Seeing these truths is a matter of coming to know yourself (which may involve living enough to grow into who you are)?

Once a moral truth comes into view and it seems like the leaves on a growing plant, is it a mistake to feel downward toward its roots? To see whether it comes from within or without? And if its within, is there a collective unconscious down there?

Are you saying there are just different myths for what's at the root of these truths? — frank

I may be responding at an angle to what you're getting at.

It's a weird thing to talk about because so many categories get blurred. And I am still far on the pre-side of embodying any moral truth I may have glimpsed. I want to say an enactment of a moral truth takes the whole plant, down to where the roots of the individual plant dissolve in a larger network.

On the other hand, I think the kind of foundational analysis of roots you'd get in a Descartes is less important here, and can even muddy things.

On the other other hand, you have to have something self-monitoring because fully embodied moral truths have a bad tendency to end up in [inquisition, fascism, genocide]

I feel like it is important to know what is fear and resentment masquerading.

Not sure what conversation you'd like me to have with Hanover and others, when the points I'm making are constantly ignored. — Maw

Most of your points are less points, than jabs, expulsions of anger, sharp needles looking for soft bellies. The points nestled among the jabs are lost because the people responding, correctly, read these points as merely the means to an end of Expressed Contempt.

I do understand the cartoon. It's an interesting cartoon in that, in responding to a line of argument, it makes the same move the argument was trying to illustrate on another level. What I take Hanover to be saying is what I was trying to outline in my post - reducing a wide spectrum of people to the worst possible outlier on the far end of the spectrum. When you accuse people of being The Worst Possible Thing, they react, reflexively, by seeing you as an enemy. There is no better means of entrenching people in their already-held positions. That's the argument

The cartoon lampoons this argument by representing the person making it as a foaming, irrational figure. The person who accuses them of racism, of course, isn't even accusing anyone. She's just looking at her phone, and having a calm thought to herself, a 'huh'. The foaming, irrational figure immediately decides to shave his head and become a nazi. Which....isn't what Hanover was planning to do at all, unless I misread him. The cartoon is making the exact same bad political/rhetorical move he was decrying. While taking, as its subject matter, the thing that it is.

What some people have a lot of trouble doing is distinguishing between Unite the Right types and other Trump voters. Everything gets smushed together. These type of people have a tendency to talk to anyone who supports Trump and treat them like someone who would've been super-down to fuck up Charlottesville. Initially, people are like, wait, wait - no, my stance is....

And then you go 'Listen you RACIST IDIOT, if you had HALF A BRAIN, you'd realize that I'M RIGHT and you are BAD. I've ADMIRABLY studied this shit and am SMART while you were doing STUPID BAD things so you should listen to me right now and stop being BAD and DUMB.

Now let's say there is tons of political nuance that's being missed, institutional racism, etc. (In fact, I would agree that this is the case.) By collapsing an entire spectrum of problematic views w/r/t race, into Racist (bad) versus woke (good) and placing everyone you disagree with all the way on the end, you guarantee that they will never listen to you. In fact, they'll, slowly, begin to doubt other, more nuanced, more apt, accusations of racism. The significance of 'racist' will begin to be devalued. Accusations of racism they would have agreed with you on before, now seem to become suspect. Eventually they'll stop listening to you altogether. They won't become literal nazis - as in your cartoon - just as Hanover didn't say he was going to become a literal nazi. They'll see enough cartoons like yours to realize there is no chance in any conversation but for themselves to be caricatured and they'll just stop listening to you.

And after a while, there'll be nothing left to do but to angrily rant to a few people who agree with you at a bar, totally unheard except by those who already agree, left alone with a simmering cioran rage, left outletless.(I've been there, and often dip back. it's an unpleasant place to be)

Though we may have different guiding concerns, I think we both agree that the pragmatic approach doesn't exhaust truth. In my initial post I tried to show how it has a (non-dominant) place, as part of a greater whole.

I do not understand this at all. Before battle, we need true belief to know how to plan. Battle begins. Sometimes what we predicted would happen does not. So, our belief about what was going to happen ended up being false.

Falsehood works very well for getting people to believe something that is not true. According to what you've just said... falsehood is true because it works.

Something is wrong there. Wouldn't you agree? — creativesoul

It may be true that certain that certain people are liable to believe a certain falsehood. That doesn't mean the falsehood is true. It means it's true that some people are liable to believe that falsehood.

