percentage of the country identifying with liberal values right now to produce such a critical mass. Achieving this will rely less on the strategies of political leaders than on the slow process of social evolution.
He is correct if any form of life is possible, shortly after the Third World War.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I prefer philosophical perspective to ideology. Ideologies lend themselves to empty slogans abstracted away from how people actually understand themselves in their pragmatic relations with others politically, economically and ethically. Positioning oneself as a savior of liberalism or calling ones party National Socialism are examples of marketing slogans that mask the profound philosophical differences that separate, say, adherents of MAGA from social liberals. Whats important is not whether two competing groups use the same language, but how far apart the meaning those concepts is in their actual use by those groups.
We need more energetic and articulate people like Elizabeth Warren. Bernie Sanders may consider himself a Democratic Socialist, but he is also energetic and articulate (but aging). I don't want to see Harris or a Clinton or the like taking the lead.
I have a history of further-to-the-left-than-Democratic-Socialist, and I know from experience that it is very difficult to arrest the attention of the ordinary man in the street, let alone build their interest, enthusiasm, and commitment into action (like voting). "Liberal democracy" should be a significantly easier sell than socialism. After all, liberal democracy, free enterprise, and all that are not asking anyone to lay their life on the line, give up their career, sell their property, or forgo a new iPhone. Nobody is even asking gun owners to repent and turn in their guns.
I mean, the core values of liberal democracy are not strange:
The core values of liberalism are individualism, liberty, equality, and the rule of law, emphasizing the rights of the individual and the consent of the governed. Other essential principles include private property, freedom of speech and religion, and a representative democracy supported by a mixed or market economy. I would add "the truth of science", given Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy, Jr. shitting on the truth of medical science and the administration's denial of climate warming.
I disagree with the vise versa part. X is defined as Western values and Western narrative, and then Y is defined as not-X. The vise versa doesn't work, because then you would be defining X as not-Y, and there would be nothing to establish the relationship to Western values. So there is no vise versa in the definitions, there is X which is Western values, and there is Y which is not-X. X cannot be defined as not-Y or you lose reference to Western values.
Quoting Astorre
This is not the dichotomy you have defined though. You have defined Western and non-Western. The dichotomy of Western and developing, is very outdated. That is because many non-Western societies are fully developed, but simply do not have the same values as the Western. We ought not class developed non-Western together with developing non-Western, and name them all together as "developing countries. That would be a mistake.
So, you have proposed a dichotomy of "Western" and "non-Western". In no way does this equate to developed and developing. It appears like you want to include non-Western, yet developed countries, in your category of "developing". Or you just want ambiguity. Why?
I don't see why independent courts or a free press lead ineluctably to realism. There are different ways to conceive of liberalism, but are any of them inherently bound up with realism?
Quoting apokrisis
I am not convinced of that either. Part of the difficulty is that trying to entangle realism with democracy or liberalism presupposes moral realism (which in this case is a moral-political realism), and the democratic sentiment of the West now generally opposes moral-political realismwhere the general opposition to moral-political realism is a large part of what liberalism has come to mean.
So even if the is-ought distinction is false, the fact that a large percentage of Westerners believe it to be true itself militates against the thesis that realism and democracy go together.
You seem to be understanding realism as political realism here. And I mean realism as in knowing the rational truth of the matter. Pragmatic realism.
So that is not moral realism either. :roll:
So what does pragmatic realism have to do with democracy or liberalism? Democracy and liberalism are moral/political positions.
But no, I am not understanding "realism" as "political (or moral) realism." For example:
Quoting Leontiskos
In that sentence the bolded "realism" does not mean "moral realism."
based on asserting that social order should follow from the reality of human interactions rather than claims about divine will.
Quoting Leontiskos
I'm asking if you have any reasons for your claim here:
Quoting apokrisis
How does realism get you to democracy and liberalism?
Via pragmatism. :roll:
As I have said any number of times, my metaphysics is naturalistic. I understand society as a biosemiotic organism. An organism is a dissipative structure that persists by constructing a model of itself in its world. An Umwelt. And so humanity can be best understood by accepting this is really what is going on and thus the metaphysics we might apply to any question of how best to order our collective affairs.
So even if the facts of reality are socially constructed, they are structured under the constraints of pragmatic habit. If we must inhabit an Umwelt, best that we all share one which is similar enough in the aspects that matter the most.
Traditional society was generally theistic and even animistic. Which worked out well enough for societies at that low level of complexity and change.
Then first the ancient Greeks and then the European enlightenment began to explore a more naturalistic basis to organising their societies. One not ruled by gods and spirits and fate and ancestral tradition but instead founded in pragmatic inquiry. The collective truth seeking of public reasoning.
This didnt really go anywhere much with the Greeks, just somewhat better agricultural empires with more organised militaries, economies and bureaucracies. But in Enlightenment Europe, it caught fire as the focus on naturalistic accounts drove science and technology. Britain in particular discovered it was sitting atop a limitless store of coal and you had the Industrial Revolution as the entropic bonanza which forced itself on humanity as its new reality. And an eager society restructured itself in response.
Agriculture was largely a steady-state regime. Fossil fuels tipped global society into runaway growth as its embedded goal.
So our ideologies are neither God-given nor freely chosen. They are just the structural habits that do the best job of adapting our collective behaviour to the opportunities that nature presents. And thats the pragmatic reality.
If we recognise that fact, then we can start to think in larger terms of how we do perceive the world and what then we can do to make a better job of properly seeing its reality.
So as a small example, we place a lot of store in measuring societys GDP. But we could instead shift our goals to measuring Societys happiness index or whatever other measure of social capital growth seems to make sense in terms of the deep goals we ought to have.
The concern with the real is what drives naturalism. We already know the world well enough to reject the supernatural when it comes to the basic business of causal accounts. We can see why knowledge is built around the semiotic relation of hypothesis and test.
Then liberalism and democracy were a pragmatic exercise in setting out the general rules of human social interaction and a way to measure collective opinion about the outcome. A feedback loop was created so that social order could start to evolve at a speed suited to an industrialising world.
And given the whole model was about this process of pragmatic inquiry - being open to discovering what works best - it is no surprise that truth seeking public institutions were given a special place. The fourth estate, parliamentary process, open markets, an independent judiciary, and all the rest.
So again, if you want to dispute my account, please explain on what basis.
So let me ask you a preliminary question: do you think that realism gets one to democracy and liberalism, or do you think that your specific variety of realism (society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism) gets one to democracy and liberalism? Because realism and what you are setting out here are not the same thing. Lots of people are realists who do not believe that society is a biosemiotic organism. Do those realists still arrive at democracy and liberalism?
Here's what I've been saying from the beginning:
Quoting Leontiskos
You claimed a connection between realism and democracy & liberalism, and I have been asking how that is supposed to work. That's the discussion I've been having with you from my very first response to you.
You have neither refuted my account that is the structuralist one that as biology goes, so sociology follows, nor have you made any effort to provide some other better theory.
The ideas had to come from somewhere. If not natural circumstance, then from where?
You only seem to be leaving supernatural circumstance as your position. And I can only conclude you are too shy to try and support that in a public forum.
We're talking about the relation between realism and democracy & liberalism. Now you want to talk about the genesis of liberal democracy?
Are you saying, "If realism did not generate liberal democracy, then what did?" Or, "If society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism did not generate liberal democracy, then what did?"
Realism, democracy, and liberalism are three incredibly complex and plastic notions. It may be that society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism supports liberalism or democracy, but first we must recognize that realism and society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism are not the same thing even if the latter is an instance of the former, and the conflation between the two seems to miss this. Second, I don't see how your relatively novel notion of society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism caused "the notion of liberal democracy [to arise and take hold on human affairs]," given the anachronism.
Historically speaking, liberal democracy arose in the relative absence of realism,* and theories such as Peirce's draw on sources behind and outside of the nominalism that had become so prevalent at the time of its rise. Presumably you are conflating realism with Baconian science, which did in fact attend the rise of liberal democracy. Of course the fact that liberal democracy arose in a relatively anti-realist period does not mean that the two are incompatible or that some variety of realism such as society-as-a-biosemiotic-organism does not support liberalism or democracy.
More generally, the democratic moral principle is that everyone is equal and votes in public affairs. The liberal moral principle has to do with individual freedom. The form of realism that will actually support democracy is therefore one which holds that equality among the demos is real, and the form of realism that will actually support liberalism is one which holds that individual freedom is real. That is how the practical-speculative juncture must be laid for things like democracy or liberalism to flourish, and my earlier point was presupposing that the juncture between the speculative sphere and the moral sphere is itself moral (and also speculative). For example, the thesis that each member of the demos is equal vis-a-vis the act of voting in public affairs is both a speculative and a practical thesis. It means that there is in fact an equality and that a political program follows upon this equality.
Quoting apokrisis
These strawmen and the ignorance underlying them are actually rather amusing. Apparently you think that everyone who disagrees with you is naively appealing to "divine will" (whatever that is supposed to mean). I'm not much interested in engaging the anti-religious chip on your shoulder, as it seems to be an excuse to avoid giving explanations for your claims (such as the claim that realism generates democracy or liberalism).
* Modern liberal democracies are positioned as a form of conflict-resolution, and therefore presuppose deep-seated disagreements. Thus it is no surprise that a large dose of nominalism attended their rise. I think a rather compelling argument could be made that realism goes hand in hand with intellectualism, whereas democracy and liberalism are bound up with voluntarism. This is a basic reason why we now see a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles - there is an inherent tension. Yet Aristotle pointed out long ago that there are different forms of democracy.
Just to remind you what was actually said
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting Leontiskos
You are not much interested in anything but misrepresenting my position and avoiding awkward questions about yours.
That is why I stressed pragmatic realism from the start. Liberal democracy was a rational exercise in expanding the scope of opinion so that society could shift from a steady-state agricultural basis to a freely growing industrial basis. Society could sense the value of intellectual diversity as the path to becoming a more plastic and adaptive entity.
So what was targeted was the win-win combination of both more competition and more cooperation in both economic and social affairs. The freedom to differentiate combined with the constraint that integrates. A dynamic which always existed as the basis of social order, but with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, a dynamic that could be made even more dynamic by spelling it out as a self-conscious ideology.
Tolerance for dissent was one side of the bargain. The ability to then impose a collective wisdom was the other. This is why I stressed that a pragmatic realism leads to a society that is composed of its interest groups or institutionalised habits. Society is supposed to learn what works best by allowing free experimentation, but also then decide what actually makes sense and institutionalising that balance at every scale of its hierarchical organisation.
Society could only become complexly developed by following this formula where things are self-organising over all its scales. You have the local mah jong club doing its thing in terms of the resolving its tensions, managing its own affairs, and then the same pragmatic realism being applied up at the level of a treasury or judiciary.
So you say modern liberal democracies are positioned as a form of conflict-resolution, and so presuppose deep-seated disagreements. But equally, they are positioned to encourage the flourishing of such disagreement, given that there will be the certainty of a Darwinian machinery to then sift what is working from what isn't. Which is where the pragmatic realism comes in judging success in terms of community level goals.
And where should those goals come from? You might say there is some absolute moral imperative or transcendent good that human society ought to be entrained to. I say instead that we are natural creatures doing natural things. What we wind up being entrained to is thermodynamics. We organise our affairs to maximise our entropy throughput. That is a measurable fact of history.
And if we don't like that answer, we theoretically could do something about it. But also, the laws of thermodynamics are pretty hard to resist. We see that everywhere we look in modern liberal democracy. Drill baby drill as they say in the US and everywhere else.
Is there also some kind of intellectualism = realism and liberal democracy = voluntarism at play here? If you find that a compelling argument, you certainly haven't made it. I don't know in what way you think it is relevant.
Then as for a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles, this seems to be your code for the kind of reductionist mentality the ideology of the machine that you would want to oppose to ... some transcendent principle you are too shy to articulate.
I find that the holism of pragmatism is a better place to attack reductionism as it can explain why there is reductionism as part of the larger triadic whole, and doesn't just angrily reject it in dualistic Cartesian terms.
From the start, I was speaking of pragmatic realism. And you immediately projected on to that your own Cartesian framing in terms of the real and the ideal. While never being willing to acknowledge that my arguments are essential Aristotelean in systems science fashion.
Nature is shaped by the structural accomodations that must emerge from its own free interaction. As Peirce argued, even the Cosmos is the product of evolutionary habit. Liberal democracy as a political machinery for trading off the counter-forces of local competition and global cooperation are just expressing that natural hierarchical dynamic at the level of organismic order.
And what other structure could have been expressed?
Sure we can have a debate over the current settings of the world order in terms of some sub-dynamic such as whether it is better to be organised around a steady-state policy or a maximum growth policy. We can argue all the details of the dynamics down to whether multiculturalism or assimilation makes for better society in a world where we are still also trying to organise under our identities as nation states.
But I like the Big Picture view that grounds such debates in the reality of systems hierarchical order where complexity arises through an ability to balance the driving dynamics in play over all scales of that hierarchical order.
And this is the basic plumbing issue that liberal democracy is meant to address. The how of how we construct a society that is balancing its freedoms and constraints over all its scales of being a scale of being that has the added stress of a compounding growth rate.
So the pragmatic model of society such as expressed by Arthur Bentley in 1908 based on Dewey is of a hierarchy of interest groups. Institutionalised habit forming over all levels.
Realism is not some concrete given in this equation anymore than idealism enjoys some transcendent status. Instead pragmatic realism is a society's own judgment on the success of its project. Truth emerges from the collective rationality that is striking an adaptive balance over all scales of a society's organismic identity. A sensible amount of dissent or conflict is also leading to a sensible degree of integration or shared learning.
That is why we can look at the shift towards technocracy and globalisation as something that seemed to make sense as a next step for liberal democracy. Or why we can see that authoritarianism cuts across the ideal of society as an organic whole a hierarchy of interest groups where the interactions between humans is something that can organise its own local wholes within all the larger wholes. It is richly and intelligent structured at any degree of magnification. Whereas a dictatorship just wants to impose some kind of hierarchical structure of control that treats society as if it were actually a machine and the dictator as actually a supreme being.
So my pragmatic realism accepts that truths are relative and there are no moral absolutes that must rule over human affairs. But then it insists on the reality of structural universals as the kind of patterned regularities that even a free nature can't help fall into due to its self-interactions. It is hard to imagine a flourishing society that isn't organised as an organic hierarchy of interests groups properly in touch not just with the real world that is its physical ground, but also with the reality of the world it is thus making.
It is the realism of being self-aware enough that society is in precisely this pragmatic recursive loop of adaptive habit formation and so being able to frame our debate about that fact with intellectual precision.
We can see that liberal democracy just arises as the obvious way to plumb a hierarchical structure intent on its own rapid growth in scale and complexity. It isn't a problem that requires any moralisation or mystical justification. We can see it for what it is and respond accordingly.
As always, your ideas are interesting and possess plausibility. But my difficulty is that you aren't arguing for realism, or democracy, or liberalism, so much as for a particular kind of realism, democracy, or liberalism. And you are also projecting that specific form back onto history, as if the historical development was a straightforward working out of that form. I mostly think that your project could be construed as a kind of hermeneutical battle over the history of such things, which in turn becomes a jockeying for how the essence of such movements is to be understood moving forward.
To give one example, you seem to view liberalism as the freedom of groups (which are formed by free association). This is curious to me both because it is historically inaccurate and because it is close to an Aristotelian revision of liberalism that others propose. In fact liberalism is based in individual freedom, not group freedom, through the ideas of Hobbes and secondary figures like Locke or Mill, and this has become only more obvious with time. The Aristotelian approach sees man as a social animal, and therefore sees groups as primary. For example:
The polis with thick subsidiarity that you describe is simply not modern liberalism. You are taking a reasonably good idea and calling it liberalism even though it is not historical liberalism, and I would rather just admit that it is different from liberalism rather than try to engage in a hermeneutical battle to try to argue that historical liberalism is significantly different than the received view allows.
Quoting apokrisis
As I said earlier, many simply associate their own "good" ideas with liberalism or democracy, because they deem themselves liberals or democrats. But the laws of thermodynamics are no more potent on democracy than on oligarchy, or aristocracy, or monarchy. The idea that a thermodynamic-based theory is somehow "democratic" is not at all in evidence.
Quoting apokrisis
Science is not decided by majority vote. It is realist by nature. It has correct and incorrect answers. Democracy is a matter of majority vote. It has no correct or incorrect answers, other than the will of the people. Do you see the difference? So what happens when the scientist claims that Covid-19 requires certain political measures, and the populus does not favor the enacting of those measures? Then you have but one example of scientific auctoritas clashing with a democratic political arrangement.
Science is anti-democratic. Folks miss this because they are predisposed to favor democracy, and they therefore conflate an aristocracy with a democracy. Contemporary science is aristocratic in that etymological merit-based sense. It is a consensus of those with the requisite merit to possess a vote. Scientific "suffrage" extends only to a tiny percentage of the population.
Quoting apokrisis
You continue to project all sorts of things into this conversation that are not in evidence.
Quoting apokrisis
I think that is precisely what liberal democracy is not. Liberal democracy has from its inception erred heavily in the direction of a lack of subsidiarity. It tends towards top-down power structures, globalism, etc. This is precisely why the "revolution of the proletariat" is always a threat to the liberal state.
Quoting apokrisis
If this isn't projection, then name me one founder of liberalism who has expressed such views.
Quoting apokrisis
Dewey is late to the game, and so I wouldn't count him as a founder. This is even beside the point that he was a critic of classical liberalism and proposed substantial changes, which is much to the point. Simpson agrees with much in Dewey in his critiques of liberalism.
Quoting apokrisis
That's well and good, but I see little relation between it and liberal democracy. I think that such a theory could be applied to most historical political arrangements seen through the bird's-eye view that you take. There is no special compatibility between such a theory and liberalism or democracy. You would be making the same claims if you found yourself in a tribal or feudal society, or a guild-based economy.
I do appreciate the explication. :up:
Edit: Presumably you are coming from a perspective which favors the marriage of market principles to Mill's free speech arguments, found in figures like Adam Smith. That perspective has truly become an inheritance of liberalism, even if it is contested in some ways. This would require a longer conversation, but I think here too there is an overidentification of market principles with democracy or liberalism (similar to the overidentification of thermodynamics with democracy or liberalism). It seems to me that on this point your odd dichotomy between "natural" and "moral" will become especially strained, as will the tension between democracy and your hierarchalism. ...The reason liberal democracies tend towards a thin geography of intermediate institutions (and therefore towards hierarchies that lack robustness) is because the anthropological starting point is too strongly individualist, which in turn creates a vacillation between the individual part and the societal whole (i.e. the liberal state).
