We have climate denial bots now? This would be funny if the situation wasn't so dire.

Here's a question, would you say what ideologies are in power, what is culture and what is counterculture, can change over time? And what then would be the criterium by which we judge that? I'd say that criterium would be power.
— ChatteringMonkey

Sure, culture changes. I presume that matrilineal culture was dominant in prehistory, simply because we knew where babies come from - between the legs of a woman. Somewhere about 1-2 millennia BC. patriarchy came to dominate. But I don't know how you measure power in this context. The ruler needs an army; the chess player needs pawns, and the little people are what the culture is made of, more so than the powerful's ablity to control it.

To change the mix of metaphors; the powerful can only blow the dog- whistle that the dogs have already been trained to respond to. — unenlightened

I'm thinking it used to be pretty clear what the dominant culture was (or maybe this is just the benefit of hindsight), but now not so much these days... we are left with a lot of splintering and polarization. Looking back maybe this will turn out to be a transitional period.

Ok no worries.

Power is a vital aspect of the patriarchy. I don't think Incels have much power, on the contrary, they seem very much a marginal group.
— ChatteringMonkey

But appearances are deceptive. Compare with the case of the poor white racist:

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
— Dylan — unenlightened

Yeah I had been thinking about this specifically. It's an interesting question. It definitely was the case that racism was an ideology of the ruling class and patriarchy originally. But I don't think I would say a white supremacist is part of the ruling ideology or patriarchy these days, if outing oneself as one would probably get you fired in a matter of days in most places. Those who have power set the rules, that is what power means in practice, therefor I'd say if you have to hide who you are, you are not a part of the powers that be.

Here's a question, would you say what is culture and what is counterculture can change over time? And what then would be the criterium by which we judge that? I'd say that criterium would be power.

Power is a vital aspect of the patriarchy. I don't think Incels have much power, on the contrary, they seem very much a marginal group.

So I dunno, Incels and the patriarchy just seems like a weirdly forced association.

However, to a great many people receiving daily threats, and those who have already been attacked, it is very serious indeed. The fact that the 'movement' is spreading, growing, recruiting
Four clicks on an incognito browser is all it takes for YouTube to churn up a video about, as the host puts it, “embracing the idea of violence” in a society that “despises” what it means to be a manhttps://globalnews.ca/news/8508795/canada-social-media-algorithm-reform/
and increasingly violent in its rhetoric is very serious. — Vera Mont

I guess I would doubt the degree to which the Incel-movement has an additional effect on these issues. Violence and rape have been a part of our history since the beginning. I don't think we need organisations and/or ideologies to have this be an issue.

because they are almost by definition socially inept, unattractive etc. and we have some kind of biological preference for the attractive and the successful.
— ChatteringMonkey
You you keep saying. How do you know? What does "almost by definition" actually mean? Might there not motivations other than self-pity involved? — Vera Mont

Well an incel means involuntary single, so you have "almost by definition" guys we are not good at getting in relationships... that is probably because of a number of factors, but high on that list would be things like attractiveness and social skills I presume.

I think the motivation is to feel better about themselves predominately.

I would argue that Incels will never gain any amount of social power to sufficiently alter the culture so it would become damaging to women and our culture as a whole...
— ChatteringMonkey
I've heard that argued about some groups who have since done a good deal of damage. ISIS comes to mind... Society as whole might recover from them; the direct casualties will not. I consider poisoning a large segment of the next generation of men to the whole concept of healthy relationships as a damage. — Vera Mont

I suppose there is always a remote possibility, like how Christianity became a world religion against all odds and almost by accident. But still, on the list of things to worry about these days, I would put them very low on that list. There's so much and my time and energy is limited.

Okay, I"ll re-iterate why this shouldn't really be a concern other than for the incels themselves maybe.

Social power, the ability to influence large amount of people and maybe sway culture and values in certain directions, is what is relevant here.

I would argue that Incels will never gain any amount of social power to sufficiently alter the culture so it would become damaging to women and our culture as a whole... because they are almost by definition socially inept, unattractive etc. and we have some kind of biological preference for the attractive and the successful.

The idea that Incels might come to pose some kind of danger to society is purely hypothetical, it's not going to happen. People don't take them seriously, it's mostly a sad phenomenon of evolution in combination with our alienating culture.

Don't take it to seriously Vera Mont, It wasn't meant that way.

I actually asked the spokesman of the the Incel-movement these questions, and he told me that they want nothing less than world-domination.