Of course there is a real, and important, ethical question of whether someone should willfully lead others to believe falsehoods (even if in pursuit of a noble end.) But that's a separate question.

is 'working' a sufficient condition of truthood? No, the pragmatic conception of truth is a negative one -constraint, falsifiability. The truth's working is a necessary condition though.

I'm late to the thread, and apologize because I may be repeating some things that have already been said. I've read the OP and I've skimmed some of the early responses, but haven't read a large portion of it or adequately digested what I have read.

So, with that caveat :

I think there is one aspect of truth - summed up in the 'correspondence theory' - where affinity with the truth is something like 'capturing' the truth. You have a 'picture' of the truth, which is a proposition. Like where early Wittgenstein goes.

There is an element of this view of the truth that makes sense to me. Say, you're a general, leading a military campaign. True statements - statements that correspond with the reality of what's going on - are very important. You can't launch an assault or a defensive maneuver effectively without having a good model of the state of things. And 'true statements' are a major element of that (I don't really know military stuff well, but hopefully this makes sense or works despite being very naive sounding to people who know military stuff.)

But, I think importantly, this proposition/correspondence thing is only one part of what's going on - the part that builds 'models' of the world, and tries to make the model correspond to the situation as much as possible. It relies a lot on fixity, and macro-perspectives. This all changes quickly when the battle begins and then you need a

Pragmatic theory of truth. Which is: what's true is what works. You're not trying to represent the world anymore, but react, moment to moment, by seeing which of your ideas meant resistance. They don't work because reality stands firm, and (what you thought were) truths crash up against it. Your truths are shown to be false when acting upon them fails. Resistance, rather than noncorrespondence, becomes the test of truth. You're not testing a model against the world (conceived as that 'state of affairs' which the model represents). You're constantly updating your sense of how to act based against what doesn't yield to those actions. This doesn't mean merely that the exigencies of the moment are preventing you from attaining the true perspective of the model, of correspondence - That whole sphere relies on fixity. Reality is constantly moving, and can't be captured moment to moment. This is a different, equally valid conception of truth.

Deflationary theories of truth fit formal systems. They're true enough, they just outsource truth-making to something outside the system. That's a fair move. It helps highlight characteristics of formal systems (that affect real life, and are affected by it.) To take an analogy: You can probably, I'm guessing, do a whole bunch of economic analysis about the formal structures of a delimited economy without considering what sustains that economy. Of course, those conditions are important to the total picture, and need to be understood. But that doesn't mean that the systems don't develop a semi-autonomous logic of their own.

And then there are a class of 'truths' - moral, aesthetic, etc - which can only be realized by accepting your situation and knowing what things impel you to act and perceive in certain ways. These truths can only be realized through acting on them or through letting them act upon you. This is where 'radical immanence' and the collapse of subject-object and 'no view from nowhere' or 'not totality' stuff comes into play. That stuff, as well as meditation, presence, being-in. None of the above three theories can substitute for this embedded truth, though they can play a part in it.

Relativism -which Nietzsche wasn't (tho maybe sometimes)- plays on a discrepancy between Moral Norms and the Universal Absolute. 'Everything is an interpretation' is scandalous, only if that means everyone is a monad transcendent to the world, rewriting the entirety in its own way. If not, the truth is still there - it just works through all actors, who can only partially access it. It's not necessarily denying truth. It's just saying there is no way that a particular actor can wrap it all together in a satisfying whole that they can possess. You can keep truth, while ditching the idea that any finite being can lay full claim to it. the idea that things really are the way they are is fully compatible with the idea that we can't make a fixed picture of how those things are.

Nadia just messaged me with similar tidings. She seems nice. I miss her.

You're really boring, is I guess I what I have left to say. I was trying to find a hook into your post.

Well - I think you have a laudable - laudable - appreciation for reason as demonstrated, clearly, by your deep appreciation for the fifteen thinkers covered in any phil 101 class. Locke, Plato, Kant. The guys!

And then I think you have a strange Active/Passive Dominant/Submissive Strong/Weak way of looking at philosophy which surfaces again and again. The tough boys. Hume, Descartes, Aristotle. You treat them like magic cards.

One weird thing was when you accused a very non-sam-harris reading member, of being a Sam Harris reader. I don't like Sam Harris much at all, but I do know that hate for Sam Harris is a badge of inclusion - signifying Real Intellectual - in reddit philosophy circles. It seemed significant that you couldn't engage an opponent without deliriously turning them into a stereotype, even though it didn't fit. Weirdly didn't fit. And then did a lot of sex jokes that are funny because they're high/low - Descartes plus dicks. Philosophy plus barroom - I'm not too pretentious and I'm not too the other thing.