It is clear that you want to take a great figures in history approach to understanding human affairs and I prefer the Hegelian structuralist approach - suitably updated.
So you seek a basis in material/efficient cause and I in formal/final cause. You say there was a first moment when some genius had the basic idea. I say we are talking about a natural dynamic that has always structured humans as social creatures and simply underwent a phase change. It became supercharged by the switch from agricultural empires to mechanised nations.
So the structure always existed. But the form of its expression evolved rapidly from kinship based social hierarchies to interest group based social hierarchies. It was about families and their plots of land. Then it became about institutions and their capital flows. Society became self-consciously organised around the idea of the free individual as the differentiating force in human affairs, coupled to the dispassionately integrating machinery of the rule of law, free markets, and other aspects of the social contract.
Folk like Fukuyama and Turchin show how structuralism is in vogue again. And structuralism gives a base to explanation that focuses on the whole that constrains rather than merely the parts that compose.
Your critique is based on not even understanding how my account is properly Aristotelean. Liberal democracy was not some free creation of some individual mind but an expression of the natural logic which shaped the reaction to an Industrial Revolution about to shake up everything.
It was how society could absorb a sudden surge in entropic power that was beginning to flow through the system. A politics and economics appropriate to managing the forces being unleashed.
And I do make that structuralist claim about human social organisation. The same hierarchical systems logic applies right through history from prehistoric times. A society is a structure of global constraints and local freedoms. There must be a collective state of mind that can then make its individual choices within that context.
History then becomes about tracking how this general theme becomes expressed in increasingly complexified and mechanised ways. There are the major transitions in the moves from hunter/gatherer lifestyles to agrarian empires to industrialised nation states. We have the shifts from oral to literate to mathematical semiosis. We have the shifts from ancestor worship to the axial religions to pragmatic realism. At each stage, the basic logic of social structure is the same, but its expression becomes focused on meeting the organisational needs of the next step.
Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is the kind of approach I would recommend if one is to focus on the actual genesis of the "Western metadiscourse". He points to the way the Catholic Church inadvertently paved the way for "liberal democracy" when for its own reasons it was breaking down the traditional kinship structure of Medieval Europe. From my notes....
So that is just one example of the now extensive literature that looks to a structuralist account of social development rather than treating it as some fortunate story of a few clever people suddenly having great ideas that somehow then spread contagiously.
You want to frame this as a debate over the origins of liberal democracy as a moralistic ideology. I instead argue that it was the new system that emerged from the same old natural principles of what a social system just is.
So where does liberal democracy begin? Well inadvertently, according to Henrich, the Catholic Church had got the ball rolling in ways that could release the intellectual and economic energy to tap into a more mechanistic approach to life in general. And once you have a mechanistic mindset, you can not only imagine engineering society so as to improve its general functioning, you can't not but help stumble on to the idea of mechanising agriculture the first steps of fencing the country side and harnessing the rivers and wind for their mechanistic power.
Then one minute you are mining pits for coal to heat your hovel and needing steam pumps to stop them filling up with water, the next you are mining coal to drive your whole world.
Ian Morris's "Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels" set out the general case (although others like Vaclav Smil have been tidying up his actual numbers. Again from my notes on these sources...
One can always debate these analyses. My point is that they are plainly far more informative about why as humans we are organised the way we are.
The structuralist perspective the one that sees humans as social creatures organising to take advantage of the resources that nature has to provide tells us far more about why we believe what we believe than any amount of "history of moral philosophy" story-telling.
In my opinion, your judgments are very accurate in that liberalism does not appear out of nowhere, like a miracle that suddenly leads society to prosperity. In your approach, liberalism acts as a catalyst for natural processes, not their source - and this, in my opinion, is true.
You rightly emphasize the role of the church, and thereby recognize that even such a seemingly universalistic structure as liberalism is a product of many particular, historically conditioned factors.
And it is difficult to argue with this. Moreover, I would strengthen your thought: not only the church, but also climate, geography, Roman law, Byzantine cultural inertia, and many other things played their role. And everywhere it was different - which is clearly visible, for example, when comparing France with Spain and North with Latin America.
However, I am ready to argue with the thesis about the universality and naturalness of liberalism. It has proven its effectiveness in a certain historical and cultural configuration. But this is not a universal way of finding a compromise. In societies where individualization did not occur and where there was no institution of the church, no pressure on clan structures, liberalism, even if it were brought in a titanium case, would still rust over time.
Moreover, I am convinced that individualism, on which liberal ideology is based, is unnatural in its depths. It was good as an ideal, as a direction, as a promise of freedom, as long as there was something to be freed from. But today, when we have met with living results - with a generation free from everything: from obligations, from attachments, from communities - liberalism itself was horrified by its own embodiment for the first time.
Liberalism exposed man. It freed him from the clan, from the church, from the state, from tradition, even from the need to bear new children. But when a person was left alone, in his apartment, where there was no one to bring him a glass of water (where there was no desire for that someone to be nearby), it turned out that he did not know what to do with his freedom.
The idea of the sovereign individual is a useful social construction. It framed the world in a certain light that allowed for the explosive growth that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and the rational mechanisation of "everything".
This construction of the Enlightened being the citizen who could live and thrive within the parameters of a liberal politics and a liberal economy was a complex thing with many moving parts. But it followed the same old structural logic of setting up a system of collective constraint that would then shape the local degrees of freedom the kind of individual member of society whose action would on the whole rebuild, and maybe even grow and improve, that society which had invested in an effort to socially construct just such a type of person.
So individuals are free to make mistakes. But that kind of inventiveness and risk taking is how an open market of ideas, skills, services or goods works. The market in the end exerts its democratic constraints, sorting a crowd of striving individuals into the winners and losers. Or into some statistical band of winning and losing that is pragmatically useful to the stability and growth of that society over the long enough run.
Thus individualism is not unnatural. It is the same old naturalistic dynamic of any organismic system. But homo sapiens of course took this approach to social complexity building to its new semiotic level. Modern humans added language and then maths to their toolkit and so could start to form socially constructed selves on top of their genetic and neurobiological selves.
Homo sapiens was an explosive success because it represented the narrative turn in nature. Neanderthals only had simple social structure as they weren't elaborate story-tellers. Humans came along and could start inventing the binding mythologies that gave their tribal groups an ancestral identity. We became the people of a place. And that then meant we lived in a larger landscape of other people in their places.
Humans didn't just live in the everyday immediacy of hunting and foraging, of coping with the basic physical challenges of existing. They now lived in landscapes that were social and alive inhabited by an ancestral past and shaped by networks of relations between hundreds and then thousands of individuals. There was trading that greatly benefitted all who could participate in the trading. There was warfare and raiding, which might not sound ideal but was just as basic to the creation of socially-constructed landscape. A patchwork of tribal identities that could balance their cooperation and their competition so as to overall rise and dominate over the other hominids who didn't have the level of language to match. Who had not learnt to act as if all individuals were bound under a shared social narrative that now lay heavy across the landscape as far as the eye could see, or the mind could even imagine walking.
So homo sapiens developed a narrative approach to social identity. Notions about reality were extended to cover the reality of a binding web of custom, history, morality. What defined self and "other" at all levels of social experience and across space and time.
Then liberal democracy sums up the Enlightenment's retooling of the cultural narrative in a way better suited to the machine age that was starting to emerge. The idea of the individual as a self of entrepreneurial ambition became something that could be widely imagined. Everywhere people looked, this was the narrative construct they expected to find looking back at them. This was the new landscape that was being inhabited. Where you had rights but also responsibilities under a society-wide legal framework. Where you could own property and accumulate capital, yet also lose it. Where you got an education that presented a wide range of opportunities, but you then had to get on and make something of your own life.
It would be a bit strange to expect this "liberal democratic" formula to spring into being fully formed from start date and then never to have evolved as it went along, responding to its own successes and failures.
Your comment focuses on the idea that it was a formula meant to free the individual and so has now become meaningless because everyone is as free as they could be, yet a little bit miserable with that outcome.
But I am arguing it was a formula to restructure the social concept of being a member of a collective social identity. Sure, the freedoms got turned up in the sense of pick any job you like, take any risks that seem worth the gamble, treat everyone else as players in the same game. My liberation is your liberation too. And in general, that still works.
Yet there is a big difference between living in a steady state balance and living in a freely growing one. Steady state systems are closed and so arrive at Gaussian bell curve distributions. There can be some central average condition that the system targets, and even a restriction on the variance around this mean.
But unconstrained growth leads to the exponentialism of a powerlaw distribution. You get the kind of world we see with social media or fossil-fuel powered consumerism. You get a tilt in the distribution of the economic goods and social capital know as the Matthew Effect. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. A few become super wealthy or super famous. The greater number become the bulk who exist in minimum wage debt slavery and feel unknown and unloved, soon enough to be entirely forgotten. There is no longer a central average outcome. A powerlaw distribution arrives at no mean and only has its trend to ever greater polarisation.
So liberal democracy began to form in a still agrarian society and became tuned to a limited growth rate. Plague, famine and war was enough friction to keep things level enough. But then the Industrial Revolution put things on a new footing. And with the Information Revolution, they really took off.
Has liberal democracy adapted? It was trying to with forms of life more appropriate to a powerlaw curve. There were always plenty of ideas. Emissions trading. Happiness indexes. Social entrepreneurs. Universal basic income. Non-governmental organisations. The international rules-based order.
But the underlying problem with accelerationism is that all thinking becomes short-term. The future gets crowded out. Eventually people even stop trying to fix things. Irrational narratives start to take hold as excuses for not attempting to keep up with the socioeconomic game we are creating. Or billionaires and autocrats have emerged with an interest in preventing any change to the settings.
So forget "liberal democracy" as some kind of modern theology. Humanity coming to its senses and seeing what was right and moral in an absolute way that will be true for all time and so can also be now discovered to be a false idol.
What really happened is that Homo sapiens has always spun the narratives which allowed for the social construction of the individual self. This social technology step us up through the gears, from foraging, to farming, to the fossil-fuel powered mechanisation of everything. And so around 1900, we entered an era of rocketing acceleration.
And over the past 120 years, we have needed to rethink the social narrative at the same accelerating pace. Is it any wonder that it might feel the wheels are finally falling off? But also, given the structure of social order is always the same underlying deal, the possibility of keeping up is still there.
The question was has the Western metadiscourse ended. It is a good question as we do rely on having some narrative large enough to encompass some collective future. But while "liberal democracy" does a good job of picking out the ideological shift that occurred, it can be seen that many think of it as just a matter of moral philosophy that is then either right or wrong in some idealist absolute fashion. The entropic logic that underpins the whole shift is seen as beside the point. As is the fact that it is just a social narrative which has been rapidly evolving in the very act of keeping up with its own real world consequences.
Hence the need to turn the political conversations back towards the pragmatic realism which they have become increasingly divorced from. Who the heck has opinions on emissions trading, happiness indexes, social entrepreneurs, universal basic income, non-governmental organisations, the international rules-based order and all the other practical stuff that seemed the hot topics even a decade ago?
Of course, we have significantly deviated from the main topic of the topic. But this did not make the discussion less interesting. Your position only strengthened my conviction that Liberalism is an ideology that arose on a real foundation of a set of conditions. Liberalism has proven its effectiveness for the society in which it arose, developed, and was embodied. It is extremely tenacious and instrumentally capable of continuing in the same spirit for a long time. In general, when I started this topic, I did not even question any of these statements, and I can wish liberalism itself to recover from the temporary difficulties it is currently facing. I believe that these challenges will be overcome.
At the same time, I continue to assert that liberalism is not a universal value for humanity as a whole. It follows from this that, in my opinion, it should not be used for export and justification of interests with high standards. Liberalism is an excellent tool. I asked if it was acceptable to say that "I climbed into my neighbor's house and established my own order there only because the neighbor beat his children with a stick and not a belt", simultaneously drawing on the resources of this neighbor for my own benefit.
Another interesting observation that arose during this discussion - the world, in general, does not care about ideology. First of all, a person wants benefits. A person sees that state "A" lives in goodness and is presented with the idea that this became possible thanks to ideology "?26". Of course, he wants his state "B" to have ideology "?26". But the point is that some state "C" appears and says: look, we also live well and we have goodness and our ideology is "?32". If state "A" goes into decline, and state "C" suddenly becomes super-developed, then ideology "?32" is correct? NO. Are goodness and personal happiness connected with ideology? It is connected if he himself shares this ideology and did not accept it because of the success of others.
And now the most important question from the beginning of the discussion: Is the West prepared to coexist with ideological and civilizational alternatives that do not necessarily aspire to Western liberalism?
I think the answer to this question will determine the future fate of humanity
Okay, good.
Quoting apokrisis
It seems like your argument is that history is the inevitable outworking of semiotic or social realities, and therefore each point in history represents the highest degree of progress possible at that given point. Because we now find ourselves in "democracy," democracy represents the highest (and inevitable) degree of progress possible in 2025. If this is an accurate portrayal, then you have your Ur-cause (semiotic or social progression), you have your effect (Western democracy in 2025), and the only thing to figure out is how the effect can be traced to the cause.
Our difference here is similar to what I pointed out in <this post> regarding wisdom. Your controlling theme is your Ur-cause, and you begin with the premise that things like "wisdom" or "democracy" must be outworkings of that Ur-cause. I do not grant that premise. I would want to look at wisdom in itself or democracy in itself, rather than constraining my understanding of such phenomena to outworkings of an Ur-cause. It's a bit of the hedgehog and the fox, if you like, where the fox is not convinced that the One Big Idea will ultimately hold up.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay. Lots of interesting ideas there, many of which are plausible. That definitely helps me understand more of the basis for your view.
Quoting apokrisis
Let's revisit Count's point:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
On your sort of reasoning, if Hitler had won the war then Nazism would be wise and it would be a higher point of progress than the more democratic alternative. On your view to know whether Nazism or Western democracy is more aligned with the inevitable outworkings of nature, we only have to look at which phenomenon won out. The Allies won the war against the Axis powers, therefore Western democracy is more aligned with "realism."
That approach strikes me as simplistic. Of course you might make a short-term vs. long-term distinction and claim that unnatural progressions can occur in the short term but not in the long term. Yet in that case the relevant question asks why democracy or liberalism are long term phenomena rather than short term phenomena.
The other oddity here is that if you abandon morality in a thoroughgoing way, then you are not capable of any normative arguments. You end up in the quandary of a fatalism that precludes free will. For example, the climate change theorist might say that we should reduce CO2 emissions, but if we fail to do so and a catastrophic event occurs, he cannot but look back and say that the catastrophe was inevitable and his effort to avoid it had no chance of succeeding. The fatalist cannot choose to fight for the Allies or the Axis.
Quoting apokrisis
Isolating a metric and making it the whole story always seems simplistic to me. It either ignores the fact that humans act for ends, or else stipulates an end without sufficient evidence. In this case the stipulation is that humans want to "get things done in the world." It seems like a projection of one telos onto all of human history.
Granted, Aristotle says that the human telos is happiness (eudaimonia), and I don't think he is projecting. But eudaimonia is not an everything-is-a-nail to the guy with a hammer. A Western industrialist may well convince himself that everyone at every point in time was only interested in industry, but history tells a different tale.
Argument by bogeyman, eh?
The ur-cause here is the evolutionary principle. What works is what survives. What can sustain itself over time through a capacity to repair and reproduce itself.
So you zero in on Nazis as a gotcha. But I would step back and ask what it is about a world system of sovereign states cooperating in trade and yet competing in wars is all about. Why did that particular social structure emerge and have considerable success in organising the modern world.
A Hitler figure would have to not just win the war but win the peace too. History says instead that WW2 cemented the transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana. So we know there who won and who lost what. There was a succession in the hegemons. But also, very little real difference in the brand of politics and economics they were peddling.
Each could claim that their track records proved the wisdom of their ways. But of course, the alert historian would say not so fast. They were lucky too. They were easily defended maritime nations sitting on top of immense fossil fuel reserves. Germanys problems werent that it was intellectually deficient but that it always had the problem of no natural borders and a grave lack of its own fossil fuel resources. Hitlers early land grab was completely in line with the rational objective of fixing those two problems in a way that the larger European collective could understand and the US didnt even care.
The problem with fascism was that it was great for mobilising a broken nation for this project but lacked the pragmatism which might have stopped the land grab before it went too far too fast.
The Brits and Americans instead could tell the world that it was being colonised for its own good. Liberal democracy came with just love, peace and trade in mind. It would respect your people, your sovereignty, your cultural differences. All you had to do was accept your position as a branch office of the corporate headquarters and life would be sweet.
Quoting Leontiskos
This is nuts. Being brought up as a pragmatist is what always gave me my own voice in society. I could either choose to go along with the way things were or act according to what I thought was better.
A trivial example is that I refused to be promoted to a Sixer in the Cub Scouts as I said I didnt want to order the other kids around. The look of incomprehension from the adults made me realise what this para-military organisation was all about and I left soon after.
So I see no problem of working within norms and then also challenging norms. The capacity to make this critical choice is central to being a pragmatist. You either play the game or change the game. And it is reason which tells you which way to go and any juncture.
So a climate change scientist can see the need to reduce emissions. But if society fails to heed, then the climate scientist has to think that either society feels it is OK that global collapse is OK - some will survive - or that society lacks the capacity to escape the world view that fossil fuel has constructed for it.
I was a climate change activist until about 2010. After that - seeing the reality of the politics and economics up close - I stop wasting my energy. It will be what it will be. And I make my own pragmatic plans within that.
Quoting Leontiskos
This is because you have the fixed normative habit of seeing dichotomies as unresolved monisms rather than the identification of the complementary limits on being - the complementary limits that then make an active choice of where to strike the useful balance.
So my systems perspectives says there can be local ends and global ends. These are measurably different in being selfish and collective. Or competitive and cooperative. So you have some general bounding contrast in play, and the system would want to balance those rival imperatives over all scales of its being. Hence the pragmatic understanding of society as a hierarchy of interest groups. The contrasting pulls of individuation and integration at every level of social order.
The metric speaks not to the polar divide but to the spectrum of balances that is to be found inbetween.