In their analysis, sexual reproduction, and the evolutionary downstream-effects in terms of social status, are the cause of a lot of hardship in men.

Therefor they want to abolish sexual reproduction (and as a consequence also women) to tackle the problem at the root-cause, and in doing so prevent a lot of pain, not only for men living now, but also in all future men.

To achieve this goal, a-sexual reproduction via cloning of men, should become the only legally allowed way to create offspring.

Since this can only really work in a globalized world if it is implemented unilaterally across the globe, world-domination should be the first goal of the incel-movement.

Look Ciceronianus, coming here on a philosophy discussion board and telling someone he is just wrong in a demeaning way, without any argumentation or explanation as to why, is just bad form. I don't know what you expect from this, other than signaling "you must be stupid, I'm so smart".

What, other than a tendency toward self-destructive and self-loathing behavior, is keeping these guys from succeeding at least at minimal levels? Are they as inept in their occupational lives as they are in their after-hours lives?

Are they just surprised to discover Thoreau's insight--most men lead lives of quiet desperation--actually applies to them? Or is their problem that their desperation just isn't quiet enough? — BC

My take it that this whole community-forming around misogynist values is a way to cope with their desperation yes.

The idea that they themselves are responsible for their situation, and feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem that come with that, is probably to hard to bear for them. And so they invent stories and a community around those stories that can serve as rationalizations that shifts the blame somewhere else.

EDIT: Put in more Nietzschean psychological terms,
either 1) you try to overcome your situation and learn some social skills and start self-actualizing (not everybody had the mentality to do this)
or 2) you spiral further down a path of lowering self-esteem, depression and inaction (from the perspective of the individual this probably the worst)
or 3) instead of this continued inward directed laceration, you let your resentment become creative and active, and create new standards of valuation wherein your situation isn't considered that bad

This is why It seems kinda silly to me to consider incels dangerous. Sure they have a pretty toxic community going on, but then they don't seem to have any real social leverage like say the cancel culture who can put that public shame-machine into motion.

In fact I even think Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism following it, played an essential role in the formation of enlightenment ideals of equality, giving rise to individual rights and feminism. In other words, It's not the realization that those traditional norms existed without reason that gave rise those progressive ideas, they precisely followed from and are a logical conclusion of christian values (who were an inversion of Roman values, and pagan values, that came before).
— ChatteringMonkey

I'm hopeful you're being ironic, but fear you're not. But I don't want to derail this thread. I couldn't help but take note of these remarkable statements, however. — Ciceronianus

It is passive aggressive baloney... what's the point?

No, it came out of a questioning of old norms. Even Stuart Mill questioned why women didn't have equal rights and I don't think the suffragette movement came out of Christianity, most at the time wouldn't consider them acting in a "Christian manner" and they wouldn't have had to if the church or other religious institutions had pushed for such ideals. And you didn't understand what I wrote about traditions, I said that the secularization of power made traditions no longer follow state praxis and instead became traditions in of themselves. Over the course of over a hundred years, since the suffragettes succeeded in getting women voting rights, these traditions have been slowly dismantled over generations since it is easier to question traditions when they only exist as cultural behaviors. I don't think you can give credit to Christian values for this since Christian values have been precisely what's been working against this progression since secularization first began. — Christoffer

I do think it came out of Christian values. Even the notion of the 'secular' only really makes sense in a Christian context (and etymological came out of that context), which is why all of these emancipatory rights came out of the western tradition, and not universally everywhere. If you want to dig deeper into this, you might want to read some of Tom Hollands stuff on how Christianity shaped our world :

https://www.amazon.nl/Dominion-Christian-Revolution-Remade-World/dp/0465093507

https://www.gethistory.co.uk/historical-period/general-history/why-the-secular-cant-exist-without-christianity

With Holland, Nietzsche pointed out even earlier how weird the Christian inversion of values really was in a world historical context. The dominant values across the world generally were those of the ruling class. To put is a bit to simple perhaps, good was what was powerful/victorious, and bad was what was weak, the victims... For the Romans the cross was a symbol of humiliation and contempt, the lowest of the low, and specifically in Christianity it became the basis of the whole western value system. Without this inversion of values, none of the emancipatory movements we saw in the west make sense.

