given that the government would be relegated down to a regalian function of maintaining property rights and a military for defense and security (primarily for upholding property rights) — Maw

You're being too generous. If Rand's ideal was realized (nearly everyone believed in objectivism because, being objective, nearly everyone arrives at the conclusion it's true; as is the case with other beliefs we consider objective -- such as there is some force gravity force us toward the ground, that the sun rises every day, and our our bodies die), then there would be no police, soldiers, judges (or politicians managing them) willing to carry out any "duty" toward the government, other people, much less some conception of justice based on the interest of the collective. If a police or soldier takes some risk to themselves, it's because there was payment proportional to the risk to render it rational for the maximization of their own gain. If a judge rules the only principle demonstrated is the ruling maximized the self interest of the judge. Moreover, there would be no "state ideology" determining some preference of where payment for service should come from (i.e. no police or soldier would believe they should work with preference for the state where they live, rather than who can pay the most), and so these police, soldiers, judges and politicians would be open to business to the highest bidder, as any good businessman is, with zero qualms over origin or their values (measured in something other than money, which they clearly have the most, and so the most value, being able to place the highest bid).

Likewise, if there is any democracy at all to try to select the few non-Randians who would risk gaining less by taking less bribes -- or, much worse, risk assassination -- to uphold some governing principle (whether it is fair property rights, fair trials to resolve contract disputes, or the fairness of the voting process; for fairness is it a pitiful cry of the weak), the people counting the votes would be as open for business to count in one way or the other, as police willing to arrest, plant evidence or assassinate if the right price right, to, among other things, get rid of these crazy non-Radians who would stand in the way of a rail project and other great deeds of the wealthy -- if sufficient payment is offered or violence threatened then not only are the votes counted in favour of who's bribed and threatened (and indeed carried out the threats on anyone that doesn't cooperate) the most, and the police and judges supposed to monitor the vote counters are as easily bribed or threatened to act in a rational way to both maximize their gain and minimize their personal risk.

Will "enlightened self interest" save the collective governing process? It can help in certain circumstances when it's clear to an oligarch that going too far in placing only Randians in positions of power will lead to chaos in the short term, but there are a few problems. First, what about the long term? if, as an oligarch, out of enlightened self interest and, in collaboration with my fellow oligarchs, we strike a truce amongst ourselves to place only enough Randians so the system offers little resistance to maximizing our own living conditions while minimizing the system itself falls apart to the point we too are affected, but placing the government on this trajectory things take this turn after we die, why would enlightened self interest prevent this scenario? Likewise, if we can extract all the value we can from the state and then just leave and go live in Switzerland to enjoy a stable society other people have foolishly built with democracy, why would enlightened self interest stop us? Also, what if the process of corrupting and pillaging the state is already underway, why would enlightened self interest compel me to take some risk to reverse the corruption rather than simply join in the fray and get out while the ports still function?

I can imagine the poor person who first picks up some of Rand's book, or listens to libertarians talking about Rand and then goes to this kind of Forum and asks quite innocently: "So, what do you guys think about Ayn Rand? Doesn't she have some good thoughts?" — ssu

People who stumble into a Scientology center (as alludes to), a meeting about the "Chronicles of the Girku", some evangelical group preaching the earth is 6000 years old, or that ISIS is the new caliphate and soon takeover the middle east and destroy all the infidels there and beyond and we should all submit ahead of the curve, or various online pseudo "quantum spiritualities", or any number of other crank philosophies -- many people may also be quite impressed and come here and say "don't they have some good ideas that should be taken seriously by this forum and academic philosophers?" as well as "there's a lot of people believing this and taking it quite seriously, isn't that evidence it has good arguments?".

What would you say to such people?

If you read my first comment on this thread, would you say something similar to someone impressed by any of the above, or is it not a good approach?

Ok, we both agree that whatever previous material you've written about the subject is not worth finding and referencing, if it hasn't been deleted. We've made progress past point one.

I see more than one point in the rest of your comment, why not be focused and brief dealing with one thing at a time?

Seems your standards of focused and brief are fairly arbitrary, only applicable when it suits you.

I enjoy going back and forth with people who act like as much of an unjustifiably arrogant asshole as you do. — Terrapin Station

What's your standard of "unjustifiably arrogant asshole"? Elaborate your criteria and what statements of mine fall into it.

especially goad you into typing so much in response to short answers. — Terrapin Station

Have you really goaded me? What would lead you to believe that? What are my aims here, why would you believe I haven't attained them?

Or, have I goaded you into demonstrating you don't follow your own demands of dealing with things "one at a time".

And goaded you into responding to a criticism of your ability to think critically with a pathetic Ad hominem of "arrogant asshole".

Maybe your posts are deleted because, failing to engage in critical thinking in good faith, you must find shelter in insults.

Maybe I have goaded you into demonstrating that you are unable to deal with the substance of my criticism of your points a, b and c, and so are simply trying to derail the conversation instead.

I provided a list of authors that wrote fiction and are taken seriously. You have not provided a single example, other than Rand, of an author "pigeonholed" as not-serious-philosophy because they "initially wrote fiction", by the academic philosophical community. If it's a pattern, certainly there are other examples; if it's not a pattern then why did this only befall Rand? If you want to progress one at a time, then first backup your claim 'a'.

Re "the reasons I believe my answer was 'complete'"--what the heck would a "complete" answer be for this? — Terrapin Station

You refer to your own comment as a "nutshell", which implies it's a summary of some more complete answer. Since you yourself make this claim, why not back it up and show what your nutshell comment is a summary of. You also make the implication that you have nothing else to say on the matter, therefore these previous answers, whatever they are, are also complete in the sense that they satisfactorily deal with any criticism ... But since this great work of yours has been lost, and your objective here is only to goad people into writing philosophy on a philosophy forum and not to try any serious re-attempt of defending your position, it seems we may never know.

The first thing you say is:

This question comes up periodically, and I thought I answered it again recently, but in a nutshell, it's a combo of — Terrapin Station

Implies you've already made answers that you consider satisfactory with respect to the issues raised here and are only here providing the nutshell version. Or at each time you only provide a nutshell version of a more complete answer you choose to withhold and never elaborate? If not, what could be more relevant than a link to both satisfactory and more complete answers that you've already made?

Or did you mean to say, "This question comes up periodically, and periodically I am unable to provide a good answer and make as poor a showing of my critical thinking abilities as will demonstrate for you here". If so, we've reached complete agreement. If not, it's certainly easier to reference material you have already made than to remake it from scratch.

"You also never responded . . ." — Terrapin Station

Ok, have you responded to my very first question for you?

Please provide a link and the reasons you believe your answer was complete and correct in the other discussion you mention. — boethius

I don't see how you have progressed by methodically dealing with things one at a time.

Let's solve one thing at a time. — Terrapin Station

Yes, I thought this was your method. And yet you make 3 successive posts about more than one thing. What gives? I thought you only ever did one thing. Furthermore, you skip all the way to point c (i) yet we haven't solved (a) much less (b).

To make matters worse:

Of course, you can type and blah blah blah on and on as much as you want, but I'm only doing one thing at a time. I see it as more or less a disease to have to type so much in response to simple comments. Aren't you capable of keeping things brief and focused? — Terrapin Station

Three comments in succession doesn't seem like one at a time. Or is it? One at a time but three times in a row? Are you being consistent here, or is it terribly not brief.

What does (c)(i) have to do with other thinkers? — Terrapin Station

"(i) not being a 'systematic' philosopher" also says nothing about quality of arguments.

Many philosophers are not considered 'systematic' in their process or world view, even disagreeing that a system is desirable or even possible. Academic philosophers do not view non-systemic thinkers as creating low quality argument simply because they work outside or even repudiate a systemic view. This is also extraneous to quality of argument. A philosopher may have positive argument for believing a system is desirable and possible and their system is correct, and so by inference, if this is correct, all non-systemic philosophers are wrong, but even in this case it's not cause to assume the non-systemic philosophers are making poor quality arguments: philosophers can make extremely high quality arguments requiring extremely careful consideration -- merit very serious review -- and still be wrong.

(c) is about the assessment of her content. — Terrapin Station

It's assessment of only part of her content, the part dealing with views of other thinkers, it says nothing of what arguments she presents herself from first principles, the much more important part.

No, I didn't. That was part of the reasons that I gave. — Terrapin Station

Your points a, b and c, are all extraneous to the quality of argument. One can write fiction and have high quality arguments. One can develop outside of academia and have high quality arguments. One can misunderstand previous thinkers and theories and nevertheless have high quality arguments (bring plausible premises to sound conclusions).

But if you also agree with my point d. that the overwhelming factor why Rand is not taken seriously is that she makes low quality arguments that have no merit to be taken seriously, then what is there to debate?

Sure a, b, and c add some slight additional obstacle for Rand to "break in" to academia on top of point d. but who cares. Shakespeare is relatively recently looked at very seriously as presaging many philosophical movements that developed later, such as existentialism (perhaps he was a very serious and dedicated philosopher that used fiction so as to avoid being burned at the stake), Spinoza and Schopenhauer were initially dismissed as irrelevant outsiders, and accusations of misunderstanding or misrepresenting previous thinkers and theories is exchanged between many schools of thought all the time (he who has "gotten" Nietzsche, cast the first stone).

What I was answering is why Rand isn't taught in an academic phil context. — Terrapin Station

Yes, this is the debate. You've advanced the theory that it's for reasons extraneous to the quality of her arguments: that a. she wrote fiction or then "initially fiction" (and so presumably academic philosophers will pigeonhole her as a writer of fiction and unlikely to take her fiction or later non-fiction work seriously due to the starting point), that b. she developed outside academia and so it's hard to "break in", c. and she had wonky and erroneous notions about previous theories and thinkers.

Now, if your saying she has the problem of the overwhelming point of d. creating very low quality arguments filled with fallacies and strawmen at every turn, then we are in agreement. However, based on your comments you seem to believe she is generally excluded from academic philosophy for your points a, b and c primarily, which leave the possibility she has great philosophical material to engage with but has been overlooked due to the biases of the academic philosophical community.

You're agreeing that the authors you mentioned aren't taught in an academic phil context. — Terrapin Station

I do not say this, I said I would answer after you explained why we should move the goal posts and why it's relevant to the debate even if we do move the goal posts. I feel I was pretty clear about this, but please point out where the ambiguity arose.