So bluntly : I think I know you. You're a reddit philosophy guy. Every post you've said fits the general beats. You're mean, but not smart enough to back it up, though you think you are. You're bar tricks. An easy cite, a pun - an intellectual! I drink therefore....

tldr: don't be a dick, at least until you can back it up. The people you believe you're trumping are far ahead of you.

So the interesting question, in my mind, isn't the need for a universal ought. It's the pragmatic one - involving rhetoric, strategy, empathy, poetics, experience - of how you find and disseminate one.

One of the great virtues of the Westminster system was a professional body called the Civil Service. In the fairytail these folk gave up worldly things in pursuit of the good of the nation. They gave independent and courageous advice to whomever was in government, while standing outside of the political process.

A similar thing was dreamed of in Classical China. — Banno

In classical China, if we're talking about the same thing/era, the independent council was made of people recruited to serve an authoritarian state. They did give up worldly things, but only through a intricate system of morality involving respect for elders, the mandate of heaven, and so forth. a universal morality of strict obedience (obedience over everything) leading to recruitment from the provinces, to be brought to the center.

An ever starker example can be drawn from the Ottoman Empire and the 'Devshirme'. The Ottoman Empire, during this period, wouldn't populate their higher-courts with insiders, but with children kidnapped. These kidnapped kids would be objective in relation to court politics, due not only to their lack of connection to dynasties, but also to the sheer trauma of capture. The emotional 'snipping ' (and, irc also physical snipping)- of capture.Thus they were able to serve the Ottoman state objectively. this still happens , but in subtler ways.

I think we're largely in agreement that the missing ingredient is a moral/ethical one ---but, for the same reason I tried to show you can't self-consciously call a guiding ideology a guiding ideology without ruining it, you can't simply say we need a moral/ethical 'ought' because we need a moral/ethical ought. Which makes me feel like - we have to 'build' one. And I don't think that's even it, because it's too top down. We have to suss out the moral/ethical order that's already there, waiting to precipitate.

Both the Ottoman and Chinese models rely on emotional 'snips' which let people decide soberly, from a macro-perspective. And the most 'snipped' people of all are post-hayekian neoliberals who can crunch the economic numbers without guilt. And that doesn't work. Because they leave the most important thing out.

OK, so we keep a few cheats on to serve as bad examples...

Actually, a fairytale about how putting too many cows on the commons leads to disaster is the usual approach. — Banno

A few cheats, for sure. That's what happened to Martin Shkreli. I'm not going to defend him, because he's a 24k piece of shit, but! he defended himself, occasionally, along these lines: 'I'm just a scapegoat for Big Pharm which does what I did every day, but even worse.- and he's right. He was tv-ready loatheable, and his public dressing-down drew off heat from everyone else.

This guy introduced A MILLION COWS plus he had a bad attitude (draws attention away from the well-pr-trained people who do far worse.)

Anti-pharm demographics went wild and reveled in his downfall, then quieted down to the occasional facebook meme.

'A few cheats' sustains an order, temporarily. Hence the insatiable, ever-growing, hunger for scandal, which appeases the need to see justice served. Scraps for that appetite. But it won't lead us to maintain the commons. That guy had way too many cows and he got his just desserts. So let us continue, keeping an eye out for the next guy with too many cows. And so on. Meanwhile the commons goes to pot and eagle-eyes real eatate men wait for a prime price to buy.

I'm picturing a west euro/russian version of the white teacher /inner city student dynamic so popular in movies over here. Down to handshakes. But, I mean, your Russian students sound fucking dope--- besides the homophobia thing of course.

That said, I also remember pretty high levels of homophobia in middle school and high school growing up. Like, 'that's gay' and 'faggot' were pretty standard fare. I still use 'that's gay' today, with friends from that time, with self-aware irony/nostalgia. (It's ok because some of my best friends are people who blew me.)

But I'm guessing, describing your student, you mean like actionable, violent homophobia though?

Stuff like that - likeable person, deeply unlikeable qualities/beliefs- is so jarring. I have an uncle who I love talking to. Very eccentric to be sure, but genuinely thoughtful and interesting. Every now and then, say something that reveals a very subtle, delicate sensibility that he can't have copied, that seems sui generis. But, I found out living with him a winter in the south, he's pretty racist. Not like what-a-millennial-calls-racist, but like 'there's some inherent difference, you'll see' racist. And then you just have to figure out how to fit those two halves together when relating to them. And, it's like - it sucks they think those things - but you're not going to just stop appreciating the good parts of their company.