And in line with what I've written. The industrial revolution emerged out of secular ideas, since "industry" before that was deeply connected to the power structure of a nation. The modern type of capitalism that raised up from the ashes of monarchy and religious institutions exponentially sped up progression and was able to further finance intellectual institutions outside of elite corridors. What happened was that more people had the ability to question the status quo and it started to influence women to do so themselves which led to things like the suffragettes movement. — Christoffer

First, as I alluded to above the secular came out of Christianity. Christianity with its valuation of the Truth, and Protestantism with its turn to individualism, rather than being in opposition with, also helped pave the way for the scientific revolution. I don't see these things in opposition to eachother, but rather as a continuation.

Second, the industrial revolution had a lot of causes. Cultural climate no doubt was one of them, which was I think influenced by Chirstianity, but more important were other material conditions like the fact that Britain had a lot of readily available coal, had a lot of surplus workers because of the agricultural revolution, and also had a lot of excess wealth because of colonial trade.

I'm not saying these emancipatory activist forces played no role whatsoever, I'm just saying that one shouldn't overestimate their role either. If we are to believe the likes of Nietzsche and Holland, Christianity had in it own valuations the seeds for its own demise, structurally giving rise to revolutions that question the existing power structures on emancipatory grounds (reformation, enlightment, French revolution, socialism/communism, woke-ism? etc etc..).

Contemporary society is a thoroughly alienating experience for many people -- not everyone, but a good share. Social media, dating apps, etc. bring the chilly competitiveness of business to the more intimate business of finding friends and sexual partners. It's great for the winners, not so hot for the losers.

The images of men and women (in many contexts) that the businesses of social media and advertising project are often very distorted, and the projections are pervasive. From media that is designed to promote consumption (of goods, services, and other people) it's no wonder that some people feel like they are the left-overs from a clearance sale. — BC

The world is alienating for many people, I agree with this, but then it doesn't seems to be acceptable to point this out if we are talking about incels. Anyway, I pretty much said what I wanted to say about this, I don't want to be an apologist for their behaviours either.

And throughout generations of traditions that no longer function in relation to older power structures, people start to notice norms that seem to exist without any rational reason.

It's no coincidence that women in Western societies managed to reach equality in voting around the same time as religious states in the West became more and more secularized. — Christoffer

This is what triggered me, I don't think this is how it works. In fact I even think Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism following it, played an essential role in the formation of enlightenment ideals of equality, giving rise to individual rights and feminism. In other words, It's not the realization that those traditional norms existed without reason that gave rise those progressive ideas, they precisely followed from and are a logical conclusion of christian values (who were an inversion of Roman values, and pagan values, that came before).

Aside from that, the biggest contributing factor I think for emancipatory values accelerating in the west, was fossil fuels, the industrial revolution and the technology build on that, creating material conditions that made these new ideologies possible.

But this is, as I said a big topic, and doesn't exactly fit here in this thread.

Yes, egging one another on; reinforcing resentment and blaming others for one's own shortcomings, instead of encouraging positive change. Charisma is rare and accidental and unreliable; courtesy, interest, versatility, tolerance and humour are far better assets. And of course, acceptance of the fact that everybody isn't ever going to get first pick. — Vera Mont

Yes that would be a more positive reaction, some obviously don't have the mental strength to avoid the pitfalls... I guess what bothers me is that the total lack of attempt at understanding and empathy is deemed fine in this case, whereas generally it is literally the basis of our morality.

Thank you for the compliment!

Nobody's marginalized for feeling unloved. They are rejected for acting like jerks - and much or worse. It's just that women who are 'marginalized" in the same way - i.e. have no sexual outlet - don't go around "punishing" - attacking - people.
But there are plenty of women online who share the same frustrated feelings of involuntary celibacy as men. These women want to have romantic and sexual relationships, but for whatever reason, are unable to do so. They call themselves “femcels,” an abbreviation of “female incel.” — Vera Mont

It's not only because they are jerks that they are marginalized, they are generally considered low status because they are single, and perhaps don't have a lot of charisma, attractiveness and/or social skills to begin with. It's a bit of a chicken or the egg problem... they don't become jerks in a vacuum, it's a bit of that good old resentment playing a role here.

EDIT: And the difference with femcel women is predominately testosterone I'd say.

Christoffer, I disagree with the whole way you look at these things, because I'm a materialist/physicalist, and believe ideas usually follow the physical and biological reality more that the other way around. Obviously it isn't that simple or unidirectional, but I think ideology are more post-hoc rationalization than that they are causes. So I don't think we will get past that here.

they have no power at all
— ChatteringMonkey

People with guns have power. — RogueAI

Not a whole lot because the military and the police have more and bigger guns. Social power is were it is at.