These authors are all taken seriously as philosophers, and taught as philosophers in the history of thought, and you can find plenty of academic dissertations on the philosophy of each one expressed in their fiction as well as use of their fiction to illustrate various philosophical themes. I would be surprised if you found a philosophy professor that dismissed any one of these thinkers as a just poor writing and arguments, nothing interesting philosophically, and really amazed if you found a professor that dismissed all five of these authors as "not philosophers; not relevant to philosophy departments".

They share in common with Rand writing fiction, but what they don't share is consistently misunderstanding previous thinkers and theories and formulating and attacking an entire field of strawmen.

But again, let's say you find a professor that does view Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Hesse, Tolstoy just as irrelevant to philosophy as Rand's fiction, what about Rand's non-fiction? Your contention 'a' seems to be it's dismissed because of her previously writing fiction, that the academic community tends to pigeonhole fiction writers who try to break out of this philosophically irrelevant genre, akin to a signer trying to expand into acting and directors and the public not giving fair treatment; what's your supporting evidence? Are there other authors that fit this pattern, or just Rand?

Which of those authors are you claiming are taught in philosophy departments as philosophers? — Terrapin Station

I didn't make any such claim, only that they all wrote initially and in some cases only fiction and are taken seriously in academic philosophy (your retort to my previous list of philosophers who also wrote fiction seemed to be that Rand is different because she initially wrote fiction). Why move the goal posts from "taken seriously" to "taught as philosophers"? Does it make a difference to the debate?

Now, I have no problem moving the goal posts and answering your question, but, first, taking one thing at a time, how does it even support your position one way or the other?

Since you want to save time, it should be pretty clear that if I answer "they are not taught as philosophers, just considered as serious philosophical material as I stated" this advances your cause, or perhaps some other answer would.

Whatever the case: How? How is this not completely irrelevant to the debate at hand?

And if it's not relevant, is not engaging in "the 'philosopher' label game" -- who of the thinkers taken seriously by academic philosophers is really a "philosopher", not just great writer, historian, intellectual, etc. and who isn't -- just petty deflection (i.e. to start a new debate about something else to avoid the substantive criticism already offered on your views)?

Of course, I'll also accept "ahhah, just wait and see what awaits you once I have your answer on this point" or some such variation. If you are certain your question is critical, I have no problem seeing where it goes.

Didn't I write the word "initially"? — Terrapin Station

What does this change? There are plenty of authors that likewise wrote initially fiction that are taken seriously, in some cases only fiction. If you wrote a masters or PhD thesis on some philosophical nuance in Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Hesse, Tolstoy, and many others, academia would not frown upon you for addressing a fictional author; rather they would be weary that you can find any nuance that has not already been addressed many times over, precisely because these authors are taken so seriously a significant body of work already exists about them that one should be cautious about making any new addition. And if one was criticized for addressing one of these or other works of fiction, the criticism wouldn't be that fiction is not a suitable form of philosophy but that the content is simply not original nor substantive and there is simply far better material available dealing with the subject matter; can you find any academic that has criticized Rand for being fiction rather than this latter form of argument?

If other fictional authors are taken seriously in academia, what is your argument about pigeonholing? which seems to imply it is a pattern of the academic philosophy community or then an exception was made in Rand's case? If there's a pattern there should be other examples. If an exception was made, why was fiction suddenly a factor in this case and not in others?

Edit: also, if we're solving one thing at a time, why skip over my first question of "Please provide a link and the reasons you believe your answer was complete and correct in the other discussion you mention." If you've already made a great defense of this issue, it seems a labour saving device -- which seems the presumed goal of "solving one thing at a time" is to save on labour -- to reference your existing defense and summarize your success; a victory lap is rarely considered onerous to the champion.

This question comes up periodically, and I thought I answered it again recently, but in a nutshell, it's a combo of — Terrapin Station

Please provide a link and the reasons you believe your answer was complete and correct in the other discussion you mention.

(a) initially she wrote fiction and it's difficult to move out of being pigeonholed (she's still popularly thought of as primarily a fiction author), — Terrapin Station

There are plenty of authors, taken seriously in academia, that wrote fiction, from the Greek Playwrights, to Shakespeare and Moliere, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Satre, Camus. Can you provide another example of a supposed relevant thinker, much less great philosopher, who has been pigeonholed as a fiction author?

Furthermore, the reason Ayn Rand comes up on philosophy discussion forums is precisely because she is not pigeonholed as simply a fiction author, otherwise she wouldn't come up at all. She was not interviewed about her views because she is just writing fiction. To her adherents she is the founder of objectivism, a philosophical school; they don't refer to other "real philosophers" that hold these views and then just mention Rand wrote some fiction with the themes. She is not dismissed by academics as terrible philosophy because it is fiction, but because it is terrible philosophy.

However, personally I would agree that she is simply a fiction author with as much philosophical relevance as Daniel Steel, and even writing in the same genre; just Steel writes eroticism for women, whereas Rand wrote erotic fantasy for young men wanting to masturbate to the contours of unfettered power.

(c) she's seen as (i) not being a "systematic" philosopher and (ii) having a lot of wonky notions, having misunderstandings, etc. about previous philosophers and theories — Terrapin Station

You seem to agree that she is not very learned, yet lament that she is not counted amount the learned. Is the criticism you mention correct but somehow irrelevant to the value of her arguments? Or is it incorrect and she does indeed accurately understand previous theories and philosophers? If the latter, please provide a citation of a typical supposed misrepresentation of previous thinkers and explain why it's in fact accurate. If the former, please explain why dealing essentially in strawmen doesn't impede relevant, much less brilliant, philosophy in Rand's case; would this be a general rule for every similar case?

Of course, many philosophers who are studied in universities, who are regularly published in academic journals, etc. also have issues with (i) and (ii), but they developed within academic philosophy. — Terrapin Station

Yes, please provide a list of these many academic philosophers who are as poor thinkers as Rand but are not only published but seriously studied by other academics. Let us compare the errors of the one with those of the latter and see for ourselves if they are similar and Rand is indeed unjustly not counted among the incompetent philosophers.

Though I agree with your conclusion, that Ayn Rand is uninteresting philosophical material, I have issue with several points of your argument.

I'm not familiar with Thomas Nigel's work, but from what you present it is equally uninteresting as Rand's and for the same reason. The idea our actions are determined by nature and nurture and so morality doesn't really exist, goes back to the ancient Greeks. If is main argument is "luck" then he's presenting nothing original and entertaining his views is just a waste of time for those familiar the works of the great philosophers who have debated this issue.

Though please point out if Nigel does review all this previous material in a serious way and makes some original extension, or at least useful synthesis, of it.

If not, it is a very similar case to Rand. She presents herself as saying something original, but the subject of self interest, that everyone does or then should act only in self interest, again goes back to the Ancient Greeks.

[...] right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. -- Thucydides

Likewise, Plato has a whole dialogue on whether the "just" only pretend to be just because it furthers their interests.

Worse still for Rand, literally the very first thing Homer thinks needing explaining is why Greek society doesn't always immediately descend into chaotic melee of all against all and the strong dominating the weak and taking what they want. His answer: Theseus and Pirithous killed all the brigands (i.e. expressing in mythological form the theory that the cohesion of society can only be maintained by heroic deeds of the equally strong defending the weak).

The work of Rand is akin to what real scientists -- i.e. those who have bothered to learn the material of their field -- call crank science -- amateurs who have barely scratched the surface of the field of their fancy and who believe they have generated some revolutionary genius concept. Of course, there's no problem being an amateur if one doesn't immediately conclude every new idea one has is original; but, if one suspects originality one bothers to go out and actually check (which is nearly guaranteed to result in finding the idea is not original and probably originated hundreds or thousands of years ago).

Moreover, it is nearly always the case that amateurs who do make some "maverick" contribution, still bothered to learn the material of their field, they just didn't do it in a academic setting; so they are exceptions that prove the rule (the rule being: no one is so smart as to be able to simply skip thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge by millions of participants and just jump straight to profound new insights).

Crank scientists and crank philosophers like Rand basically have the intellectual capacity of children, insofar as their subject matter expertise is concerned.

Someone serious about discussing Rand's contentions would go back to the ancients Greeks, the Tao, the Upanishads, Buddha, Confucius, the Tora and the Gospel, and see, starting from the beginning of written history and in addition what insights archaeologists and sociologists have gained in to pre-history and non-written cultures, and from this starting point see how the issue is debated all the way to the present, then present the results of this inquiry and the critical positions that have been taken over the years and the arguments in favour of preferred premises and conclusions and against the primary contenders with them, followed by one's original ideas, if there be any (there is no problem with novel analysis of old ideas).

This is a significant amount of work, but, if you think about it, it's very likely the only pathway to make some serious contribution to what has been already said. Crank philosophers like Rand don't bother to put in the work to make a serious contribution, so why should serious people take her seriously? There is plenty of crank philosophy out there, as it requires almost no effort to generate more and more or it, and there is simply no time to analyse it all and meticulously demonstrate every recasting of old ideas into new words and uncovering every totally unsupportable argument, false dichotomy and total obliviousness to critical contentions.

Now, the proponents of Rand take comfort in her popularity within the US. "She must have good ideas if she has such a following" is generally the view, implicit or explicit, that they believe is good basis to avoid engaging in the actual philosophical material that has been written about their beliefs. This is of course a foolish view.

edit: it was Theseus and Pirithous not so much Hercules.

I am quite new to the practice of Stoicism but I am now reading "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" and I am thoroughly enjoying it. — Rein Van Imschoot

These "Stoic" books for a popular audience are generally written by fools that don't understand stoic philosophy, but are just trying to cash in on the cachet the word stoicism has, since we use it today sort of as a proxy to say someone is wise about things, and of course one of the emperors of Rome with good name recognition was a stoic (and our culture heavily romanticizes the Roman period).

I would suggest reading the source stoic material. Boethius goes without saying. As well as more academic analysis of the history of stoic philosophy. A really approachable academic view is "history of philosophy without any gaps", has a few podcasts on stoicism.

Why "pop" stoicism should be avoided, is because the authors, being fools striving to spin stoicism into gold, can't help but psychologize stoicism: that stoic ideas and outlook will "help you in your life" by building a "more resilient psychology" in one way or another. They may allude to the stoics having a different purpose for their philosophy, but being fools, can't or don't bother to explain it.