In many ways that dynamic reminds me of 'redneck' culture in Maine. My habit is to drink in dive bars in Portland, and that's usually the crowd there (I'm huddled in the corner).That thing of being feminine when you're 'out' with your man, though forceful and independent in general especially seems similar.

The 'redneck' thing breaks down along class lines - but not always. There's what's called 'redneck rich,' guys who grew up poor but started a towing business or something, or the sons and daughters of the same. Support for #metoo (as well as, say, BLM etc), on the other hand, tends to correlate with a certain level of cultural capital, or, failing that, with middle-class aspirations. It's a shame because the legitimately good aspects of #metoo quickly become less important than its function as a signifier of class membership, which is then rejected on principle.

I suppose the difference is that, in Maine, all this is in conscious (defensive?) opposition to a 'dominant' culture which seems exactly the inverse of what you're describing (at least in the regions you've visited.)
---
I very much second what @Baden said (the avalanche movie is Force Majeure, by the way, one of my faves.)

I'm having a little trouble understanding you, but it sounds to me like you're thinking of psychological bearing as being a feeling about sociological gender, when I explicitly mean it not to be; that's what "gender identity" already accurately describes. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, my apologies. That was a late-night too-many-beers post. I hastily read through the OP and, as you say, made 'bearing' out to be a sort of inclination toward representations of 'sociological gender.' & Even if I had been right in my understanding, my post would've still been a mess.

I mean, have you read anything of quality - have you read Plato? Have you read the Apology? — Bartricks

Yeah! It's like, do you even lift bro?? Are you capable of using cold hard reason? (not many are! you have to be tough!) Like, Have you read Descartes, rookie? Do you even know anything about overt overcompensation?Like, are you even aware of how certain types of people tend to compulsively project passivity and vulnerability onto things so they can play out obvious fantasies of being active and invulnerable?

So true, preach brother. A bunch of rubes on here who can't recognize the reason of plato.

Hook me up! :wink:

Oh! Different meanings of 'hookup.' There's the romantic one - one night stand, etc. There's also the drug one. 'I know a guy who can hook us up.' The latter is what I meant. I just meant I knew someone who could get me drugs, and I was torn up, so I took them up on it.

I like your tripartite schema. It makes sense to me, just empirically. It fits, it works.

Before I go into about the potential problems I see looming, a bit about me : White, cisgender, heterosexual male. Not classically (american) masculine - very much the opposite, really- but still, identifying as male.. I check all the boxes of a person who might not have a right to speak on this.

That said, I struggled greatly with body dysmorphia from late-elementary school til my mid-twenties. Very skinny, but thought I was fat. Was convinced that something was wrong and my face and body didn't have distinct outlines like other people. Obsessively worked out, and skin-pinched, and compared. Would leave parties when my sense of my physical sense of self started to melt like warm jello, dragging my psychological sense of self in tow. Never felt 'at home' in social roles, always felt like I was playing a role that didn't fit. (still essentially the same, but its cooled down a little, enough to punch in, punch out, and survive)

I don't offer that as a token of equivalence, or group membership. I just mean : This is the psychological point from which I understand this stuff, rightly or wrongly.

Ok, so, the potentially problematic stuff :

Sex speaks for itself, I agree with you there. Then: 'Sociological gender' originally comes from behaviors/attitudes/self-presentations that developed from the way cultures handled differentiation of sex. 'psychological gender' is a further turn of the screw, which deals with representations of sociological gender and our bearing toward them. (It's more complicated, of course, because it's not just representation, but the hypercomplex interplay of representation and lived gender roles.)

Call this the postmodern gender status quo. Sex, gender, gender representation. This is what we grew up with (I'm assuming you're a millennial like me.)

The novel thing with our generation is making explicit 'bearing,' as you perfectly put it.

The question is : should 'bearing' automatically entail recognition of the person as the thing they bear toward?

I say : No.

Let me qualify: If you have a bearing toward this or that and it works, then it works. I'm not saying we should enforce normative gender roles.

But. The reasoning is like this : The attractive, libidinal power - the thing that draws people, makes them bear toward this or that role - is the sedimented structure of last-generation gender roles. and their representations. Those didn't come out of nowhere. History struggled and shook its way to this distribution of 'roles.' They came about, rightly or wrongly, from a life-and-death struggle (so for instance the fetishization of '50s housewife as 'feminine' par excellence comes from WW2 and how america handles the aftermath.)