Recent revolutions in population genetics suggest that a relative minority of men have had reproductive privilege historically, so i don't think looking to prehistory brings us closer to a solution, on the contrary i'd say.

No Tzeentch, society has decided that women are the victims, so it's okay to marginalize incel men... they are evil because they are man, and so technically part of the patriarchy (eventhough they have no power at all and are considered the lowest of the low).

And so as members of these societies condemning violence, even if marginalized in the case of incels, it is still a big obstacle to act on these beliefs
— ChatteringMonkey

That's true ChatteringMonkey I think the culture is pretty much standard anti-violence in most places and I reckon now is the least violent we have been as a populus compared with hundreds or thousands of years ago. But I also think this is why very brief, sporadic and horrific events are occurring randomly. Like school-shootings. Mass shootings in the locations where the pent up rage/hatred spills over the social anti-violence precedent that usually is sufficient to counter it. — Benj96

This is a bigger problem in the US than say in Europe, and is more because of US gun laws and the place of violence in that society. I think one needs to look more at that relationship with violence, than at the specific problem of incels.

Yes that's what I suggested in my first post:

I'm not sure what to do about it, other than generally providing for more community-alternatives that can provide support and maybe some meaning. These seem to have eroded for everybody, not only incels, and leaves a lot of people that get sidetracked without any direction or guidance. — ChatteringMonkey

But ultimately the problem is not totally solvable by acceptable means I think, there will always be those who will miss out because they are less attractive/charismatic/rich than others. A healthy society doesn't solve the frustrated desires of those. Historically this has always been a problem.

And I don't think we really want the unacceptable means of dealing with the problem, like say castration, putting down, genetic alteration etc etc.

Why don't we just put them down, like the males of breeding animals we have no use for? Wouldn't that be a major step towards progressive utopia!

Maybe Benj, only the future can tell.

Beliefs are interlinked with the body, and do influence our actions, yes. But as a society we generally condemn physical violence rather strongly now (relative to past societies). And so as members of these societies condemning violence, even if marginalized in the case of incels, it is still a big obstacle to act on these beliefs.

Incels are a dying breed of men who are just holding on to traditions that the rest of us have already moved away from. — Christoffer

God, you really have drunk that progressive kool-aid.

It's not just a matter of a bunch of guys holding onto an outdated ideologies, I think you underestimate 1) how biology played a role into forming these traditional ideologies in the first place, and 2) how their frustrated biological drives now plays into forming post-hoc misogynists rationalization. I bet a lot of incels coudn't care less about traditional norms and values... they're mostly frustrated, and invent stories to make it more bearable for themselves.

More radical by todays standards maybe, but not in an absolute sense I don't think, they used to form roving warbands, were recruited in the army, or started insurrections... now they are merely a nuisance like an internet-troll is considered annoying. Their frustrated energy is re-directed mostly into verbal aggression, instead of physical aggression, which is probably a win for society... unless it has some yet unknown toxic effects downstream.

I'm not sure what to do about it, other than generally providing for more community-alternatives that can provide support and maybe some meaning. These seem to have eroded for everybody, not only incels, and leaves a lot of people that get sidetracked without any direction or guidance.

Incels always have been a problem historically, because a lot of testosterone without a reason (aka a women and a family) that can channel it into a social constructive force is a recipe for and source of societal unrest.

What changed is societal evolutions making being incel even more undesirable (MeToo, male-centered values devaluated etc etc), and technology like social media making it easier to organize around whatever.

It's not overlooked, it's taboo to talk about it.
— ChatteringMonkey

Yes, which is unfathomable to me. Whatever the contributing factors to ecological damage are, they are magnified by the size of the population. If we can't at some point rise to the level of rational dialogue, I don't suppose we are as a species worthy of survival anyway. — Pantagruel

It's a thorny issue in more than one way, but a large part of the problem is that acknowledging all the different aspects of the issue, poses fundamental problems to all current dominant political ideologies... They don't seem to be able to incorporate what would be needed into their ideology without becoming something else.

We all were using a lot less energy in 1890,
— BC

I don't think the rate of emission matters much. Produce the emission size from the 1890s over a period of 500 years and you've got a climate crisis. — frank

I does matter some, there are carbons sinks that have more time to draw carbon out of the atmosphere, and slower emissions do mean slower temperature change, which give us and eco-systems more time to adapt.