This is why the natural world is fractally organised. That is what you get when the balancing is not just at one level but the same balance being expressed freely at all levels. Even the balance can be measurably balanced once you understand that the dichotomy leads on to larger natural thing of the hierarchy. The Platonic structure that science only discovered in the past century in the maths of fractals, powerlaw distributions, scalefree networks, dissipative structure, and all the other ways of saying the same thing as a new metaphysical perspective on natural order.
Quoting Leontiskos
Happiness is probably a vague enough term to hide the difference between talking about seeking a life balance and pursuing a hedonic pole.
But if we are to understand eudaimonia properly, we have to dig into that exact difference in viewpoint. Do we mean what it feels like to be in balance with our life and world - a state of equanimity - or what it feels like to be madly ecstatic just turned down to some low simmer that feels like the sustainable norm. A quiet content. A state of equanimity in short. Neither especially happy nor upset. Just ticking along nicely in the sense that sudden joy or sudden upset are adaptive states we could flip into as quick as circumstances might demand or justify.
So you keep saying that my position is the one that cant say anything much about the good and the bad. But my reply is that you dont even seem to have started to understand the dynamical nature of such things. You are treating the good as a fixed destination placed at some impossible distance from wherever we are. I make the argument for how it is all about the dynamical balance that can stabilise our sense of being a self in its world. The pragmatism of being as adapted as possible, both in the short term and the long term, to the game that is living a life as a social creature.
That looks like a red herring, given that you seem to agree with what I've said.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, but my point is that your approach is materially identical to post hoc rationalization. "What is superior/pragmatic is that which survives; Nazi Germany did not survive; Therefore, Nazi Germany was inferior." That is the premise, and then one has to provide reasoning to connect the ur-cause to the effect, which in this case has to do with fossil fuels and fascism.
The reason such an approach is not formally identical with post hoc rationalization is because its norm really is survival, and survival really is measured in retrospect. On this approach what is good is precisely what survives, and this is associated with what "works" or what is "pragmatic" or what is "real," and there is no additional good/normativity.
My other point with Nazi Germany is that your approach seems to have suffocated contingency. Most historians would say that the Axis Powers might have won the war, but on a fatalistic view everything that happens happens necessarily (again, unless one makes distinctions such as the short-term vs. long-term distinction). So let's move to that question of contingency and freedom.
Quoting apokrisis
But that's exactly what my argument predicts.
Quoting apokrisis
What's interesting about this case is that the climate scientist seems to think that he is opposing activity that is suicidal on the level of the human species (and perhaps beyond). On your evolutionary principle "what works is what survives." So is it possible for the human species to commit accidental suicide and fail to survive? If so, then what survived was precisely what did not work (for humans).
We can make the fatalism argument more abstract if you are concerned about "bogeymen." Suppose that political ideas are measured only by whether they survive. Thus if political idea X out-survives political idea Y, then political idea X is superior to political idea Y by the only possible metric.
Now Apokrisis is standing before a society where X and Y are clashing. He must make a choice. Does he promote X? Y? Neither? If he chooses to promote one of the two ideas, such as he did temporarily in 2010, then he is at the same time predicting that X (say) will out-survive Y. Whether he is right or wrong is fairly simple, for time will tell. If X out-survives Y then he will say, "I was right." If Y out-survives X then he will say, "I was wrong, and now I will switch sides." He is always a "fair-weather fan" in that sense, for moral perplexity cannot arise where there is not more than one moral telos.
The reason the reductio ad absurdum cannot simply be brushed aside with "bogeyman" labels is because there is a very strong cultural premise whereby one would continue to resist the Nazis even after the war was lost and the Nazi "survivability" proved itself superior. The reductio is an appeal to the fairly strong idea that good is not inevitable, and has to do with more than mere survival.
Quoting apokrisis
What's interesting is that this is a moral choice in the classic sense, and not merely a "pragmatic" choice. You seem to be implicitly boasting that you are not the kind of person who wanted to "order the other kids around" and contribute to a "para-military organization." You are not saying, "My survivability and the survivability of my social environment will increase if I refuse the promotion to Sixer, therefore I will refuse the promotion." You are doing much the opposite, "I will sacrifice the boon of the approval of my peers and the Scout Leader because I value something that is more important than that approval, and am willing to act on it." You harmed the survivability of the social whole in order to honor your individual conscience. After all, militaristic hierarchical organization is one of the most time-proven organizational orderings.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I don't think so. I don't assume that I have the epistemic access to recognize every dichotomy as either an unresolved monism or complementary limits on being. They may be either. I don't know ahead of time. I think there is a resolution but I don't assume that I will be able to understand it.
Quoting apokrisis
But what does the bolded mean, "the system would want"? Does the system have wants and desires, or is it being reified and anthropomorphized?
I understand that you have, say, the pole of the individual human and the pole of the human species, where the first has to do with selfishness and the second has to do with collectivity. But my hunch is that survivability is the only telos for both. "Selfishness" has to do with individual survivability and "collective" has to do with the species' survivability. As a more robust alternative I would offer the classic poles of subsidiarity and solidarity.
My difficulty is that this looks like a rather one-dimensional contrast. The only possible source of contrast and complexity is coming from individual survival vs. group survival. On my view the evolutionary reductionism does not properly account for the human mind and human teloi. Humans often place their end in things that are basically unrelated to survival, and this is precisely what accounts for the vast complexity of social life.
For example, the suicide bomber attests to the power of the human mind, which is able to subordinate the end of survival to other ends. There are just too many anomalies for the survival theory. If the survival theory were correct then human social realities would be a great deal simpler than they in fact are.
Quoting apokrisis
Perhaps neither (or either), but is either one the same as the evolutionary survival account? For example, the telos of pleasure certainly seems to fold into a eudaimonic account more easily than a survival account, given that people and also groups will often harm their survivability for the sake of pleasure. I actually think your survival-account would track the data points quite well if humans did not exist at all, as the aberrations would seem to be much fewer among non-human animals.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh, that's fine, but I think you will find that if you want to teach people how to pursue such a good you will require a lot more than survivability language. If this is right, then the end you outline will not actually be persuasive to most people, and it will then need to be dressed up in other clothing. So you get a new caste of priests mediating the supreme telos to the masses who cannot interact with it directly. It seems that whenever someone dreams up a new ultimate telos (such as the Enlighteners did), they quickly find that hardly anyone is waiting in line to get on board, and that the masses need to be provided with a "temporary" proxy.
Take technology for example. A new technology can drastically influence the course of human history. Many technologies seem positively opposed to the survival telos (e.g. nuclear weapons, contraception, perhaps even social media), and they are propagated nonetheless. If any such technologies are historically contingent, then we have cases where survivability is strongly impacted by a contingent cause that is not itself ordered to survivability.
I also find that "balance" approaches tend to be almost indistinguishable from other robust approaches in practice. For example, I think you will end up appealing to the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, just in a roundabout way. The question is then whether the simplification is helpful: whether pragmatism prefers that humans conceive of an ur-cause or not.
What survives is the fact we can examine. We can use it to ask the larger question of why that general kind of thing might be what emerges from the test of time.
It could be just due to contingency. Or it may be due to a structural advantage.
So you throw Nazis into the conversation. I say fine. Europe had its well known history of evolving into a community of sovereign states, Germany had its history of struggling to build itself up into a great industrial power despite some significant cultural advantages. We can examine the particular in terms of the general and debate in what ways a fascist turn was at first a success and then a failure. And to what degree the reasons for either were contingent or structural.
But it seems you like your history dumbed down. Nazis bad. Boo, hiss.
Quoting Leontiskos
Well I cited contingencies. Such as a lack of oil fields and defensible borders. Accidents of geography that turned out to matter given the political and economic structures that had evolved to dominate the European landscape.
So again, try to be less sloppy.
Quoting Leontiskos
Once more you betray that you can only think of worlds where ends are reached and history is complete. Utopia is constructed and heaven on Earth is achieved.
But my whole outlook is dynamical and relative. There is no necessity that anything lasts forever, nor that it be relentlessly all onwards and upwards until final perfection arrives. You are creating strawmen.
Quoting Leontiskos
All these weak arguments. If I make a wrong prediction, I discover something about my understanding of the structural principles involved.
With climate change, it was looking as if global governance would react just like it had over aerosols destroying the ozone layer. But then when the US republicans in particular became climate deniers, I had to revise my model of what was going on. I had to make the connection to the fossil fuel lobby and its political power. I had to understand human society in the more general context of thermodynamics and dissipative structure theory. This larger picture - still just as evolutionary, but now at superorganism level - revealed what happens when the world gets so financialised under neoliberalism that capital flows hook into whatever maximises profits. And cheap energy is the base of the pyramid.
So it was not about switching sides. It was about recognising how the issues were much larger than political agreement on some obvious technical fix. The beast had evolved and was using an army of lobbyists to distort our very grasp of reality so as to perpetuate its own superorganismic existence.
We went to turn off the tap. And the tap said no. That was a strange enough turn of events to dig deeper into the politics of it all.
Quoting Leontiskos
Your analysis is about Game of Thrones level. Winning a war is not winning the peace. Darwinism isnt a battle to the death. It is about flourishing at the long run ecosystem level. Life on Earth has suffered many mass extinction events and then bounced back with even greater richness and complexity.
You seem trapped in some narrative about the war of good over evil. Im simply pointing out that organisms have a natural structural story that we can discern. And that applies to social history just as much as biological history.
Quoting Leontiskos
Again you have an old fashioned notion of evolution as a brute individualistic struggle rather than a collective flourishing. Nature has no beauty for you I take it?
Quoting Leontiskos
Your view is reductionist so no surprise it seems inadequate. Try answering in terms of what Ive argued rather than this continual strawmanning.
Quoting Leontiskos
You keep talking about survival because you want to pretend that by organismic order, I mean mere contingency. But as I said, it is about what works. What can sustain itself over time. The structure that can adapt and flourish. The organisation that can organise itself.
Quoting apokrisis
I've said it before, but I will repeat. There are two ways of making a dialectical distinction.
The first is that you can argue there are two extreme poles of being and they connect in a single direction. There are the good and the bad, the true and the false, the beautiful and the ugly, the divine and the bestial, etc. It is just obvious that there is the one pole representing the direction things ought to go, and then the other direction they thus need to be leaving well behind.
One is the right pole to reach, the other is the correct pole to reject. That creates an absolute rule that doesn't seem to need any further justification. There is just one correct finality and you must keep aiming at it even if you can't always get there.
The second view of how it works is instead that there are two poles, but their relationship is complementary or synergistic. They might be opposites, but they are fruitful opposites as they go together in creating the larger thing of a balanced system. They are the dialectic that make for the greater whole.
So now we are talking of the Unity of Opposites. The fundamental categories of the Greek cosmos.
Chance and necessity, discrete and continuous, local and global, matter and form, atom and void, one and many, chaos and order, etc.
Their relation as poles of being is one of mutual co-creation. They are the basic contrasts which allow anything to actually exist as the stable reality that arises inbetween. Instead of one standing for the rejection of the other, they each stand as supplying what the other lacks. In its only in their balanced combination that things become properly whole.
So you and I look for quite different things to organise out explanations of the world. You say societies just ought to be directing all their efforts towards the good, as why on earth would it make sense to aim at the bad?
I say that it is instead some fruitful balance of opposites that must be struck. One is looking for the actions that play the complementary roles out of which a flourishing society could evolve.
Social science uniformly gives the answer as to what complementary pair is competition and cooperation. And how this dichotomy can push in both these directions by being organised in terms of hierachical scale. Competition is natural to the more local scale of being, and cooperation is natural to the global scale of being.
What else could bind a complex whole into a state of self-organising dynamical balance but that it be ordered as some set of global constraints stand in relations with some set of local freedoms. Or global necessity yoked to local contingency.
Neither side is a bad thing even if both sides couldn't be more logically in opposition. It is only when you have such an opposition that you can have the third thing that is their self-organising balance. You can have a society that is both globally coherent and yet locally dynamic. A society that can be integrated because it is also differentiated enough for that integration to even be a thing.
So there is a clash of metaphysics. And my argument is that the real world only supports the second story. Opposition can only truly exist if the opposition is complementary a two way street that creates its own dynamical balance.
If your arrow of causation just points away from one pole and towards the other, then how could anything ever in fact arise? Why would the bad ever come into existence if the good is always the goal? And how could the good even be said to exist unless the bad did exist as well? Is the bad secretly the good because the rejection of the bad is how the good gets achieved?
You can see how this kind one-way absolutism goes around in circles unable to ground the central relation that it wants to claim.
But a metaphysics based on the emergence of complementarity is self-grounding. You need complete opposites as then you have two things that work together. And they can only in fact be complete opposites as working towards a complementary balance is the very thing that is constraining them. If they failed to be complementary, they couldn't survive the test that is their ability to hang together as a unity.
Needless to say that all ancient metaphysics Greek, Taoist, Buddhist understood this fact about the logic of Nature. You need fundamental opposition. But it has to be organised to play complementary roles. And reality emerges in self-creating fashion out of the resulting balancing act.
There is very much said in detail about liberalism as a system that optimally balances societal interests in motion. I also want to draw attention to another feature of liberalism, one that should be mentioned when unpacking this phenomenon closely.
To this end, let us return to the question: what is power, in its essence? This might open new paths for reflection.
Take, for instance, the masterslave relationship in a classical slave-owning society, such as Ancient Rome. The slave is in complete bodily subjection to the master. The master may coerce him, command his life, beat him, punish him and this is how history textbooks, films, and literature often present it. (By the way, in historical dramas where Roman characters are shown as noble, it is always understated or omitted that they were slave-owners as if this shadow of history no longer casts light upon them.)
But the same sources repeatedly omit a fundamental point: the slave was not simply a thing, but a resource, and therefore required investments. By purchasing a slave, the master acquired not absolute freedom, but a bundle of obligations, without which the slave loses his value as an object of mastery.
Any careful master was obliged to:
1. Keep the slave healthy without health, no work is possible.
2. Provide housing else the slave might perish, escape, fall ill.
3. Ensure food a hungry slave is a restless, even dangerous, slave.
4. Provide some minimal education so the slave may work, obey commands, manage tools or tasks.
5. Maintain obedience whether by discipline or reward, but inevitably.
6. Oversee the procreation of slaves offspring could become additional resource.
7. Ensure minimal welfare for productivity depends on not pushing the body beyond collapse.
8. And finally protect against external threats: theft, murder, flight, even revolt among slaves.
This is structural care, not humanist fancy. It arises not from moral goodness but from the logic of property. And despite all the barbarism of the system, it is compelled to include care, otherwise it collapses as a system of mastery.
Now let us place on the other side of the scale liberal relations of freedom.
Here, the owner of capital does not have slaves but workers. He goes to the market, recruits personnel. This new?master doesnt care how the worker survives, where he lives, how he eats, how he reproduces, whether he is happy or not. What matters to him is the workers efficiency. To work more and demand less. If the worker falls ill or dies tomorrow, it is not a problem for the master: he simply goes to the market and finds another, one already raised from childhood to be efficient, fast, better. These workers themselves aspire to everything; they themselves take care of themselves.
I used two extremes as examples. If someone offered me to choose where Id prefer to be a master, Id, without hesitation, choose the second variant. Humanity, in general, seems to have arrived here, which is sensible. However, between these two extremes there have existed many other forms of social order: tribal communities where the leader bore responsibility even for the stability of the rains; feudal regimes where one had to defend ones peasants from raids, administer justice, be a model of mercy; socialism, where the working people were guaranteed free housing, education, etc.; finally authoritarian regimes where the master is held responsible for the prosperity of the people who follow him.
Liberal demagogues, speaking of tyranny and the absence of choice, forget this element. If someone calls himself a master, he is obligated to care.
From personal experience, I have noticed a difference between working in a liberal state and a non?liberal (authoritarian) one. In a liberal state you must give your maximum at work; in a non?liberal one you may not have to be the most excellent or efficient. Why? Because non?liberal regimes generate a whole stratum of people who believe someone should come and give: freedom, salary, guarantees, safety. It is precisely for this that they vote. Unlike in liberal societies, where people strive themselves to forge their happiness.
---
Perhaps herein lies the main metaphysical kernel of liberalism:
it is power without the master.
Not because the master no longer exists, but because he has become invisible, elusive, inaccessible to reproach.
He no longer commands he regulates. He does not care he provides platforms. He does not answer he disconnects.
Are you free?
Then be responsible for everything.
But freedom that does not include structures of responsibility this is not emancipation, but a form of finely crafted abandonment.
And if the slave, despite all his unfreedom, was once held by the masters sleeve, today the free person falls alone.
-----
As an example of the stability of a nonliberal regime, I would like to cite Gaddafi. Personally, I do not justify him - this is important to emphasize. But let's try to look at his regime not from the position of conventional morality, but from the point of view of the structure of responsibility.
During his rule, every citizen of Libya received: free education and health care, often housing, assistance with the birth of a child, subsidies for newlyweds, subsidies for food and gasoline. The state, as a figure of the master, was forced to take care - because such was the model of power.
After NATO's military intervention and the overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011, Libya plunged into chaos, civil war, fragmentation. Millions of citizens lost not only their previous guarantees, but also the very structure on which they relied.
The master disappeared - along with him, the guarantor disappeared.
One can argue about what Gaddafi was like as a person. But the philosophical fact remains: an authoritarian regime was associated with responsibility for its subject.
This form can be terrible, violent, cruel - but it was there, it worked.
Liberal societies often perceive this as a "tyrannical cage" from which one must escape. But when the cage disappears, and with it the food, warmth and protection disappear - then the question becomes different:
What is more important: to be free and nobody's, or unfree, but in a system where someone needs you?
Sure, these are points. But where they should lead on to is my general point that any form of political or economic organisation has to have an organismic balance. Rather than dealing in baffling contradictions, we need to be dealing in the clarity of complementary balances.
Argument by paradox is a very normal tactic. But it isn't useful. It should just be telling you that you are stuck trying to boil reality down to some reductionist monism a single principle when really you should be seeing that contradiction is where you are starting to see the outline of a fundamental dichotomy coming into sight. And once you can resolve the contradiction as a complementary balance of actions, then you can arrive at the third thing which is the triadic structure of a hierarchy.
A story of two things in complementary interaction, organised by scale. The systems story of some set of global constraints and a matching set of local freedoms. A logical dichotomy arranged so that there is a separation of the two sides of the equation as the local and the global are far apart but then also the two sides can mix and find a balance as they become two counter-actions being expressed with equal vigour of all scales. That is how a complex system can exist and how a complex system can just keep growing by adding levels of complexity levels over which it is both differentiating and integrating.