Gender roles are grounded in the 'real'. The struggle is what lends power to those roles. Divest those roles of the historical thing they're grounded in and everything gets less and less attractive. Representations of representations of representations.

'Bearing' is in large part a bearing-toward those things that you feel best express you, those roles which would let you live your 'authentic' life. But those roles are birthed from struggle. You can't change your bearing - I believe that - but you also don't have an automatic right to be recognized as the thing you bear toward. Once identification becomes equivalent to recognition, the very thing that makes those things worth bearing-toward collapses. An insatiable hunger ensues. 'If I only I was recognized as what I feel myself to be I would be happy'. That's a mirage. If everyone is recognized as what they feel, the worth of that recognition disappears. Being recognized automatically as what you identify as makes the worth of recognition evaporate. The pull of those roles were based in early moments, living as a presexual being being molded in a real world. If there is no firm world, there is no pull.

And when that happens, and everyone gets to be who they want to be - the bad feelings sprout out somewhere else.

I hear you. It wasn't necessarily directed at you. Just the whole thread, Jesus, and my neuroticisms showing in full force.

I think, my real point was that cognitive distortions only manifest after the fact. So, no harm meant. — Wallows

No worries. My last post was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, I'm not actually upset. Mostly, I just want to say 'I feel you.' It's hard to live with this kind of thing, but I think it's possible.

(The LSD stuff was probably what people in AA call 'war stories' where you play up stuff that you officially regret, for the pleasure of recounting it, and seeming interesting. A temptation to be avoided, if possible.)

Though don't we have external ends, now? I think wealth acquisition is a kind of external end, no? And, in our current environment at least, it's the insatiable desire for wealth meeting the finite resources required for that wealth that's ruining our commons. Or do you mean that the opposition, in eliminating said telos, doesn't offer anything and so just isn't compelling? — Moliere

Definitely wealth acquisition is an external end - its just not a moral one. It's relentlessly amoral, in fact, even avowedly so - Hayek says markets are amoral, in principle, and quietly laments that fact while maintaining its just the way it is.

But I'm not championing external ends as ... ends in themselves. I'm saying they're necessary and the political (and personal!) struggle is finding shared ends to work toward.

I also want to hear more....I just want to hear realistic, pragmatic approaches and suggestions.I think we're on the same page, I'm just being a little bit of a bloviating diva about it.

Listen! I was HEARTBROKEN. Some lady walks into my life says she has a sheet of acid for a couple hundred.... only a saint could resist.

Let me provide an anecdote. I was having one of those strange days that I knew wouldn't end well. Towards the start of the night, I had delusions that reality is actually run by aliens that secretly run society as they see fit. Sorta a synopsis of "They Live!" movie. What was different this time was the amount of mental stock value I was putting into this delusion. It all seemed to make sense that angels were fighting aliens over the fate of humanity.

It's worrying because I felt my core logical faculties to start melting or being eroded, meaning that my condition was lapsing or something. Suicide wasn't the only thing that came to my mind, more like worry and exasperation of my mental condition. — Wallows

I relate to this. I sometimes have similar delusions too (they were exacerbated last fall when a break-up and meeting someone with a 'hookup' aligned & I went on a month-long LSD binge.)

For me these 'delusions' are either (1) Exciting and mania-inducing, like I have some deep-insight being transmitted to me or (2) very scary and feed into suicidal though and worry, just like you say.

I've been trying, mostly successfully, to manage them like so : At this point, I know I've had these things since at least late high school. Over the years I've learned a bit about how they come and go. I track them, and my moods, and other stuff, and I can see a cyclical pattern. That's the first thing that helps : I know, when it's happening, that this isn't forever. If i can get some sleep, and focus on routine, and take care of myself, it'll diminish after a while.

But the other problem is how convincing they seem at the moment. It's hard not to believe the delusions. I've found that it helps me to tell myself that, while they're not 'true', they are insights that are being distorted, as kind of hamfisted metaphors. I don't reject them anymore, I mean, but see them as imperfect presentations of something I'm not ready to handle. That helps me when the feeling of 'truth' is so overwhelming I can't discount it. It allows me to remain in it, without forcing me to any kind of rash action. 'It's true in some way, but clouded, so I can't act on the understanding I think I have, because it's imperfect and distorted' if that makes sense.

(My 'delusions' usually center around gnostic themes, similar to P.K. Dick (and probably partially because I read so much about and by him.) They involve 'archons' and 'sleep/awakening' and all that sort of thing. )

Love these.