Beware of pointing to population as a contributing factor in this eco-crisis, you will get accused of being a Malthusian. It's not overlooked, it's taboo to talk about it.

Social laws are not causal, and future human and social consequences are not necessitated by the past. At the extreme, humans can choose to act in opposition to such predictions. It is logically impossible to know what someone will do in the future, since even given that they know, it remains that they might do otherwise. I can predict that you stop reading this post here, but it remains that you may choose to read on — Banno

I didn't really address this particular point I feel.

The problem I have with this idea (that it is logically impossible to predict what humans will do because if they know it, they can always choose otherwise) is that these predictions don't necessarily concern individuals, but groups of people or the outcome of a lot of people interacting with eachother. Maybe individuals have some amount of agency, although I would probably argue about the extend of it, but groups of people don't necessarily have. Social outcomes are almost never the result of a single self-aware person make a decision, the impact of individuals is usually rather limited, and so I don't think it would be logically impossible to make predictions about the future of societies.

I'm gathering that there are more points people pick up than this from Michel :D -- yes?

I agree that there's no static system or utopia, and that social lives are in perpetual motion. That's not the point I saw in Michel, but hey, we agree there.

*That is, the guy who, in writing, wrote about how slavery is good. That guy. Slaves? OK. Oligarchy? Fuck that shit. That guy. — Moliere

Yes, it is what I take away from it I guess.

Michels wasn't a static entity either ;-), he started out a socialist and when he wrote about the Iron law of of oligarchy he apparently was some kind of syndicalist revolutionary. He was not that extreme yet when he wrote that book. But yeah I do get your point, there's a lot not to like about the guy for sure.

The interesting thing to me is that he did come out of socialist milieus and the unions, people who are supposedly aware of and actively fighting against oligarchies, and yet turned oligarchy themselves. That is where he got the experiences that influenced his ideas about oligarchy.

(1) In the Politics even Aristotle* makes a distinction between Oligarchy and Aristocracy -- and he happens to like Aristocracy over Oligarchy. Naturalized politics is kind of his whole thing and gets along with the idea that we can falsify such stuff, I think.

1: Given that we're looking at all societies due to the law-formluation, I'd take Aristotle's Politics as evidence that many constitutions exist, and someone smart back then knew about these tendencies but didn't generalize oligarchy to all organizations. If we're looking for textual counter-examples then he counts. — Moliere

I'm not all that familiar with Aristotle... but even though he was in many ways more empirically minded, he was still a student of Plato and his academia. Isn't aristocracy akin to the Ideal form, how it is ideally conceived and intended originally, and oligarchy how it eventually ends up after special interests corrupt it over time. If that is the case, then this wouldn't exactly be a counterexample to the iron law, but rather a more general and broader theory about the eventual corruption of political organisations.

(2) The second formulation of the CI pretty explicitly points out how one would organize with someone: by treating them as not merely a means, but as an end unto themselves.

2: This points to how we can collectively organize on ethical grounds even from a libertarian individualist stance. It's not inevitable, from that perspective, because we all make choices based upon some commitment, and here is a commitment which harmonizes collective action rather than pits all individuals against one another. Even on rational grounds. — Moliere

I'm not sure how to address this because I don't think the CI works in practice. I don't mean this in a base or mean spirited way, but we do sometimes use people as a means, out of practical and psychological necessity... I would be hard if not impossible to live in total accordance with the CI.

I think I do agree that collective organisation around values is where it is at, I'm just not sure how we can do it in practice while at the same time avoiding all the known pitfalls. What you describe for instance functionally looks a lot like how religions or myths would organize communities around shared value systems, but then a lot can and historically has gone wrong with that.

Thank you for your response. I think I disagree with the general picture you paint though. A lot of historians do indeed view human history and future as fundamentally unpredictable. There are others though who do think there are patterns we can discern and use to make predictions about the direction of human societies, like say Peter Turcin. Turcin started as a biologist predicting behaviours of groups of other animal species, with some success, and he saw no reason why this couldn't be tried with "human populations" as he became a historian.

One reason I think there is much resistance to this idea, we'd like to think we have a lot agency in determining the direction of our societies, it's a problem for our treasured notion of free will if we don't.