So there are habits of thought we bring to philosophical discussions. And pointing out seeming paradoxes is some kind of start to that. It demonstrates that every attempted monism undermines itself.
But then you need to be able to move on and dig deeper. Discover the more complex story that will be some emergent system of balanced forces. Some deep division that has arrived at its complementary resolution. A seed of structured organisation with the capacity to scale or grow.
Quoting Astorre
There is now an extensive literature on the superorganism approach to understanding what is really going on in human affairs.
It is pointless trying to understand liberal democracy in terms of moral philosophy. We can't just impose values on a natural system. Values have to arise out of the success of the system. They have to be what is learnt from pragmatic experience. Indeed, the success of the system is what winds up imposing its values on us. And it is by believing otherwise that we become disconnected from the system that is evolving its complexity. We can't be masters of a world we misunderstand what is really going on.
So what is going on? An organism is a mix of information and entropification. It is a system that can evolve because it has a memory and can learn. It can become the master of power. It can develop a narrative that regulates physics and so set itself up as a self-remaking structure an organism that knows how to both repair and reproduce its essential fabric of being.
In terms of humans as social superorganisms, we have gone through three major restructurings in those terms. First we were foragers, then farmers, then fossil fuel burners. Each developed its own narratives to collectively organise its populations around the business of entropification. The flow of power of free energy or work capacity through its veins. Tribal cultures have their typical narrative. Agricultural empires have theirs. And an industrialising world had to develop yet another.
Tribes have to have a deep understanding and connection with their natural landscapes.
Farmers have to be organised about extracting calories from their land and generating enough surplus to cover the overheads that come with that. The bureaucracy to organise the people. The military to protect what can be taken. The trade networks that bring in the technology and resources from lands beyond what is owned.
But the third story of the machine age was very different as what it started to eat was ancient raw energy stores hydrocarbons buried just under the ground. Instead of having to adjust your social values to the constraints of waiting for the sun to come up each morning, the rains to come each season, the harvest to roll around each year, there was suddenly an unlimited supply of power that could be consumed as soon and as fast as you liked. All you had to do was re-organise your society and start helping yourself. Getting to the head of the line first, bringing the largest plate you could imagine, stuffing yourself silly.
The availability of power used to be a restriction on human desires. Now the problem was the consumption. The scramble was to grow the collective capacity for entropification. Rebuild society on a narrative of exponential expansion.
So that is what happened. A new set of values came in.
At first perhaps, moral philosophy thought well we know what we should do with unlimited power. The agricultural world we just left behind could have been better served by generating a greater surplus that was also distributed more evenly. The new industrialising world could be a utopia with no need for wars or poverty. All labour could be mechanised. Housewives would have dishwashers. Husbands would work in clean, safe and well-lit places. Everyone would be living like kings and queens.
But such fantasies were overtaken by the realities of the superorganism. Mechanised fossil fuel consumption promoted its own new virtues. The ones where humans became increasingly atomised as cogs in the machine. Life became displaced from natural landscapes and even farmed landscapes. We moved into the abstractions of urban landscapes and eventually cyber landscapes.
Or if we really lift the covers on what has been going on, we live in capitalised and financialised landscapes. With neo-liberalism, that new master narrative emerged. Capital flows and natural resource flows made their direct connection that now cut out the middle person. The economy was now a stripped down dragster for burning fuel. It had to become that way as it was the only way of creating a large enough mouth to gobble all the still buried energy at the 3% compounding rate that had become established.
OK. That is an exaggerated telling of the tale. A narrative to account for the narrative. But my point is that natural systems have their own dynamics. And we humans can't just dream up some values do a little moral philosophy hand-waving and expect to apply them to how the world works. We can say no to war, to slavery, to spoilt landscapes, to social inequality, and a whole long list of things that seem not-very-good, and so terribly-bad. But nature is just going to roll on over that in ways that we really ought to learn to recognise.
As Art Berman says in his The Great Simplification Energy is the economy. Money is a call on energy. Debt is a lien on future energy.
And David Graeber points out in his masterly "Debt: The first 5000 years", debt is slavery. It was how slavery got culturally institutionalised in the age of agricultural empires. You had to borrow in times of hardship and after that you slid into being owned by your creditor. Money was invented as it stands for that exact relation that exact dichotomy. Life almost immediately became a question of which side of the ledger your number was entered into as a debtor or a creditor as soon as life became civilised. From the time of Sumer and even before, the world could slide from owing you to owning you.
Aglietta and Orleans illustrate how this central organising principle is expressed even in religion where human existence is itself treated as a primordial debt. The Brahmanas verses that assert: You are born to death and only by sacrifice can you redeem yourself from death.
So both classical liberalism and neo-liberalism were just the scaling of this ancient civilising principle the exact narrative that could lock the individual into a system of collectivised entropy production. The age of agriculture was already organised into an intricate web of credit and debt. Presented with an unlimited free lunch of entropic power in the form of fossil fuel, humanity had to scramble to keep up with the opportunity. Debt had to be super-sized to bind humanity to the Herculean mission of dissipating that much power in an orgy of consumption.
So at every turn of the human story, a systems logic is at work. Nature self-organises. And the human superorganism is simply another level of that developing natural complexity.
As participants in nature, we would seem to have choices. And moral philosophy would like to think those choices are absolute. There is some divine imperative that is the master of nature. And we were created to get that job done on this tiny speck of dust orbiting some completely anonymous solar fusion reactor for the brief moment until we cooked the planet we were living on. What a joke that line of thinking is.
But even if we are not the masters of the universe, we can learn to understand the metaphysical logic that explains nature at its most general systematic level and go from there.
And as I say, the politics of the modern neo-liberal superorganism the conversion of all human life to a lien on future energy has become a busy field of research and discussion. The pragmatic reality is being analysed and evidenced. The reasons we have been acting as we do is not so paradoxical in the light of how things naturally come together in a world that is fundamentally self-organising.
The strawmen abound. I've already explained why this is a misconstrual in places like this:
Quoting Leontiskos
Or that "balance" approaches are fine, but not unique:
Quoting Leontiskos
If you are aiming at balance, then for you balance is good. You can't just keep avoiding that fact and claiming that good/bad divisions must be avoided. Once it is recognized that balance is good, then one will want to ask why it is good, or what it means for it to be good.
My central objection is that survival-based poles lack explanatory power. It's as if you think that shades of grey are all that is needed to explain the world, and I think we need colors. I think that the explanadum of human social reality is more complex and robust than survival-based poles are able to account for, and that a unified survival-theory is therefore an oversimplification. Your account literally reads to me like the very Protestant Occasionalism that you so often project onto your interlocutors, with a tidy Ur-cause that accounts for everything. ...With that objection and one or two others aside, I see nothing overly wrong with a "balance" approach to ethics or metaphysics. Such is soundly Aristotelian.
Yet you are also saying that I do not properly understand how great your semiotic-evolutionary theory really is. And that may be. Maybe you really are able to explain all of the diversity of human social realities with one unified theory, and I just don't understand that theory well enough to see it. That's possible, but I have no reason to believe it, and the reason this discussion can go nowhere is because your esoteric theory is opaque to those who have not spent a large amount of time with it.
There are lots of interesting ideas there, but let me focus on just one:
Quoting Astorre
I think this is on point, and it is at least clear that our current stage of liberalism has resulted in a dearth of subsidiarity. The individual has become isolated, responsible only for themselves and therefore not responsible at all. And where individuals are to be responsible only for themselves and their state of being, we end up confused in the face of realities which contradict this doctrine. For example, the "crack baby" confuses a society which holds to the doctrine of liberal individualism.
In the Hobbesian mindset the only foundational agent other than the individual is the state, and the only rights bestowed upon the individual by any other agent are bestowed by the state. Thus in the modern liberal mindset the only one which truly owes us obligationsthe only "master"is the liberal state. Thus one must either reason from what one receives from the state to what one is owed (i.e. "The state gave me bread therefore I was/am owed bread by the state"), or one must reason from what one is owed to what one is owed by the state (i.e. "I have a right to X, therefore it is the state and only the state which must fulfill this right").
This unnatural situation where there is only the agent of the individual and the agent of the state results in a lack of natural intermediate and subsidiary institutions and associations by which rights and duties are generated among social animals. Instead of assuming that every right must be fulfilled by the state, a non-liberal society is much more apt to assume that some rights are fulfilled by subsidiary institutions, such as the spouse, or the family, or the community, or the polis. Or in the case you give, one would look to the "master."
You are still strawmanning. My position is irreducibly complex and not - like yours - fundamentally simplistic.
So balances can be good or bad. And the difference? One in some quantifiable sense works and the other doesnt. A typical way to quantify this would be survival. The good balance has the further fact that it lasts. It persists. It is successful in perpetuating a state of homeostatic identity even in the face of environmental perturbation, etc.
Quoting Leontiskos
But what are colours but exactly the kind of opponent channel processing that my dichotomising approach specifies? Red is not-green and yellow is not-blue. Hue discrimination is the complexity built up from having three frequency sampling forms of retinal cone cells wired up with a dichotomising circuit logic. Blue is blue to the extent yellowness is lacking. And vice versa.
You plucked an example from the air and it completely proves my point. The logic of dichotomies is a basic fact of perceptual science.
Quoting Leontiskos
That is gracious of you. In return, I think you sometimes almost get what Aristotle was wrestling with in trying to flesh out his hylomorphism and four causes.
Quoting Leontiskos
Or you havent spent any time studying the science of anything and its all too overwhelming. No social science. No neurobiology. No evolutionary biology. No systems science or complexity theory. :grin:
Let me ask you a question. Why do you consider all opinions that differ from yours to be reductionist and one-sided? What if I personally agree with most of your judgments, and I am only trying to supplement and diversify them? Maybe I just want to show some examples from practice and experience? Or maybe your approach is so perfect that it does not need this? Try to read what others answer not as criticism of your thoughts, but as a constructive complementary discussion.
Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. It is stated on paper: you are free from everything, just do not violate the rights of others. Freedom lies in the fact that no one is responsible for you. In essence, at all times in liberal regimes there have always been other institutions of unfreedom: the church, morality, institutions of civil society. I wrote about this above: try to declare in a liberal society that you love Putin or Kim - you will immediately be attacked, but not by the state, but by civil society. Much has been said here about the prohibition of dissent in authoritarian regimes. And yes, the consequences of dissent in such regimes will be harsher. However, I see how many forum participants seem to have the firmware "Liberalism is good" pre-installed, and even if they themselves doubt it, they are not very willing to speak out about it. Isn't this another form of prohibition of dissent? More sophisticated?
Rest assured, I am not the one criticizing your religion. Not the one who objects to the pillars of your faith in liberalism. I am probably the one who wants to find out the reasons, to ask the ultimate question about value and origin.
Many might also have thought that I am a supporter of authoritarianism. This is also not true. The fact is that society, humanity continues to develop. Until recently, liberalism was the most optimal means of finding a social compromise. However, when I saw the decline of the institutions of control of liberalism (which civil society was engaged in), the content of hidden pillars was revealed to me, which were not mentioned in the original ideas of Hobbes, Rousseau. Now, liberalism is considered the key to success by inertia, but today this is no longer the case. When some countries interfere in the affairs of my state with their stereotypes, which now do not work as they should for them - this saddens me, because it does not promise anything except wars and destruction (which is clearly visible in the example of Libya, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.).
My goal is to find something else that would be capable of self-organizing structures, and which previous ideologies do not allow to appear, constantly putting spokes in the wheels with their interventions.
When you say my approach, you are talking about a systems metaphysics that goes back to the start of Greek philosophy. Anaximander had already set out the holism of the unity of opposites to get modern rational thought started.
And reductionism is fine as far as it goes. The systems approach in fact incorporates reductionism into its holism. It recognises upwardly acting material construction as the other of downward acting global constraint.
But reductionism is the mindset that is particular strong in Anglo thought. It dominates the imagination. Germans and Russians have more of a systems thinking tradition. Buddhist and Taoists likewise.
So it is a fact that a lot of metaphysical debates are confused as they try to answer the big questions armed only with half the story.
Quoting Astorre
I would love it if a critique could be advanced. But you will notice that there are only assertions being provided and not arguments. No serious analysis or evidence offered. Just strawman efforts of knocking down things I havent said.
I know this feeling when you yourself, understanding the topic very well, put forward a hypothesis - a very well-founded and well-developed one. In this case, you dream of criticism, like a philosopher. "Break me, because I honestly want to be affirmed or to doubt." This feeling is very close to me personally. However, I really liked your approach, it is very consonant with my own thoughts. True, I take as a starting point not biology or nature, but the ideas of Marx and Le Bon. But this does not prevent me from coming to similar conclusions, which, as I see it, complement each other.
At the same time, the question arises - what next? What is the path? What will be next? What can be offered in return?
Ive had years of academic stress-testing so Im not too concerned. :up:
Quoting Astorre
Given the hegemonic world power is being run as a clown show, that question has become even more intriguing. Not sure Trump makes sense from either a reductionist or holistic perspective.
This reminds me of Byung Chul Han's theory of autoexploitation in the "achievement society." I wrote about this before:
As Han himself describes part of it:
Quoting apokrisis
[I]Everything[/I] "works" at producing some outcome.
The societies of both 1984 and A Brave New World are both presented as being extremely stable, and in a way that is at least plausible. Would they be good societies in virtue of this stability? That seems like too weak of a criteria because they are widely accepted as obviously dystopian (and for reasons that I think are obvious). So either we need another standard for rejecting A Brave New World and 1984, or we bite the bullet and pronounce them "good" because they are stable over long timescales and able to adapt to challenges. But if we bite the bullet, it hardly seems like we need ethics anymore. This is more of an eliminativism to my mind than an ethics.
And yet presumably we still want to appeal to "good evidence," "good reasoning," and "good argument," as more than just: "the types of argument and reasoning that reproduce effectively and survive." For instance, if "good" is just whatever persists, then I surely should not turn towards agreeing with you, for, if I believe my own beliefs to be good, than holding on to them, come what may (and striving to reproduce them in others), is my surest path towards proving their merit. Afterall, they won't survive and reproduce if I abandon them, so I should stick to them, and sticking to them in turn proves their merit.
No doubt, openly stating such a strategy is probably "maladaptive" precisely because most people don't accept this standard for the "goodness of ideas," and would see my strategy as a sort of absurd sophistry on my part.
Actually though, social critics have made just this sort of point re secular educated urban liberals' inability to maintain birth rates that would even allow their population to only fall by half each generation. It would seem to be an ideology that must rely heavily on conversion versus organic growth. I would think this says nothing about the choiceworthyness of such a view, but on a "natural selection of ideas/ideologies" account, it seems to be a major flaw, akin to some sort of mutation that tanks fertility in organisms.
I'm familiar with the terms and fields, but suffice to say, the idea that complexity studies and systems theory can decisively explain ethics and politics, or wisdom, virtue, etc. (or that it has settled the ultimate fate of the universe re cosmology, or has resolved the "Hard Problem," etc.) are idiosyncratic claims. Certainly, they might usefully inform these areas, although people take them in widely different directions. I don't find the approach here convincing for the reasons stated above and in the other thread. The idea that having studied these topics would make this useage clear does not seem to be the case to me.
Exactly! That is the central feature of my metaphysics. The one first sketched by Anaximander.
Everythingness is impossible. Therefore somethingness exists.
All paths might seem possible. But most cancel each other out. And that is how you arrive at that which works. The somethingness that becomes our world. The structure of being which can hang together as some unity of opposites.
The sort of metaphysics you find in physics for example when there is talk of the collapse of the wavefunction of the Universe. The ultimate expression of the principle of least action.
So the reductionist worries about the impossibility of getting something like the Universe out of nothing. The holist can flip that on its head by arguing instead that something exists because everything is just too much. It contains its own dialectical negation to the point that only the ur-dichotomies can survive the Darwinian contest.
The Universe could have had any number of dimensions, as why not? Well everything would have had to boil down to just 3D if the ur-dichotomy was the symmetry-breaking of rotation-translation. The two inertial symmetries that grounded Newtonian mechanics. The only dimensionality that is equal and balanced in terms of its rotational and translational degrees of freedom is 3D. Thus it becomes the something that exists.
So this holistic metaphysics is the way to go. Anaximander named his everythingness the Apeiron. And its dichotomisation was the process of apokrisis. Peirce improved on this by turning the story into a proper logical notion. He called the everythingness a logical vagueness. Something even deeper than merely the confusion of fluctuations that would be an every thing. A vagueness would be more like the physical notion of a quantum foam - the state that a self-organised dimensionality would have to arise from as a Darwinian sum over all its possibilities.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If you listen to what I say, then you should already be guessing that I would be asking about where is that which is other to this stability and so just as necessary and good to the whole.
So if stability is one side of the equation being balanced, plasticity is the other. In Nature, a good structure is resilient. It is adaptive as well as self-sustaining. It is rigid but it also bends. It has an identity but it also evolves.
This gives a clear basis on which to critique these dystopias. Do they seem balanced in the natural fashion I describe?
Even constitutional democracies have autocrats to rule them. A king or president or prime minister. For a political system to be balanced, it must be both rather fixed in its long-term decisions and flexible in making quick choices when faced with immediate issues. There must be someone whose word is law at the very centre of things, but someone who is also just as ruled by constitutional laws when declaring a war or an emergency of any kind.
And this form of rational organisation is just naturally how the intelligence of brains is organised. A constitutional set of habits and a commanding spotlight of attention. A long term wisdom and an in the moment cleverness. Both an evolved stability and an evolved plasticity in some kind of good, because functional, balance.
So dialectical structure - the unity of opposites - explains all structure in nature. It is how the real world self-organises. Human societies exist in the real world and so follow the same mathematical logic. Peirces triadic story of vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies. Or firstness, secondness and thirdness.
If stability is one of the goods that a society supplies, then this can only be because it also supplies the other thing which is its plasticity - its resilience and adaptability. It can both change and stay the same because these two social goods are being delivered over appropriately separated timescales. Stability as the long run goal and plasticity as the immediate quick adjustment.
This ties back to OP question. Liberal democracy works better in that it does balance the elected autocrat and rigid constitution functions in some scalable way. Very large and complex societies can exist if this general model of self-organisation is instituted over all scales of a society.