As someone who's had only the briefest nervous excursions outside his own cultural milieu (& I'm only talking about the American South ) this is premium vicarious living.

(That said, the previous inhabitants of my current apartment were a doctor and a mail-order bride from [somewhere slavic] so I like to imagine I have some spiritual connection with eastern Europe.)

Sometimes I wanted to cover my ears but chose to suffer the incredible noise so as not to look like a soft Westerner — jamalrob

How intense is the pressure to be traditionally masculine? If there is a lot of pressure, is it lessened if you're a foreigner or the opposite? Do Russians have stronger ribs?* I've grown very comfortable with the reflexive self-mocking of masculinity that gets you through in middle class liberal America (and EU europe?) and I think it would be jarring, for me, to be an environment that very straightforwardly celebrates traditional masculinity. But is the Russian premium on masculinity overemphasized over here?


*Or no? The most famous Russian-American I know died in strangely similar circumstances. I'm glad you fared better. Plus I imagine that's a pretty handy (and well-earned!) warstory in terms of the proving-you're-not-a-soft-westerner thing.

addendum - I mentioned Kant in a previous post, because I think his bending-back of the ethical telos (toward man as end in himself) leads directly to this kind of impasse. It's one thing when you're advancing this idea in a world where that advancement is still partly radical. But when everyone agrees, it stops working so well. I agree that we shouldn't treat people as means, but we also can't treat people as ends really, because people need external ends. If you put the ends 'inside' them, the thing falls apart (it deconstructs straight to Nietzsche, then Heidegger) In other words, it's better as a prohibition (don't treat people as means) than as a positive ethics.

Breezing through

submission - michel houellebecq

Late to the game on this one, and I'm bummed I let my preconceptions get in the way of actually reading it. It's really good in pure literary terms & its also a pageturner & its also extremely nuanced.

It's a little empty -- but only because we are stuck in certain habits, I think.

I mean 3 can mean all kinds of things. It's kind of a negative space -- what counts as culture, after all? And how do you foster it? Is it possible to do so today? And if so, how?

For my part I am happy to point out that the supposedly pragmatic solutions are just not very pragmatic on the basis that they aren't working. By all means get them working -- maybe that's the best we can do. But we surely shouldn't defend what's not working on a pragmatic level if it's just not accomplishing the task of building sustainable economies. — Moliere

I actually do agree with you. It was very unclear, but what I'm objecting to with 'number-threeism' is the selection of number three as more or less the endpoint of productive thought. A discussion like this thread can easily degenerate into 'choose your fighter' and proceed to everyone having a basically moral argument, with the selection of 'number-threeism' being nothing but self-identifying as 'good.' Other people can select other fighters to identify as 'no-nonsense' and 'realistic'. What the kids call virtue-signalling.

And then you have a terrible thing where the 'good' and the 'realistic' are separated, and people fight them out, identifying with what virtue they value most. Like you said, it's bogus because the 'realistic/pragmatic' options aren't really. And the 'good' option for the sake of choosing the good option often leads to misanthropy, where instead of devoting creative energy to solve the problems, you maintain your goodness by lamenting the badness of everyone else in a 'broad condemnation' as @frank put it.

My objections and complications weren't meant to nix number three, but to try to point out some of the really fundamental problems it would have to overcome--- the 'alien threat' is a joke, but also really does seem like the only option at first blush (it's really an old neoconservative argument about needing an Other to unify against). So I guess the trick would to be to reverse engineer things to see why the alien would work as a solution ( I think it would) and then break that down, and figure out what could have the same effect, without (a)waiting for a miraculous threat from the skies, like the god that heidegger said could save us or (b) fostering a 'noble lie' about an external enemy (e.g. islamofascism). Take the neocon insight and separate the wheat from the imperial chaff. I think the wheat is that concerted virtuous effort needs some kinf of ethical telos, and that's what's lacking if we talk about virtuously maintaining for the sake of maintaining.

Possible plot for a new Adam Curtis documentary? — jamalrob

We live in extraordinary times. We find our universities awash in strange and mysterious theories, theories that threaten our very sense of reality. This film will tell the story of how, in the 1980s, a mystical jewish philosopher and a japanese-american pragmatist created two diverging paths of political thought, paths which we are still travelling to this day.