So putting it simply, even if we accept that there is a trend in democratic institutions towards centralisation of power, humans can choose to work against that trend. — Banno

Yes human can (and will) work against it, that's not the point I don't think, the point is that humans on aggregate won't keep working against it hard enough over time. It's more like say the second law of thermodynamics in that way... even tough locally entropy can decrease, on aggregate the total entropy of the system will always increase over time. Roll enough dice and you will tend to the mean.

The supposition that democratic institutions will become oligarchies gives no time frame. Suppose a given institution remains democratic after a year, is that a falsification of the "Law"? Perhaps we shoudl wait ten years? If an institution remains democratic after a hundred years, do we consider the law falsified? Any institution that remains democratic is not a falsification, since it can be claimed that it still will become an oligarchy. Hence the supposed law is inherently unfalsifiable.

While studies of the history of such institutions might reveal a trend, there is no reason to suppose that such trends are inevitable. Trends can only tell us what happened in the past, not what will happen in the future. This is a result of the problem of induction, addressed by Popper in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and resolved by fablsificationism. Inductions of the form that are used to justify the supposed "iron law" are logical invalid. Even in physical sciences, the statements sometimes called "Laws" are for fablsificationism only as-yet unfalsified generalisations, to be further tested. Historicism will oft mistake such a trend for a supposed universal law.

Social laws are not causal, and future human and social consequences are not necessitated by the past. At the extreme, humans can choose to act in opposition to such predictions. It is logically impossible to know what someone will do in the future, since even given that they know, it remains that they might do otherwise. I can predict that you stop reading this post here, but it remains that you may choose to read on. — Banno

It's hard to argue this point because this seems like a variation of Hume's problem of induction, and I think ultimately Hume was right, there is no reason to believe the future will resemble the past. But you can use that objection against science as a whole, and all we are left with is some form of absolute scepticism. Scientist haven't cared all to much about this lack of epistemological foundation and just went with what seemed to work.

Specifically about the social sciences, as you are probably well aware, there has been a replication crisis , starting a good decade or so ago... and I would argue they haven't really recovered since. Either results of research cannot be replicated or the research is so trivial truism to be of little use... I think there are issues with trying to use the same methodology as the exact science in the social sciences. It's just a lot harder to isolate phenomena and have all other variables remain the same so empirical test can be run that can be compared with eachother.

So, again, where does that leave us?

We can just throw our hands up into the air, and give up on the endeavour altogether. I would be fine with that, I wouldn't say Michels theory is a scientific theory, but I still do think there is something there, even if not scientifically proven. We believe a lot of things that strictly can't be proven.

Or we can try to devise better methodologies that do try and address these concern, like Peter Turcin. Maybe that will be successful, maybe not, we will have to see.

What constitutes an oligarchy is left ambiguous by the Law. As a result the supposed trend towards oligarchy is left to interpretation, so any mooted historian may find or falsify the trend as they see fit - based on their ideology, as it where. Ideology is written into the very structure of the "Law". Hence it is disingenuous to insist that responses avoid ideology. A better response would be to openly admit the ideologic base of both the supposed "Law" and the responses. — Banno

What I object to is the all to common dismissal out of hand, because it doesn't fit our ideology. You were the first one in this thread to post something that actually dealt with the substance. I would like to think that the purpose of a philosophy board is to question our beliefs rather than to have them confirmed and echoed all the time.

Oligarchies fail eventually, even Michels himself says as much, because oligarchs tend to always push inequalities to far, and so it breeds discontent, and eventually revolutions... at which point you get new organisation and things can start again.

The point is not that oligarchy is a good system, or even that one shouldn't even try to do something about it, tensions and struggle against oligarchy is just as inevitable... the point, I think, is rather that we never arrive at some perfect static system, at some utopia, but that these things are in perpetual motion.

Yes yes, it always comes down to this, we don't like the consequence of an idea, so it can't be true... as if the consequences of an idea have anything to do with it's veracity.

I wanna say maybe Poppers critique is itself ideological, as a progressive you would want the future to be unconstrained from the past, so it can be whatever we want it to be.

It seems to me that Poppers critique in the poverty of historicism would apply more to something like dialectical materialism and Marxism, than Michels thesis about how organisations tend to oligarchy... because Marxism is much more a prediction of where the totality of society goes.

Maybe more importantly, I wonder where that leaves us? If we want to demand the same methodological standards like in the exact sciences, it seems to me very little can be said that would stand that test, and so we are just left with competing ideologies without any real justification in past events? That doesn't seem right to me, the world does seem to put constraints on what is possible.