This is particularly evident in your post and to the large extent the author has mislead you or then
is confused themselves.

Although a term "negative visualization" could be used in the context of stoicism, it is misleading and I would suggest avoiding the term. Without a lot of caveats, "negative visualization" is a straight up contradiction in stoic philosophy.

The core of stoic philosophy is that the only thing that has value is your own intentions, as that's all that you can control. Therefore, in this moral system the only "negative visualization" available would be visualization that you adopted intentions that you view as profoundly evil. There is zero reason to carry out such a visualization.

What the author has, due to either their total incompetence or then complete disrespect of the stoic philosophers (probably both), confusingly borrowed from stoicism for their vain purpose of writing a crappy book, is the practice of accepting all the potential consequences of ones intentions and decisions.

The consequences of intentions in stoicism are accidental, as we cannot control outcomes, and so there they are all equivalent in terms of moral evaluation.

Now, in a context where we are using "good and bad" or "positive or negative" without any moral connotation -- for instance we can talk of a "good" chess move or a "bad" chess move in a given chess position and there is clearly zero moral evaluation going on about the chess pieces or chess players -- then we can categorize, for the purpose of analysis, potential consequences in "good" and "bad" or "negative" and "positive" with the mentioned caveats to remove all moral evaluation.

However, this is a confusing use of language when talking about ethics, even if in normal life we'd of course agree that your apartment burning down "would be bad", in thinking about a philosophical subject where good and bad are used to evaluate moral worth, and easily carry a moral connotation -- for instance, if I say "you're a bad chess player" it can easily carry a tinge of moral judgement; that being a bad chess player makes you a lesser person in my view -- depending on how I say the words or then the context of the discussion.

And the Stoic writers take some pains to make this as clear as possible, that of course from a purely analytic and abstract point of view they prefer their house not to burn down. However, the goal of stoicism is not to accept the core stoic ethical perspective, and then add on a whole bunch of "but, but, but" to reconstruct a completely banal view of life where it remains "better to be rich" and that stoicism can help one have a "strong psychology" which both increases the probability of getting rich as well as serves as an arrogant hedge in the event one loses something.

The ethics of stoicism is profoundly non-material. Yes, we live in a material world and the consequences of our decisions play out in the material world, but it is not the material that has value.

Understanding stoic philosophy should not lead to the question "how does this help me" but rather a cascade of self-doubts about one's roll in the world and society: what one's intentions really are and if those intentions are good or not, and what standard of morals are the good standard of morals. Stoic philosophy is not a tool, crutch or hedge, to accomplish better the flippant goals provided by social conformity or then better coping with being left out of those goals: it is rather first and foremost a profound critique of conformity and rejection of all intentions that has crept in from being brought up in society but have no justification when looked at more closely, and second a system of analysis to help in a search for the good and true intentions.

As a last note, stoicism, although an advanced intellectual system, does not place value on the intellect, it is an accidental feature like anything else material that has no value in itself. Anyone with whatever faculties and whatever knowledge can be striving toward the good much more so than someone with the best faculties to understand and the best knowledge about stoicism. The effort towards the good, which stoicism prizes, is not an analytical construct but rather an intuitive fundamental effort of the will, soul, core or being or whatever you want to call the intentions that precede conceptualization. Stoicism is therefore not needed to be morally worthy, indeed more morally worthy than any stoic, but rather stoicism is a natural consequence of people with the intention to improve their intentions and who happen to have the time, faculties, access to knowledge to engage in analysis about themselves; given the opportunity and capacity, someone with good intentions will likely conclude they should verify, as far as is possible, if their intentions are as good as they think. To do this is a lengthy project that must encompass not only analysis of oneself but also society and the natural world. To "accept the consequences of one's actions" is not meant as an easy going, wishy-washy "ke sera sera" attitude, but it is implied actually knowing what those consequences are likely to be, which requires knowing as much about people and the natural laws as one possibly can, to then accurately predict what's likely to happen (the distribution of potential results and their relative probabilities) and to then evaluate if that is really in line with what one intends, and if not reforming one's intentions. For the ancient philosophers, it went without saying that one should try to know things, but in our age of shortcuts and glorification of laziness, focusing on the "accepting outcomes" is completely meaningless if one is clueless to what is actually going on in the world and what affect one's actions actually have or could have.

I'm rather disconnected from the world but whenever I check the news it's about people who are supposedly trying to change the world. — TheMadFool

Perhaps, it shouldn't surprise you that this is what you find on the news, but you maybe mixing different kinds of self-identified "world changers" and generalizing the disingenuity and poor arguments of some to all.

I would argue your impression should not surprise you, because anyone trying to make any change at all will claim that A. the world needs changing and B. that their proposed change is good.

Many in this group, however, may not actually believe in these statements, rather they may just believe it's the statements to make; i.e. marketing. For instance, a corrupt politician (who is already corrupt and not fooling themselves about it) won't make the statement "I'm corrupt, vote for me" but rather they will market themselves as bringing positive change. Likewise, corporate lobbiest, executives, funded academic, conflict-of-interest pundits, funded think-tankers, or otherwise corporate representatives may have no illusions that they are presenting an argument in the news that is good for the corporation that is paying them to make those said arguments, and it's not good for the world in general and they are only making these arguments because they are being paid. There are also useful-idiots in the same categories that have no critical thinking skills; they may actually believe the proposed A+B arguments, and are funded precisely because they champion that view. Likewise, for non-profit groups such as religions, NOG's, social movements of various kinds. And beside these, there's the "silicon valley startup" culture, darlings of main stream media, that, if you are dissatisfied, are offered up and fawned over as the "radicals" that are going to shake up and disrupt business as usual; and again, whether they believe it or not, it's better marketing to say your new service or product is making the world a better place.

Now, this is not to paint all politicians, corporations, non-profits, religious organizations, and entrepreneurs with the same brush, my entire point here is that we can not generalize from a particular self labelled or media labelled group, and we can expect, and certainly can't exclude, that the self-aware disingenuous "world changers" as well as useful idiots they employ appearing in the news; it likely follows that someone with critical thinking skills will not be very convinced by arguments from this group. And, more importantly, if the mainstream media was a terrain that not only allowed the disingenuous and useful idiots but actually favoured them (perhaps because corporate news is not a neutral organization itself or it they are simply doing there job and "giving people what they want"), then we might expect to find exactly the following observation:

I guess by ''change'' people want to give the impression that the efforts of these people, who hog the airtime on networks, are positive; an improvement so to speak. — TheMadFool

I don't want to put corporate news on trial, here, I simply wish to invite you to consider if your observation is surprising or not.

What I wish to focus on is the underlying question of your post, that is if "world changing" itself is a fools errand or not.

You seem to be aware that in the past world changing was probably needed as well as aware that, being largely disconnected from the world that the people who surround you represent a statistical selection bias. You see little need for world changing around you and your argument that this sentiment might be generalized seems to rest on remaining unconvinced by the main stream media. Since you already have 2 premises needed to challenge your view, I'll leave you to inspect the third.

I'd also like to mention that between the disingenuous and useful idiots groups above and well the genuine, well reflected and, if not correct then compelling interlocutors, there's of course a large spectrum in between, of genuine but confused, inarticulate or even counter productive people that are perhaps right in their feeling that the world needs changing but are unable to formulate their reasons for this, much less what would be efficient action with respect to it. Again, if these people are often on the media, perhaps because they're a lot of them or perhaps because they are useful targets or perhaps the media really is neutral and just giving a platform to everyone, then it likely follows, even they are right about some things, that they are unconvincing.

The point I'd like to focus on, is the the positive argument that some world-changers are correct, of which I'd self-label myself as apart and so feel responsible to defend this world view on the forum; of course, as a tiny part of my world changing mission.

There are many arguments of why actively changing the world is a worthwhile endeavor, but I'll focus on two.

The first, is that, as you mention we pretty much all believe slavery was bad and that people were in the right to actively endeavor to end slavery. If we consider this believe as correct and we look closer at it, we find that the question of slaver was not one of number, that "most people were slaves" or even "most slaves are treated brutally" but of type, that slavery itself is morally repugnant. Slavery is still very much a thing and if we believe the abolitionists had the the right cause, then it's extremely likely that they would not have consider a resolution of slavery simply calling slavery a different name, but that exactly the same or sufficiently similar conditions to slavery fall within the same scope of the slaver-is-bad argument. Since it is not a question of number but of type, then it follows we should continue to change the world to abolish slavery until the task is done. Likewise, the same argument applies if we believe people who fought for democracy were in the right until the entire world is democratic (the counter argument that some people don't "want to be democratic", well if it's the majority who feel that way then the only way to check is through democracy).

The second argument is to simply look at the present and talk numbers. Are (entirely preventable) wars and famines affecting millions morally justified to do nothing about? If someone was starving right in front of me, would I act? What changes morally if the person is far away? What can practically be accomplished, if anything, is a much harder challenge but does something being inconvenient or difficult sufficient grounds to dissolve moral responsibility? If we turn our attention to the West, though I would agree we need not worry about the middle class, there are a large number of people in poorer classes: should we care? essentially depends on whether the status quo is justifiable justifiable.

The third argument is to consider whether the global economic system is sustainable. If it's not sustainable, regardless of whether one believes it would require large or small change, then the definition of not-sustainable is that it will come to an end on the one hand and on the other that the process of being unsustainable is the destruction of conditions, in other words nature. From here, one can argue that even if one cares not about the slaves, the oppressed or the down-trodden because there is not enough of them or it is entirely self-inflicted suffering, and one only cares about middle-class Western life style as a "good thing", then if the system supporting this life style is not sustainable then presumably there is some basis to act to make it sustainable; otherwise it's difficult to say it's a good thing as you seem to suggest in your post. The other direction this can take is that preserving the conditions for human civilization, whether the value is placed on civilization or nature, is a moral responsibility; that every avoidable extinction is a tragedy and we should strive to avoid more of them. The question of whether our economic system is sustainable -- or even if it is not whether it will simply self correct without anyone doing a particular effort above what would otherwise fancy them to do -- is of course an empirical question with a significant amount of resources available.