I really liked the Fukuyama, btw. Only about 1/3 of it has anything to do with the caricature that has been so often criticized. The other two thirds are those criticisms. It's really not the naive, triumphal book it's made out to be. I don't ultimately agree with him, I guess, but it's the most cogent political worldpicture I've groked (though I haven't groked many.) It's refreshingly direct, and it's insane that it was written in 92 (he predicts that there will be a wave of authoritarian movements and a backslide of democracy sometime in the next generation. He sees it as likely temporary, but he predicts it will be severe and will see new, unheard of authoritarian-hybrids. He also predicts that immigration will become one of the biggest issues for 'posthistorical states') I'm planning to reread Negri & Hardt's Empire next to compare and contrast.

(also - hoping that at some point you'll drop some man-on-the-street accounts of what modern Russia's like. )

I take @frank to be saying it's easy to identify as the type of person who chooses number 3, but it's a little empty.

This is the kind of thing figures like Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut made careers of. But they were also incredibly misanthropic outside of being congratulated on being number-threers. I don't know about Vonnegut, but Twain seemed to realize it - as in his Mysterious Stranger - but reconciled himself to not broaching it publically.

So, (1.) the Environmental Committee issues a dictat from time to time that declares the fish allowance this year, and (2.) the Hanoverian Hussars are deputed to kill the first-born of apostates.

In the happy Banno world of social responsibility, government is a simple matter of coordination, (1.) experts work out what is best and we all do it; (2.) the brutality of coercion, is only required because there are cheats.

Things could be better than they are though, and mainly by not letting the cheats make the rules and enforce them. — unenlightened

'Things could be better than they are' feels to me like a necessary horizon for any happy world of social responsibility. There are those idyllic moments of communal self-sustaining, where there is pleasure (meaning, beauty) in simply, as a group, keeping things going. But the kind of virtue that extends across days and months and years seems to require a for-the-sake-of-which. Something like an ethical vanishing point around which virtuous deeds/behaviors/character organize.

If true, that's a problem, because if the happy world succeeds in getting rid of the cheats, it loses the for-the-sake-of-which or toward-which (to speak in faux-heidegger) that sustains social responsibility. On a broader scale, 'getting rid of the cheats' seems to be an ethical goal that corresponds to a cyclically repeated stage of 'corruption' or 'decadence' and usually leads to new cheats. The most obvious recent example being Stalinism.

That said, the recognition of this need to overthrow seems baked into whatever political/economic thing we have now, where we (1) incorporate that need for revolution into a series of elections and (2) cede the non-revolutionary boring-governing stuff to career technocrats, i.e. the guys who determine how many fish.

But a technocratic kibosh on over-fishing is different from a Levitican or Deuteronomic kibosh on promiscuous thread-weaving because the former is self-consciously an attempt to maintain equilibrium, while the latter is shot-through with cosmic significance and is enmeshed in epically understood historical struggle.

( First, against pharaoh. then as part of a divinely sanctioned campaign to take Canaan. Then a struggle against Assyria, and Babylon. Then as the hope for restoration. Then as the hope for a messiah.....there's always a struggle and the laws are always reimparted with value in the face of that. What we know as Deuteronomy was, scholars say, a conscious attempt to bring a mythical past to bear on a troubled present. Deuteronomy was probably heavily rewritten by priests almost a millennia after its official date of composition. )

Well-secularized economic revisionists will point out that what these strange prescriptions and ordinances were doing really was maintaining equilibrium and imparting it with some mystical significance ideologically- and maybe. But that doesn't change the fact that explicitly, consciously, making the end-goal maintenance of equilibrium destroys the idea of an end-goal. If there is no goal, and we're still not happy, then why maintain equilibrium? The rational reconstruction eats itself. We can maintain equilibrium under false pretenses, only because the pretense is why we maintain equilibrium in the first place. as in: explain rationally to a date that all this romantic stuff you're doing is really just to perpetuate your genes. Even if that were true, it would end up in you not perpetuating your genes.

The mirage I'm trying to point at is a commons maintained for the sake of maintaining a commons. I like the idea but it seems otherworldly (or something that pokes into profane reality in heightened moments) but to actually do it seems, to me, to require some common goal and struggle, which will get people out of the game-theory mess I tried to sketch in my first response. The alien threat was tongue-in-cheek, but virtue has always been tied to real world threats, stormclouds on the horizon. Abstracting ethics from struggle seems a lot like what Derrida does when he extracts the formal structure from whatever he happens to be reading. Kant and all subsequent formal ethics are good t know, but ethics without situation is empty. Virtue is always directional.