Even tennis clubs and local community boards have constitutions and chairs. Wherever you go in a properly liberal and democratic society, this kind of structure should be completely familiar. Everything is a version of the basic dichotomisation of power. Stability and plasticity are basic goods being balanced appropriately every where you could look. A fact that can be taken for granted.
Now stack that up against your stable dystopias. You can see what is instead fundamentally missing across all scales of a police state run by a dictator. It is so obvious it smacks you in the face. With a truncheon if you voice it out loud.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I dont know. One minute you are quoting stuff about the autoexplotive turn of modern neoliberalism, the next you are pointing out its consequences as if your mind cant make the connection.
Do I really have to explain to you the force of your own arguments? If you are right about the first point, then here is your own evidence for why it is a correct diagnosis.
Neoliberalism is self dooming for quite a few reasons, not least that it is boiling the planet at an accelerating rate. It you strip away all the constitutional restrictions on growth - such as debt limits and environmental protections - then an unbalanced society run by unhinged capitalism is what results.
No wonder the US is now run by a multiply bankrupt property developer and casino owner who then spent 14 years posing as a titan of industry on a reality show where yuppie talent is pitted against itself in a largely arbitrary death match with the worst possible prize of supposedly working for the idiot boss figure.
Neoliberalism had some good theory behind it. But was fundamentally dishonest in its claims about rising tides floating all boats and wealth being able to trickle down faster than it would be hoovered up.
If birth rates are falling, well who in their right mind is going to bring kids into such a world, even if they are in the 1 percent and have some semblance of a natural work life balance?
So you are correct that the current social order is auto exploitative. In itself, that isnt a bad thing. Its quite fun to be young, free and entrepreneurial. But when that autoexploitation is unbalanced - a story not scaled over all levels of society - then it does become a bad and unnatural thing. The 1% are the auto part of the equation, leaving the 99% to be the exploited.
Anyone can understand the force of that maths.
Yes, that's well said. You my be interested in Count Timothy's thread, "The Myopia of Liberalism."
As to the question of whether it is the liberal state or the liberal civil society which defends liberalism from illiberalism, I want to say that it is both. This is part of the paradox wherein liberalism professes to be value-neutral and yet is inevitably founded upon the value system of liberalism. When someone promotes an idea that is at odds with liberalism, the liberal culture will oppose them, and this opposition will come from both the state and the civil society. For example, the end-limit of promoting a figure like Putin will end up conflicting with the laws of the liberal state. Put differently, if enough people within a liberal society embrace an illiberal approach, then the liberalism of that society will itself fail and the laws will need to be changed to reflect the societal change.
Quoting Astorre
Can you say more about the "hidden pillars" of liberalism? Presumably you are thinking of the pushback that comes from civil society, but I am curious about the nature of those hidden pillars.
Quoting Astorre
I think philosophical anthropology is tightly knit with any political program. For example, Hobbes' "State of nature" is tightly bound up with liberalism, and the truth or falsity of Hobbes' doctrine will correlate to the success or failure of liberalism. Of course there are alternatives that deviate in smaller or larger ways from Hobbes' anthropology, but I think Hobbes is the most central, coherent, and enduring philosophical basis of liberalism. I would say that Aristotle offers a better philosophical anthropology and a better political program as well.
Quoting apokrisis
You see where strong disagreement gets us? Clarity on your question now emerges.
What came after liberal democracy as a pragmatic social enterprise? Oligarchy and idiocracy. Two forces in some kind of systemic balance. But one that is itself completely confused about how that is now meant to work its way through to some new state of world order. Pax Trumpiana. The Nobel for which Donald yearns.
The history lesson goes that two world wars and a great depression created a need for whatever came after the imperial empire world system. Europe and its colonies. The centres of capital and power coupled to its far-flung resource-capturing net and its network of military bases to keep a lid on the native politics. The UK in particular mastered this delicate art of imperial balance. But by the 1940s, its world system was in tatters.
The US had emerged as the world manufacturing giant and so had the capacity to step in and takeover. War had resulted in a new deal at home. Walter Scheidel did a nice book explaining how big wars are always the "Great Leveler" that result in the breaking down of wealth and redistributing it back to the people. So the US had instituted a new notion of social democracy where there was high taxes, big infrastructure investment and the creation of social safety nets.
Corporations were allowed to do their predatory thing and even approach monopoly ownerships oligarchy but also they had to be good citizens. Play nice with the trade unions. Clean up after themselves with environmental protections. Become benevolent organisation caring for workers in factory towns, and generally acting with the wider interests of the US community in mind as much as that of their shareholders and desire to extract profit.
This new corporate benevolence could then be the model for the new imperial empire. The UK had already had to make that kind of balancing act during its own reign. That is how it could rule the world by straddling the chokepoints of the world's shipping lanes with a handful of military bases and a small colonial service. The US could update this model by taking over the world's reserve currency from the UK, and its network of bases, then telling the world to go and free trade. Form their own democracies in the corporate mould. The US would run its central political institutions like the UN, World Bank and IMF, sit back and cream off the profits from running the world money system, take care of the job of being the world's policeman and so also controlling that side of the show, and let the world focus on its trade and social development.
Of course existential challenges to this post war accord emerged swiftly. The Cold War and then the oil wars. And also the US couldn't resist squeezing more juice from this imperial lemon. Nixon and Kissinger dropped the gold standard and made the dollar a debt-backed instrument. It tamed the oil producers by turning them into petrodollar investors in the US system. And it reacted like a scalded cat to the Soviet military threat, and that was only partly political theatre given that nuclear power trumps even hydrocarbon power when it comes to its energy density and explosive potential.
Anyway, this was the liberal democratic world order much as we knew it. American getting so rich on dollar hegemony and humming factories that even the working class felt that heady entropic power surging through their veins. Everyone could drive a gas guzzler, feast at the take away, holiday at Disneyland. The rest of the world, bobbing along in the US's wake.
But then things started to come apart in bigger ways. Neo-cons turned up the heat on the communists and their regimes to varying degrees collapsed. The oil trade wars became oil real wars as running a resource economy is the kind of monopolistic enterprise that sets an oligarchy against its people. Autocrats have to found so the wealth can get properly plundered.
Neo-liberalism also followed as the oligarchs demanded that the global political restrictions on capital ie: debt creation should be lifted in the the same way that the local political restrictions on resource exploitation were being systematically dealt with.
So the capitalist beast was constantly evolving. The US working class had been the winners of a phase of greater social democracy. But the US oligarchy eventually shed any pretence of a social conscience and financialised its own people too. The US debt was allowed to explode. House ownership became leveraged speculation. Life became whatever minimum wage would get you, or how much the new financial recklessness felt you could afford to borrow.
All this sets us up for the modern day. The true coming apart of the oligarchs vs the idiocracy.
The fall of Communism saw Russia turned into an autocrat-run oil exporter with a new oligarch class who had stolen the state infrastructure for its monopolistic profits. Putin was KGB and had just done his 1997 doctorate on oil politics. Literally. "A degree in economics at the Saint Petersburg Mining University [where his thesis was] on energy dependencies and their instrumentalisation in foreign policy." Putin had a political vision and his gang of thieves.
This oligarchy had its own idiocracy in the form of information autocracy. Putin just had to make his voters believe that they lived in a well-run country, with an ancient identity, and where the vote wasn't rigged, the media not managed.
China went a more traditional route based off its own long history. Trade it understood. Manufacturing it could learn. Financialisation was right up its street and it was quite happy to run up a national debt at a rate way exceeding even the US. Oligarchy was sort of managed by kinship relations and purges. Then the same kind of informational autocracy was practiced, backed by relatively competent rather than wildly corrupt secret policing.
The US meanwhile was not a mere natural resource play, nor a Johnny come lately manufacturing play. It was now a full on capital play. And on top of that, an information technology play. The US citizen, and indeed the world citizen, was there to be tapped for their debt creation and now their personal data. There was a virtual world being born where anything was free to be the case. An apparently costless and frictionless world where money and resources no longer really mattered.
The price of entry was only the tiniest fraction of a few cents, or teaspoons off a barrel of oil. But the catch was that it was now a price extracted across the entirety of absolutely everything that was making you feel like a private and free individual a paid-up member of the liberal democratic compact. Social media in particular gets to grab your body and soul. And the new super-oligarchs were the ones who had those information tech monopolies.
So the US has the dollar and that as debt creation drains the wealth out of every area of life it touches. We live in housing developments and eat at fast food joints that are as drained of social capital as they are of physical substance. Then tech comes in over the top of that with its promise of the new infinite frontier of a cyber reality. It becomes predatory even on the financial level of oligarchy as any kind of sensible stock market pricing and CEO salary setting gets tossed out the window. Wall Street gets taken for a ride and crypto currency mops up the rest.
And so the new politics of the idiocractic state come into view.
Russian and China have informational autocracies where the citizens must to some genuine degree believe in the world as it is being painted for them. Incredible competence is required to maintain the collective fiction that as a society, it is winning bigly. And something has to be delivered for real as evidence. In China's case, actual economic power in return for a shittier life although one still much freer and more prosperous than that of its recent memory under Mao. And in Russia's case, a few decades of US investment in jacking up its oil fields coupled to a steady rebuilding of its suddenly abandoned Soviet empire, until Ukraine became the step looking like the one that went too far.
But the US is in a quite different position. Sure, it also has always been a propaganda state. It had to cement its own identity having been started rather abruptly without a solid history. It had its founding myth of being the home of the free and the dispossessed. Raise the flag and swear your allegiance.
It rode the liberal democratic good times and grabbed the reins from Imperial Britain when it really didn't even have another sensible choice. It struck a deal stacked in its own favour, and off things went for another 50 years.
The post-war paradigm of responsible corporations and unionised labour gradually evaporated. The ownership of the world financial and military apparatus started to fall into the hands of a new oligarch class a mindset with its own political and social theories. The information revolution was now in full swing and out-pacing the manufacturing revolution. What the US debt was financing now was not merely a world based on consumers, but on a world based on an influencer and drop-shipping economy.
Life lived as a reality show. Life as you would live it in a costless and frictionless Universe. Life lived where violent polarisation was the daily entertainment rather than a rationally-framed dialectic. The life lived as an idiocracy of opinions and alternative facts. A life drained of the pragmatic realism which had been connecting the two sides of the existential equation the physical energy consumed for the social meaning extracted in some degree of flourishing balance.
So the current recipe is oligarchy and idiocracy. Life as unbounded resource extraction and a soul-devouring reality show. A disconnection that looks fatal, but which could run on for as long as a big enough narcissistic incompetent fool can be found to front it. The illusion of a strong man in charge.
Putin was a strong man with a vision of how to glue things together. Pump the oil and don't alarm the voters. As long as they believe that it is only oligarchs now falling out of windows, and the state barely touches on their lives as the oil and gas gets piped abroad, then the system ticks along in some sort of stable equilibrium.
Xi is another strong man although rumours of his demise grow daily who tightened up on China's mercantilist exploitation of the US's 1940s free market play. And competent implementation keeps that show on the road. Manufactured goods flow freely and China's population has full bellies. Things work on a level that is tolerable, and the scope of dissent severely limited.
Trump is then exactly what a idiocracy might wish for. Although his oligarch backers didn't quite bargain for his actual level of incompetence, and all those that he would appoint to jobs in his second term.
But then also, the US oligarch class is itself marked by its own grave incompetence. Whether tech bro left or Christo-fascist right, it lives in the same idiocracy. The same detachment from the pragmatic reality of what actually makes for a well-functioning society. We see this in Musk and Vance. We see this in the Supreme Court. We see it in the guy who sells pillows and all the other idiots who suddenly get promoted to multi-billionaire hood by the simple fact of living in an economy structure to be a wealth and debt ratchet. The idiots who never had a clue feel they get to have the super-sized vote on how the world ought to be run.
And why not if you believe that reality is a costless and frictionless realm? Your hopes and fears are what become must populate that limitless landscape. Idiocratic society where narcissistic incompetence become something that works. Something that is fast becoming implemented over all scales of US society as hierarchy theory says it must.
Trump is just giving away the Imperial US Empire you would think. And why not? Idiocracy seems the bigger prize now. The costless and frictionless landscape where polarisation drives the clicks. The new owners of the means of production are getting rich beyond imagination as the cost and the friction has been matchingly shrunk below the level of popular comprehension.
The reality show is eating the voters alive. The real world still exists somewhere in the middle of all the information and entropification. But capital flows and the entropic flows are now a dance taking place over the socially-shared horizon. The cost and the friction can't be seen. And that creates the stability at least for a while of a collective state of delusion.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree. To be sure, a lot of liberals get away from his particularly dire anthropology, but even if they pivot to a more Kantian, abstract "choosing agent," they still end up with something very similar (i.e., an atomized utility seeker). Others try to layer in that man is an essentially social animal, but they still ultimately end up falling back on a combination of contract theory and utility maximization/satisfaction for their justification of the political system (Mill, Smith, Rawls, etc.).
Personally, I think Hume, and more broadly empiricism and skepticism, are key here. Hume's grounding of morality (and so the foundations of law and justice) in sentiment seems to naturally privatize and atomize the citizen. Empiricism also has a sort of atomized knower built in to it from the get-go (sense data being private), and so judgements about the good will have to be privatized as well, particularly if they are grounded in sentiment rather than the extended/quantifiable. The metaphysics that have tended to go along with empiricism and naturalism have generally placed all goodness and beauty (presumably the ground for organizing society) within our individual skulls (even in realist theories). Goodness is locked in private, individually accessible experiences. Skepticism about human nature (or any natures) springing from this metaphysics is important too, since it cuts out any foundation for a bridge across this gap. The later move towards an "anti-metaphysical stance" (IMO, just another metaphysical position), with its tendency towards unresolvable pluralisms also suggests a procedural contract theory.
All these factors make it very hard to escape the privatization of values, which in turn makes it very hard to escape an atomized anthropology. Atomization in turn lends itself to contract theory. As an aside, it's funny just how much of this stuff Plato considers (particularly in the Republic) and rejects, because he doesn't have these starting points.
In terms of the genealogy of these ideas, I think theology is very relevant here, as guys like John Milbank and Brad Gregory have shown. That's one of the ironies of liberalism, the source of its anthropology comes, at least in its origins, from one of the "forbidden sources" of justification.
In terms of what could come next, it's very hard for me to see because I don't see the presuppositions that lead towards liberalism being significantly challenged any time soon. We may be in a "metaphysical turn" in analytic/scientific thought, but it's a fairly weak one. Liberalism is literally built into many scientific disciplines (e.g., its essentially a dogmatic presupposition of political economy, in the same way Marxism was for Soviet bloc political economy, and it has deep roots in psychology). Any change would be "revolutionary" in the same way the Enlightenment was.
Of course, I've said this a bit too loudly, perhaps a bit more emotionally than I should have. But the thing is, in my opinion, if we're given the ability to critically analyze reality and the foundations of human understanding, why not use it in the realm of social organization? Why should something be done one way or another, and who determined it in advance? These questions lead to various unconventional thoughts. The first step towards resolution is to acknowledge the problem, identify its aspects, and assess its depth. In my opinion, this is a purely philosophical endeavor. On the other hand, if we look at history, it becomes clear that any social system is preceded by a theoretical foundation, which is then implemented by the apostles of the doctrine: Hobbes and Rousseau (among others) founded liberalism, Marx and Engels founded communism, and Gobineau founded Nazism. Even Putin has Ivan Ilyin.Trump has Curtis, and the globalists have Walzer or Fokuyama.
Therefore, I believe that philosophy can and should provide the tools for future generations to organize their societies.
I must admit that I was not familiar with the works of this philosopher. I will be happy to familiarize myself with his works
What would you argue is a realistic and beneficial alternative to liberalism? Would you include MacIntyres communitarian approach?
But Fukuyama does a good job of illustrating how theology was just another important strand of the eventual pragmatic synthesis. Anthropology hardly denies the role religion plays in organising human societies. Although early liberal philosophy certainly argued that humans ought to be in charge of their own affairs and that the lead could be taken from natural science rather than supernatural tradition.
Then in terms of how history has gone, the Anglican Church has turned itself into another social services NGO. Part of the new establishment under the third way turn meant to soften the ravages of Thatcher and Reagans strident neoliberalism.
We should worry less about what our social institutions say they are and look at more what they actually do.
In earlier posts in this thread, you pointed out the key role of the Christian church in the development of individualism in the West. I was intrigued by this idea and here is what I found on the subject.
It seems that individualism is based on the idea of ??"individual salvation" and individual responsibility before God. From the information I found, it follows that in the pre-Christian era this idea existed, but in a rather rudimentary form: the main emphasis in Judaism was on the collective salvation of the people of Israel.
Collective identity was dominant: a Jew thinks of himself as part of Israel as the people of the Covenant. Salvation is the liberation of the people (from Egypt, Babylon, the future messianic era).
However, already in the prophetic literature (for example, in Ezekiel, Isaiah) there are notes of personal responsibility: "The soul that sins, it shall die" (Ezekiel 18:4). Here is a hint that each person is personally responsible for his actions. Thus, the idea of ??personal responsibility and even personal salvation was already present in Judaism, but it was not central.
Christianity has somewhat revised this approach. The focus shifts to a personal relationship with God, not to the law of Moses or belonging to Israel:
1. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6)
2. Salvation through faith, not through ritual observance of the law:
"Your faith has saved you" (Luke 7:50)
3. The principle of internal conversion - a change of mind and heart:
"The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21)
4. The promise of eternal life to everyone, regardless of nationality, gender, status and past (for example, the parable of the prodigal son, or the conversation with the thief on the cross)
Christianity makes individual salvation the central element of its message.
Christian ideas fit perfectly into the Roman paradigm. Along with the Judeo-Christian tradition, Western consciousness was powerfully influenced by antiquity.
Roman law was the first to develop the concept of persona a legal entity, an individual as a bearer of rights and obligations.
These ideas merged with Christianity, creating a synergy: Christianity provided a metaphysical justification for the value of the individual (created in the image and likeness of God, has an immortal soul), and Greco-Roman thought provided tools for self-knowledge and social realization of this individuality (logic, law, ethics).
Further, Christian philosophy only develops and strengthens this idea, which could not but influence the social structure and the way of thinking of pre-modern contemporaries:
1. Augustine emphasizes the inner man, introspection, grace that changes personality.
2. Thomas Aquinas, and later - Protestant ethics (for example, Max Weber) - all this reveals the personal moral and spiritual autonomy of man.