Before discussing the empirical (not only is perhaps the system sustainable, perhaps there are no slaves or no sufferers that choose not to suffer), and in particular for a philosophy forum it is I believe more fitting, I am here only defending that they conclusions follow from the premises: that if there are slaves, then we should "change the world" until there are no slaves; that if there are preventable wars and famines and preventable undignified working conditions, we should act to prevent these things; that if our system sustenance and shelter is not sustainable we should act until it is sustainable. Would you agree or disagree that these arguments are sound?

If there is agreement, then both the empirical questions as well as what actions, if any, are effective and which, if there are several, are the most effective, would be the next pertinent issues.

Then again, never has any mass extinction event before happened with such an adaptable and dominant species around. If (and when) some species has by it's own actions inadvertently dug it's own hole for it's own extinction, no species has ever had such awareness of it's own actions than the species you boethius belong to. And I think you aren't alone with your thinking. — ssu

Sure, there are many new elements to the current situation that have no precedence. However, unless our novel abilities reduce risks to essentially zero, we are still left with the question of how much global risk is acceptable. Are you arguing our adaptability makes us immune to catastrophe?

Hmm. Saying that others are in denial means that you are saying that they are wrong. — ssu

Yes denial is a combination of both being wrong and having the information and faculty easily available to arrive at the right answer. Of course, people in denial will believe they are right or then then issue is trivial.

If I argue that the end the World isn't close at hand, am I in denial? — ssu

Please re-read my comment.

I emphasize quite clearly that these problems are complex, we cannot know when breaking points are: maybe they are far off. We do not know.

The issue is how much risk is tolerable. 50 percent? 10 percent? 1 percent? 0.1 percent?

So no, it is not denial to argue the end of the world is not close at hand, in the sense of a guarantee. I also would argue the end is not guaranteed.

If I argue that the obvious actual problems do pose a serious threat, but not an existential one, am I in denial? — ssu

Yes, I would say this is denial.

The logical structure of the serious global problems that we are discussing, imply an increase in existential risk the greater the "serious risk".

The more global systemic problems, the more our social and ecological systems are stressed, and the greater the existential risk.

Though this issues isn't too relevant to me personally -- as I believe we should feel responsible for avoiding a large majority of human caused extinctions of other species -- even if you are only concerned about humanities survival full stop, the issues I brought up in my previous post do have a real chance of leading to extinction.

For instance, climate change could cause a global famine could trigger a nuclear war, which in turn causes a nuclear winter, which could destroy most photosynthesis and so oxygen levels would then plummet; it's not a foregone conclusion survival long term is easy in post-apocalyptic oxygen-low atmosphere: bunkers and submarines and the like would certainly have technology to make enough oxygen in the short term, but in the long term it maybe impossible to maintain bubble-ecosystems and related technologies.

Of course there's a chance a global famine won't happen, and even if it does a nuclear war doesn't result etc. The issue is what probability is morally acceptable with respect to various chain of events leading to extinction.

The more we disrupt the climate, the more biodiversity we destroy, the more plastic and other waste we dump in the environment, and the more resources we consume frivolously, my contention here is the more stress we place on ecological and social systems, and the more stress these systems experience the greater the likelihood of reaching breaking points.

The research is readily available on the state of natural systems. Even a cursory examination of the research is more than enough to establish the global risks we face are non-trivial. The question is what level of global risks (to nature, to civilization, to the human survival as such) are morally justifiable?

Just last week the UN has released an assessment of biodiversity where they conclude over a million (additional) species are at risk of extinction if we continue business as usual (they of course have factored in projected population declines in reaching this conclusion). It's simply not clear what the affects will be on earth systems of losing one million species. From a risk-management perspective, it's far better to not run the experiment to find out.

We won't stay long in the overshoot in my view.

One has to understand that there will be a peak of human population, and then it will decrease. This happens because of the rise of prosperity. Young people alive can quite well see "Peak Population" and then deal with the problems resulting from declining global population. — ssu

Though I agree we won't stay in overshoot for very long, by definition overshoot comes to an end, the danger is ecosystems collapsing.

Population peak is a help to arrive at sustainability, but is far from sufficient.

There are plenty of UN and other academic papers and reports on our unsustainable use of resources.

If we take no preventative measures, overshoot would resolve in one of three scenarios.

We are currently at a warm peak, interglacial, of a long ice age climate regime where there is permanent ice at the poles. Our warming of the climate, so far, is pretty bad, disrupting forests and killing corals, as well as causing economic harms such crop losses, more powerful storms, more floods, more droughts and coastal erosion. However, these things, today (and as they get a lot worse tomorrow), are a small nuisance compared to pushing the earths climate system into a "hot box" regime, that last existed hundreds of millions of years ago. When icesheets and permafrost start to collapse, the process feeds itself by warm water drilling through the ice and making it softer, carbon beneath being released as well as libido change making it warmer. It just so happens that when earth's orbit and spin are just so to start such a process of collapsing ice sheets, every 40 000 to 100 000 years, during our cold-box regime, though a very rapid, the process runs out of steam and ice sheets remain on Greenland and Antarctica as well as the cap in the north pole; processes that remove greenhouse gases in combination to moving to cooler (for the Northern hemisphere) part of the orbit cycle, leads to rebuilding the Northern continental ice sheets. We simply don't know exactly what it would take to fully complete the cycle of de-icing the world, nor exactly what the implications would be, but what is agreed by the experts is that the risk is very real and the consequences are catastrophic on a global and permanent scale (a large part of the earth maybe uninhabitable, essentially all rain forests would likely desertify, and the ocean ecosystem may collapse completely). What we know from studying past climate and computer models is that the earth system is very sensitive to greenhouse gases and libido changes (fairly subtle differences in orbit translate to a difference between kilometer thick ice all over Canada, Europe and Russia, and a big forest with people living and growing food there).

The other problem, that is made worse by climate change and would result from a switch to a hot-box regime, but we are also causing outright even without climate change is web-of-life collapse. We know from previous mass-extinctions that the web-of-life can only take so much disruption before the system simply collapses and a majority of life forms cannot survive or adapt. Again, we do not know what the line in the sand is for the major world ecosystems, but we know it is there. A good analogy is someone who is overworked and super stressed and is a hazard to themselves and others; we can see there's a danger, but it's impossible to predict "the day" where the person falls asleep at the wheel, or develops a fatal disease, or just snaps; people can be tough and resilient, but there is always a breaking point; when ecologists talk of "stresses" for an ecosystem, they are meaning to imply that enough stresses and the system can no longer cope.

Lastly, even without global and severe ecosystem collapse of the above types, we may encounter cascading failure of our global industrial system. Though depleting any given resource can be solved, it is not a magical process but takes capital and organization; depleting too many resources in combination to supply line disruptions due to conflict and disasters of various kinds, more or less analogous to how ecosystems can break and collapse, could lead to a economic collapse spiral that cannot be recoverable. The world's transport and energy infrastructure is a complex interdependent web and the world only has so much food in store. The intuition that our systems are fairly fragile is, in my view, why post-apocalyptic movies and television is so compelling; the break down of society is easy a very believable process. At the moment, famines are a regional thing, and diversity of location as well as food stores is a strong buffer against global famine; but resistance to a threat is not quite the same as being totally immune. Although I would doubt very much a global famine has no engineering solution, the problem is a feedback loop between disruption to our infrastructure and political disruptions (preventing the infrastructure problems being solved) that spins into chaos. As the US military has recently concluded in a study, a permanent collapse of the US electric grid would result in some 90% of American dying within a year or so; what exact steps would lead to such a scenario are difficult to predict, but it should not be discounted as a potential failure mode (even absent large scale climate shift or ecosystem collapse).

People in denial about these issues, which I expect a good part of this forum would be not to mention the general population, like to say "they don't believe these things are likely" or then "well we'll solve these problems with technology, I believe in science"; however, the question is not whether these risks are more than 50% probable, the question is how high a probability is morally tolerable. When scientists say we are conducting an uncontrolled experiment at a global scale, they mean that the inherent risks of doing so are morally intolerable from the outright, regardless of whatever equivocations one may like to throw on how high the risks are.

I think it's useful to add to my last comment, of which the theme is to reduce everything to observations and abstract mathematics, that physicists do not generally have the view that we're just noticing patterns from our "head box" and the math gives the right patterns of what to expect but has no meaning, rather they do usually view there is profound building blocks of the universe in the mathematics.

What physicists generally view as "what's really real" are symmetries and symmetry breaking.

If there was no symmetry then nothing would stay the same from time to time or place to place, and there would be no time or space to begin with, and so nothing could have any identity (which we seem to have, so we don't live in a universe with no symmetry) and if symmetry was never broken then everything would be exactly the same everywhere and again there would be no identity apart from the whole (and we seem to be a separate part from everything surrounded by other similar separate parts, and so again we don't live in a fully symmetric universe).

So, although we can't really visualize the "true substance" and there can always be smaller features we can't see at the moment - and may never be able to see - we do know that whatever the true substance is that we live in, it has real properties of symmetry as well breaking of that symmetry; and when we think about what it is to "know a substance" it is to know properties of it, so in this sense we do know something fundamental of the noumena that is beyond simply our observations. What we don't know, for now, is exactly how all the symmetries and symmetry breaking fit completely together (but we do know a surprising amounts).

Well, that was a throwaway comment. What I mean is anything could be the case for all we know. — EnPassant

Yes, I agree, Kant's noumena, the thing in itself, could be anything.

When I mention we may have a revolution in physics that may change completely our concepts of time and objects ... likely we will still be wondering about the noumena.

Space is two things. It is an ontological reality and a geometric reality. Ontologically space is there. It is not nothingness, it is a substance. But space as geometry seems to be more accessible to science. — EnPassant

Yes, one way to put this distinction into relief, is that we could conceptualize living in a world that has no regular clocks or rulers. We could perceive and do things but could not make any geometry, as we currently understand it.

We don't see particles, we only see trace effects. A spot on a photographic plate is a trace effect, not a particle! What is important here is to see the both the detection apparatus and the trace effect are macroscopic, classical objects; they both exist in classical spacetime. This means that the trace effect is necessarily a classical object, obviously located in classical spacetime. But where is the particle before/after detection? Nowhere. Nowhere in classical spacetime that is. This is why Bohr says it is meaningless to say where it is. It is 'elsewhere'. — EnPassant

I am also partial to reducing to Borhs view, in terms of what we are really justified (at the moment) of taking.