A truism. Doing anything more than you "ought" is immoral by definition. But this isn't a moral question. It's a political/legal one, so we impose laws to advance the state's interest. Whatever you're getting at, get at, which seems to be that you want our consciences to tell us that 3 trout per season is sustainable, but not 4. 10 trout is not gluttony, immoral, and a sin. It's just more than the population can sustain, so we regulate it. Maybe in other seasons 10 makes sense. — Hanover

For older societies, it often isthe case that 10 trout in a certain season is a sin, in other seasons virtuous. When everything is tightly woven together (as in the bizzarre breadth of the laws of Leviticus) It'snot a hippy thought - it's why an arch-conservative like Burke champions tradition in quasi-evolutionary terms, as an inherent understanding of what works and what disrupts, that builds up over time without anyone necessarily knowing why. James Scott calls it 'metis'.

The regulatory state enters in when this tradition falls apart, either because we're too recently transplanted to know without knowing what practices work, or because a new economic model/ behavior has torn to pieces organic communities.


But all that said, I agree, because however lamentable our lack of 'metis' or millennia-won tradition, it's already happened, so we can't just hearken back.

Not I.

A regulatory body with teeth falls under the Big Fat Dictator solution. All well and good, but I want here to expose the morality of the very need for such a solution.

Sure, Let's work out how many cows the commons will support. Let's also consider that having more cows than you ought is unethical. And that's what is missing from the economic analysis.

Accepting the economic, amoral analysis has led to the situation we are in now, where those with more cows on the common are somehow considered virtuous. — Banno

Taking for granted a succesful attempt at invirtuating the masses.

(Maybe a cabal of virtue ethicists slowly insinuates a noble lie/truth about the dignity of responsible one-cow-manship through hollywood screenplays, and the next generation has been so steeped in the vibe, it comes naturally to them. Or maybe, a group of economic determinists figures out how to change conditions such that social conditions also change and onecowmanship is rewarded, ground up..)

But even taking that invirtuation as a hypothetical fait accompli:

One bad apple spoils the bunch.

But even if there's not a bad apple:

The awareness that one bad apple spoils the bunch, makes it overwhelmingly likely that someone, even someone otherwise virtuous, prememptively, defensively bad-apples. If rot is inevitable, one has to protect one's family, after all, and provide them with meat and milk.

But even if no one does that :

The awareness that others might think of things in terms of a general awareness of bad apples spoiling the bunch, means that they preemptively, defensively bad-apple before someone else does.

That seems like a hard thing to work around -

So : We need an extraterrestial existential threat, more palpable than eventual global warming, that makes everyone share a common goal. Just gotta wait for one to show up.

rage & time - peter sloterdijk
end of history & the last man - francis fukuyama
reality is not what it seems - carlo rovelli
the europeans - henry james

Apparently Fukuyama studied under Derrida at Yale. The guy who engineered modern neoconservatism, helped get us embroiled in Iraq - he was gonna be a cont-lit guy. Later, Derrida strikes him down in Spectres of Marx. this is weird. Kissinger era realism went though a continental bottleneck and got us post 911 us policy

Nah they're all fucking idiots. — StreetlightX

what a wonder stuff like zuccoti fails. Lets regroup and figure out why the fucking idiots didnt listen to us. Can't they see we see them as equals?

Unfortunately, political agency has been increasingly reduced to action via consumerism. Take for example the very first question regarding climate change in last night's presidential debate. The moderator asked Cory Booker, a vegan, if people should follow his diet. Rather than tackle corporate-based structural issues that are the predominate source of the problem, the solution is formulated, exclusively more or less, as a burden on the individual consumer. — Maw

But is this not just 'consuming' the debate, to satisfy one's demand for examples of corporate consumerism to attack? Isn't this a shoring-up of identity? Atheists like to make the move of saying the proper reaction to theological talk is not to disprove God, but to just leave that conservation be and go on with what matters to them. so

What if we all talked about who we are and what our concerns are and concrete ways to address them? And interlaced the political theory with that?

-but this is a philosophy forum!

If the philosophy leads you to the singular, the concrete, then its exhausted itself conceptually and can only say the same thing in different ways, leading finally to a decadent rococo self-complexifying. Its a machine that feeds on contemporary events (I'm guilty here too) as grist for the mill. If the singular thing is to be believed then theory is a ladder to be kicked over, tho used when appropriate.

-but Kant on the french revolution

No

Read my post back over. I don't care if you're authentic. You're draping something else over me. Identity can only see identity.

I'm not trying to talk to you. — StreetlightX

You're not trying to talk to anyone. That's the problem.

Let's try this: I'm thirty years old, I live in Maine, I work in a call center. Talk to me. Distribution, participation. What do you have to say?