3. Luther strengthens the theme of personal faith against church intermediaries.
Now you do not even have to belong to a church or go there. You do not need to belong to some people or be chosen by God. You yourself can communicate with God, and your salvation depends on your righteousness. The Protestant ethic not only strengthened personal faith, but also sanctified individual labor and accumulation as signs of divine election. Capitalism, at its core, is a system that rewards individual initiative, risk, and responsibility. The entrepreneur is the economic equivalent of the existential hero, who creates his own destiny (and his own capital).
Further, all this is transformed into individual human rights, freedom of conscience (after all, if you are not righteous, this is your problem), pluralism of opinions - it becomes a consistent development. At the same time, the idea of ??God as the source of everything is being debunked, as it has been replaced by faith in science.
"I don't care what John thinks, because it's his own business. I don't care how he runs the household or raises his children, because he's responsible for it himself." And the crown of all this is Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus. Existentialism - as personal responsibility to oneself for one's own actions in the absence of a common meaning or common responsibility.
All this is the story of someone escaping responsibility to someone else. What I wrote above - no one is responsible for anything. The question arises: What is the next stage of liberation? Maybe now is the time to free ourselves from the need to be? After all, we are already free from everything else, including any identity, social connections, aren't we? This is exactly where I see one of those very pillars of liberalism that I spoke about earlier.
Of course, all this is too reductionist: you can't just look at Christianity as the source of everything. All the changes in public consciousness did not happen in a vacuum, but under the influence of many other things, as you noted in your comments. But this idea seemed too beautiful to me to just keep it to myself =)
Yes. Christianity was a new social technology. It could break the old world with its tribal kinship structure by shifting hierarchical allegiance from an ancestral genealogy to a transcendent ream. With the church then clipping the ticket as the middleman handling this transaction.
So in some ways it might have seemed like a thoroughly selfless project. But also historians like Fukuyama provide the evidence of how the church became a paying concern as it could shift tribal people from ancestor worship to god worship, and ancestral tribute to church tribute.
Liberation from tribal structure was a significant step in social development. But now the freed individual became part of the new super-clan of the church.
Here we are in particular tracking how this panned out in the Western European context as the Roman Church became divided into its Byzantine and Germanic tribal wings. And how this evolved into a feudalist system some 1000 years after Christianity got going.
From my paraphrasing of Fukuyama:
One could go into much more detail. But Fukuyama's point is that the Church itself was plugged into the Greek and Roman philosophy that underwrote a move from traditional clan social structure to a plan for society based on a rational understanding of how to create a social complexity that was able to scale. Western Europe was the ideal Petrie dish for this experiment as it was naturally chopped up into a collection of equal sized kingdoms that were both in sovereign competition and yet united under a general Papal rule. It was a dynamic situation and growing in complexity as it had embraced this more pure form of systems architecture.
Graeber notes likewise how the Church fostered the rationality that paved the way for the full-blown social engineering of the Enlightenment. And the curious way that the tribal habit of mind had to be first broken by identifying the rational with the divine before it came back down to Earth and was allowed to organise human affairs just in being the practice of reason.
Quoting Astorre
Yep. The history is intricate. What the Church believed about souls or values wasn't really what mattered. Much more important was that it created a strata of society that could foster a rationality that could begin to organise the existing tribal clan structures into a more modern story of free and equal individuals acting in the context of an abstracted framework of law.
A better idea could take root and flourish. Although that better idea was always a balancing act in that it wasn't just about the free and equal individual. It was just as much about a framework of constitutional constraints to place clearly marked boundaries on that freedom and equality.
Quoting Astorre
And there we certainly differ. Absolute freedom makes no sense. To have meaning, freedom has to exist within a context of constraint.
You can't have a good game of tennis if no one is following any agreed set of rules. Sure, you can always call for more freedom. But then what are you going to do with it? And when do you remember ceasing to care what others might do with their freedoms if this unlimited freedom to do just whatever is being handed around equally?
So what is the next stage of liberation? A lot of people seem to think it would be nice to get back to smaller and tighter communities. Another form of liberation might be to aim to become more worldly to be able to move through all sorts of communities and find it easy to fit in with those other ways.
Life makes more sense to me if you see individualism and collectivism as a spectrum of possibilities. Fitting in or striking out are just two kinds of opposing behaviour that we can meaningfully employ. Neither binds us. We can make choices and learn from where they take us.
I formulated this question in order to emphasize the absurdity to which we have reached in freeing ourselves from everything.
I don't really understand what you mean by this. I think you correctly identify the role of Protestantism in the formation of individualism, and the role of Christianity in grounding the value of the person. And also that these are very much one of the 'pillars of liberalism'. The founding philosophers of liberalism generally had a commitment to the social contract in the form of reciprocal rights and duties (although today the rights seem to be exaggerated and duties deprecated.) All of this was developed against an implicitly Christian background, from which the idea of social equality originated (as opposed to the rigid social hierarchies of the preceeding cultures). Furthermore that the ideal of progress was a version of the Eschaton transposed into a secular register. But the human condition, as such, was never envisioned to be complete or capable of fulfilment in the original Christian sense. So while liberalism grew out of that soil, it lost its connection to it in some fundamental way with the decline of faith.
So what next stage of liberation could there be, if not some version of the utilitarian ethos of the 'greatest good for the greatest number'? I think the obvious issue is the need to culture to transition from an economy of abundance to one of scarcity, as that is what the world is facing. We can't sustain the levels of consumption of goods and energy that the West has grown used to. Already we overshoot the Earth's capacity to sustain the consumption of resources which outstrips the natural regenerative capacity of the planet on an earlier date each year (see Earth Overshoot Day). So what kind of economic or political system would recognise or validate frugality and conservation rather than conspicuous consumption? That doesn't look a lot like 'freedom' in the economic sense, which is the freedom to pursue and fulfil one's desires.
Actually a pioneering political economist comes to mind, E F Schumacher, who published the trendsetting Small is Beautiful book in 1973, one of the early influential books in sustainable economics. Schumacher argued in his chapter on Buddhist Economics that economics should serve people rather than the other way around. The Buddhist model prioritizes well-being, meaningful work, simplicity, and ecological balance over the Western fixation on growth, profit, and consumption. He frames this not as a religious doctrine but as a reminder that economics is always rooted in values, and that the Western science of economics has its own unexamined metaphysicsone that Buddhist economics can help illuminate and counterbalance (although it must be noted, he developed this concept whilst an economic adviser in Burma, which has hardly gone on to become an exemplar for any kind of development.)
Nevertheless, the broader point stands: that Western capitalism has prioritised material abundance and consumption as the hallmark of progress, and it's a model that is not sustainable in the face of the scarcities that are threatening global well-being. So maybe the kind of liberation that needs to be sought, is the liberation from endless consumption - which does sound rather Buddhist.
As I noted above, the question "what should we free ourselves from now?" was a kind of logical reductio ad absurdum.
In fact, recently discussing the topic of outdoor practices, I thought about the fact that a contemporary has to intentionally leave his comfort zone in order to feel alive again.
It turns out that our desire for safety and comfort has led us to a place from which it is worth running. And I fully support your idea, only in a slightly broader sense: in order to feel alive, some need is needed, some dissatisfaction, some aspiration. Otherwise, what is the point of striving for inaction, as in Buddhism, if we do nothing anyway?
So I began to plan a trip to nature, and options immediately appeared in my head to go to the mountains or to equipped gazebos on the river bank. But why not go to the steppe under the scorching sun with sand in your face and snakes? It turns out that the mind itself chooses the safest and most comfortable option.
But where is the authenticity then?
The thing is that perhaps philosophers will not have to invent anything themselves, since the current overconsumption and population growth will reformat everything in the most optimal way, so that we will not even notice it.
I believe there are likely many examples in history of people happily (at first) giving up their freedoms. It seems like a pretty human thing to do.
Empirically, what appears to emerge is a brutal new puritanism, political correctness taken to extremes.
Of course not. It already doesn't coexist with alternatives, it wants to rule over the entire world.
Quoting Astorre
And in the "free and liberal and advanced West" a woman is told she is "not expressing herself" if she isn't wearing makeup, high heels etc.
Perhaps they don't want a "dictatorship" in the sense of actually calling it that way; but they probably want someone strong and capable in the leadership position.
Somehow quite pessimistic
There are several types of individualism, but it seems you're only talking about expansive individualism, or entitled individualism, or narcissistic individualism.
But there is also defensive individualism -- born out of a painful recognition that one is left to one's own devices, alone and abandoned by others. Like they say, "The heavens are high up, the tzar is far away, so one just has to see to it that one helps oneself."
I haven't encountered a classification of types of individualism. Please share links for further study. This would be very useful for me.
Your idea of ??"defensive" individualism as a response to loneliness sounds compelling and adds nuance. However, I don't think it contradicts my paradigm, but rather complements it. In my analysis, I focused on individualism as an ideology and cultural foundation (from Christian salvation to liberalism), rather than as a personal reaction.
At the same time, let's try to connect these levels. For example, the "defensive" type is possible precisely in societies where individualism is already ingrained: in a primitive community or collectivist culture, self-isolation would lead to exile or death, but in a liberal world (where "I don't care what John does"), it becomes a rational survival strategy. Thus, even defensive individualism rests on the same foundationfreedom from collective obligations.
Are there examples of defensive individualism within traditional or collectivist societies? Yes, I think there are, and it's not uncommon. For example, hermitismboth individual and group. Other examples (but they're more about moral individualism) include Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn in the USSR. The former was a prominent enough scientist to be subjected to harsh repression, while the latter was exiled from the USSR.
My theory (individualism as a product of Christianity and liberalism) isn't refuted by these examples, but it is qualified: individualism in collectivist societies is rare and requires specific conditions. This makes it the exception rather than the rule, which confirms the idea of ??a "foundation" in liberal societies where individualism is systemically supported.
In general, developed countries' propaganda toward their geopolitical rivals is based, among other things, on the idea of ??conveying to citizens beliefs about personal uniqueness, inimitability, and individuality. For example, Voice of America and Radio Liberty, US-funded broadcasters, broadcast programs emphasizing individual rights, freedom of speech, and personal success. For example, they told stories of "independent" Americans who achieved success without state control, contrasting this with the Soviet system, where "everyone is responsible for everyone else." This sowed the seeds of rebellion: "Why should I depend on the collective when I can be independent?" Such broadcasts reached millions of listeners in the USSR, contributing to the rise of dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.
Today, a similar tactic is being used against China and Russia, where the emphasis on individualism is being used to criticize authoritarian systems. Propaganda focuses on "personal uniqueness" as a universal value to provoke internal conflict: "Why should I be responsible for the affairs of the state or the collective?"
But this process is two-way: rivals also use propaganda: China and Russia promote collectivism as a "defense against Western individualistic decadence." The narrative of "personal unhappiness" is also characteristic of their approaches. Collectivist propaganda directly attacks individualism as selfishness.
The situation seems acute, and instead of embracing the best in each other, everything is gradually returning to a "clash of systems," albeit in a different form. I don't like this. The idea of ??this topic was, among other things, an attempt to find ideological compromises. However, I must admit, my naive attempts always fall on the rocks of economic interests.
I'm currently reading a memoir, based on a series of Harvard University lectures, by philosopher/mathematician A. N. Whitehead : Science and Philosophy. He was born & bred British, toward the end of Empire, but spent his later years in the U.S., which he viewed as a beacon of reason for the rest of the world. If only he could see us now!
One chapter, written just prior to the beginning of WW2, is entitled "An appeal to sanity". It describes the unsettled state of the world, especially Europe, as the after-effects of The Great War (WW1) set-up the grievances & motives for WW2. The first sentence of the chapter may be appropriate for this topic : "In international relations the world alternates between contrasting phases, resulting from variation of emotion between the phases of low and high tension". He then described the "notable shift in global sentiment", especially in the colonies of former empires.
What he was reporting, philosophically, was the Hegelian Dialectic*1 of contrasting worldviews that alternate in "popularity" from time to time. For example, before WW2, the European hegemony over the non-western world was winding down. Which placed stress on the Western powers to adjust to the new, less top-down, political relationships. Ironically, in the 1930s, Germany was defeated, demolished & destitute under the crushing bootheel of the Versailles treaty, which dismantled the Austro-Prussian empire. "My, how the mighty have fallen"! So, you can understand the seething resentment of the ordinary German, and their angry Aristocrats, to whom Hitler's Make Deutschland Great Again (MAGA) polemics & diatribes had visceral emotional appeal.
Now, after several decades of being crushed under the bootheel of left-wing Liberalism, the oppressed Oligarchs of the US --- despite their economic hegemony --- are vowing to make their country into a militaristic world Empire again. And so it goes, around & around and back again. As my southern mother used to say, after the American Civil War : "bottom rail is on top!" I suppose this thread is a metadiscourse on the less-than-neighborly dialogue in current politics, such as America's Secretary of WAR, girding the loins of his flabby generals to make-war-not-love. Don't worry, it's just talk. :wink:
The Hegelian dialectic :
a philosophical process described by G.W.F. Hegel as the engine of reality and consciousness, unfolding through a triadic movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This process involves an idea or state (thesis) giving rise to a contradictory opposing idea or state (antithesis), which is then reconciled into a higher, more comprehensive form (synthesis) that becomes the new thesis, perpetuating the cycle of development and progress. This dynamic of conflict and resolution leads to the evolution of ideas, history, and the self-realization of the Absolute Spirit
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=hegelian+dialectic
I agree that the parallels you mentioned between the contemporary United States and Germany in the 1930s seem apt at first glance, especially in the context of emotional tensions and attempts to restore national identity. However, as you rightly noted, Hegel's dialectic presupposes a clear antithesisin Germany's case, it was a national resentment directed at external perpetrators (the Treaty of Versailles).
In the United States, however, in my view, the antithesis is more internal. The contradictions we observe are more closely linked to divisions within societybetween various ideological, cultural, and economic groups. This is not so much a struggle against an external enemy as an internal identity crisis, which is generating the fragmentation of a thesis that was once united in the form of the "American Dream."
One could say that the United States is currently in a phase of "high tension," but this tension is not directed outward, as it was in pre-war Germany. Instead, it is tearing apart the social fabric from within. Here it's appropriate to recall Machiavelli, whom you didn't mention, but whose idea of ??creating an "enemy image" to consolidate society seems relevant. The problem, however, is that in the contemporary US, such an enemy image (whether external or internal) is too vague to unite society. Attempts to artificially create onethrough the rhetoric of militarism or culture warsso far appear unconvincing, perhaps due to the loss of "soft power."
And here we come to the key point: the loss of ideological certainty. Western metadiscourse, which until recently was perceived as universal, is beginning to lose its persuasiveness not only to the outside world but also to the West itself.
When internal contradictions become too obvious, exporting an ideologydemocracy, liberalism, or other valuesbecomes difficult. This, in my opinion, is the "end of Western metadiscourse" referred to in the title of this thread. We are witnessing not just a change of phase in Hegelian dialectic, but perhaps the emergence of a new synthesis that has not yet acquired clear outlines.
Exactly! The world has changed radically in the 21st century. National or state borders are now much more fluid & porous than in the early 20th century. And us-vs-them antipathies are no longer aimed externally at well-defined enemies, but at neighbors, who may differ only in ideologies. In the 1970s, cartoonist Walt Kelly created a new meme, by turning a famous 19th century quote inside-out*1. His lovable possum philosopher made an early environmental statement by pointing the finger-of-blame at us, instead of at them*2.
During the American Civil War (1861 -- 1865), you could draw a straight line between the well-defined enemy states : the Mason-Dixon line. But today, the enemy combatants are not so easy to compartmentalize. That's because their identifying characteristics are not physical & practical, but metaphysical & philosophical.
Today, the American president is sending war-fighting troops into American cities, not to liberate them from tyranny, or to liberate them from Liberalism, but to tyrannize them under his own idiosyncratic ideology. New meme : "Trump has met the enemy, and he is us". :cool:
*1. [i]During the War of 1812, the United States Navy defeated the British Navy in the Battle of Lake Erie. Master Commandant Oliver Perry wrote to Major General William Henry Harrison, We have met the enemy and they are ours.
Kellys parody of this famous battle report perfectly summarizes mankinds tendency to create our own problems. In this case, we have only ourselves to blame for the pollution and destruction of our environment..[/i]
https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/we-have-met-the-enemy/
*2. THE ENEMY WITHIN
One of the central problems with liberalism is the incoherence of its neutrality principle. Liberalism claims that it is a neutral, universal, tradition-independent framework, when in fact it is one particular, non-neutral tradition among others. The liberal state envisions itself as a kind of referee who oversees the game but does not interfere on behalf of any side and has no value-commitments of its own. It is perhaps the only political philosophy which pretends that it is itself neutral; which pretends that it utilizes no metanarrative in ordering narratives.
In this way the whole notion of liberalism is founded upon a lie and a falsehood, and it is quite difficult to maintain such a bald lie on a societal and cultural level. It requires its adherents to constantly tell themselves entailed lies, such as that value-based claims like "free speech is good" or "rape is bad" are not value-based claims. The racism question that keeps coming up in my thread is another good example of the incoherence (cf. Jacobs' recent podcast).
As soon as we add to "X should be illegal" the obvious truth that the prohibition of X involves a normative or value-based premise, we have abandoned one of the most central tenets of liberalism. On the referee analogy, one might claim that the referee does not interfere with the game, but even if this is granted for the sake of argument it remains indubitably true that the referee is enforcing the rules of one particular game and not another. At the deeper and more philosophically sober level, there is no referee who is altogether neutral in that sense. So if the state is the referee and the citizens are the players, then the referee is by definition non-neutral as long as the citizens are not allowed to play any game they like. And of course this condition holds for the very definition of a referee.
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Deeply related is this assessment by historian Tom Holland, particularly when Islam's incompatibility with secularity is discussed (1:09:19):
A good point and I agree. And yet what if all societies must construct some such transcendent fiction? - an argument I have made in this thread, and which plays large in Fukuyamas account of human political history.
So yes, there are no neutral referees and indeed human nature would make that impossible. But liberalism can still construct its institutions under that collective belief in impartiality. It could at least steer in the direction.
What seems apparent is that social animals are organised by the emergence of dominance-submission hierarchies. It is something that is engineered in at a genetic level.
Humans have a capacity to narrate their worlds and so could create social order at this new civilised level. To make that happen, the old dominance-submission games had to be submerged under some form of collective transcendent identity. A narrative about ancestral landscapes, judging gods, or democratic justice. Even the mightiest in the group had to bow their heads before a power that outranked even them.