It's not a popular view in "physics discussions", but that's because it doesn't give many ideas; visualizing different interpretations is generally more fruitful, but when physicists ask after a bunch of talk of "what are the observables and what are the operators" I generally take this to imply at the end of the day we need to get back to Borh's view to see what's, if anything, has been accomplished.

However, there is an alternative view, I believe most associated with Dirac, which is the goal is to build a physics theory that describes the quantum realm, describes our apparatus that probes the quantum realm and describes ourselves and to fully get rid of the "classical apparatus of the eye, computer screens and detectors". From what I can tell, this view is gaining a lot of popularity. As far as I know there's no epistemological basis to reject this view, just that it hasn't succeeded yet. Though my feeling is that someone with enough skill and knowledge could still make a very robust defense of Bohrism.

If there is a light source at A and a photographic plate at B and a photon is detected it is natural to assume that the photon traveled in a straight line from A to B. But, strictly speaking, all we can say is that the photon left a trace effect at A and a trace effect at B. — EnPassant

The core of quantum theory is that we cannot "see particles" like we can see large objects; all the math just transforms initial conditions to observables that experiments can probe. Particles are also not really assumed in quantum physics, they are just an analogy for quantized field vibrations, and quantized fields are basically just an analogy for abstract mathematics (abstract spaces that contain all the variables and operators that convert the variables a probabilistic prediction of what a given probe of the system will find) that tie the initial conditions to observables.

Because this is the view and we never actually see what's "happening in the middle", we only ever observe on the sides of quantum phenomena, things have been recently reduced even further to the surface area around our system, such as a particle accelerator (where the detectors are essentially infinity away compared to the size of a quark which is being probed), black wholes (where information must be somehow "on" the event horizon), as well as the entire universe, where in each case we observables are tied together and we can forget about there even being a middle, what is referred to as "the bulk" -- we live in and perceive the bulk, but it seems we don't need it to do physics ... maybe.

For, another theory being worked on today reduces things even further to just "events" that are all discrete and individual are not in a "space" but have a network of relations between them which gives rise to the illusion of space, time, particles, fields etc.

If the photon is not really travelling in a straight line (because it is not even in classical spacetime) the straight line must be seen as an artefact of the experimental apparatus itself. This is because the whole experiment is taking place on 'this side' of the interface between these two spacetimes. Consequently any relationship between trace effects must be in terms of a classical 4-D geometry. That is, the positions of particles (in reality trace effects) is imposed on the situation because the experimental apparatus, being a classical object in classical spacetime, can do nothing else but force things into a classical geometry. — EnPassant

Our apparatus is definitely classical, but it's a fairly radical direction to claim our apparatus imposes anything on the quantum realm ... as this seems to imply the apparatus exists first. To understand the limitations of what we're able to observe doesn't require giving up the assumption that we're made up of smaller things and that smaller things are causing things to happen in our apparatus. So to say our apparatus force things into classical space-time, is extremely ambitious. It's not required to go that far, though I wouldn't say on a philosophy that you can't go that far. The less extreme view is that we just so happen to live on a scale where thermodynamics affects us, we have definite observations, and how this arises from our various many parts is somewhat of a mystery: that entropy was low in the past and that quantum probabilities do resolve into something definite at some point between us and our parts / experiments; are both unresolved mysteries, as far as I know, that give rise, in addition to general relativity and the standard model, to our classical perceptions.

It may be that in quantum reality radioactive decay may be perfectly regular and predictable (maybe all such events are even simultaneous.) In mathematics it is easy to create a function with a regular input but a seemingly random output. — EnPassant

I'm not sure what you mean by everything happening simultaneous. If such were the case there would be no cause and effect?

In mathematics it is easy to create a function with a regular input but a seemingly random output. — EnPassant

Yes, hidden variables theories are when things are determined by features we can't observe, represented by variables that we don't know anything about and functions that transform those inputs into outputs; but since we don't know the inputs we can only evaluate the probability space of the outputs -- which happen to be worked out to exactly the same predictions as quantum physics currently provides without the hidden variables.

I agree with your definition of the difference between classical and quantum time (what you seem to call metaphysical time). — EnPassant

I am not equating classical and metaphysical time. One could do so (that there is a newtonian-like world beneath our ability to observe), but by metaphysical time I mean to refer to any and all definitions that are not observing clock ticks.

But if we deem a series of events to be random - like radioactive decay - we should specify by what time line they are random. — EnPassant

The randomness issue is not directly related to time definitions, but to whether there are hidden features that we can't observe.

The position that there is not any randomness in a Newtonian sense, is called "hidden variables theories", but you can imagine that there's just small "springs and gear mechanisms" everywhere (that we can't observe) that fully determining how every event turns out; the internal states of these tiny mechanisms are the hidden variables. Actually building such theories is usually highly abstract and don't generally involve tiny springs and gears but deterministic fields or just deterministic abstract variables added to our existing theories: variables we cannot, and can never, observe; they just remain an unknown and the probabilities are built-up out of our lack of knowledge; just like if I shuffle a card deck I can predict a 1 in 52 chance of flipping over any card due to losing track of the variables, but the event is not spontaneous since if we do keep track with a high-speed camera we can work it out, unlike radioactive decay -- current quantum theories, as they are used, simply give us directly the probability curve of radioactive decay or any other event; it is pure spontaneity.

Physicists generally take this pure spontaneity view because there it makes not difference to add variables that have no consequence on the results; so there's no practical reason to think in terms other than pure spontaneity. Of course, not everyone, those working on hidden variable theories have a different view, and I'm sure there's some physicists that don't view hidden variable theories as fruitful to work on, and would bet against them coming up with any new prediction, but do not believe in pure spontaneity from a metaphysical point of view.

And, according to quantum physics things will stay with the pure spontaneity in terms of how predictions are made, but we can't exclude a revolution in physics next year or a thousand years from now that changes this perspective.

The definition of space and time would likely be a central part in any revolution in physics, but not necessarily relating to the spontaneity issue. Quantum gravity would be a revolution in physics, and the main approach for a while was to simply try to fit gravity into our Quantum theory and behave like the other forces (reduce everything to the quantum paradigm and call it a day); it's only the failure to have done so that has led physicists to more radical frameworks, that redefine time and space differently.

'Greed' is probably more appropriate to the private sector individuals earning disgustingly high amounts. We all work for personal 'gain' in this system. — Devans99

We all work for gain, but not all of us can work for personal profit maximization or the system doesn't work? This is what I understand from your statement.

No they should not. Corrupt governments do get found out in the end. So do corrupt individuals. I think in the west, the civil service is relatively free from corruption. Politics is a different question though. — Devans99

But this just pushes the question of who is responsible over again. I asked who was responsible for maintaining the system, you said civil servants, but it is in fact the citizenry that must do the work of overseeing the civil servants. Again what ethic should they base this oversight roll on? Why can't the citizenry also seek to maximize gain, why is it only the capitalists and mobsters that can have this ethic depending on what system they find themselves in? For instance, why should a citizen bother to keep informed or bothering to vote if they do not evaluate it is as a positive risk/reward activity, as the same energy going other activity has a higher reward function for themselves?

A followup question, given that we agree capitalists do not have a personal ethic that is compatible with public service, it is only accidental that they produce value in your description due to a government system and culture, shouldn't the citizens strive to keep capitalists away from influencing governing processes? Considering they only produce value with their personal system of greed due to the system they find themselves in, isn't it a catastrophic risk to the system if the capitalists are able to change the system for their own gain rather than the good of all as the public servants would otherwise be doing?

I agree that capitalists do not deserve credit for doing God's work. Despite that, I still maintain that they are doing God's work even though they are often unaware of that. — Devans99

We agree that they deserve no credit, I am not convinced that they are doing God's work though unaware. But let us get back to this point at another refrain.

Yes, civil servants work for personal gain, but produce common good. They are part of the capitalist system too. — Devans99

You have changed the personal system from greed to gain, are these different motivations or the same?

I agree that civil servants work for a wage, but are they working under an ethic of personal greed, to maximize their gains or less?

For instance, if a civil servant is offered a bribe, and they are confident it is reasonable risk/reward, should they take the bribe? If not, what moral grounds should they have to refusing the bribe?

I think they are both greedy but the system/culture is different. — Devans99

How so? Anyone from any culture can join a gang and work their way up to become a mobster; in some cases, given their skill set, it's an economically rational decision.

Would you agree that a mobster that evaluates the risk/reward of continuing to be a mobster is no longer good, and embezzles their money into the legal economy and goes "legit", does not need to make any changes to their greed ethic to make such a move? And, once the mobster is fully legit and so operating like any capitalist, is now creating value on balance?

Likewise, you would agree a businessman who is in the red and turns to organized crime, such as dealing cocaine or fentanyl out of their operation, to supplement their income, as long as it's a wise decision in terms of risk/reward, such a business-to-mob transition likewise does not need any internal ethical changes to carry out such a course of action, just that it pays off?

Our governments maintains the system. — Devans99

I understand governments prevent us living in a society completely ruled by the mob.

My question is who maintains the government that maintains this culture/system in which, according to you, capitalists working under a personal greed ethic help society on balance?

If so, shouldn't the credit, the "God's work" be attributed to the government and whoever is involved in maintaining the government?

Most critical of my questions, concerning the actions that go towards this government/culture/system maintenance that are required for things to not be mob and corruption based, do these maintenance actions follow from a ethic of personal greed too? If so, can you describe how so?

If not, what other ethic is required to maintain the system, and who are the people that follow this other ethic and diverge from personal greed whenever it is necessary to maintain the system?

Both the mob and capitalists are greedy, but they are operating under different systems:

- Mobsters kill people and distribute dangerous drugs that harm society
- Capitalists do not kill people. They create goods and services that on balance, help society. — Devans99

This is exactly my question. Do they do this due to some internal difference in their greed ethic, if so what is that difference, or because they happen to find themselves in different systems?

If it is the latter case, who maintains the system that makes capitalists behave as you propose, and do they also operate under this greed ethic?

They create goods and services that on balance, help society. — Devans99

Have you checked? What's your definition of helping society and how did you calculate that capitalists on balance help society?

Capitalism is a system that turns personal greed into common good through specialisation and economies of scale. It's hugely inefficient but better than anarchy. So even though they may not be aware of it, capitalists are doing God's work (in an inefficient sort of way). — Devans99

The mob also runs on a system of personal greed, likewise the system is inefficient but certainly more efficient than anarchy, are the mobsters also doing God's work?

If they aren't doing God's work, what is the difference in the internal ethos of of personal greed that you would argue is different? If there is no real difference, and the ethos of greed is essentially the same and business don't just assassinate their competitors due to state controls, wouldn't the God's work be displaced to these systems of control on personal greed?

On the other hand, Derrida hated interviews, always insisting that his thought could not possibly be properly understood in a few sentences, and that it required a deep background in a host of philosophical traditions and authors. This doesn't sound like someone who expected to take on the role of public intellectual. — Joshs

Yes, I didn't make it clear in my post that he's still talking to an intellectual class, who then take ideas and make art or write articles and books or organize protests and movements (but higher education is free, so these people are much more mixed up in society). France has a public education system, and as I mentioned a pass time of debate, so there's a context where it's possible to impact the culture outside of television. The linking of television, punditry and intellectual, (i.e. marketing a simplified version of one's ideas rather expressing them) is exactly the framework I'd say we'd take more or less for granted in the English world if you want to impact the culture, but in France you can "write complicated philosophy" and enough people read it to have an impact. As I mention, it's still an intellectual class he's talking to, but one with more influence.

Also, he always said that he was much better received in the U.S. than in France. That is why he spent so much time lecturing in the U.S. — Joshs

But well received by who? The analytic philosophers? The establishment? Or cultural revolutionaries of one sort or another?

But even so, I think there was a similar "cultural conversation" happening in the US at that time, but largely confined to the liberal arts milieu; the silent majority was the majority as demonstrated several times (whereas in France this post war intellectual criticism resulted in May 68).

Aw for today, I'm not sure someone comparing Marxism in a Messianic framework would be so well received today, even at the universities.

Also, I didn't mean to imply that the educated French are big fans of Derrida, in my view his overall objective is to challenge people and not make a following; my point is just that there's a context in which his writing make a lot more sense, compared with when I tried reading him in English from an English monde-intellectual perspective.

The problem of translating an intentionally opaque thinker with thoughts "too complicated" for interviews is also a barrier.

This is not a defense of Derrida, just that he's not necessarily trying to debate solely with technically focused philosophers and win debates with them, and someone interested in philosophy in the English world is likely, at least it was my case, to view other technical philosophy enthusiasts as the only audience for philosophy and the only people who can appreciate "being thoroughly beaten" (likely he does not view those debates as winnable in any case, but the analytic philosophy malaise of "if you want to make money then you'll have these; if your a theist you'll want to argue this or that; if you care about nature then it can be defended; if you want to destroy the world you'll need these precepts" is where focus on analysis leads). After living on the continent for sometime, in my view as very focused not solely on ideas and analysis itself, but to an equal degree on how ideas are live in the cultural setting, how they change (how people change) and are trying to understand those living cultural ideas, to discuss and attempt to change them; in so doing, it's a much more "mystified" conversation, as we can't be exactly sure what those ideas are, what people actually believe, what new informations would convince them of what (of course now we have facebook and big data, so problem solved).

Stopping people from voting by threat/violence, or by already having removed their citizen rights, is not exactly what democracy is about. — I like sushi

The threat/violence and repression of the communists were done under constitutional powers granted by the Reichstag Fire Decree. It's debatable how many MPs voted for the Enabling Act simply because they "felt threatened", and again the electorate could have voted for representatives that would stand against the Nazi's regardless of threats (the communists were a minority and their repression was legal under the Fire Decree, people could have voted for more of them and/or more anti-Nazi social democrats; but they didn't and anti-Nazi's were in the minority).

There is nothing that says violent and manipulative people can't participate in democracy. It is you that is close but not cigar: you are including in your definition of democracy the assumption that it must be constituted by people who value the democratic process, peaceful deliberation and no dirty tricks. You are confusing democratic values with the democratic process itself.

Someone defending the philosophy of democracy must contend with the fact that the democratic process can be used by someone who values dictatorship to seize power through completely legal steps. Hitler is an example of this in practice.

The other parties could have opposed him, but didn't. It's a weak quibble to say they "felt threatened", the MP's that voted for the enabling act weren't forced at gun point to vote one way in a farce of democracy; there was debate, there was a deal cut with the leader of the other major party; there were nevertheless people who voted against it. The ambiance may have been "threatening" but any MP who felt strongly anti-Nazi certainly would have voted against despite the atmosphere; the fact is the majority were not strongly anti-Nazi and largely sympathetic to Nazism (hence why the leader of the other major party accepted a deal; support in exchange for a a position in the de facto dictatorship). If the repression of the communists was an unconstitutional outrage, the other parties could have opposed the repression and the Fire Decree (but they didn't because they didn't like the communists either).

Historians don't talk about the "Hitler coup" nor the "19 something revolution where Hitler overturned the government with a group of guerrilla fighters descending from the mountains".

Hitler was the government! And he exploited weaknesses in the design of German democracy to create a pathway to a legal dictatorship.

Now historians also agree that a majority of Germans were not in favour of Nazism, a lot thought he was a joke and wouldn't win a significant amount of seats and didn't bother to vote. But the point of this part of the discussion is not that Hitler's rise was unconstitutional or that Germany didn't have a democratic process, but to point out Hitler didn't truly "represent" the German people (in a meta-democracy way, just as we can say today Trump doesn't "represent" Americans, due to losing the popular vote, in the same meta-democracy way), as well as to provide a general lesson on the dangers of not-voting and the danger of parliamentary first-past-the-post systems and constitutional emergency powers.

If you review your argument carefully it reduces to Hitler having an unfair advantage in passing the Enabling Act, due to a prior accumulation of power under the entirely constitutional Fire Decree (granted by Hindenburg, who was president and had that emergency decree power in a democratic system; he could have decreed otherwise). In other words, your argument is that the democracy was badly designed, not that Hitler seized power in an undemocratic way.

Hitler did not stage a coup nor overthrow the government with a revolutionary force, he played the democracy game (as anyone can do in a democracy, regardless if they value democracy or not), and he accumulated enough support and power to be able to legally exclude his fiercest opponents and then used that position to solidify totalitarian power, again legally.

To be a proponent of democracy is to accept such people can participate in public life and form parties and run for office and be in government; but to have faith that good democratic design and enough people really valuing democracy itself can prevent such people rising to form a legal dictatorships, as well as update and adapt the system when needed.

However, there's no mechanism in democratic theory to guarantee legal dictatorship can't happen; it's a risk and a criticism of democracy that a proponent of democracy must deal with.

There is no debate? He didn’t get democratically elected. Saying “democracy gone wrong” insinuates he was democratically elected. Hopefully that misconception is firmly ironed out now so we can leave it alone. — I like sushi

Ok, then yes, we disagree on this point.

Though I don't view Hitler being elected as a point against democracy, it's simply the case that he used the political process to form a government and institute a dictatorship; there was no coup (if you see a third option between the two, please explain it).

From Wikipedia:

The Act passed by a vote of 441–84, with all parties except the Social Democrats voting in favour. The Enabling Act, along with the Reichstag Fire Decree, transformed Hitler's government into a de facto legal dictatorship.

The Reichstag Fire Decree was also constitutional, and as Wikipedia notes "the Nazis used the provisions of the Reichstag Fire Decree to arrest all 81 Communist deputies (in spite of their virulent campaign against the party, the Nazis had allowed the KPD to contest the election[167]) and prevent several Social Democrats from attending [the vote on the enabling act]".

Do you dispute Wikipedia's description? How is the de facto dictatorship not compatible with the democratic process the Germans had? How was it a coup? or then some third option that is neither legal nor a coup? (i.e. how do you argue against the legality of each step towards the Nazi's seizing power without saying "a poorly designed democratic system"). The Nazi's didn't have a majority, but it's a parliamentary system, Hitler got the other parties to vote for his Enabling act, and he used a completely constitutionally valid Decree to round up the communists. Sure, the fire wasn't lit by the communists, but that I would include in the "risks of democracy": that bad faith actors can use subterfuge for propaganda purposes; the Germans still voted enough Nazi's into power as well as other parties largely sympathetic to the Nazi's; i.e. the argument "it's only democracy if no one plays any tricks", I do not think is valid.

So you read the sentence "and it would go without saying that they'd be able to argue their view that the Nazi's were democracy gone wrong (and perhaps due to a poorly designed democratic system) and that is a risk but not definitive conclusive evidence that democracy is bad" as well as the rest of my comment, and you still believe I am putting forth that the Nazi's rise in Germany is a good argument against democracy?

Be that as it may, if we want to debate this, are you saying Hitler did not rise through a democratic process?

You’d have to provide some pretty convincing evidence to back up that claim! — I like sushi

Did you read the rest of my comment?

Look, I came from China. Marxism is shi-. — YuZhonglu

To add to ssu's comment, Hitler was voted for in a democracy, so were many other dictators (as well as many a coup that simply overthrew the democracy), yet few here would even attempt to argue that: Hitler was bad, Hitler came to power in a democracy, therefore democracy bad. If you step back for a moment, the reason that this argument form is used with respect to Marxism or socialism or communism, is that nearly 2 centuries of propaganda backs up what reduces to simply repeating that propaganda. So it's understandable that people who repeat it think of themselves as doing good, but is it critical thinking?

If someone was arguing for democracy against opponents here, it would go without saying that they'd be able to accept democracy does indeed allow tyrants to get voted in but that it is not necessarily a fatal flaw to the philosophy of democracy itself (they would then argue why not); and it would go without saying that they'd be able to argue their view that the Nazi's were democracy gone wrong (and perhaps due to a poorly designed democratic system) and that is a risk but not definitive conclusive evidence that democracy is bad.

Indeed, if we were arguing in Marx's time, a proponent of democracy would need to contend with the criticism that one major democratic experiment led straight to Nepolean and the subsequent wars that killed millions of people, and the other major democratic experiment was clearly just colonial elites not wanting to give up their slaves. Point being, at one point, whether the point referenced or then before, it was not clear that real democracies in practice didn't simply descend to a worse despotism (aristocrats argued this for literally thousands of years; and they worked pretty hard to make sure there wasn't any prosperous democracies around for most of that time).