So this is what all societies have in common. The need for an uber-narrative which secures the identity of the individual. A neutralising force that breaks down the local gang boss and allows a society to scale - to grow large and complex despite the still natural tendency to play dominance-submission games.
So yes. Liberalism is a fiction. A meta narrative of a perfection that can never be achieved. But if it scales, then that already says it is a better meta-narrative than the other brands going around.
Whether human societies should freely scale is a new question that has come into view. But liberalism did win that competition. And so the question is what comes next. Is it so good that it can keep adapting even to the planetary forces it itself has unleashed?
Sure. But whats the best alternative to liberalism? Which countries do you believe operate on pure principles of liberalism, and what should they replace this with?
Liberalism has all sorts of definitions. My claim is that if a society stops lying to itself in the way I outlined then it is no longer liberal (i.e. that that form of neutrality is a necessary condition of liberalism). The alternative is to stop lying to ourselves in that way, and this would result in substantive public debate over the particular form of good the nation-group wishes to privilege. So you might still say that rape should be illegal, but you could no longer say that legislating against rape is value-neutral. This in turn would require public debate about why and whether certain values should be enshrined in the laws. It would no longer do to say, "That is a value, therefore it has no place in law." It would become a question of which values have a place in law (or public life) and which do not.
But made a number of important points and I will have to respond to those before moving on in this line.
Yes, I think that's fair. I'm unsure what counts as liberalism these days. I always thought it was a bit of a continuum.
Okay, great.
Quoting apokrisis
You are introducing a number of complex issues on which we may disagree at a relatively fundamental level. I don't agree with this first one, namely that all societies must construct some such transcendent fiction, but if it were true then the society would no longer function once the "cat is out of the bag" and the fiction is known to be a fiction, and I think that is becoming increasingly true with liberalism. In any case, let's look at the way you develop it:
Quoting apokrisis
So on this theory I gather that we could not return to an outdated uber-narrative which has now been debunked, given that it no longer possesses the necessary plausibility to function. Does the neutrality of the liberal state still possess the necessary plausibility to function?
Another difficulty I have with this idea is that it moves freely between the conscious lie and the unconscious lie. This isn't inherently problematic, but once a lie becomes excessively conscious it is much harder to maintain, and liberalism professes the lie of neutrality with a doctrinal earnestness. Given that the liberal lie is systematically presented rather than being an element of mythology or primordial tradition, I think it will be much harder to maintain.
Finally, you are presenting this as the problem of dominance-submission dynamics and the solution of a fictional uber-narrative. First, I would note that Jordan Peterson is constantly talking about group dynamics through the perspective of primatologists who debunked the idea that "gang boss" dominance (tyrannical social ordering) is common among primates. I don't recall the details, but his point is that that form of dominance is not an efficacious social ordering, which is why one instead sees forms of leadership and submission that are not based on brute strength or tyrannical behavior. If that's right and even primates can manage to avoid "local gang boss" hierarchies, then I don't see why ideational humans would need special help from fictional narratives.
The other point here is that most political philosophies, such as Aristotle's, try to tackle this issue head-on without the help of fictional narratives. That is, they attempt to provide rational grounds for avoiding tyrannical social orderings instead of resorting to a fictional narrative. Does that route seem unpromising to you for some reason? Because I don't see a great need to maintain the lie of liberal neutrality, at least beyond the manner in which every culture and time sees itself as normative, neutral, rational, etc.
Quoting apokrisis
This is another point where I tend to disagree. Around the timestamp I gave for that video Holland implies that liberalism didn't win that competition. There are other dynasties that far surpass liberalism, including Islam, China, Rome, and perhaps Christianity if it is separable from liberalism.
Presumably you are claiming that liberalism sits atop the mountain at this point in history, therefore it has won. On my view one must look at the natural lifecycle of a civilization in order to understand how successful it was vis-a-vis propagation or scaling. Here is the quote:
(The really interesting point with Islam is that it explicitly presented propagation/scaling as an argument for its own legitimacy, and the more territory it conquered, the more often it adverted to this argument. This form of "pragmatism" is common among many ancient civilizations.)
So I think you are making valid arguments, but I think the premises are questionable. Specifically, I think it would be easy to argue that it is not true that liberalism is theoretically or historically superior to other social orderings; and I don't know that a dominance-submission problem exists such that it needs to be answered with fictional narratives.
With that said, I think someone like yourself could modify liberalism fairly easily by discarding the neutrality principle and honoring values of individualism, productivity, free inquiry, etc. The argument from someone like yourself is apparently that liberalism is superior precisely because of its values, and at that point it could be argued that the fictional neutrality could be dropped given the wide recognition of the legitimacy of liberal values.
Where is the evidence for this in history? Which religion or even political structure because it was discovered to be a fiction? The Catholic Church lives on. Marxism too.
The reason is that truth can be transcendent even after the facts seem to have abandoned it. So God might not be real. But if society is better organised under His name, then I could live with that.
Anglicanism seems to have gone with that. The Brits also preserved the romance of having a monarchy. The nobility of running an imperial empire as a colonial trade network. In a lot of ways, the UK brand of liberalism thrived as it relied on this quite adaptive mix of transcendent authority. The US by contrast always felt officious and ill at ease with itself. Never actually a land of those feeling much freedom.
So God can be a fiction. The King can be a fiction. A Commonwealth can be a fiction. Everyone can see that and still find it a more useful truth if it binds everyone to a shared sense of social order.
The fiction isnt the problem. The issue is whether the fiction can evolve in productive fashion.
Quoting Leontiskos
But how close did we ever get to implementing that neutrality? We certainly seemed to be doing well for a time in my experience of living in various social democracies of colonial stamp.
But then the US took over the world reins. The pragmatic fictions of the Brits were turned into the properly fictions ones of the Yanks. Bush invading Iraq as it had brought down the Twin Towers and needed the salvation of democracy and freedom. Or life as it is meant to be lived under big business and evangelicalism.
Quoting Leontiskos
Ive sat with those in high office and their aims are far more pragmatic. Thatcher might have been more of the doctrinal stripe. Or she might just have had a middle class distaste of working class power and a matching love of the aristocratic elite.
But Ive seen more interest in how to implement properly neutral public policy than doctrinal fervour. At least by choosing to live in a country as near the ideal as it could be in the world as it has become.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yep. I have studied the details. I know the differences and also the similarities between bonobos and chimps. I wouldnt leap to citing Peterson as my source. But RIchard Wrangham I recently mention in this light.
Quoting Leontiskos
Read why Richard Wrangham calls us the self-domesticating ape.
Quoting Leontiskos
Nope. I thought that reason would always triumph. That is the way I was brought up. But then I studied the socially constructed nature of reason. And then its modern politically and economically constructed nature.
Again I would cite Fukuyama as his three volumes on comparative world political structure is what really brings the message home.
The problem for liberalism is when it justifies itself under the old rubric of the good, the true, the beautiful, the almighty. The fiction is being rubbed in your face. One is being asked to worship at the base of a flag and recite an oath of obedience. Literal submission to a flapping bit of cloth.
I would gag at that. I prefer a country where no one really knows the national anthem and cant even be sure whether the flag is their own or their neighbours,
My idea of liberal transcendent principle is pragmatism. A bit like Buddhism in being what you practice rather than what you preach. But an ideal worth the effort.
Quoting Leontiskos
If have to defend some transcendent principle, it would be pragmatism rather than liberalism - social or economic.
Liberalism has only won in the sense that it scales. It has outpaced the others in terms of growth in being stripped down to take risks and gamble on what burning a planets worth of resources can deliver.
So sure, other dynasties have their successes, especially to the degree they tended towards pragmatism and found ways to counter autocracy and corruption.
But liberalism was what lit a rocket under the world. And surely I am as big of critic of that as much as you. I never said might makes right. Ive always said healthy balance is what we should seek. Unrestrained growth without a matching sense of direction doesnt sound like a viable plan to me.
Quoting Leontiskos
So the Islamic caliphate ambition puts it among the sophisticates of world order. Along with Putins Greater Russia and Chinas end to its 100 years of humiliation?
I dont think judging civilisations on sophistication is a great metric. Nor even on a metric of its global extent at the expense of its local diversity.
Growth is good. But then so is equality. So judgement ought to be about the ability of a political system to balance its own natural contradictions. We can line them all up and judge them just on that.
Quoting Leontiskos
I stick to what I said. But perhaps what I say is clearer now?
Dominance-submission was an evolutionary problem for social organisation as it doesnt scale. Homo sapiens took off just as the most successful foragers on the planet as they evolved the level of grammatical language to narratise the landscape they lived in. Turn the world into a place of ancestral history and custom. The land became organised over a vastly greater sense of space and time. It became possible to imagine life as an extended network of fighting and trading, raiding and sharing. Competing and cooperating.
The Neanderthals lived in small isolated bands. Sapiens rolled over the landscape in a sudden wave of social narrative. They wave swept across everywhere until it laid claim to the planet as its ancestral heritage. A place to be organised by war and trade. The seed of liberal order. An order that was good to the degree it could negotiate the internal contradictions that so powerfully drove it.
Quoting Leontiskos
But neutrality is about a balance. One that needs the always larger view that can encompass the necessary contradictions. And so to be humanity, we need to socially construct that transcendent point of view. That is what the collective narrative has always been about.
Pragmatism just exposes the mechanics of how this is done in a post-foraging and post-agrarian world. We can appreciate the mechanism in its own rational terms. It the fictions are transparent, then at least they can be critiqued.
I would say they live on because they do not believe their lodestar is a fiction. An example where the lie was found out and the social order collapsed as a result would be the USSR.
Quoting apokrisis
We will almost certainly end up disagreeing on this.
Quoting apokrisis
I would argue that one cannot believe something and not believe something at the same time. Or that it will at least lead to problems. This is why a "noble lie" must always be told by an elite group of rulers andif it is to succeedbe believed by a large portion of the society. If the lie comes to be known as a lie the system will fall. Not in a day, but inevitably. If a lie requires belief, and one cannot believe what they know to be false, then how could a lie function when it is known to be false?
Quoting apokrisis
Does the question make sense if the neutrality is impossible? I wonder if you think the neutrality is impossible in fact but one can reach it in an asymptotic manner...? I am of the mind that it is impossible in a stronger sense than that. I would only say that certain events such as the invasion of Iraq contributed to the faltering of the fiction. Implementing the lie of neutrality and implementing neutrality are not the same thing.
Quoting apokrisis
When I speak of those who are "doctrinally earnest" I am thinking of Locke, or of the Founders of liberal regimes in 1776 or 1789. I agree with you that the political leaders are less interested in liberal philosophies.
Quoting apokrisis
He is relying on the research of Frans de Waal. Here is an example, found at random: timestamp.
My point here is that if Peterson is correct then it seems that a simple dominance theory does not obtain. I don't know if you agree or disagree with de Waal.
Quoting apokrisis
Don't lies and fictions come to light eventually even if they are not rubbed in your face? If so, this is going to be a problem for liberalism's longevity.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay. I think I am in agreement with you on much of this.
I suppose I should ask whether or to what extent you favor neutrality, and how you would societally justify neutrality in a pragmatist context. For example, is a fiction needed? Is a fiction pragmatic, especially in the long term?
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, that sounds intelligible and plausible. But I want to ask why you see this as "the seed of a liberal order"? What is the signification of "liberal" in that sentence? Are you saying that social narrative is key to human success, and liberalism promotes social narrative? Or perhaps that liberalism promotes the proper kinds of social narrative?
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, and what does the favored form of "neutrality" balance? What are we to be neutral with respect to?
Quoting apokrisis
So now I am wondering if we agree that the fictions should be made transparent? Or are you just saying that now that the fictions are being laid bare we have an opportunity to recalibrate our direction?
The USSR collapsed not because it was too Marxist but because the vigour and paranoia of the liberal west out-competed it. The USSR functioned reasonably well and at least achieved the main aim of clambering aboard the rapidly industrialising world. But it was fundamentally inefficient rather than fundamentally a lie.
Quoting Leontiskos
That is why we have ambiguity. Logic demands that we don't. But then that is why Peirce had add vagueness to logic. That to which the PNC does not apply.
Between absolute belief and absolute disbelief. I would say in practice that is where we all should sit. Even if the counterfactual grammar of logic doesn't like it.
Quoting Leontiskos
Well it's true. I never met them. :grin:
Quoting Leontiskos
I've studied all this. His Chimpanzee Politics was one of my own go-to cites. Then he also wrote Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. So even in a species split by a river, we have two contrasting examples of what dominance~submission looks like. Just a difference between open bush and denser forest has its ecological impact on the social politics that emerge as the optimising fit.
Dominance~submission may be the natural dynamic. But it plays out with all the variety of its many different settings.
So the dynamic has the simplicity of a dichotomy. And then also the variety of the one principle that can emerge as the balancing act that suits every occasion.
Quoting Leontiskos
Liberal democracy clearly promotes discussion about the socially constructed nature of society. That is the liberating thought. Hey guys, we invented this system. And if it seems shit, we can therefore invent something better.
Quoting Leontiskos
By neutral, I mean in the dynamical systems sense of being critically poised. Ready to go vigourously in opposing directions as the need demands. So we have to have some central state from which to depart in counterfactual directions.
Neutrality is not a state of passivity. It is the most extreme form of potency as you can swing either way with equal vigour. Which is what makes you choice of direction always something with significance and meaning.
A passively neutral person is a very dull fellow. An actively neutral person is centred and yet always ready to act strongly in either direction. Be your friend, be your enemy. Act as the occasion appears to demand and then switch positions just as fast if something changes.
So neutrality at the level of an egalatarian social democracy is about promoting equal opportunity for all, but then also allowing everyone to suffer or enjoy the consequences of their own actions. Make their own mistakes and learn from them.
Within then socially agreed limits. A social safety net below and a tax and justice system above. A liberal society would aim to mobilise its citizens as active participants of that society, yet still impose a constraining balance on the overall outcomes. Winning and losing is fine. Just so long as it is kept within pragmatically useful bounds.
Quoting Leontiskos
Well you seem to be calling social constructions fictions. So I can go along with that. They are community narratives. And they did start out as mythologies. But then even stories of ancestral spirits were fairly accurate oral records keeping a useful structure of belief alive.
So in my view, fiction and truth is already under pragmatism a line that is blurred. That is why semiotics speaks of experience as an Umwelt. Our models of the world have to be the model of a world that also includes the central thing of our self in the thick of it. We are socially constructed. And that is what we are socially constructing.
Once you get this level of self-awareness of what we individually are, then true and false becomes a little beside the fact as a logicist judgement.
Worrying about that is what leads to the existentialist crisis. It cripples many people. Wondering whether they are ever managing to express their true inner selves in a world where they only encountering others wearing the same social masks.
How can one be true to oneself in a world where the shared project of social-construction is what one must actively participate in?
Well my argument is that "liberalism" is the promise of that kind of world. Or rather pragmatism.
Liberalism of course wound up including a huge dollop of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment project. Every thesis needs its antithesis and so hope for some kind of resolving synthesis.
But what goes wrong is not setting up the social machinery to resolve a social systems necessary internal contradictions. Liberalism wound up polarised by reason and emotion, science and faith, and all the rest. At the level of ideology, it remained Cartesian. It had to respect the Church as the household in which science grew up in.
In a truly pragmatic country, reason and emotion would be balanced in the way that they are in neurobiology. Cognition assessing the situation. Physiology priming for action in the best direction. From the poise of a centred self, the strong and purposeful choices that can get made. But which don't characterise the self as being just whatever was some choice at some time.
You can have political parties divided by left and right. Liberal and conservative. Working class and managerial class. But then the system as a whole is free to pick and choose how it acts from this range of options. Identities aren't tied to particular solutions. Everyone can see that pragmatism is what is winning in the general long run. Life doesn't feel broken at the social level, and thus at the individual level.
In the context of this discussion, I'd like to share a real-life example that's unfolding right before our eyes. This is a very sensitive topic, and I'll try to be as impartial as possible, but I'm afraid that what I write will not please either side. I'll discuss the protests in Georgia (October 4-5).
I'd rather not describe what's happening there in my own words; instead, I'll cite the opinions of media outlets, which have covered the events in completely different ways.
1. BBC. Main sources: article from October 5, 2025, "Georgia protesters try to storm Tbilisi presidential palace" and video "Watch: Protesters attempt to storm Georgia's presidential palace" (October 4). The article describes an attempt to break into the palace grounds, the use of pepper spray and water cannons by police to disperse them, and the arrests of five people. The protests are presented as "anti-government" and pro-European, with references to EU flags and an election boycott. This creates a narrative of a struggle for "freedom" against "authoritarianism," implying sympathy for the opposition without making any direct assessments. The impression of "repression" is carefully reinforced. The role of Georgian Dream as a legitimate force is minimized, while Russian influence, which supports the undemocratic government, is emphasized.
2. Russia Today Protesters are "storming" and "inciting unrest," arrests are a "legitimate response." Statements from the authorities predominate; the opposition is casually referred to as "pro-EU." Videos emphasize protester violence; the phrase "history repeats itself" implies the "artificiality" of the protests (a hint at external manipulation). Ignoring repression and focusing on "unrest," European influence is emphasized, presenting the protests as destabilizing.
This is how events are being presented right now globally. A typical standoff in the information space. Each side chooses which source to trust, but we see how widely different the presentations are, although this is not outwardly emphasized.
Of interest was the extent to which each of these parties participates in shaping public opinion in Georgia.
Based on available data as of October 2025 (from USAID, EU, NED, and other sources), the "democratic" pool (grants for civil society, human rights, independent media, anti-corruption, Trade flows from the West (US + EU + others) to Georgia amounted to $200-300 million in 2023-2024 (the opposition and related areas).
Russia and Georgia have increased trade and tourism over the past two years, following a thaw in relations. Currently, 22% of all tourism revenues for the Georgian economy come from Russian tourists, approximately $200 million in direct investment into the economy came from Russia, $2.04 billion in direct cash transfers from Russia to Georgia by citizens, and trade turnover between the countries has grown by approximately 15% over the past two years.
From these data, it follows that both Russia and Western countries have interests in Georgia. As can be seen from the sources, Western countries' interests lie in political partnership and influence, while Russia's interests lie in economic partnership and preventing a repeat of the Ukrainian scenario for itself.