Now, this doesn't establish things either way; perhaps democracy does lead invariably to despotism; perhaps Marxism in all it's forms does lead invariably to despotism. The point of a philosophy debate forum is to debate it, support one's arguments or then criticize another's arguments, then contending with rebuttals, subtleties and reformulations.

For instance, some Marxists view democracy as essential to Marxism, and therefore the despotism of the Soviet Union or Communist China (both emerging long after Marx is dead) is incompatible with what Marx believed and wrote. The main supporting evidence of this is Marx's view of the Commune of Paris.

All post-war French philosophers and intellectuals tend to sound ridiculous in English. However, after living in France for a few years I started to understand them better.

The key difference, I think, with philosophy in the English world is that there are much more sophisticated political and philosophical debates within French society, and continental societies in general, at dinner parties and over coffee as well as television and the Radio (it's a national pass-time). There is also not as strong a conformism of opinion, so you can easily get into a debate about "Marxism", or any topic, in casual conversation. Of course there's still an "intellectual class", but in general there are more topics up for debate and even more so within the intellectual class; and, importantly, there's a very radical part of the culture constantly both protesting and criticizing the government; the yellow vest protests are in no way out of no where. You can be driving along and two philosophers are introduced on the radio and they start debating contemporary events, in particular politics.

In short, continental intellectuals live much closer to the idea that concepts have consequences, not just due to the social discussions above but also being "in the thick of it" vis-a-vis the Nazis and then right next to the Soviet Union; not to mention the French Revolution and all the intellectualizing around that.

Whereas in the English world, it's usually a given that philosophical discussion is only really between academically trained philosophers, maybe the odd mathematician can join (but no one else!) and so discussion may as well be completely precise and laid out for highly technical criticism. If obvious truths are uncovered it is assumed that (in the US, England and other English speaking countries) that the political pundits will ignore those truths and stay to their scripts, and even moreso the general population; that to change opinions generally take some sort of marketing campaign, so in the English world if intellectuals come to this question then the political debate is how to make a marketing campaign to get people to believe at least a few points issuing from the actual debate, taking into account the unmovable cherished beliefs and a general lack of critical thinking; and it's a given that only a few would ever bother to read, much less understand, what the actual political and ethical points are in any profound way.

Whereas "on the continent" there's a natural defense against the intense propaganda in Western media, due to a language barrier where a lot of propaganda simply sounds dumb when translated.

As such, at least this is how my perspective changed after living in France, intellectuals like Derrida aren't trying really to win debates with other technical philosophers, but rather trying to have a direct cultural impact. So if we approach Derrida from an analytical perspective, it seems he just fails and therefore is irrelevant, but if we consider his goal is to say something directly to the culture, both trying to convey some important truth while provoking thought and inspiring action, then I think he starts to make more sense, and that he assumes a significant portion of the culture will read him and take those ideas into yet more conversations affecting yet more people.

Likewise, from this perspective, he is talking to French people, trying to stir them up, and uses a lot of French mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, and small ironies that sound fine in French; but when translated to English it's never clear what's what, so everything is up for mystification.

When a translated passage isn't clear, it's even more unclear because it's difficult to know what might be translator error or choice. Since it's "philosophy" the translator chose always the driest possible rendering.

So, I took the liberty of translating from scratch the paragraph as a little exercise to see what the translation choices are. In my version I try to render the more conversational tone that the original French has (it's still quite obtuse, but not as obtuse as the cited English translators version in obtuseness, given, of course we can't forget, only if it is obtuse at all to begin with; but, then again [and knowing what we have already discussed as well as the rest of the discussion] is not as obtuse as it may seem; so we must keep this in mind).

This transformation and this opening of Marxism conforms to what we were calling an instant ago the spirit of Marxism. If the analysis of this Marxist kind rests indispensable, therefore, it appears radically insufficient where the Marxist ontology, which is the foundation of the science or Marxist or the Marxist critique, also contains itself, must contain, and you really can't go without it regardless of modern or post-modern denigrating, a messianic eschatology. Paradoxically, at this title at least, and of course it necessarily is included in but cannot naively be counted as just another ideology or theology for which it calls for critique and demystification. In so saying, we cannot claim that this messianic eschatology that is common to both the religion it criticizes and to the Marxist critique must simply be deconstructed. If it is indeed common to both, excepting the content (and if we must deal with the fact that of course neither of them could accept it, this epokhe of the content, then we can proceed here with just what is essential to messianism in general, the thought of a better future to come), then it is also the formal structure of the promise that follows from them [overflows] or precedes them. Well, what rests also irreducible to all deconstruction, what also stays as indeconstructible as the possibility of deconstruction itself, is perhaps a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, a messiah, even, without messianism, an idea of justice - which we differentiate always with the idea of laws or even people's rights - and an idea of democracy - which we differentiate with how it's currently understood and it's particular characteristics today. (Allow me to refer here to “Force of Law” and The Other Heading) So here we are, and maybe we must now think, and think differently, to ask ourselves where it's going, that is to say where it is leading the Marxism which leads by interpreting it, and so cannot go anywhere without transformation, and not where it would lead us given where it has already been or where it could have gone.

Returning to the neo-evangelism of Fukuyama [...]

-- Posters translation of Spectre de Marx, P 101-102.

By the way, Zizek is totally wrong about ecological change. Oh yes, it's happening, but his disaster scenarios are utter rubbish. — YuZhonglu

Scenarios in the debate, or that he elaborates in other places? In either case, what's utter rubbish about them?

There were plenty of points where Zizek could really have hammered down on Peterson; just look at Zizek's bitch face when Peterson's floundering for examples of 'Post-Modern Neomarxists' or when Zizek corrects him on Foucault (Foucault wasn't a Marxist, he was a major critic of Marxism). But he didn't, why? — fdrake

Yes, the whole debate was a long discovery of the fact that Perterson has just taken for granted the US right-wing meme term "neo-marxist" to refer to identity politics, but there are no actual examples of neo-marxists and Peterson suddenly realized that it's a problem for a critical thinker.

Zizek let it slide because Peterson was so impressed by basic Hegelian / Marxist analysis of our situation as well as Zizek's "seductive charisma, especially to a younger audience" that he wanted to found a "Zizekism" right then and there.

Perterson lost the debate of defending capitalism when he recognized that the destruction of the oceans was a problem: to paraphrase "There's been some good things too for the environment, like more trees in Europe -- ok, yes, there's a total catastrophe in the oceans -- but good things have happened too". Zizek did come back to this point a few times, but there was never any answer, just a long ramblings about personal responsibility to get eventually to the basic point of "take the plank out of your own eye before trying to take the sliver out of the eye of your brothers" but in a new hip psychobabble version. Discussing the oceans would have been the "Marxist v Capitalism" point of contention, and choosing to avoid that issue and instead praise Zizek was why there was no debate.

In short, just two Marxists agreeing that the commodification of everything is a major problem.

Banning plastic straws is a good step, also, as you mentioned, plastic packaging in general but due to this individual moral culpability produced by the "environmental" movement, nobody is willing to demand that, nobody sees these bigger economic incentives at play....Yesterday was Earth Day in my country, yet all my friends on Instagram's big contribution was to repost those "one like = one tree" campaign posts that companies do for fundraising and free advertising...or shared this rapper that produced some song about the earth...0 understanding of the bigger picture, and 0 initiative to protest or make any real sort of change. — Grre

Yes, the corporate friendly media will only allow corporate friendly environmentalism.

However, when I was in the 16 to 18 range and becoming aware of these issues, at the time it was even worse, denialism and false-equivalence was at full power. Even people who accepted the science basics mostly dismissed the consequences as being "hundreds of years away".

So the current pop-environmentalism is still a big step up from where it was.

However, between 18 and 20 I felt I was literally going insane. Once the moral weight of what is happening really settles in and the truly horrifying scale (just the other day, experts announced the great barrier reef in significant risk to essentially die completely -- again, a decade ago is was "the great barrier reef is too big and too old, it could never die ... and if it did start to have problems, well it would obviously be a big wake up call and we'd certainly do something then!!) along with the realization that the truth has been easily available for decades (the basics of green house caused climate change was worked out over a hundred years ago, along with consequences of topsoil erosion and primary forest loss understood well before that) and so little has been done.

However, it's not the case that nothing has been done; maybe it's too little too late, but maybe we get lucky and we have more time than currently seems likely or there is some massive awareness shift that happens suddenly. My point here, is just that between 18 and 20, trying to address myself to the people around me was mostly just banging my head against the wall; at 20 I realized plenty of really clever and charismatic people with credibility, resources and platforms have been making the arguments for generations, and so it's a fools errand to approach things this way of trying to convince people who don't really want to listen or will never reconsider consumerist and careerist values and plans in any case.

The alternative, is to go meet the few people who are equally concerned, make or join projects that are doing a part of those small things that do really contribute and are thought out in a theory that is not naive and takes into account all the cultural and technical obstacles. Where motivated people get hung up I find, is that they place all sorts of preconditions of what "true environmentalism is", preconditions that are either simply not realistic or then incompatible with their character and capabilities. However, I think contributions can be made from pretty much any type of career or activity; what matters, in my view, is a good enough theoretical understanding to not get co-opted or unintentionally contribute to counter-productive things. In otherwords, there's a way to raise awareness and get debates going that are authentic and not theater (probably not on television, but there are other ways), likewise there are legal actions that can at least slow environmental destruction, there is doing projects that demonstrate or push further ecological best practices that then contribute to forming the basis of pushing for policy (both by showing it's feasible and helping to quantify the implications), there is academic research that (though there is more than enough to justify all sorts of effective policies) further proves things, and there is getting directly into politics.

Though we're far from any sort of victory, there have not only been failures in the environment movement. One success I consider a model is organic food. When it started by solitary and small groups of farming radicals that rejected chemical based, soil depleting and seed controlled agriculture, agro-corporations tried to just straight up ban it (one famous case in France the corporations just directly argued that organic farming "undermined industrial farming" with all sorts of fanciful arguments of why this was terrible for society); there was a lengthy battle at each step, for the right to farm without chemicals to begin with (was it even safe for the consumer!?), around the right to re-use seeds, around the right to advertise that it's organic and have labels etc., and each step awareness campaigns, legal actions, as well as developing organic farming practices itself was needed. The organic industry that is normal to have around today was a lengthy multi-decade struggle. Why it's a big success is that it has developed actual techniques and preserved seed varieties that we may soon be in a position to simply have no other choice but to use (so if those methods weren't developed we'd just be screwed), and second it's demolished the industry argument through all those decades that there's "simply no other choice" (people will still equivocate and argue there's higher yields, but even a decade ago it would be common to be accused of wanting to basically kill everyone with starvation for promoting organic agriculture -- I got this all the time when organic produce became widely available and I made a point of being as close to 100% organic as I can be), and, third, in developing countries having the organic option has even higher impact as farmers are even more vulnerable to seed monopolies, more vulnerable to chemicals as they don't have proper equipment, and soil in the tropics is much more fragile so techniques that kind-of-work with heavy dirt (ground up by the glaciers) can have massive soil erosion in very the very thin dirt tropics and pests can be much worse in the tropics because there's no frost and insect reset (so diversified farming keeping a predator/prey balance is even more effective).

So, a lot of organic consumerism can be theater, and a lot of industrial organic agriculture can be of questionable sustainability (not to mention the transport), but it's really of critical importance that it exists, and without the radicals who started a half century ago it could still be the accepted fact that industrial agriculture is the only option; that would be in a terrible position to be in. Of course, there's way more political work to do to make agriculture sustainable, but if we didn't even have any working examples the political obstacles would be impossible.

What I'm trying to stress here is that every kind of skill and character strengths were needed to make organic agriculture a thing (and eating is not fundamentally a consumerist activity, we do need to eat and sustainable agriculture will be the only choice available at some point, that is the definition of sustainability, so the sooner we deploy it the better and to deploy it at scale requires the methods to be worked out, proven and sufficient people knowledgeable of them).

Why don't we do this? Are you ready with a program which will convince people to do this, in the face of probably vicious resistance by police, corporations, the military...? Honestly, I think this is what we should be doing -- I personally don't know how to get people out to do these kinds of things. — Bitter Crank

I thought about it for several years and turned things in every which way I could, but decided it's basically impossible ... for now ... in the West. Most deep environmental thinkers, however, only stop at the first part and don't realize it's only true for now and in the West.

And why should we expect any different? The West benefits and is now entirely dependent on the global system as it is, why would the people that benefit be highly motivated to change it? And by benefit I am including the mostly exploited wage earner that nevertheless still has the privilege of driving a car, playing top-end video games, going the the cinema, eating meat at most meals, having every electric appliance one may need, etc.

However, there's lot's of people who don't currently benefit from the global system, and after thinking more I realized that it's here that a large difference can be made currently. The problem the West faces with respect to renewable energy is that the infrastructure is already built and has a large stock of fossil burning capex to amortize (and so a huge resistance by the corporations owning those sunk costs to keep them valuable) and the rest of society is optimized for these sources (using renewables changes the efficiency calculation of a lot of other infrastructure, such as trains being vastly more efficient than trucks and cars to power with renewables); and with respect to agriculture the main problem is only 2 percent of people work in agriculture and so "eating local" doesn't actually mean local but rather what's trucked in from dozens of miles; on top of this, a system that produces all the food with 2 percent of people requires full mechanization that again is an optimum built around oil.

However all the above problems don't exist in poor places that have no infrastructure and where most people are subsistence farming. In such places renewable technologies and decentralized technologies can be deployed with basically instant benefit and combined with sustainable agriculture methods (which may or may not be close the case in these regions), economic development becomes sustainable. This technological system is much more resilient, mainly due to decentralization, than fossil fuel supply lines and large electric grids. If such a system gets "good enough" it simply provides a far better quality of life than what trying to plugin to the Western system (i.e. move to a slum and try to move up) provides. Right now, both systems are both in competition (a government may have some sustainable policies available ... but opt to just kick everyone off the land and turn it over to agribusiness) and also this new system depends heavily on the Western system (to get capital goods such as the renewable technologies in question).

However, with time, this new sustainable technological system can become more robust and start producing more goods required to sustain itself; it can decouple from the Western system.

At the same time, climate change and other environmental disasters and mineral depletion as well as the usual problems internal to capitalism combine to start to destabilize the global resource extraction and production as well as financial system. So this brings us to the "for now" qualifier.

The consequence of not being sustainable is that things can simply not last as they are. At some point the Western system simply becomes untenable and regions start to drop out for one reason or another (a la Greece). As regions drop out of the Western system, expectations are realigned, and suddenly a much better technological system that's sustainable and local becomes very attractive. If it's developed enough, it can spread to previously-rich regions.

When I came to these conclusions was over 15 years ago, so it seemed fairly abstract at the time, but I would say today it's at the stage where these dynamics start to be visible (consequences like forest fires and hurricanes ).

Well, that "great leap" indeed caused a famine that killed officially 15 million, and perhaps twice the number, yet I said that after the last deathrattles of Maoism Communist China was still had to avoid famine in the 1970's. — ssu

Agreed. I just wanted it to be clear, to anyone unfamiliar, that large famines did occur.

Deng Xiaoping's famous argument, "It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat." explains quite well the Chinese Communists approach to Capitalism. Of course communists living in the West don't at all see it in the same way. — ssu

The problem I was alluding to was not that engaging in global capitalism has not been good for Chinese Deng Xiaoping and other elites, but rather that, for Western neoliberal or neoconservative commentators, that using it as an example of capitalism working must deal with the very large state interventions in every sector as well as the uncomfortable efficiency of capitalism (according to neoliberal/conservative metrics) under a completely totalitarian state; for instance, I remember, I believe Bloomberg article, a while discussing how it's a close race this century to see if capitalism runs better under despotic regimes than democratic and investors are reevaluating the assumption of last century that capitalism needed democracy. For the bloomberg context there's nothing else to say, but these issues I think are serious problem for someone, for instance in a philosophy context, using China as an example of how capitalism is "good".

Yet here's the problem: look at what they really embrace for their 'more responsible' and 'just' economic growth. Usually they aren't at all inspired if a country embraces liberalism and capitalism and starts working up the steps in the globalized market. No, usually the most ardent critical commentators see the as the 'positive' approach Venezuela of Hugo Chávez (before the problems were evident) or other socialist countries. I even remember this praise about Eritrea, which is a really odd dictatorship. — ssu

I'd invite you to view this as possibly a strawman projection; this is not in my experience what the "ardent critical commentators", at least the informed one's, argue; though please point me to sources that make these claims if I have simply missed this literature.

In terms of Chavez, the main issue is with American imperialism in South America and opposition to that. So, in this framework, Chavez was good vis-a-vis showing US interests could be opposed, but I don't think many informed commentators believed Chavez's plans were guaranteed to work. There's the strong impact of the price of oil on Venezuelan state finances as well as US actions (intelligence or economic) that could easily frustrate Chavez's policies.

There was of course defense of Venezuelan's right to self determination and to vote for a "socialist" and right to be left alone in implementing those policies, vis-a-vis fairly open talk in US neoconservative circles that it's time for a coup and assassination of Chavez. People in the West defending Chavez, while he was alive, was mostly with respect to US hawks calls to kill him, and then of course immediately being branded by such hawks as communist sympathizers. Likewise, anyone with an interest in South American politics is keenly aware revolutions for democracy and social progress can easily turn to despotism, either in reaction to US policy or because of the personalities involved. Whether it's a "step in the right direction" when things go wrong is always debatable.

However, I am very doubtful any ardent commentator was pointing to Venezuela as the example of "social democracy done right" and a soon-to-be great model to follow, but rather as examples of national mineral resource revenue distributed to the poor as obviously better than simply being pocketed by elites and foreign companies (without implying it's a long term economic strategy); Chavez was extremely popular for a reason.

In any-case, I agree with the comment that "they aren't at all inspired if a country embraces liberalism and capitalism and starts working up the steps in the globalized market". In an ecological framework, if the global economic system isn't sustainable, becoming more dependent on that system and destroying wholesale natural resources isn't a good thing. For instance, increasing GDP by cutting down the Amazon for cattle and corn, or killing a river with a damn, or unregulated highly polluting mining, is not a real benefit to anyone. Furthermore, the single biggest contributor to sustained economic growth in impoverished places is education; this is a pretty strong consensus in the development aid sector and it is not supplied by embracing Western capitalism. Of course, embracing democracy, education, valuing the environment (and policies can follow from these things that create sustainable economic Growth) can seem like embracing Western values, and some extent it is, but I would not say it's embracing liberalism and capitalism as it is really practiced (privatization, no environmental regulations for poor countries, no nationalization of resources, lot's of corruption); an example of a the "third way" model would be Costa Rica.

The flip side of that is that it controls the way High IQs are treated, as freaks and social losers. Submitting to this by becoming a nerd is self-destructive; it is an insult to intelligence. Straight-A students must become Alpha Males; only then will they stand up to the King Apes and tame them. They must get at least 50% of the value of corporate patents. With the wealth they created and deserve, they will soon drive out the investors whom we are so foolishly dependent on today. — TheSageOfMainStreet

How do you suggest the High IQs get this 50% value? The low IQ's should just vote in laws to hand it to them?

Though I understand your frustrations with the patent system, perhaps consider it is a symptom and not a small defect that can be fixed as you describe.

Also, the people running the corporations didn't muscle their way to the top, they are generally among the High IQs you wish to benefit.

When people with straight-A's are ostracized it's, in my experience, because of either intense family pressure to perform academically, to the exclusion of other things conducive to socialization (in the context of values that are not conducive to socialization to begin with); and/or simply the time commitment required excludes socialization; and/or a competitive drive so strong with one's peers that it is self-ostracizing mixed with a submission to authority and obsession with institutional value signaling that is also self-ostracizing (to most high-school students, who are generally in some level of confrontation or rebellion, either because they see there is something wrong with the whole system or because they are building and asserting their identity which is likely to nor fully aline with family or institutional expectations); and/or a sense of superiority and entitlement beliefs (for instance, that people who work for corporations for an agreed wage and agreed contractual terms simply deserve 50% of the patent profits, without any consideration of whether other parts of the system upon which patent-value depends are fair for inferior Low IQs or less privileged people) that are again self-ostracizing.

However, if the person in question is really that smart, then in graduate level education they will finally be among peers they can respect and who have equal reverence for intellectual performances and institutional value signalling.