This suggests that demonstrations and clashes on the streets of Georgia are taking place for economic reasons (one side advocates democracy and EU accession; the other side advocates (The economic benefits of good neighborliness)
We've all heard about the need to fight for our rights, take to the streets when there's disagreement, etc. But the question is different: does a successful democratic revolution (color revolutions) in a former Soviet republic lead to good or happiness? I didn't notice this in Ukraine.
But then, do other foreign states have the right to interfere in the affairs of another state by inciting ideological contradictions? I wondered - why doesn't the UN take care of this?
And here's what I found: in 2022-2023, Ukraine, Latvia, and Poland initiated resolutions in the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/RES/49/21, A/HRC/RES/52/24) calling for "combatting foreign sponsorship of disinformation." This indirectly concerned media funding, but Russia and China voted against it, calling it "Western censorship." The US supported it, but only for "hostile" media (like RT), not their grants.
Academics (Loyola University, Chicago) and some NGOs proposed a "Convention on Preventing Foreign Interference in Elections," including a ban on funding foreign media and political parties. This was discussed at the General Assembly, but hasn't gone beyond talk: the US, Russia, and China don't want to lose their leverage.
Judging by these data, the powers that be are content with this. Humans appear to be mere bargaining chips on the global stage. Major players are willing to calmly provoke, incite, and wage wars to advance their interests. We see how global powers, under the guise of good intentions, shape public opinion, support their preferred forces, and push for protests or suppression. And no side is "absolutely righteous."
But is this a surprise? I suppose you could point to the level of public pretence we have got used to in international affairs. Trump might have changed norms there. Back to naked mercantilism and colonialism.
However also, face does matter for nations. The pretence needs to be in place just to feel good about yourself even at national level. Trump after all really seems to care about a Nobel peace prize.
So what is the question here? It just seems natural to me that every nation would spin its own self-centred narrative about events in the larger world. And also that information war to influence the internal perceptions of other nations has been going on ever since it became practical as an objective. As in the BBC world service and the ability to bounce radio broadcasts around the world.
This isn't really a question, but rather an empirical confirmation of our philosophical discussion. Philosophy is often criticized for building castles in the air; I simply checked the reality from open sources. Of course, the depth of my analysis is superficial; I don't claim a rigorous methodology.
But my question is this: What do you think philosophy could do in this situation? Where is the solution? Should we seek one? Or is the current state of affairs satisfactory, and will a new order emerge after a reassessment of the balance of power?
I think if you can see social structure as the expression of natural forces, then you will better understand the reality you must contend with. But then if that is your approach to philosophy, you probably would not go into philosophy in the first place. You would get into systems science. A more practical level to try to make change. :grin:
I have nothing to object to in some of these assertions, but I sincerely believe that it is precisely philosophy, in its characteristic manner of undermining the fundamental principle or being amazed by the self-evident, that is capable of somehow resolving the current crisis. Or rather, not resolving it once and for all, but creating the groundwork for future crises.
But history would suggest that ideologies are better evolved than invented.
Okay, but part of the lie that kept the USSR afloat was the idea that it was flourishing inside its walls. The lie was that it was out-competing the liberal west. Then reality crept in, the lie was seen to be false, and the boat sank.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting apokrisis
I don't grant that we have ambiguity because we need to lie to ourselves with fictions and both believe and not believe something at the same time. In the Thomist tradition vagueness is usually captured by the notion of analogical predication (which derives from Aristotle's "pros hen" ambiguity). So we do need to account for vagueness in a quasi-logical way, but I don't see how this changes what I've said about the lie that is uncovered. If I have to believe that my country is out-competing the liberal west even when I know it is not true, ambiguity isn't going to save my boat. The power of vagueness only extends so far.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, thanks.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, fair enough. Like I said, the arguments you present are reasonably strong. I need to pick my battles.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, thanks. More specifically, you said, "[Neutrality is about a balance that needs] the always larger view that can encompass the necessary contradictions." This "always larger view" is the transcendent fiction. So what are the contradictions and what is the fiction?
Equal opportunity combined with an allowance of consequences can seem like a contradiction, but I think we agree that this is only true when one is thinking about equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. The "socially agreed limits" might signify the contradictions you have in mind, given that a safety net is in tension with an allowance of consequences. But perhaps there are other contradictions? And again, what precisely is the transcendent fiction of liberalism that relativizes these contradictions?
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, and I can agree with much of this.
Quoting apokrisis
...Although I would say that we are only partially socially constructed. There are important "constraints" on the theory that we are socially constructed.
Quoting apokrisis
If I recall, I originally said that liberalism requires the lie of value-neutrality, and you said that such a thing was the transcendent fiction that undergirds liberalism. I think that's where the language of "lies" and "fictions" comes from. One might use "fiction" without implying falsehood, but much of what we have discussing as "fiction" presupposes falsehood. When I use "fiction" I mean something like a "noble lie," i.e. a lie that is meant to have a beneficial effect.
Quoting apokrisis
So if liberalism (or else pragmatism) is a thing that exists in some places and not in other places, and if its central tenets are the points you outlined about equality of opportunity, consequences, etc., then is liberalism something that ought to be sought or not? In other words, you are implying all sorts of arguments for the normative superiority of liberalism while at the same time resisting the conclusion that liberalism is normatively superior. This goes back to the fatalism point, where one is apparently allowed to attribute all of the boons of liberalism to its high quality as a social narrative, and yet at the same time say that whatever works is what is best, and that therefore if a society falls away from liberal tenets there is nothing to worry about. (NB: Of course one need not say that liberalism is best in order to say that it is good or superior.)
Put differently, if we fall away from liberalism you will apparently just "switch" from liberalism to pragmatism. Analogously, someone who champions motorboats might move from motorboats to sailboats when the gasoline runs dry, but then protest that what they really championed was not motorboats but rather boats in general. Still, to argue in favor of a political philosophy is to favor its success and to be averse to its failure. So even if we switch from motorboats (liberalism) to sailboats (pragmatism), there still must be criteria for success and failure; for being right or wrong about one's thesis. If pragmatism is just whatever happens to currently be occurring, then it doesn't make sense to argue for or against it. It must be a falsifiable thesis, so to speak.
That's not it at all. Vagueness comes before counterfactuality. Ambiguity is what counterfactually intends to clean up. We are requiring of ourselves that the truth has to be either this or its "other". Ww are breaking our world into its structure of fact and fiction. Its counterfactual narrative.
But vagueness always remains despite the narrative. The same words can't strike every listener in exactly the same way. Or even the same listener listening twice. As Heraclitus said about stepping into a river.
We are telling ourselves a convincing story. Whatever the ideology. And we need to remember it is that kind of story. A sieve on possibility. An argument attempted in the style of counterfactual logic.
Quoting Leontiskos
Well I visited Moscow as a child in 1967. And I saw the mostly bare shelves of the department store in Red Square with its crude wooden toys and yet massive queues. I swapped Japanese bubblegum for Soviet badges on the blackmarket bridge. I experience the almost performative level of Marxist forbearance with which the USSR would out-do the soft and decadent West. The narrative that the ordinary person would be able to accept as if it was reasonably true as an ideology. Russians out-toughing the Western blow-hards.
And after experiencing the public narrative, we went back to the baroque gilt splendour of our hotel suite to swig champagne and jest loudly for the microphones before heading down to join the elite in the dining room with its marble fountain and carp pond as its fin de siecle centre. Army officers popping off more champagne corks at the chandeliers. Thick fur coats everywhere. The giant stuffed bear that stood at the entry. The other truth of this Marxist state.
As a foreigner, it was easy to see both sides and arrive at the conclusion that the USSR was genuinely in competition with the West in that the population were sold on out-toughing the West and the elite were living it up in the way you would expect. They were on-board with the narrative too.
Reagan and Thatcher had to turn up the narrative heat for the elite to confront the contradictions and limits of the Soviet system. To make some changes that quickly turned into a slippery slide into chaos that even Reagan and Thatcher never expected.
Quoting Leontiskos
Not sure that you can insist on it being fictional. And certainly as a Peircean, I would take constraints or mathematical symmetries to be as real as the "contradictions", or degrees of freedom and broken symmetries, that they would generate in the word.
So are you trying to win the argument by semantics seizing on other meanings to what I might have intended? Holding words hostage rather than seeing then as words I might accept in the spirit of having some common ground some larger and vaguer view from which to launch into the dialectical task we seem to have agreed to?
Quoting Leontiskos
Well exactly. It somehow seems both fair and unfair at the same time that liberalism would give everyone the same opportunity and yet not deliver the same outcome.
At least Marxism promised both "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" to quote Marx.
So Marxism seems to win in its simple equation. We can see the balance implicit in this complementary and dialectical framing of how a society ought to be.
Which is why I say liberalism only makes better sense as it speaks to a dichotomy that can scale. The one where the complementary dynamic is to each, compete as hard as you can while also cooperating as fully as possible. Do the Christian thing of treating others as you would have them treat you.
Every ideology needs its dialectical algorithm that requires you to see social interactions as always inherently not just dyadic but complementary. An inversion or reciprocal relation where both sides of the equation are "good, just, fair, beautiful, divine, etc".
And that is what an ideal ideological algorithm achieves. A win-win blend that scales.
Christianity got to take over the Roman empire and eventually much of the world. It had the clever trick of owning the souls and allowing the secular everyday get on with its business. A trickle up economics where the church could become a rich and powerful political enterprise with a sideline in social services.
Soviet Marxism could do OK for a while as a police state and information autocracy. Western liberal democracy just went mad on it productivity growth. Go fully secular and worship money creation. Or go turbo-secular and start believing in the supreme good of debt creation and now the infinite money glitch of AI and Crypto.
OK. What was I saying about needing a win-win algorithm to anchor society? What happened to the good thinking there?....
Quoting Leontiskos
Well yes. I only stress the social constructionism as when I launched into evolutionary psychology I found that everyone else was going down the genetic route to the exclusion of the social level of semiotic structure.
I had already studied the ethological science, so that covered the genetic basis of things pretty well. It was the difference that language makes that was the weakly explored area of Western philosophy and science. It was Marxist Jews like Vygotsky and Luria who had the stellar insights on that side of things.
Western liberal democracy actually does human psychology shockingly badly. Damagingly badly. Worse than the Catholic Church. That in itself should tell us something.
Not about what works. But about the need for a social narrative so powerful it does turn the individual into the kind of psychological being it needs that individual to be.
Really be. But if they just have to wear a social mask and suck it up as a dubious fiction, then that is OK. Good enough if less than ideal.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes. I realise you meant a white lie or a noble lie or a necessary lie. And so not really a lie. Or at least a lie absolved of some of its original sin. :wink:
Quoting Leontiskos
What works is what works. So sure, you can claim tautology.
And if what works is what works at particular times and places in history, that is now instead the breaking if that tautological symmetry. You have some general ideology that works. And you have its particular instances that this also work or now counterfactually don't. Something new is perhaps revealed by things becoming properly developed into a hierarchical structure. Some system of constraint and its degrees of freedom. A state and its people. Doing their thing. Discovering how that goes, especially in the face of others doing their own thing.
To be honest, I never really think in terms of normative arguments and is/ought dichotomies. I have to look up what they might mean nearly every time someone wants to discuss them. Just not really a distinction that means much from my pragmatist point of view. Way too simplistic.
Quoting Leontiskos
You see, all this sounds silly to my ears. Pragmatism makes sense as the most all-encompassing and general viewpoint. As Peirce argued, even the Cosmos is pragmatically structured. And life and mind share the same self-organising causal logic just with the added self-referential semiotics.
Liberalism is then a rather general and grab-bag term for talking about human social and economic order. It is the new pragmatism that arose in the Enlightenment, along with the Romantic reaction the Enlightenment engendered. You can read the books of that time and assemble some kind of semi-coherent narrative of what this unholy secular mess was all about in spirit.
For the sake of a discussion, I go along with this loose, rather vague, jargon. Seeking to get precise where its starts to seem to matter.
So perhaps I am more a builder of boats who sees pragmatism as the lake or sea that would even need a boat. And it wouldn't be the end of the world if there never were any boats. Or at least boats where folk might imagine they were there for the fun of it whether under sail or thrust along by motor.
When it comes to boats, I would thus have a well developed hierarchy of perspectives for sure. Boats can move stuff from place to place in a way that is good. Boats for pleasure always struck me as nuts.
I come from a seafaring family. My dad built me a first dinky sail boat when I was seven. I wasn't the faintest bit interested. I would rather body surf any day.
So no. I don't just switch simple categories as if everything exists as a plurality of choices on a single plane of contingency. I go up and down levels of hierarchies. There is the rigour of a dichotomous order which can aim to become fully developed as a systems narrative. The generality that frames the particularity. And the particularity that likewise retains the ambiguity to challenge that habit of generalising.
Do I like boats? It depends.
Do I like boating? Yeah, nah. Too much faffing around with gear and time. Going around for the sake of going around.
Is liberalism a brand that is fundamentally "me"? It depends. Well, yeah nah. Call me a pragmatist. Or maybe more specifically a Greenie though no longer much of a believer that humans could organise under that particular ideological banner.
Quoting Astorre
It's simply an observation of mine.
There is a lot of criticism of individualism going around, especially from religious/spiritual circles. I find, though, that much of that criticism is cruel and heartless, as the religious/spiritual refuse to acknowledge that individualism is a much more complex phenomenon than they give it credit; and more, that it is precisely the religious/spiritual with their practices (or "malpractices") that are in part or fully causing this same individualism that they are so criticial of.
Defensive individualism is a consequence of when the collective refuses to take any obligation toward a particular individual or a particular category of individuals. Illegitimate children, orphans, widows, the poor, people who, often by no fault of their own, ended up on the "wrong side of the track".
It's when the "community", the "collective", "society" ostracizes a person or a category of persons that these ostracized people resort to a defensive type of individualism. They're not happy to be individualists at all, but they have no other choice, as society has rejected them.
This type of individualism has an entirely different motivation than the entitled individualism ("I'm so wonderful, get out of my way, you worthless bug") that people usually mean when they criticize individualism.
Such American propaganda in favor of individualism is, in my opinion, actually just another effort by the upper class to absolve themselves from any and all responsibility toward the lower classes.
Somehow, I'm not convinced by this explanation. I've lived in a country that used to be "socialist/communist" (with a strong " "). Now that the country is not in that system anymore, it's evident what many people hated about it and what they really want. Many want the same old overt class system that has existed for centuries (and even during the time when the country was nominally "socialist/communist").
People, especially those of the upper class and those trying to become the upper class do want to "depend on the collective" -- but only as long as it is within their own upper class. They don't want to show any respect to someone who is of a lower class than they are.
It's always about classism.
But these Western propagandists don't seem to understand that esp. a culture like the Chinese has no beef with either individualism or collectivism. These nations are extremely mercantile, competitive, capitalist to the extreme, and they have been this way for millennia. The reason these people at large don't feel responsible for the affairs of the state or the collective isn't individualism (for they're not individualists of this kind), it's that their primary focus is on making money, and they're not shy about it. In those cultures, money is no something dirty, the way it is often portrayed in the West (although recently less so).
The Western idea of individualism usually conjures up an image of a solitary person, somewhere alone.
If an average Westerner sees images like these:
they probably think how these people are "sheeple", a "nameless mass", people with "no individuality".
And yet what such a Western view fails to acknowledge is that in order to successfully participate in those mass dances where everyone is doing the exact same thing, or in order to practice religious worship in such mass events, one needs to be able to be supremely focused on one's task at hand. One cannot do those things by following others; if one did that, the whole performance would fail.
I think that those Easterners are actually far more individualistic than Westerners, for they are able to perform their tasks and duties, successfully, while surrounded by others, without allowing themselves to be distracted by them. This requires a kind of focus and ability that we in the West are just not trained to have. For us, in order to focus, we normally need physical solitude (which can be very expensive and hard to obtain).
As a further example, I have heard that in a classical Korean music school, all musicians practice in the same big room at the same time. They train themselves to focus on their own instrument, their voice -- while in the middle of everyone else doing the same thing for themselves. Imagine the noise that one needs to block out! What could be more individualistic!
Our discussion seems to be about 50 years too late. Although, I'm convinced, it must have been a very interesting time, with two diametrically opposed ideologies debating directly and sharply, contrasting themselves with one another. In the end, liberalism prevailed.
And you know, no matter what anyone says, the USSR, in my opinion, lost honorably. It simply admitted its inability to compete and disappeared, fragmenting into separate states. Vanished into oblivion, without taking tens of millions of lives with it.
What happened next is another matter. And what's happening now. Recently, I studied opinions in post-Soviet Russia on this issue. I was intrigued by one of them. I don't want to go into details, but one opinion voiced at the time was: To become a liberal country and end communism, Russia must undergo a revolution. Otherwise, the elites will simply change their colors, and what was already there will continue under a different name. And so it happened: in a number of post-Soviet countries, where there were no major reshuffles or large infusions of money, only the signs changed, while the discourse remained the same. All that remained of the USSR was the worst, and to this was added all the worst of liberalism.
Today, this conflict between collectivism and individualism takes on new colors, although not as acute as before. But in a completely different way and we see that there are now grounds for criticizing modern liberalism from within Western societies. It seems humanity has become confused. Postmodernism has also mixed in.
These are very interesting times: what's happening now and in the next five to seven years will determine the world order for decades to come. So much is happening that we can't even name it (we're drowning in arguments), let alone develop any solutions.
All that's left is to stock up on popcorn...
Whats not to like, if youre rich.
I can perfectly understand your feelings, especially since my family members live in the United States, where they moved in search of a better life. I worry about them, and although they supported Trump, at the time of his election, I predicted the outcome of his presidency would be either a severe domestic political crisis or an unleashed war (as a means of preventing this crisis and achieving consolidation). Only God knows how this will ultimately end, but I continue to maintain that the next 5-7 years are crucial.
For myself, I have chosen the path of minimal reflection regarding political events, as this allows me to preserve at least some remnants of myself.
The thing is, the world is finite, resources are finite, and to believe that a world of equality and brotherhood throughout the world is possible simultaneously is, in my view, false. There will always be centers that will live at the expense of others, and peripheries without rights, without money, without hope. Perhaps what is happening today is a reconsideration of the current centers that has begun.
What can I do in these processes? I think many of us ask ourselves this question. My answer is that I can generate meaning, re-evaluate the given, criticize and offer new lenses, and do other idle things. :grin: