Modern liberal democracies are positioned as a form of conflict-resolution, and therefore presuppose deep-seated disagreements. Thus it is no surprise that a large dose of nominalism attended their rise. I think a rather compelling argument could be made that realism goes hand in hand with intellectualism, whereas democracy and liberalism are bound up with voluntarism. This is a basic reason why we now see a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles - there is an inherent tension. Yet Aristotle pointed out long ago that there are different forms of democracy. — Leontiskos

That is why I stressed pragmatic realism from the start. Liberal democracy was a rational exercise in expanding the scope of opinion so that society could shift from a steady-state agricultural basis to a freely growing industrial basis. Society could sense the value of intellectual diversity as the path to becoming a more plastic and adaptive entity.

So what was targeted was the win-win combination of both more competition and more cooperation – in both economic and social affairs. The freedom to differentiate combined with the constraint that integrates. A dynamic which always existed as the basis of social order, but with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, a dynamic that could be made even more dynamic by spelling it out as a self-conscious ideology.

Tolerance for dissent was one side of the bargain. The ability to then impose a collective wisdom was the other. This is why I stressed that a pragmatic realism leads to a society that is composed of its interest groups or institutionalised habits. Society is supposed to learn what works best by allowing free experimentation, but also then decide what actually makes sense and institutionalising that balance at every scale of its hierarchical organisation.

Society could only become complexly developed by following this formula where things are self-organising over all its scales. You have the local mah jong club doing its thing in terms of the resolving its tensions, managing its own affairs, and then the same pragmatic realism being applied up at the level of a treasury or judiciary.

So you say modern liberal democracies are positioned as a form of conflict-resolution, and so presuppose deep-seated disagreements. But equally, they are positioned to encourage the flourishing of such disagreement, given that there will be the certainty of a Darwinian machinery to then sift what is working from what isn't. Which is where the pragmatic realism comes in – judging success in terms of community level goals.

And where should those goals come from? You might say there is some absolute moral imperative or transcendent good that human society ought to be entrained to. I say instead that we are natural creatures doing natural things. What we wind up being entrained to is thermodynamics. We organise our affairs to maximise our entropy throughput. That is a measurable fact of history.

And if we don't like that answer, we theoretically could do something about it. But also, the laws of thermodynamics are pretty hard to resist. We see that everywhere we look in modern liberal democracy. Drill baby drill as they say in the US and everywhere else.

Is there also some kind of intellectualism = realism and liberal democracy = voluntarism at play here? If you find that a compelling argument, you certainly haven't made it. I don't know in what way you think it is relevant.

Then as for a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles, this seems to be your code for the kind of reductionist mentality – the ideology of the machine – that you would want to oppose to ... some transcendent principle you are too shy to articulate.

I find that the holism of pragmatism is a better place to attack reductionism as it can explain why there is reductionism as part of the larger triadic whole, and doesn't just angrily reject it in dualistic Cartesian terms.

From the start, I was speaking of pragmatic realism. And you immediately projected on to that your own Cartesian framing in terms of the real and the ideal. While never being willing to acknowledge that my arguments are essential Aristotelean in systems science fashion.

Nature is shaped by the structural accomodations that must emerge from its own free interaction. As Peirce argued, even the Cosmos is the product of evolutionary habit. Liberal democracy as a political machinery for trading off the counter-forces of local competition and global cooperation are just expressing that natural hierarchical dynamic at the level of organismic order.

And what other structure could have been expressed?

Sure we can have a debate over the current settings of the world order in terms of some sub-dynamic such as whether it is better to be organised around a steady-state policy or a maximum growth policy. We can argue all the details of the dynamics down to whether multiculturalism or assimilation makes for better society – in a world where we are still also trying to organise under our identities as nation states.

But I like the Big Picture view that grounds such debates in the reality of systems hierarchical order where complexity arises through an ability to balance the driving dynamics in play over all scales of that hierarchical order.

And this is the basic plumbing issue that liberal democracy is meant to address. The how of how we construct a society that is balancing its freedoms and constraints over all its scales of being – a scale of being that has the added stress of a compounding growth rate.

So the pragmatic model of society – such as expressed by Arthur Bentley in 1908 based on Dewey – is of a hierarchy of interest groups. Institutionalised habit forming over all levels.

Realism is not some concrete given in this equation anymore than idealism enjoys some transcendent status. Instead pragmatic realism is a society's own judgment on the success of its project. Truth emerges from the collective rationality that is striking an adaptive balance over all scales of a society's organismic identity. A sensible amount of dissent or conflict is also leading to a sensible degree of integration or shared learning.

That is why we can look at the shift towards technocracy and globalisation as something that seemed to make sense as a next step for liberal democracy. Or why we can see that authoritarianism cuts across the ideal of society as an organic whole – a hierarchy of interest groups where the interactions between humans is something that can organise its own local wholes within all the larger wholes. It is richly and intelligent structured at any degree of magnification. Whereas a dictatorship just wants to impose some kind of hierarchical structure of control that treats society as if it were actually a machine and the dictator as actually a supreme being.

So my pragmatic realism accepts that truths are relative and there are no moral absolutes that must rule over human affairs. But then it insists on the reality of structural universals as the kind of patterned regularities that even a free nature can't help fall into due to its self-interactions. It is hard to imagine a flourishing society that isn't organised as an organic hierarchy of interests groups properly in touch not just with the real world that is its physical ground, but also with the reality of the world it is thus making.

It is the realism of being self-aware enough that society is in precisely this pragmatic recursive loop of adaptive habit formation and so being able to frame our debate about that fact with intellectual precision.

We can see that liberal democracy just arises as the obvious way to plumb a hierarchical structure intent on its own rapid growth in scale and complexity. It isn't a problem that requires any moralisation or mystical justification. We can see it for what it is and respond accordingly.

The freedom to differentiate combined with the constraint that integrates. A dynamic which always existed as the basis of social order, but with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, a dynamic that could be made even more dynamic by spelling it out as a self-conscious ideology. — apokrisis

As always, your ideas are interesting and possess plausibility. But my difficulty is that you aren't arguing for realism, or democracy, or liberalism, so much as for a particular kind of realism, democracy, or liberalism. And you are also projecting that specific form back onto history, as if the historical development was a straightforward working out of that form. I mostly think that your project could be construed as a kind of hermeneutical battle over the history of such things, which in turn becomes a jockeying for how the essence of such movements is to be understood moving forward.

To give one example, you seem to view liberalism as the freedom of groups (which are formed by free association). This is curious to me both because it is historically inaccurate and because it is close to an Aristotelian revision of liberalism that others propose. In fact liberalism is based in individual freedom, not group freedom, through the ideas of Hobbes and secondary figures like Locke or Mill, and this has become only more obvious with time. The Aristotelian approach sees man as a social animal, and therefore sees groups as primary. For example:

This appeal to the medieval arrangement, or to other arrangements of loose empire with strong local differences and independence as opposed to the despotic liberal state, is not put forward as nostalgia for a lost past. It is put forward as a way of stimulating a more imaginative and free-ranging approach to the treatment of contemporary political questions. In fact, the past combination of extensive empire with the multiplication of local differences could be imitated today precisely by a rethinking of the notion of the liberal state. For the state of nature doctrine (whence the notion of the liberal state principally derives) can be reformed into an argument for loose empire combined with strong communities. All one needs to do is to make the state of nature doctrine apply not to individuals (the way Hobbes and Locke and others did), but rather to communities. So instead of individuals forming a state by means of a social contract, let communities form a federation or league by means of defensive alliances, not unlike the way the former colonies in the United States did by means of the Articles of Confederation. Such alliances may differ in many ways and embrace more or fewer things, and the alliances might depend on a superior power as well as on member communities (the way the medieval arrangement depended on the emperor, or the way the settlement in Greece after the battle of Chaeronea depended on Philip of Macedon and then on his son Alexander the Great). No matter. The basic idea remains the same, and it is the idea that is important, rather than the details.

Such a way of applying the state of nature doctrine would be not only better but also more historically accurate. For it is manifest that men do not exist first, or at all, as individuals but rather as belonging to communities. Not only are we all born into some community, such as the family or the equivalent, but with few and largely irrelevant exceptions, we all remain and function as parts of one or more communities for the whole of life. It is as such parts of communities that we live and act, that we form visions of the good and pursue them, and that, in the service of these visions, we love and hate, fight and die... — Peter L. P. Simpson, Political Illiberalism, 182

The polis with thick subsidiarity that you describe is simply not modern liberalism. You are taking a reasonably good idea and calling it liberalism even though it is not historical liberalism, and I would rather just admit that it is different from liberalism rather than try to engage in a hermeneutical battle to try to argue that historical liberalism is significantly different than the received view allows.

But also, the laws of thermodynamics are pretty hard to resist. We see that everywhere we look in modern liberal democracy. Drill baby drill as they say in the US and everywhere else. — apokrisis

As I said earlier, many simply associate their own "good" ideas with liberalism or democracy, because they deem themselves liberals or democrats. But the laws of thermodynamics are no more potent on democracy than on oligarchy, or aristocracy, or monarchy. The idea that a thermodynamic-based theory is somehow "democratic" is not at all in evidence.

Then as for a constant clash of scientific auctoritas with liberal and democratic principles... — apokrisis

Science is not decided by majority vote. It is realist by nature. It has correct and incorrect answers. Democracy is a matter of majority vote. It has no correct or incorrect answers, other than the will of the people. Do you see the difference? So what happens when the scientist claims that Covid-19 requires certain political measures, and the populus does not favor the enacting of those measures? Then you have but one example of scientific auctoritas clashing with a democratic political arrangement.

Science is anti-democratic. Folks miss this because they are predisposed to favor democracy, and they therefore conflate an aristocracy with a democracy. Contemporary science is aristocratic in that etymological merit-based sense. It is a consensus of those with the requisite merit to possess a vote. Scientific "suffrage" extends only to a tiny percentage of the population.

From the start, I was speaking of pragmatic realism. And you immediately projected on to that your own Cartesian framing in terms of the real and the ideal. While never being willing to acknowledge that my arguments are essential Aristotelean in systems science fashion. — apokrisis

You continue to project all sorts of things into this conversation that are not in evidence.

Liberal democracy as a political machinery for trading off the counter-forces of local competition and global cooperation are just expressing that natural hierarchical dynamic at the level of organismic order. — apokrisis

I think that is precisely what liberal democracy is not. Liberal democracy has from its inception erred heavily in the direction of a lack of subsidiarity. It tends towards top-down power structures, globalism, etc. This is precisely why the "revolution of the proletariat" is always a threat to the liberal state.

But I like the Big Picture view that grounds such debates in the reality of systems hierarchical order where complexity arises through an ability to balance the driving dynamics in play over all scales of that hierarchical order.

And this is the basic plumbing issue that liberal democracy is meant to address. The how of how we construct a society that is balancing its freedoms and constraints over all its scales of being – a scale of being that has the added stress of a compounding growth rate. — apokrisis

If this isn't projection, then name me one founder of liberalism who has expressed such views.

So the pragmatic model of society – such as expressed by Arthur Bentley in 1908 based on Dewey – is of a hierarchy of interest groups. Institutionalised habit forming over all levels. — apokrisis

Dewey is late to the game, and so I wouldn't count him as a founder. This is even beside the point that he was a critic of classical liberalism and proposed substantial changes, which is much to the point. Simpson agrees with much in Dewey in his critiques of liberalism.

It is hard to imagine a flourishing society that isn't organised as an organic hierarchy of interests groups properly in touch not just with the real world that is its physical ground, but also with the reality of the world it is thus making.

It is the realism of being self-aware enough that society is in precisely this pragmatic recursive loop of adaptive habit formation and so being able to frame our debate about that fact with intellectual precision. — apokrisis

That's well and good, but I see little relation between it and liberal democracy. I think that such a theory could be applied to most historical political arrangements seen through the bird's-eye view that you take. There is no special compatibility between such a theory and liberalism or democracy. You would be making the same claims if you found yourself in a tribal or feudal society, or a guild-based economy.

I do appreciate the explication. :up:


Edit: Presumably you are coming from a perspective which favors the marriage of market principles to Mill's free speech arguments, found in figures like Adam Smith. That perspective has truly become an inheritance of liberalism, even if it is contested in some ways. This would require a longer conversation, but I think here too there is an overidentification of market principles with democracy or liberalism (similar to the overidentification of thermodynamics with democracy or liberalism). It seems to me that on this point your odd dichotomy between "natural" and "moral" will become especially strained, as will the tension between democracy and your hierarchalism. ...The reason liberal democracies tend towards a thin geography of intermediate institutions (and therefore towards hierarchies that lack robustness) is because the anthropological starting point is too strongly individualist, which in turn creates a vacillation between the individual part and the societal whole (i.e. the liberal state).

If this isn't projection, then name me one founder of liberalism who has expressed such views. — Leontiskos

It is clear that you want to take a “great figures in history” approach to understanding human affairs and I prefer the Hegelian structuralist approach - suitably updated.

So you seek a basis in material/efficient cause and I in formal/final cause. You say there was a first moment when some genius had the basic idea. I say we are talking about a natural dynamic that has always structured humans as social creatures and simply underwent a phase change. It became supercharged by the switch from agricultural empires to mechanised nations.

So the structure always existed. But the form of its expression evolved rapidly from kinship based social hierarchies to interest group based social hierarchies. It was about families and their plots of land. Then it became about institutions and their capital flows. Society became self-consciously organised around the idea of the free individual as the differentiating force in human affairs, coupled to the dispassionately integrating machinery of the rule of law, free markets, and other aspects of the “social contract”.

Folk like Fukuyama and Turchin show how structuralism is in vogue again. And structuralism gives a base to explanation that focuses on the whole that constrains rather than merely the parts that compose.

Your critique is based on not even understanding how my account is properly Aristotelean. Liberal democracy was not some free creation of some individual mind but an expression of the natural logic which shaped the reaction to an Industrial Revolution about to shake up everything.

It was how society could absorb a sudden surge in entropic power that was beginning to flow through the system. A politics and economics appropriate to managing the forces being unleashed.

There is no special compatibility between such a theory and liberalism or democracy. You would be making the same claims if you found yourself in a tribal or feudal society, or a guild-based economy. — Leontiskos

And I do make that structuralist claim about human social organisation. The same hierarchical systems logic applies right through history from prehistoric times. A society is a structure of global constraints and local freedoms. There must be a collective state of mind that can then make its individual choices within that context.

History then becomes about tracking how this general theme becomes expressed in increasingly complexified and mechanised ways. There are the major transitions in the moves from hunter/gatherer lifestyles to agrarian empires to industrialised nation states. We have the shifts from oral to literate to mathematical semiosis. We have the shifts from ancestor worship to the axial religions to pragmatic realism. At each stage, the basic logic of social structure is the same, but its expression becomes focused on meeting the organisational needs of the next step.

Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is the kind of approach I would recommend if one is to focus on the actual genesis of the "Western metadiscourse". He points to the way the Catholic Church inadvertently paved the way for "liberal democracy" when for its own reasons it was breaking down the traditional kinship structure of Medieval Europe. From my notes....

Henrich tracks the rise of the modern industrial mindset. He says it starts with Catholic Church atomising kinship into nuclear families. This then sets up a generalised competition that can scale. And that gets supercharged by Industrial Revolution with its fossil fuels and universal division of labour.
So breaking down tribes that collectively own a landscape and resources. This frees things for a new economics and social structure that can scale according to its ides and resources.
You get the rise of European monasteries and universities, then universal education and literacy under German reformation - the church being pushed out and the state coming in to create nationalistic atomism.
Urbanism, property rights and national law then law actual ground for liberal economics and mechanised production. Which fossil fuels supercharges.
Henrich evidence from the spread of church bishoprics across Europe shows sharp uptick in authors and innovators resulting, along with the new mobility where people are mixing across a collective Christendom. A production of creatives.
Gregory Clarke’s theory of Catholic Europe’s creative rise is based on the new virtue of Protestant patience. Thrift and long term investment. Planning for stable collective growth. But Clarke argued this as a genetic trait rather than a social skill.
England of pre-industrial era was a collective brain of 3 million while Ming dynasty China was 100 to 160 million. And Henrich says that larger brain showed in gun powder and all the other Chinese innovation.
But destruction of European kinship organisation after 1000 AD opens floodgates on people flow. Henrich’s group mapped a grid of 1.5x1.5 bishoprics and followed flows of a list of a million famous names by their birth and death places.
By 1200, more Europeans had moved to cities than in China. And where clans had owned a craft, now it became more individual with guilds. Masters with strangers as apprentices who then moved off to open own shops.
Catholic Church atomised by eliminating polygamy that favoured chiefs with many wives. The traditional kinship structure that organised a hunting-farming landscape in tribal hierarchy style.
Eliminated even cousin marriage out to 6th relation and even spiritual kin like god parents. Church also created inheritance by testimony rather than lineage. So that atomised nuclear relations both genetically and legally.
This all creates indivuated family units of the smallest possible scale. A household on its plot. And to a degree this was accidental as plague and war created widows, while the church was incentivised as the widows also left their wealth to the church.
The church also directed collective action towards the general good of the community rather than building up your clan. So a clear payback in terms of agriculture as entropy production in the Middle Ages, couple to a matching surplus and the trade network that allows. Again setting the course for the Industrial Revolution .
Chinese by contrast maintained relations with their clan village and moved into clan enclaves in the cities. They were tied to a share heritage by a religion that meant they had to return home for key religious events. Catholics could go to local church in any new city.
Greece and Rome made some steps towards this with republicanism and morals, but still remained a system of clans and patrilineage. Son owns nothing while dad lives.
Henrich says no evidence that church was actively thinking of the advantages of atomising clans. No record of an argument in the many local bishopric discussions of an evolving norm. Only one quote from St Augustine about the benefits of distant marriage that even hints at a philosophical approach. So seems instead a structural attractor story of stumbling into the global transcendence and local initiative systems paradigm that could unlock first medieval agriculture and social stability, then paved the way for fossil fuel supercharging.
Henrich agrees that it was self-fueling in the fact that the churches could spread as they created more successful villages. So as a top down system, it worked to unlock social power and thus propagate itself across the medieval landscape.
And of course this all feeds into his collective brain story as a Europe wide network of knowledge and coordination is the intellectual power to match the entropic power.

So that is just one example of the now extensive literature that looks to a structuralist account of social development rather than treating it as some fortunate story of a few clever people suddenly having great ideas that somehow then spread contagiously.

You want to frame this as a debate over the origins of liberal democracy as a moralistic ideology. I instead argue that it was the new system that emerged from the same old natural principles of what a social system just is.

So where does liberal democracy begin? Well inadvertently, according to Henrich, the Catholic Church had got the ball rolling in ways that could release the intellectual and economic energy to tap into a more mechanistic approach to life in general. And once you have a mechanistic mindset, you can not only imagine engineering society so as to improve its general functioning, you can't not but help stumble on to the idea of mechanising agriculture – the first steps of fencing the country side and harnessing the rivers and wind for their mechanistic power.

Then one minute you are mining pits for coal to heat your hovel and needing steam pumps to stop them filling up with water, the next you are mining coal to drive your whole world.

Ian Morris's "Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels" set out the general case (although others like Vaclav Smil have been tidying up his actual numbers. Again from my notes on these sources...

Ian Morris, Stanford historian, is good on human social and economic story….
Ian Morris studies of growth in social capital defines civilisation in terms of communities being able to get things done in world. So about community self-actualisation. Or in a complex society, that means organisation by interest groups – a high contrast mix of integration~differentiation.
He developed separate metrics to cover western and eastern societies, one radiating out from Mesopotamia, the other from the Yellow River valley. And he analyses in terms of energy harnessing, urbanisation as social complexity, war making capacity and information technology. And he then ranks progress with an index, with energy capture being 80% of the ability to project communal power.

Morris's social development index claims West rose from a score of just 4 some 14,000 years ago to 43 by 100 CE. The number wobbles between 28-41 until 1700. Then quadruples to 170 in 1900, and 906 by 2000.
Of the 2000 total, energy capture, war making and information tech all get 250 points, organisation adds another 156.
The ranking for the East is similar until 1800 but lags at 71 in 1900, and 565 in 2000. So the oil driven 20th C sees West jump x20 over its 1700 level on overall civilisation power and community self-actualisation scale, while the East improves by x13.

One can always debate these analyses. My point is that they are plainly far more informative about why as humans we are organised the way we are.

The structuralist perspective – the one that sees humans as social creatures organising to take advantage of the resources that nature has to provide – tells us far more about why we believe what we believe than any amount of "history of moral philosophy" story-telling.

So that is just one example of the now extensive literature that looks to a structuralist account of social development rather than treating it as some fortunate story of a few clever people suddenly having great ideas that somehow then spread contagiously.

You want to frame this as a debate over the origins of liberal democracy as a moralistic ideology. I instead argue that it was the new system that emerged from the same old natural principles of what a social system just is.

So where does liberal democracy begin? Well inadvertently, according to Henrich, the Catholic Church had got the ball rolling in ways that could release the intellectual and economic energy to tap into a more mechanistic approach to life in general. And once you have a mechanistic mindset, you can not only imagine engineering society so as to improve its general functioning, you can't not but help stumble on to the idea of mechanising agriculture – the first steps of fencing the country side and harnessing the rivers and wind for their mechanistic power. — apokrisis

In my opinion, your judgments are very accurate in that liberalism does not appear out of nowhere, like a miracle that suddenly leads society to prosperity. In your approach, liberalism acts as a catalyst for natural processes, not their source - and this, in my opinion, is true.

You rightly emphasize the role of the church, and thereby recognize that even such a seemingly universalistic structure as liberalism is a product of many particular, historically conditioned factors.

And it is difficult to argue with this. Moreover, I would strengthen your thought: not only the church, but also climate, geography, Roman law, Byzantine cultural inertia, and many other things played their role. And everywhere it was different - which is clearly visible, for example, when comparing France with Spain and North with Latin America.

However, I am ready to argue with the thesis about the universality and naturalness of liberalism. It has proven its effectiveness in a certain historical and cultural configuration. But this is not a universal way of finding a compromise. In societies where individualization did not occur and where there was no institution of the church, no pressure on clan structures, liberalism, even if it were brought in a titanium case, would still rust over time.

Moreover, I am convinced that individualism, on which liberal ideology is based, is unnatural in its depths. It was good as an ideal, as a direction, as a promise of freedom, as long as there was something to be freed from. But today, when we have met with living results - with a generation free from everything: from obligations, from attachments, from communities - liberalism itself was horrified by its own embodiment for the first time.

Liberalism exposed man. It freed him from the clan, from the church, from the state, from tradition, even from the need to bear new children. But when a person was left alone, in his apartment, where there was no one to bring him a glass of water (where there was no desire for that someone to be nearby), it turned out that he did not know what to do with his freedom.

Moreover, I am convinced that individualism, on which liberal ideology is based, is unnatural in its depths. It was good as an ideal, as a direction, as a promise of freedom, as long as there was something to be freed from. But today, when we have met with living results - with a generation free from everything: from obligations, from attachments, from communities - liberalism itself was horrified by its own embodiment for the first time. — Astorre

The idea of the sovereign individual is a useful social construction. It framed the world in a certain light that allowed for the explosive growth that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and the rational mechanisation of "everything".

This construction of the Enlightened being – the citizen who could live and thrive within the parameters of a liberal politics and a liberal economy – was a complex thing with many moving parts. But it followed the same old structural logic of setting up a system of collective constraint that would then shape the local degrees of freedom – the kind of individual member of society whose action would on the whole rebuild, and maybe even grow and improve, that society which had invested in an effort to socially construct just such a type of person.

So individuals are free to make mistakes. But that kind of inventiveness and risk taking is how an open market of ideas, skills, services or goods works. The market in the end exerts its democratic constraints, sorting a crowd of striving individuals into the winners and losers. Or into some statistical band of winning and losing that is pragmatically useful to the stability and growth of that society over the long enough run.

Thus individualism is not unnatural. It is the same old naturalistic dynamic of any organismic system. But homo sapiens of course took this approach to social complexity building to its new semiotic level. Modern humans added language and then maths to their toolkit and so could start to form socially constructed selves on top of their genetic and neurobiological selves.

Homo sapiens was an explosive success because it represented the narrative turn in nature. Neanderthals only had simple social structure as they weren't elaborate story-tellers. Humans came along and could start inventing the binding mythologies that gave their tribal groups an ancestral identity. We became the people of a place. And that then meant we lived in a larger landscape of other people in their places.

Humans didn't just live in the everyday immediacy of hunting and foraging, of coping with the basic physical challenges of existing. They now lived in landscapes that were social and alive – inhabited by an ancestral past and shaped by networks of relations between hundreds and then thousands of individuals. There was trading that greatly benefitted all who could participate in the trading. There was warfare and raiding, which might not sound ideal but was just as basic to the creation of socially-constructed landscape. A patchwork of tribal identities that could balance their cooperation and their competition so as to overall rise and dominate over the other hominids who didn't have the level of language to match. Who had not learnt to act as if all individuals were bound under a shared social narrative that now lay heavy across the landscape as far as the eye could see, or the mind could even imagine walking.

So homo sapiens developed a narrative approach to social identity. Notions about reality were extended to cover the reality of a binding web of custom, history, morality. What defined self and "other" at all levels of social experience and across space and time.

Then liberal democracy sums up the Enlightenment's retooling of the cultural narrative in a way better suited to the machine age that was starting to emerge. The idea of the individual as a self of entrepreneurial ambition became something that could be widely imagined. Everywhere people looked, this was the narrative construct they expected to find looking back at them. This was the new landscape that was being inhabited. Where you had rights but also responsibilities under a society-wide legal framework. Where you could own property and accumulate capital, yet also lose it. Where you got an education that presented a wide range of opportunities, but you then had to get on and make something of your own life.

It would be a bit strange to expect this "liberal democratic" formula to spring into being fully formed from start date and then never to have evolved as it went along, responding to its own successes and failures.

Your comment focuses on the idea that it was a formula meant to free the individual and so has now become meaningless because everyone is as free as they could be, yet a little bit miserable with that outcome.

But I am arguing it was a formula to restructure the social concept of being a member of a collective social identity. Sure, the freedoms got turned up in the sense of pick any job you like, take any risks that seem worth the gamble, treat everyone else as players in the same game. My liberation is your liberation too. And in general, that still works.

Yet there is a big difference between living in a steady state balance and living in a freely growing one. Steady state systems are closed and so arrive at Gaussian bell curve distributions. There can be some central average condition that the system targets, and even a restriction on the variance around this mean.

But unconstrained growth leads to the exponentialism of a powerlaw distribution. You get the kind of world we see with social media or fossil-fuel powered consumerism. You get a tilt in the distribution of the economic goods and social capital know as the Matthew Effect. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. A few become super wealthy or super famous. The greater number become the bulk who exist in minimum wage debt slavery and feel unknown and unloved, soon enough to be entirely forgotten. There is no longer a central average outcome. A powerlaw distribution arrives at no mean and only has its trend to ever greater polarisation.

So liberal democracy began to form in a still agrarian society and became tuned to a limited growth rate. Plague, famine and war was enough friction to keep things level enough. But then the Industrial Revolution put things on a new footing. And with the Information Revolution, they really took off.

Has liberal democracy adapted? It was trying to with forms of life more appropriate to a powerlaw curve. There were always plenty of ideas. Emissions trading. Happiness indexes. Social entrepreneurs. Universal basic income. Non-governmental organisations. The international rules-based order.

But the underlying problem with accelerationism is that all thinking becomes short-term. The future gets crowded out. Eventually people even stop trying to fix things. Irrational narratives start to take hold as excuses for not attempting to keep up with the socioeconomic game we are creating. Or billionaires and autocrats have emerged with an interest in preventing any change to the settings.

So forget "liberal democracy" as some kind of modern theology. Humanity coming to its senses and seeing what was right and moral in an absolute way that will be true for all time – and so can also be now discovered to be a false idol.

What really happened is that Homo sapiens has always spun the narratives which allowed for the social construction of the individual self. This social technology step us up through the gears, from foraging, to farming, to the fossil-fuel powered mechanisation of everything. And so around 1900, we entered an era of rocketing acceleration.

And over the past 120 years, we have needed to rethink the social narrative at the same accelerating pace. Is it any wonder that it might feel the wheels are finally falling off? But also, given the structure of social order is always the same underlying deal, the possibility of keeping up is still there.

The question was has the Western metadiscourse ended. It is a good question as we do rely on having some narrative large enough to encompass some collective future. But while "liberal democracy" does a good job of picking out the ideological shift that occurred, it can be seen that many think of it as just a matter of moral philosophy that is then either right or wrong in some idealist absolute fashion. The entropic logic that underpins the whole shift is seen as beside the point. As is the fact that it is just a social narrative which has been rapidly evolving in the very act of keeping up with its own real world consequences.

Hence the need to turn the political conversations back towards the pragmatic realism which they have become increasingly divorced from. Who the heck has opinions on emissions trading, happiness indexes, social entrepreneurs, universal basic income, non-governmental organisations, the international rules-based order and all the other practical stuff that seemed the hot topics even a decade ago?

Of course, we have significantly deviated from the main topic of the topic. But this did not make the discussion less interesting. Your position only strengthened my conviction that Liberalism is an ideology that arose on a real foundation of a set of conditions. Liberalism has proven its effectiveness for the society in which it arose, developed, and was embodied. It is extremely tenacious and instrumentally capable of continuing in the same spirit for a long time. In general, when I started this topic, I did not even question any of these statements, and I can wish liberalism itself to recover from the temporary difficulties it is currently facing. I believe that these challenges will be overcome.

At the same time, I continue to assert that liberalism is not a universal value for humanity as a whole. It follows from this that, in my opinion, it should not be used for export and justification of interests with high standards. Liberalism is an excellent tool. I asked if it was acceptable to say that "I climbed into my neighbor's house and established my own order there only because the neighbor beat his children with a stick and not a belt", simultaneously drawing on the resources of this neighbor for my own benefit.

Another interesting observation that arose during this discussion - the world, in general, does not care about ideology. First of all, a person wants benefits. A person sees that state "A" lives in goodness and is presented with the idea that this became possible thanks to ideology "№26". Of course, he wants his state "B" to have ideology "№26". But the point is that some state "C" appears and says: look, we also live well and we have goodness and our ideology is "№32". If state "A" goes into decline, and state "C" suddenly becomes super-developed, then ideology "№32" is correct? NO. Are goodness and personal happiness connected with ideology? It is connected if he himself shares this ideology and did not accept it because of the success of others.

And now the most important question from the beginning of the discussion: Is the West prepared to coexist with ideological and civilizational alternatives that do not necessarily aspire to Western liberalism?

I think the answer to this question will determine the future fate of humanity

And I do make that structuralist claim about human social organisation. The same hierarchical systems logic applies right through history from prehistoric times. A society is a structure of global constraints and local freedoms. There must be a collective state of mind that can then make its individual choices within that context. — apokrisis

Okay, good.

History then becomes about tracking how this general theme becomes expressed in increasingly complexified and mechanised ways. There are the major transitions in the moves from hunter/gatherer lifestyles to agrarian empires to industrialised nation states. We have the shifts from oral to literate to mathematical semiosis. We have the shifts from ancestor worship to the axial religions to pragmatic realism. At each stage, the basic logic of social structure is the same, but its expression becomes focused on meeting the organisational needs of the next step. — apokrisis

It seems like your argument is that history is the inevitable outworking of semiotic or social realities, and therefore each point in history represents the highest degree of progress possible at that given point. Because we now find ourselves in "democracy," democracy represents the highest (and inevitable) degree of progress possible in 2025. If this is an accurate portrayal, then you have your Ur-cause (semiotic or social progression), you have your effect (Western democracy in 2025), and the only thing to figure out is how the effect can be traced to the cause.

Our difference here is similar to what I pointed out in <this post> regarding wisdom. Your controlling theme is your Ur-cause, and you begin with the premise that things like "wisdom" or "democracy" must be outworkings of that Ur-cause. I do not grant that premise. I would want to look at wisdom in itself or democracy in itself, rather than constraining my understanding of such phenomena to outworkings of an Ur-cause. It's a bit of the hedgehog and the fox, if you like, where the fox is not convinced that the One Big Idea will ultimately hold up.

Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is the kind of approach I would recommend if one is to focus on the actual genesis of the "Western metadiscourse". — apokrisis

Okay. Lots of interesting ideas there, many of which are plausible. That definitely helps me understand more of the basis for your view.

So that is just one example of the now extensive literature that looks to a structuralist account of social development rather than treating it as some fortunate story of a few clever people suddenly having great ideas that somehow then spread contagiously.

You want to frame this as a debate over the origins of liberal democracy as a moralistic ideology. I instead argue that it was the new system that emerged from the same old natural principles of what a social system just is. — apokrisis

Let's revisit Count's point:

Is it impossible to "measure" what is better or worse? I'm quite ready to offer an explanation of why Nazism was bad and unwise. It seems that it is precisely the move towards a reduction to "adaptation" (without any clear idea of what is being adapted towards) that renders such an explanation impossible, from what I can see at least. — Count Timothy von Icarus

On your sort of reasoning, if Hitler had won the war then Nazism would be wise and it would be a higher point of progress than the more democratic alternative. On your view to know whether Nazism or Western democracy is more aligned with the inevitable outworkings of nature, we only have to look at which phenomenon won out. The Allies won the war against the Axis powers, therefore Western democracy is more aligned with "realism."

That approach strikes me as simplistic. Of course you might make a short-term vs. long-term distinction and claim that unnatural progressions can occur in the short term but not in the long term. Yet in that case the relevant question asks why democracy or liberalism are long term phenomena rather than short term phenomena.

The other oddity here is that if you abandon morality in a thoroughgoing way, then you are not capable of any normative arguments. You end up in the quandary of a fatalism that precludes free will. For example, the climate change theorist might say that we should reduce CO2 emissions, but if we fail to do so and a catastrophic event occurs, he cannot but look back and say that the catastrophe was inevitable and his effort to avoid it had no chance of succeeding. The fatalist cannot choose to fight for the Allies or the Axis.

One can always debate these analyses. My point is that they are plainly far more informative about why as humans we are organised the way we are.

The structuralist perspective – the one that sees humans as social creatures organising to take advantage of the resources that nature has to provide – tells us far more about why we believe what we believe than any amount of "history of moral philosophy" story-telling. — apokrisis

Isolating a metric and making it the whole story always seems simplistic to me. It either ignores the fact that humans act for ends, or else stipulates an end without sufficient evidence. In this case the stipulation is that humans want to "get things done in the world." It seems like a projection of one telos onto all of human history.

Granted, Aristotle says that the human telos is happiness (eudaimonia), and I don't think he is projecting. But eudaimonia is not an everything-is-a-nail to the guy with a hammer. A Western industrialist may well convince himself that everyone at every point in time was only interested in industry, but history tells a different tale.

On your sort of reasoning, if Hitler had won the war then Nazism would be wise and it would be a higher point of progress than the more democratic alternative. — Leontiskos

Argument by bogeyman, eh?

The ur-cause here is the evolutionary principle. What works is what survives. What can sustain itself over time through a capacity to repair and reproduce itself.

So you zero in on Nazis as a gotcha. But I would step back and ask what it is about a world system of sovereign states cooperating in trade and yet competing in wars is all about. Why did that particular social structure emerge and have considerable success in organising the modern world.

A Hitler figure would have to not just win the war but win the peace too. History says instead that WW2 cemented the transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana. So we know there who won and who lost what. There was a succession in the hegemons. But also, very little real difference in the brand of politics and economics they were peddling.

Each could claim that their track records proved the wisdom of their ways. But of course, the alert historian would say not so fast. They were lucky too. They were easily defended maritime nations sitting on top of immense fossil fuel reserves. Germany’s problems weren’t that it was intellectually deficient but that it always had the problem of no natural borders and a grave lack of its own fossil fuel resources. Hitler’s early land grab was completely in line with the rational objective of fixing those two problems in a way that the larger European collective could understand and the US didn’t even care.

The problem with fascism was that it was great for mobilising a broken nation for this project but lacked the pragmatism which might have stopped the land grab before it went too far too fast.

The Brits and Americans instead could tell the world that it was being colonised for its own good. Liberal democracy came with just love, peace and trade in mind. It would respect your people, your sovereignty, your cultural differences. All you had to do was accept your position as a branch office of the corporate headquarters and life would be sweet.

The other oddity here is that if you abandon morality in a thoroughgoing way, then you are not capable of any normative arguments. You end up in the quandary of a fatalism that precludes free will. For example, the climate change theorist might say that we should reduce CO2 emissions, but if we fail to do so and a catastrophic event occurs, he cannot but look back and say that the catastrophe was inevitable and his effort to avoid it had no chance of succeeding. The fatalist cannot choose to fight for the Allies or the Axis. — Leontiskos

This is nuts. Being brought up as a pragmatist is what always gave me my own voice in society. I could either choose to go along with the way things were or act according to what I thought was better.

A trivial example is that I refused to be promoted to a Sixer in the Cub Scouts as I said I didn’t want to order the other kids around. The look of incomprehension from the adults made me realise what this para-military organisation was all about and I left soon after.

So I see no problem of working within norms and then also challenging norms. The capacity to make this critical choice is central to being a pragmatist. You either play the game or change the game. And it is reason which tells you which way to go and any juncture.

So a climate change scientist can see the need to reduce emissions. But if society fails to heed, then the climate scientist has to think that either society feels it is OK that global collapse is OK - some will survive - or that society lacks the capacity to escape the world view that fossil fuel has constructed for it.

I was a climate change activist until about 2010. After that - seeing the reality of the politics and economics up close - I stop wasting my energy. It will be what it will be. And I make my own pragmatic plans within that.

Isolating a metric and making it the whole story always seems simplistic to me. It either ignores the fact that humans act for ends, or else stipulates an end without sufficient evidence. — Leontiskos

This is because you have the fixed normative habit of seeing dichotomies as unresolved monisms rather than the identification of the complementary limits on being - the complementary limits that then make an active choice of where to strike the useful balance.

So my systems perspectives says there can be local ends and global ends. These are measurably different in being selfish and collective. Or competitive and cooperative. So you have some general bounding contrast in play, and the system would want to balance those rival imperatives over all scales of its being. Hence the pragmatic understanding of society as a hierarchy of interest groups. The contrasting pulls of individuation and integration at every level of social order.

The metric speaks not to the polar divide but to the spectrum of balances that is to be found inbetween.

This is why the natural world is fractally organised. That is what you get when the balancing is not just at one level but the same balance being expressed freely at all levels. Even the balance can be measurably balanced once you understand that the dichotomy leads on to larger natural thing of the hierarchy. The Platonic structure that science only discovered in the past century in the maths of fractals, powerlaw distributions, scalefree networks, dissipative structure, and all the other ways of saying the same thing as a new metaphysical perspective on natural order.

But eudaimonia is not an everything-is-a-nail to the guy with a hammer. — Leontiskos

Happiness is probably a vague enough term to hide the difference between talking about seeking a life balance and pursuing a hedonic pole.

But if we are to understand eudaimonia properly, we have to dig into that exact difference in viewpoint. Do we mean what it feels like to be in balance with our life and world - a state of equanimity - or what it feels like to be madly ecstatic … just turned down to some low simmer that feels like the sustainable norm. A quiet content. A state of equanimity in short. Neither especially happy nor upset. Just ticking along nicely in the sense that sudden joy or sudden upset are adaptive states we could flip into as quick as circumstances might demand or justify.

So you keep saying that my position is the one that can’t say anything much about the good and the bad. But my reply is that you don’t even seem to have started to understand the dynamical nature of such things. You are treating the good as a fixed destination placed at some impossible distance from wherever we are. I make the argument for how it is all about the dynamical balance that can stabilise our sense of being a self in its world. The pragmatism of being as adapted as possible, both in the short term and the long term, to the game that is living a life as a social creature.

Argument by bogeyman, eh? — apokrisis

That looks like a red herring, given that you seem to agree with what I've said.

The ur-cause here is the evolutionary principle. What works is what survives. What can sustain itself over time through a capacity to repair and reproduce itself. — apokrisis

Right, but my point is that your approach is materially identical to post hoc rationalization. "What is superior/pragmatic is that which survives; Nazi Germany did not survive; Therefore, Nazi Germany was inferior." That is the premise, and then one has to provide reasoning to connect the ur-cause to the effect, which in this case has to do with fossil fuels and fascism.

The reason such an approach is not formally identical with post hoc rationalization is because its norm really is survival, and survival really is measured in retrospect. On this approach what is good is precisely what survives, and this is associated with what "works" or what is "pragmatic" or what is "real," and there is no additional good/normativity.

My other point with Nazi Germany is that your approach seems to have suffocated contingency. Most historians would say that the Axis Powers might have won the war, but on a fatalistic view everything that happens happens necessarily (again, unless one makes distinctions such as the short-term vs. long-term distinction). So let's move to that question of contingency and freedom.

I was a climate change activist until about 2010. After that - seeing the reality of the politics and economics up close - I stop wasting my energy. It will be what it will be. And I make my own pragmatic plans within that. — apokrisis

But that's exactly what my argument predicts.

So I see no problem of working within norms and then also challenging norms. The capacity to make this critical choice is central to being a pragmatist. You either play the game or change the game. And it is reason which tells you which way to go and any juncture.

So a climate change scientist can see the need to reduce emissions. But if society fails to heed, then the climate scientist has to think that either society feels it is OK that global collapse is OK - some will survive - or that society lacks the capacity to escape the world view that fossil fuel has constructed for it. — apokrisis

What's interesting about this case is that the climate scientist seems to think that he is opposing activity that is suicidal on the level of the human species (and perhaps beyond). On your evolutionary principle "what works is what survives." So is it possible for the human species to commit accidental suicide and fail to survive? If so, then what survived was precisely what did not work (for humans).

We can make the fatalism argument more abstract if you are concerned about "bogeymen." Suppose that political ideas are measured only by whether they survive. Thus if political idea X out-survives political idea Y, then political idea X is superior to political idea Y by the only possible metric.

Now Apokrisis is standing before a society where X and Y are clashing. He must make a choice. Does he promote X? Y? Neither? If he chooses to promote one of the two ideas, such as he did temporarily in 2010, then he is at the same time predicting that X (say) will out-survive Y. Whether he is right or wrong is fairly simple, for time will tell. If X out-survives Y then he will say, "I was right." If Y out-survives X then he will say, "I was wrong, and now I will switch sides." He is always a "fair-weather fan" in that sense, for moral perplexity cannot arise where there is not more than one moral telos.

The reason the reductio ad absurdum cannot simply be brushed aside with "bogeyman" labels is because there is a very strong cultural premise whereby one would continue to resist the Nazis even after the war was lost and the Nazi "survivability" proved itself superior. The reductio is an appeal to the fairly strong idea that good is not inevitable, and has to do with more than mere survival.

A trivial example is that I refused to be promoted to a Sixer in the Cub Scouts as I said I didn’t want to order the other kids around. The look of incomprehension from the adults made me realise what this para-military organisation was all about and I left soon after. — apokrisis

What's interesting is that this is a moral choice in the classic sense, and not merely a "pragmatic" choice. You seem to be implicitly boasting that you are not the kind of person who wanted to "order the other kids around" and contribute to a "para-military organization." You are not saying, "My survivability and the survivability of my social environment will increase if I refuse the promotion to Sixer, therefore I will refuse the promotion." You are doing much the opposite, "I will sacrifice the boon of the approval of my peers and the Scout Leader because I value something that is more important than that approval, and am willing to act on it." You harmed the survivability of the social whole in order to honor your individual conscience. After all, militaristic hierarchical organization is one of the most time-proven organizational orderings.

This is because you have the fixed normative habit of seeing dichotomies as unresolved monisms rather than the identification of the complementary limits on being - the complementary limits that then make an active choice of where to strike the useful balance. — apokrisis

No, I don't think so. I don't assume that I have the epistemic access to recognize every dichotomy as either an unresolved monism or complementary limits on being. They may be either. I don't know ahead of time. I think there is a resolution but I don't assume that I will be able to understand it.

So my systems perspectives says there can be local ends and global ends. These are measurably different in being selfish and collective. Or competitive and cooperative. So you have some general bounding contrast in play, and the system would want to balance those rival imperatives over all scales of its being. Hence the pragmatic understanding of society as a hierarchy of interest groups. The contrasting pulls of individuation and integration at every level of social order. — apokrisis

But what does the bolded mean, "the system would want"? Does the system have wants and desires, or is it being reified and anthropomorphized?

I understand that you have, say, the pole of the individual human and the pole of the human species, where the first has to do with selfishness and the second has to do with collectivity. But my hunch is that survivability is the only telos for both. "Selfishness" has to do with individual survivability and "collective" has to do with the species' survivability. As a more robust alternative I would offer the classic poles of subsidiarity and solidarity.

My difficulty is that this looks like a rather one-dimensional contrast. The only possible source of contrast and complexity is coming from individual survival vs. group survival. On my view the evolutionary reductionism does not properly account for the human mind and human teloi. Humans often place their end in things that are basically unrelated to survival, and this is precisely what accounts for the vast complexity of social life.

For example, the suicide bomber attests to the power of the human mind, which is able to subordinate the end of survival to other ends. There are just too many anomalies for the survival theory. If the survival theory were correct then human social realities would be a great deal simpler than they in fact are.

Happiness is probably a vague enough term to hide the difference between talking about seeking a life balance and pursuing a hedonic pole.

But if we are to understand eudaimonia properly, we have to dig into that exact difference in viewpoint. Do we mean what it feels like to be in balance with our life and world - a state of equanimity - or what it feels like to be madly ecstatic … just turned down to some low simmer that feels like the sustainable norm. A quiet content. A state of equanimity in short. Neither especially happy nor upset. Just ticking along nicely in the sense that sudden joy or sudden upset are adaptive states we could flip into as quick as circumstances might demand or justify. — apokrisis

Perhaps neither (or either), but is either one the same as the evolutionary survival account? For example, the telos of pleasure certainly seems to fold into a eudaimonic account more easily than a survival account, given that people and also groups will often harm their survivability for the sake of pleasure. I actually think your survival-account would track the data points quite well if humans did not exist at all, as the aberrations would seem to be much fewer among non-human animals.

So you keep saying that my position is the one that can’t say anything much about the good and the bad. But my reply is that you don’t even seem to have started to understand the dynamical nature of such things. You are treating the good as a fixed destination placed at some impossible distance from wherever we are. I make the argument for how it is all about the dynamical balance that can stabilise our sense of being a self in its world. The pragmatism of being as adapted as possible, both in the short term and the long term, to the game that is living a life as a social creature. — apokrisis

Oh, that's fine, but I think you will find that if you want to teach people how to pursue such a good you will require a lot more than survivability language. If this is right, then the end you outline will not actually be persuasive to most people, and it will then need to be dressed up in other clothing. So you get a new caste of priests mediating the supreme telos to the masses who cannot interact with it directly. It seems that whenever someone dreams up a new ultimate telos (such as the Enlighteners did), they quickly find that hardly anyone is waiting in line to get on board, and that the masses need to be provided with a "temporary" proxy.

Take technology for example. A new technology can drastically influence the course of human history. Many technologies seem positively opposed to the survival telos (e.g. nuclear weapons, contraception, perhaps even social media), and they are propagated nonetheless. If any such technologies are historically contingent, then we have cases where survivability is strongly impacted by a contingent cause that is not itself ordered to survivability.

I also find that "balance" approaches tend to be almost indistinguishable from other robust approaches in practice. For example, I think you will end up appealing to the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, just in a roundabout way. The question is then whether the simplification is helpful: whether pragmatism prefers that humans conceive of an ur-cause or not.

Right, but my point is that your approach is materially identical to post hoc rationalization. "What is superior/pragmatic is that which survives; Nazi Germany did not survive; Therefore, Nazi Germany was inferior." That is the premise, and then one has to provide reasoning to connect the ur-cause to the effect, which in this case has to do with fossil fuels and fascism. — Leontiskos

What survives is the fact we can examine. We can use it to ask the larger question of why that general kind of thing might be what emerges from the test of time.

It could be just due to contingency. Or it may be due to a structural advantage.

So you throw Nazis into the conversation. I say fine. Europe had its well known history of evolving into a community of sovereign states, Germany had its history of struggling to build itself up into a great industrial power despite some significant cultural advantages. We can examine the particular in terms of the general and debate in what ways a fascist turn was at first a success and then a failure. And to what degree the reasons for either were contingent or structural.

But it seems you like your history dumbed down. Nazis bad. Boo, hiss.

My other point with Nazi Germany is that your approach seems to have suffocated contingency. — Leontiskos

Well I cited contingencies. Such as a lack of oil fields and defensible borders. Accidents of geography that turned out to matter given the political and economic structures that had evolved to dominate the European landscape.

So again, try to be less sloppy.

On your evolutionary principle "what works is what survives." So is it possible for the human species to commit accidental suicide and fail to survive? If so, then what survived was precisely what did not work (for humans). — Leontiskos

Once more you betray that you can only think of worlds where ends are reached and history is complete. Utopia is constructed and heaven on Earth is achieved.

But my whole outlook is dynamical and relative. There is no necessity that anything lasts forever, nor that it be relentlessly all onwards and upwards until final perfection arrives. You are creating strawmen.

Whether he is right or wrong is fairly simple, for time will tell. If X out-survives Y then he will say, "I was right." If Y out-survives X then he will say, "I was wrong, and now I will switch sides." He is always a "fair-weather fan" in that sense, for moral perplexity cannot arise where there is not more than one moral telos. — Leontiskos

All these weak arguments. If I make a wrong prediction, I discover something about my understanding of the structural principles involved.

With climate change, it was looking as if global governance would react just like it had over aerosols destroying the ozone layer. But then when the US republicans in particular became climate deniers, I had to revise my model of what was going on. I had to make the connection to the fossil fuel lobby and its political power. I had to understand human society in the more general context of thermodynamics and dissipative structure theory. This larger picture - still just as evolutionary, but now at superorganism level - revealed what happens when the world gets so financialised under neoliberalism that capital flows hook into whatever maximises profits. And cheap energy is the base of the pyramid.

So it was not about switching sides. It was about recognising how the issues were much larger than political agreement on some obvious technical fix. The beast had evolved and was using an army of lobbyists to distort our very grasp of reality so as to perpetuate its own superorganismic existence.

We went to turn off the tap. And the tap said no. That was a strange enough turn of events to dig deeper into the politics of it all.

there is a very strong cultural premise whereby one would continue to resist the Nazis even after the war was lost and the Nazi "survivability" proved itself superior. — Leontiskos

Your analysis is about Game of Thrones level. Winning a war is not winning the peace. Darwinism isn’t a battle to the death. It is about flourishing at the long run ecosystem level. Life on Earth has suffered many mass extinction events and then bounced back with even greater richness and complexity.

You seem trapped in some narrative about the war of good over evil. I’m simply pointing out that organisms have a natural structural story that we can discern. And that applies to social history just as much as biological history.

"Selfishness" has to do with individual survivability and "collective" has to do with the species' survivability. — Leontiskos

Again you have an old fashioned notion of evolution as a brute individualistic struggle rather than a collective flourishing. Nature has no beauty for you I take it?

On my view the evolutionary reductionism does not properly account for the human mind and human teloi. — Leontiskos

Your view is reductionist so no surprise it seems inadequate. Try answering in terms of what I’ve argued rather than this continual strawmanning.

Perhaps neither (or either), but is either one the same as the evolutionary survival account? — Leontiskos

You keep talking about survival because you want to pretend that by organismic order, I mean mere contingency. But as I said, it is about what works. What can sustain itself over time. The structure that can adapt and flourish. The organisation that can organise itself.

The ur-cause here is the evolutionary principle. What works is what survives. What can sustain itself over time through a capacity to repair and reproduce itself. — apokrisis

This discussion can go nowhere I believe because of a basic difference in our metaphysical logic.

I've said it before, but I will repeat. There are two ways of making a dialectical distinction.

The first is that you can argue there are two extreme poles of being and they connect in a single direction. There are the good and the bad, the true and the false, the beautiful and the ugly, the divine and the bestial, etc. It is just obvious that there is the one pole representing the direction things ought to go, and then the other direction they thus need to be leaving well behind.

One is the right pole to reach, the other is the correct pole to reject. That creates an absolute rule that doesn't seem to need any further justification. There is just one correct finality and you must keep aiming at it even if you can't always get there.

The second view of how it works is instead that there are two poles, but their relationship is complementary or synergistic. They might be opposites, but they are fruitful opposites as they go together in creating the larger thing of a balanced system. They are the dialectic that make for the greater whole.

So now we are talking of the Unity of Opposites. The fundamental categories of the Greek cosmos.
Chance and necessity, discrete and continuous, local and global, matter and form, atom and void, one and many, chaos and order, etc.

Their relation as poles of being is one of mutual co-creation. They are the basic contrasts which allow anything to actually exist as the stable reality that arises inbetween. Instead of one standing for the rejection of the other, they each stand as supplying what the other lacks. In its only in their balanced combination that things become properly whole.

So you and I look for quite different things to organise out explanations of the world. You say societies just ought to be directing all their efforts towards the good, as why on earth would it make sense to aim at the bad?

I say that it is instead some fruitful balance of opposites that must be struck. One is looking for the actions that play the complementary roles out of which a flourishing society could evolve.

Social science uniformly gives the answer as to what complementary pair is – competition and cooperation. And how this dichotomy can push in both these directions by being organised in terms of hierachical scale. Competition is natural to the more local scale of being, and cooperation is natural to the global scale of being.

What else could bind a complex whole into a state of self-organising dynamical balance but that it be ordered as some set of global constraints stand in relations with some set of local freedoms. Or global necessity yoked to local contingency.

Neither side is a bad thing even if both sides couldn't be more logically in opposition. It is only when you have such an opposition that you can have the third thing that is their self-organising balance. You can have a society that is both globally coherent and yet locally dynamic. A society that can be integrated because it is also differentiated enough for that integration to even be a thing.

So there is a clash of metaphysics. And my argument is that the real world only supports the second story. Opposition can only truly exist if the opposition is complementary – a two way street that creates its own dynamical balance.

If your arrow of causation just points away from one pole and towards the other, then how could anything ever in fact arise? Why would the bad ever come into existence if the good is always the goal? And how could the good even be said to exist unless the bad did exist as well? Is the bad secretly the good because the rejection of the bad is how the good gets achieved?

You can see how this kind one-way absolutism goes around in circles unable to ground the central relation that it wants to claim.

But a metaphysics based on the emergence of complementarity is self-grounding. You need complete opposites as then you have two things that work together. And they can only in fact be complete opposites as working towards a complementary balance is the very thing that is constraining them. If they failed to be complementary, they couldn't survive the test that is their ability to hang together as a unity.

Needless to say that all ancient metaphysics – Greek, Taoist, Buddhist – understood this fact about the logic of Nature. You need fundamental opposition. But it has to be organised to play complementary roles. And reality emerges in self-creating fashion out of the resulting balancing act.

There is very much said in detail about liberalism as a system that optimally balances societal interests in motion. I also want to draw attention to another feature of liberalism, one that should be mentioned when unpacking this phenomenon closely.

To this end, let us return to the question: what is power, in its essence? This might open new paths for reflection.

Take, for instance, the master–slave relationship in a classical slave-owning society, such as Ancient Rome. The slave is in complete bodily subjection to the master. The master may coerce him, command his life, beat him, punish him — and this is how history textbooks, films, and literature often present it. (By the way, in historical dramas where Roman characters are shown as noble, it is always understated or omitted that they were slave-owners — as if this shadow of history no longer casts light upon them.)

But the same sources repeatedly omit a fundamental point: the slave was not simply a thing, but a resource, and therefore required investments. By purchasing a slave, the master acquired not absolute freedom, but a bundle of obligations, without which the slave loses his value as an object of mastery.

Any “careful” master was obliged to:

1. Keep the slave healthy — without health, no work is possible.


2. Provide housing — else the slave might perish, escape, fall ill.


3. Ensure food — a hungry slave is a restless, even dangerous, slave.


4. Provide some minimal education — so the slave may work, obey commands, manage tools or tasks.


5. Maintain obedience — whether by discipline or reward, but inevitably.


6. Oversee the procreation of slaves — offspring could become additional resource.


7. Ensure minimal welfare — for productivity depends on not pushing the body beyond collapse.


8. And finally — protect against external threats: theft, murder, flight, even revolt among slaves.



This is structural care, not humanist fancy. It arises not from moral goodness but from the logic of property. And despite all the barbarism of the system, it is compelled to include care, otherwise it collapses as a system of mastery.

Now let us place on the other side of the scale liberal relations of freedom.

Here, the owner of capital does not have slaves but workers. He goes to the market, recruits personnel. This new‑master doesn’t care how the worker survives, where he lives, how he eats, how he reproduces, whether he is happy or not. What matters to him is the worker’s efficiency. To work more and demand less. If the worker falls ill or dies tomorrow, it is not a problem for the master: he simply goes to the market and finds another, one already raised from childhood to be efficient, fast, better. These workers themselves aspire to everything; they themselves take care of themselves.

I used two extremes as examples. If someone offered me to choose where I’d prefer to be a master, I’d, without hesitation, choose the second variant. Humanity, in general, seems to have arrived here, which is sensible. However, between these two extremes there have existed many other forms of social order: tribal communities where the leader bore responsibility even for the stability of the rains; feudal regimes where one had to defend one’s peasants from raids, administer justice, be a model of mercy; socialism, where the working people were guaranteed free housing, education, etc.; finally authoritarian regimes where the master is held responsible for the prosperity of the people who follow him.

Liberal demagogues, speaking of tyranny and the absence of choice, forget this element. If someone calls himself a master, he is obligated to care.

From personal experience, I have noticed a difference between working in a liberal state and a non‑liberal (authoritarian) one. In a liberal state you must give your maximum at work; in a non‑liberal one you may not have to be the most excellent or efficient. Why? Because non‑liberal regimes generate a whole stratum of people who believe someone should come and give: freedom, salary, guarantees, safety. It is precisely for this that they vote. Unlike in liberal societies, where people strive themselves to forge their happiness.


---

Perhaps herein lies the main metaphysical kernel of liberalism:
it is power without the master.
Not because the master no longer exists, but because he has become invisible, elusive, inaccessible to reproach.
He no longer commands — he regulates. He does not care — he provides platforms. He does not answer — he disconnects.

Are you free?
Then be responsible for everything.

But freedom that does not include structures of responsibility — this is not emancipation, but a form of finely crafted abandonment.
And if the slave, despite all his unfreedom, was once held by the master’s sleeve, today the free person — falls alone.

-----

As an example of the stability of a nonliberal regime, I would like to cite Gaddafi. Personally, I do not justify him - this is important to emphasize. But let's try to look at his regime not from the position of conventional morality, but from the point of view of the structure of responsibility.

During his rule, every citizen of Libya received: free education and health care, often housing, assistance with the birth of a child, subsidies for newlyweds, subsidies for food and gasoline. The state, as a figure of the master, was forced to take care - because such was the model of power.

After NATO's military intervention and the overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011, Libya plunged into chaos, civil war, fragmentation. Millions of citizens lost not only their previous guarantees, but also the very structure on which they relied.
The master disappeared - along with him, the guarantor disappeared.

One can argue about what Gaddafi was like as a person. But the philosophical fact remains: an authoritarian regime was associated with responsibility for its subject.
This form can be terrible, violent, cruel - but it was there, it worked.

Liberal societies often perceive this as a "tyrannical cage" from which one must escape. But when the cage disappears, and with it the food, warmth and protection disappear - then the question becomes different:

What is more important: to be free and nobody's, or unfree, but in a system where someone needs you?

You are using paradox to argue against itself. You say liberalism is contradicted by the fact that complete individual freedom isn't even desirable. And that slavery is not so bad because the owner is incentivised to take good care of their property.

Sure, these are points. But where they should lead on to is my general point that any form of political or economic organisation has to have an organismic balance. Rather than dealing in baffling contradictions, we need to be dealing in the clarity of complementary balances.

Argument by paradox is a very normal tactic. But it isn't useful. It should just be telling you that you are stuck trying to boil reality down to some reductionist monism – a single principle – when really you should be seeing that contradiction is where you are starting to see the outline of a fundamental dichotomy coming into sight. And once you can resolve the contradiction as a complementary balance of actions, then you can arrive at the third thing which is the triadic structure of a hierarchy.

A story of two things in complementary interaction, organised by scale. The systems story of some set of global constraints and a matching set of local freedoms. A logical dichotomy arranged so that there is a separation of the two sides of the equation – as the local and the global are far apart – but then also the two sides can mix and find a balance as they become two counter-actions being expressed with equal vigour of all scales. That is how a complex system can exist and how a complex system can just keep growing by adding levels of complexity – levels over which it is both differentiating and integrating.

So there are habits of thought we bring to philosophical discussions. And pointing out seeming paradoxes is some kind of start to that. It demonstrates that every attempted monism undermines itself.

But then you need to be able to move on and dig deeper. Discover the more complex story that will be some emergent system of balanced forces. Some deep division that has arrived at its complementary resolution. A seed of structured organisation with the capacity to scale or grow.

Perhaps herein lies the main metaphysical kernel of liberalism:
it is power without the master.
Not because the master no longer exists, but because he has become invisible, elusive, inaccessible to reproach.
He no longer commands — he regulates. He does not care — he provides platforms. He does not answer — he disconnects.

Are you free?
Then be responsible for everything. — Astorre

There is now an extensive literature on the superorganism approach to understanding what is really going on in human affairs.

It is pointless trying to understand liberal democracy in terms of moral philosophy. We can't just impose values on a natural system. Values have to arise out of the success of the system. They have to be what is learnt from pragmatic experience. Indeed, the success of the system is what winds up imposing its values on us. And it is by believing otherwise that we become disconnected from the system that is evolving its complexity. We can't be masters of a world we misunderstand what is really going on.

So what is going on? An organism is a mix of information and entropification. It is a system that can evolve because it has a memory and can learn. It can become the master of power. It can develop a narrative that regulates physics and so set itself up as a self-remaking structure – an organism that knows how to both repair and reproduce its essential fabric of being.

In terms of humans as social superorganisms, we have gone through three major restructurings in those terms. First we were foragers, then farmers, then fossil fuel burners. Each developed its own narratives to collectively organise its populations around the business of entropification. The flow of power – of free energy or work capacity – through its veins. Tribal cultures have their typical narrative. Agricultural empires have theirs. And an industrialising world had to develop yet another.

Tribes have to have a deep understanding and connection with their natural landscapes.

Farmers have to be organised about extracting calories from their land and generating enough surplus to cover the overheads that come with that. The bureaucracy to organise the people. The military to protect what can be taken. The trade networks that bring in the technology and resources from lands beyond what is owned.

But the third story of the machine age was very different as what it started to eat was ancient raw energy stores – hydrocarbons buried just under the ground. Instead of having to adjust your social values to the constraints of waiting for the sun to come up each morning, the rains to come each season, the harvest to roll around each year, there was suddenly an unlimited supply of power that could be consumed as soon and as fast as you liked. All you had to do was re-organise your society and start helping yourself. Getting to the head of the line first, bringing the largest plate you could imagine, stuffing yourself silly.

The availability of power used to be a restriction on human desires. Now the problem was the consumption. The scramble was to grow the collective capacity for entropification. Rebuild society on a narrative of exponential expansion.

So that is what happened. A new set of values came in.

At first perhaps, moral philosophy thought well we know what we should do with unlimited power. The agricultural world we just left behind could have been better served by generating a greater surplus that was also distributed more evenly. The new industrialising world could be a utopia with no need for wars or poverty. All labour could be mechanised. Housewives would have dishwashers. Husbands would work in clean, safe and well-lit places. Everyone would be living like kings and queens.

But such fantasies were overtaken by the realities of the superorganism. Mechanised fossil fuel consumption promoted its own new virtues. The ones where humans became increasingly atomised as cogs in the machine. Life became displaced from natural landscapes and even farmed landscapes. We moved into the abstractions of urban landscapes and eventually cyber landscapes.

Or if we really lift the covers on what has been going on, we live in capitalised and financialised landscapes. With neo-liberalism, that new master narrative emerged. Capital flows and natural resource flows made their direct connection that now cut out the middle person. The economy was now a stripped down dragster for burning fuel. It had to become that way as it was the only way of creating a large enough mouth to gobble all the still buried energy at the 3% compounding rate that had become established.

OK. That is an exaggerated telling of the tale. A narrative to account for the narrative. But my point is that natural systems have their own dynamics. And we humans can't just dream up some values – do a little moral philosophy hand-waving – and expect to apply them to how the world works. We can say no to war, to slavery, to spoilt landscapes, to social inequality, and a whole long list of things that seem not-very-good, and so terribly-bad. But nature is just going to roll on over that in ways that we really ought to learn to recognise.

As Art Berman says in his “The Great Simplification” – “Energy is the economy. Money is a call on energy. Debt is a lien on future energy.”

And David Graeber points out in his masterly "Debt: The first 5000 years", debt is slavery. It was how slavery got culturally institutionalised in the age of agricultural empires. You had to borrow in times of hardship and after that you slid into being owned by your creditor. Money was invented as it stands for that exact relation – that exact dichotomy. Life almost immediately became a question of which side of the ledger your number was entered into – as a debtor or a creditor – as soon as life became civilised. From the time of Sumer and even before, the world could slide from owing you to owning you.

Aglietta and Orleans illustrate how this central organising principle is expressed even in religion where human existence is itself treated as a primordial debt. The Brahmanas verses that assert: “You are born to death and only by sacrifice can you redeem yourself from death.”

So both classical liberalism and neo-liberalism were just the scaling of this ancient civilising principle – the exact narrative that could lock the individual into a system of collectivised entropy production. The age of agriculture was already organised into an intricate web of credit and debt. Presented with an unlimited free lunch of entropic power in the form of fossil fuel, humanity had to scramble to keep up with the opportunity. Debt had to be super-sized to bind humanity to the Herculean mission of dissipating that much power in an orgy of consumption.

So at every turn of the human story, a systems logic is at work. Nature self-organises. And the human superorganism is simply another level of that developing natural complexity.

As participants in nature, we would seem to have choices. And moral philosophy would like to think those choices are absolute. There is some divine imperative that is the master of nature. And we were created to get that job done on this tiny speck of dust orbiting some completely anonymous solar fusion reactor for the brief moment until we cooked the planet we were living on. What a joke that line of thinking is.

But even if we are not the masters of the universe, we can learn to understand the metaphysical logic that explains nature at its most general systematic level and go from there.

And as I say, the politics of the modern neo-liberal superorganism – the conversion of all human life to a lien on future energy – has become a busy field of research and discussion. The pragmatic reality is being analysed and evidenced. The reasons we have been acting as we do is not so paradoxical in the light of how things naturally come together in a world that is fundamentally self-organising.

This discussion can go nowhere I believe because of a basic difference in our metaphysical logic. — apokrisis

The strawmen abound. I've already explained why this is a misconstrual in places like this:

Throughout there seems to be a kind of equivocation, where you eschew the terms "good" and "bad" by claiming that an optimal mixture of both is what is needed, but then you don't seem to notice that what is actually good on that account is the optimal mixture. Don't you agree that the optimal mixture or balance is good, and that the ordering is bad to the extent that it deviates from this optimal balance? This is why I think Count Timothy von Icarus' objection cuts deeper than you realize, for it applies also at this new level of good-as-balance. If I am right and you have your own conception of what is good and what is bad, then acknowledging this would help put us on the same page and would help us appreciate a common criterion. — Leontiskos

Or that "balance" approaches are fine, but not unique:

I also find that "balance" approaches tend to be almost indistinguishable from other robust approaches in practice. For example, I think you will end up appealing to the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, just in a roundabout way. The question is then whether the simplification is helpful: whether pragmatism prefers that humans conceive of an ur-cause or not. — Leontiskos

If you are aiming at balance, then for you balance is good. You can't just keep avoiding that fact and claiming that good/bad divisions must be avoided. Once it is recognized that balance is good, then one will want to ask why it is good, or what it means for it to be good.

My central objection is that survival-based poles lack explanatory power. It's as if you think that shades of grey are all that is needed to explain the world, and I think we need colors. I think that the explanadum of human social reality is more complex and robust than survival-based poles are able to account for, and that a unified survival-theory is therefore an oversimplification. Your account literally reads to me like the very Protestant Occasionalism that you so often project onto your interlocutors, with a tidy Ur-cause that accounts for everything. ...With that objection and one or two others aside, I see nothing overly wrong with a "balance" approach to ethics or metaphysics. Such is soundly Aristotelian.

Yet you are also saying that I do not properly understand how great your semiotic-evolutionary theory really is. And that may be. Maybe you really are able to explain all of the diversity of human social realities with one unified theory, and I just don't understand that theory well enough to see it. That's possible, but I have no reason to believe it, and the reason this discussion can go nowhere is because your esoteric theory is opaque to those who have not spent a large amount of time with it.

There are lots of interesting ideas there, but let me focus on just one:

Perhaps herein lies the main metaphysical kernel of liberalism:
it is power without the master.
Not because the master no longer exists, but because he has become invisible, elusive, inaccessible to reproach.
He no longer commands — he regulates. He does not care — he provides platforms. He does not answer — he disconnects.

Are you free?
Then be responsible for everything.

But freedom that does not include structures of responsibility — this is not emancipation, but a form of finely crafted abandonment.
And if the slave, despite all his unfreedom, was once held by the master’s sleeve, today the free person — falls alone.

...

What is more important: to be free and nobody's, or unfree, but in a system where someone needs you? — Astorre

I think this is on point, and it is at least clear that our current stage of liberalism has resulted in a dearth of subsidiarity. The individual has become isolated, responsible only for themselves and therefore not responsible at all. And where individuals are to be responsible only for themselves and their state of being, we end up confused in the face of realities which contradict this doctrine. For example, the "crack baby" confuses a society which holds to the doctrine of liberal individualism.

In the Hobbesian mindset the only foundational agent other than the individual is the state, and the only rights bestowed upon the individual by any other agent are bestowed by the state. Thus in the modern liberal mindset the only one which truly owes us obligations—the only "master"—is the liberal state. Thus one must either reason from what one receives from the state to what one is owed (i.e. "The state gave me bread therefore I was/am owed bread by the state"), or one must reason from what one is owed to what one is owed by the state (i.e. "I have a right to X, therefore it is the state and only the state which must fulfill this right").

This unnatural situation where there is only the agent of the individual and the agent of the state results in a lack of natural intermediate and subsidiary institutions and associations by which rights and duties are generated among social animals. Instead of assuming that every right must be fulfilled by the state, a non-liberal society is much more apt to assume that some rights are fulfilled by subsidiary institutions, such as the spouse, or the family, or the community, or the polis. Or in the case you give, one would look to the "master."

If you are aiming at balance, then for you balance is good. — Leontiskos

You are still strawmanning. My position is irreducibly complex and not - like yours - fundamentally simplistic.

So balances can be “good” or “bad”. And the difference? One in some quantifiable sense works and the other doesn’t. A typical way to quantify this would be survival. The good balance has the further fact that it lasts. It persists. It is successful in perpetuating a state of homeostatic identity even in the face of environmental perturbation, etc.

It's as if you think that shades of grey are all that is needed to explain the world, and I think we need colors. — Leontiskos

But what are colours but exactly the kind of opponent channel processing that my dichotomising approach specifies? Red is not-green and yellow is not-blue. Hue discrimination is the complexity built up from having three frequency sampling forms of retinal cone cells wired up with a dichotomising circuit logic. Blue is blue to the extent yellowness is lacking. And vice versa.

You plucked an example from the air and it completely proves my point. The logic of dichotomies is a basic fact of perceptual science.

With that objection and one or two others aside, I see nothing overly wrong with a "balance" approach to ethics or metaphysics. Such is soundly Aristotelian. — Leontiskos

That is gracious of you. In return, I think you sometimes almost get what Aristotle was wrestling with in trying to flesh out his hylomorphism and four causes.

That's possible, but I have no reason to believe it, and the reason this discussion can go nowhere is because your esoteric theory is opaque to those who have not spent a large amount of time with it. — Leontiskos

Or you haven’t spent any time studying the science of anything and it’s all too overwhelming. No social science. No neurobiology. No evolutionary biology. No systems science or complexity theory. :grin:

Let me ask you a question. Why do you consider all opinions that differ from yours to be reductionist and one-sided? What if I personally agree with most of your judgments, and I am only trying to supplement and diversify them? Maybe I just want to show some examples from practice and experience? Or maybe your approach is so perfect that it does not need this? Try to read what others answer not as criticism of your thoughts, but as a constructive complementary discussion.

This unnatural situation where there is only the agent of the individual and the agent of the state results in a lack of natural intermediate and subsidiary institutions and associations by which rights and duties are generated among social animals. Instead of assuming that every right must be fulfilled by the state, a non-liberal society is much more apt to assume that some rights are fulfilled by subsidiary institutions, such as the spouse, or the family, or the community, or the polis. Or in the case you give, one would look to the "master." — Leontiskos

Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. It is stated on paper: you are free from everything, just do not violate the rights of others. Freedom lies in the fact that no one is responsible for you. In essence, at all times in liberal regimes there have always been other institutions of unfreedom: the church, morality, institutions of civil society. I wrote about this above: try to declare in a liberal society that you love Putin or Kim - you will immediately be attacked, but not by the state, but by civil society. Much has been said here about the prohibition of dissent in authoritarian regimes. And yes, the consequences of dissent in such regimes will be harsher. However, I see how many forum participants seem to have the firmware "Liberalism is good" pre-installed, and even if they themselves doubt it, they are not very willing to speak out about it. Isn't this another form of prohibition of dissent? More sophisticated?

Rest assured, I am not the one criticizing your religion. Not the one who objects to the pillars of your faith in liberalism. I am probably the one who wants to find out the reasons, to ask the ultimate question about value and origin.

Many might also have thought that I am a supporter of authoritarianism. This is also not true. The fact is that society, humanity continues to develop. Until recently, liberalism was the most optimal means of finding a social compromise. However, when I saw the decline of the institutions of control of liberalism (which civil society was engaged in), the content of hidden pillars was revealed to me, which were not mentioned in the original ideas of Hobbes, Rousseau. Now, liberalism is considered the key to success by inertia, but today this is no longer the case. When some countries interfere in the affairs of my state with their stereotypes, which now do not work as they should for them - this saddens me, because it does not promise anything except wars and destruction (which is clearly visible in the example of Libya, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.).

My goal is to find “something else” that would be capable of self-organizing structures, and which previous ideologies do not allow to appear, constantly putting spokes in the wheels with their interventions.

Let me ask you a question. Why do you consider all opinions that differ from yours to be reductionist and one-sided? — Astorre

When you say my approach, you are talking about a systems metaphysics that goes back to the start of Greek philosophy. Anaximander had already set out the holism of the unity of opposites to get modern rational thought started.

And reductionism is fine as far as it goes. The systems approach in fact incorporates reductionism into its holism. It recognises upwardly acting material construction as the “other” of downward acting global constraint.

But reductionism is the mindset that is particular strong in Anglo thought. It dominates the imagination. Germans and Russians have more of a systems thinking tradition. Buddhist and Taoists likewise.

So it is a fact that a lot of metaphysical debates are confused as they try to answer the big questions armed only with half the story.

Try to read what others answer not as criticism of your thoughts, but as a constructive complementary discussion. — Astorre

I would love it if a critique could be advanced. But you will notice that there are only assertions being provided and not arguments. No serious analysis or evidence offered. Just strawman efforts of knocking down things I haven’t said.

I know this feeling when you yourself, understanding the topic very well, put forward a hypothesis - a very well-founded and well-developed one. In this case, you dream of criticism, like a philosopher. "Break me, because I honestly want to be affirmed or to doubt." This feeling is very close to me personally. However, I really liked your approach, it is very consonant with my own thoughts. True, I take as a starting point not biology or nature, but the ideas of Marx and Le Bon. But this does not prevent me from coming to similar conclusions, which, as I see it, complement each other.

At the same time, the question arises - what next? What is the path? What will be next? What can be offered in return?

In this case, you dream of criticism, like a philosopher. "Break me, because I honestly want to be affirmed or to doubt." — Astorre

I’ve had years of academic stress-testing so I’m not too concerned. :up:

At the same time, the question arises - what next? — Astorre

Given the hegemonic world power is being run as a clown show, that question has become even more intriguing. Not sure Trump makes sense from either a reductionist or holistic perspective.

Perhaps herein lies the main metaphysical kernel of liberalism:
it is power without the master.
Not because the master no longer exists, but because he has become invisible, elusive, inaccessible to reproach.
He no longer commands — he regulates. He does not care — he provides platforms. He does not answer — he disconnects.

This reminds me of Byung Chul Han's theory of autoexploitation in the "achievement society." I wrote about this before:

Say we have a privileged, wealthy guy with a "good family" who cares for him. He has lots of opportunities. And he follows the middle to upper class dictum: "get good grades and wrack up accomplishments so you can go to a good college, and do the same there so you can get a good job, and then you can get a good job and do what you want."

He does this. No extraordinary evil befalls him. He has no extraordinary vices. Maybe he drinks or smokes pot a bit too much, or plays too many video games, or has a porn habit, or cannot get a girlfriend, or cannot keep to just one. Maybe not. Nothing out of the ordinary.

And he's miserable. He's prime bait for radical ideologies of one sort of another precisely because he "did everything he was told," and is miserable. This isn't an uncommon phenomena. That's sort of the recruiting mantra of radicals on the right and left, although it certainly helps if people struggle in the labor market or are "overeducated." We could imagine this sort of thing playing out across many gradations. It can even happen to the ultra wealthy (perhaps particularly to the ultra wealthy).

Here is Han's point: in the autoexploitative context of modern liberalism, this man's unhappiness is a personal failure. The self is a project, and it's happiness is a goal that has to be achieved as an accomplishment.

And there are lots of men and women who have encountered this sort of "personal failure." Millions it would seem. So the question is, at what point do we stop thinking this is an aggregate of millions of personal, individual failures and begin to say it is a systematic, social failure or a philosophical failure?

As Han himself describes part of it:

Depression is a narcissistic malady. It derives from overwrought, pathologically distorted self-reference. The narcissistic-depressive subject has exhausted itself and worn itself down. Without a world to inhabit, it has been abandoned by the Other. Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself. Today’s narcissistic “achievement-subject” seeks out success above all. Finding success validates the One through the Other. Thereby, the Other is robbed of otherness and degrades into a mirror of the One — a mirror affirming the latter’s image. This logic of recognition ensnares the narcissistic achievement-subject more deeply in the ego. The corollary is success-induced depression: the depressive achievement-subject sinks into, and suffocates in, itself. Eros, in contrast, makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic inferno. It sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation. A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love — which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other.

Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama — only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love: “Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, is without reason; it invades and wounds us.” Achievement society —which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project— has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.


- "The Agony of Eros," Byung-Chul Han

So balances can be “good” or “bad”. And the difference? One in some quantifiable sense works and the other doesn’t. A typical way to quantify this would be survival. The good balance has the further fact that it lasts. It persists. It is successful in perpetuating a state of homeostatic identity even in the face of environmental perturbation, etc. — apokrisis

Everything "works" at producing some outcome.

The societies of both 1984 and A Brave New World are both presented as being extremely stable, and in a way that is at least plausible. Would they be good societies in virtue of this stability? That seems like too weak of a criteria because they are widely accepted as obviously dystopian (and for reasons that I think are obvious). So either we need another standard for rejecting A Brave New World and 1984, or we bite the bullet and pronounce them "good" because they are stable over long timescales and able to adapt to challenges. But if we bite the bullet, it hardly seems like we need ethics anymore. This is more of an eliminativism to my mind than an ethics.

And yet presumably we still want to appeal to "good evidence," "good reasoning," and "good argument," as more than just: "the types of argument and reasoning that reproduce effectively and survive." For instance, if "good" is just whatever persists, then I surely should not turn towards agreeing with you, for, if I believe my own beliefs to be good, than holding on to them, come what may (and striving to reproduce them in others), is my surest path towards proving their merit. Afterall, they won't survive and reproduce if I abandon them, so I should stick to them, and sticking to them in turn proves their merit.

No doubt, openly stating such a strategy is probably "maladaptive" precisely because most people don't accept this standard for the "goodness of ideas," and would see my strategy as a sort of absurd sophistry on my part.

Actually though, social critics have made just this sort of point re secular educated urban liberals' inability to maintain birth rates that would even allow their population to only fall by half each generation. It would seem to be an ideology that must rely heavily on conversion versus organic growth. I would think this says nothing about the choiceworthyness of such a view, but on a "natural selection of ideas/ideologies" account, it seems to be a major flaw, akin to some sort of mutation that tanks fertility in organisms.



I'm familiar with the terms and fields, but suffice to say, the idea that complexity studies and systems theory can decisively explain ethics and politics, or wisdom, virtue, etc. (or that it has settled the ultimate fate of the universe re cosmology, or has resolved the "Hard Problem," etc.) are idiosyncratic claims. Certainly, they might usefully inform these areas, although people take them in widely different directions. I don't find the approach here convincing for the reasons stated above and in the other thread. The idea that having studied these topics would make this useage clear does not seem to be the case to me.

Everything "works" at producing some outcome. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly! That is the central feature of my metaphysics. The one first sketched by Anaximander.

Everythingness is impossible. Therefore somethingness exists.

All paths might seem possible. But most cancel each other out. And that is how you arrive at that which works. The somethingness that becomes our world. The structure of being which can hang together as some unity of opposites.

The sort of metaphysics you find in physics for example when there is talk of the collapse of the wavefunction of the Universe. The ultimate expression of the principle of least action.

So the reductionist worries about the impossibility of getting something like the Universe out of nothing. The holist can flip that on its head by arguing instead that something exists because everything is just too much. It contains its own dialectical negation to the point that only the ur-dichotomies can survive the Darwinian contest.

The Universe could have had any number of dimensions, as why not? Well everything would have had to boil down to just 3D if the ur-dichotomy was the symmetry-breaking of rotation-translation. The two inertial symmetries that grounded Newtonian mechanics. The only dimensionality that is equal and balanced in terms of its rotational and translational degrees of freedom is 3D. Thus it becomes the something that exists.

So this holistic metaphysics is the way to go. Anaximander named his everythingness the Apeiron. And its dichotomisation was the process of apokrisis. Peirce improved on this by turning the story into a proper logical notion. He called the everythingness a logical vagueness. Something even deeper than merely the confusion of fluctuations that would be an “every thing”. A vagueness would be more like the physical notion of a quantum foam - the state that a self-organised dimensionality would have to arise from as a Darwinian sum over all its possibilities.

The societies of both 1984 and A Brave New World are both presented as being extremely stable, and in a way that is at least plausible. Would they be good societies in virtue of this stability? — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you listen to what I say, then you should already be guessing that I would be asking about where is that which is other to this stability and so just as necessary and good to the whole.

So if stability is one side of the equation being balanced, plasticity is the other. In Nature, a good structure is resilient. It is adaptive as well as self-sustaining. It is rigid but it also bends. It has an identity but it also evolves.

This gives a clear basis on which to critique these dystopias. Do they seem balanced in the natural fashion I describe?

Even constitutional democracies have autocrats to rule them. A king or president or prime minister. For a political system to be balanced, it must be both rather fixed in its long-term decisions and flexible in making quick choices when faced with immediate issues. There must be someone whose word is law at the very centre of things, but someone who is also just as ruled by constitutional laws when declaring a war or an emergency of any kind.

And this form of rational organisation is just naturally how the intelligence of brains is organised. A constitutional set of habits and a commanding spotlight of attention. A long term wisdom and an in the moment cleverness. Both an evolved stability and an evolved plasticity in some kind of good, because functional, balance.

So dialectical structure - the unity of opposites - explains all structure in nature. It is how the real world self-organises. Human societies exist in the real world and so follow the same mathematical logic. Peirce’s triadic story of vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies. Or firstness, secondness and thirdness.

If stability is one of the goods that a society supplies, then this can only be because it also supplies the other thing which is its plasticity - its resilience and adaptability. It can both change and stay the same because these two social goods are being delivered over appropriately separated timescales. Stability as the long run goal and plasticity as the immediate quick adjustment.

This ties back to OP question. Liberal democracy works better in that it does balance the elected autocrat and rigid constitution functions in some scalable way. Very large and complex societies can exist if this general model of self-organisation is instituted over all scales of a society.

Even tennis clubs and local community boards have constitutions and chairs. Wherever you go in a properly liberal and democratic society, this kind of structure should be completely familiar. Everything is a version of the basic dichotomisation of power. Stability and plasticity are basic goods being balanced appropriately every where you could look. A fact that can be taken for granted.

Now stack that up against your “stable” dystopias. You can see what is instead fundamentally missing across all scales of a police state run by a dictator. It is so obvious it smacks you in the face. With a truncheon if you voice it out loud.

Actually though, social critics have made just this sort of point re secular educated urban liberals' inability to maintain birth rates that would even allow their population to only fall by half each generation. It would seem to be an ideology that must rely heavily on conversion versus organic growth. I would think this says nothing about the choiceworthyness of such a view, but on a "natural selection of ideas/ideologies" account, it seems to be a major flaw, akin to some sort of mutation that tanks fertility in organisms. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don’t know. One minute you are quoting stuff about the autoexplotive turn of modern neoliberalism, the next you are pointing out its consequences as if your mind can’t make the connection.

Do I really have to explain to you the force of your own arguments? If you are right about the first point, then here is your own evidence for why it is a correct diagnosis.

Neoliberalism is self dooming for quite a few reasons, not least that it is boiling the planet at an accelerating rate. It you strip away all the constitutional restrictions on growth - such as debt limits and environmental protections - then an unbalanced society run by unhinged capitalism is what results.

No wonder the US is now run by a multiply bankrupt property developer and casino owner who then spent 14 years posing as a titan of industry on a reality show where yuppie talent is pitted against itself in a largely arbitrary death match with the worst possible prize of supposedly working for the idiot boss figure.

Neoliberalism had some good theory behind it. But was fundamentally dishonest in its claims about rising tides floating all boats and wealth being able to trickle down faster than it would be hoovered up.

If birth rates are falling, well who in their right mind is going to bring kids into such a world, even if they are in the 1 percent and have some semblance of a natural work life balance?

So you are correct that the current social order is auto exploitative. In itself, that isn’t a bad thing. It’s quite fun to be young, free and entrepreneurial. But when that autoexploitation is unbalanced - a story not scaled over all levels of society - then it does become a bad and unnatural thing. The 1% are the auto part of the equation, leaving the 99% to be the exploited.

Anyone can understand the force of that maths.

Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. It is stated on paper: you are free from everything, just do not violate the rights of others. Freedom lies in the fact that no one is responsible for you. In essence, at all times in liberal regimes there have always been other institutions of unfreedom: the church, morality, institutions of civil society. I wrote about this above: try to declare in a liberal society that you love Putin or Kim - you will immediately be attacked, but not by the state, but by civil society. Much has been said here about the prohibition of dissent in authoritarian regimes. And yes, the consequences of dissent in such regimes will be harsher. However, I see how many forum participants seem to have the firmware "Liberalism is good" pre-installed, and even if they themselves doubt it, they are not very willing to speak out about it. Isn't this another form of prohibition of dissent? More sophisticated? — Astorre

Yes, that's well said. You my be interested in Count Timothy's thread, "The Myopia of Liberalism."

As to the question of whether it is the liberal state or the liberal civil society which defends liberalism from illiberalism, I want to say that it is both. This is part of the paradox wherein liberalism professes to be value-neutral and yet is inevitably founded upon the value system of liberalism. When someone promotes an idea that is at odds with liberalism, the liberal culture will oppose them, and this opposition will come from both the state and the civil society. For example, the end-limit of promoting a figure like Putin will end up conflicting with the laws of the liberal state. Put differently, if enough people within a liberal society embrace an illiberal approach, then the liberalism of that society will itself fail and the laws will need to be changed to reflect the societal change.

the content of hidden pillars was revealed to me — Astorre

Can you say more about the "hidden pillars" of liberalism? Presumably you are thinking of the pushback that comes from civil society, but I am curious about the nature of those hidden pillars.

My goal is to find “something else” that would be capable of self-organizing structures, and which previous ideologies do not allow to appear, constantly putting spokes in the wheels with their interventions. — Astorre

I think philosophical anthropology is tightly knit with any political program. For example, Hobbes' "State of nature" is tightly bound up with liberalism, and the truth or falsity of Hobbes' doctrine will correlate to the success or failure of liberalism. Of course there are alternatives that deviate in smaller or larger ways from Hobbes' anthropology, but I think Hobbes is the most central, coherent, and enduring philosophical basis of liberalism. I would say that Aristotle offers a better philosophical anthropology and a better political program as well.

At the same time, the question arises - what next? What is the path? What will be next? What can be offered in return? — Astorre

No wonder the US is now run by a multiply bankrupt property developer and casino owner who then spent 14 years posing as a titan of industry on a reality show where yuppie talent is pitted against itself in a largely arbitrary death match with the worst possible prize of supposedly working for the idiot boss figure. — apokrisis

You see where strong disagreement gets us? Clarity on your question now emerges.

What came after liberal democracy as a pragmatic social enterprise? Oligarchy and idiocracy. Two forces in some kind of systemic balance. But one that is itself completely confused about how that is now meant to work its way through to some new state of world order. Pax Trumpiana. The Nobel for which Donald yearns.

The history lesson goes that two world wars and a great depression created a need for whatever came after the imperial empire world system. Europe and its colonies. The centres of capital and power coupled to its far-flung resource-capturing net and its network of military bases to keep a lid on the native politics. The UK in particular mastered this delicate art of imperial balance. But by the 1940s, its world system was in tatters.

The US had emerged as the world manufacturing giant and so had the capacity to step in and takeover. War had resulted in a new deal at home. Walter Scheidel did a nice book explaining how big wars are always the "Great Leveler" that result in the breaking down of wealth and redistributing it back to the people. So the US had instituted a new notion of social democracy where there was high taxes, big infrastructure investment and the creation of social safety nets.

Corporations were allowed to do their predatory thing and even approach monopoly ownerships – oligarchy – but also they had to be good citizens. Play nice with the trade unions. Clean up after themselves with environmental protections. Become benevolent organisation caring for workers in factory towns, and generally acting with the wider interests of the US community in mind as much as that of their shareholders and desire to extract profit.

This new corporate benevolence could then be the model for the new imperial empire. The UK had already had to make that kind of balancing act during its own reign. That is how it could rule the world by straddling the chokepoints of the world's shipping lanes with a handful of military bases and a small colonial service. The US could update this model by taking over the world's reserve currency from the UK, and its network of bases, then telling the world to go and free trade. Form their own democracies in the corporate mould. The US would run its central political institutions like the UN, World Bank and IMF, sit back and cream off the profits from running the world money system, take care of the job of being the world's policeman and so also controlling that side of the show, and let the world focus on its trade and social development.

Of course existential challenges to this post war accord emerged swiftly. The Cold War and then the oil wars. And also the US couldn't resist squeezing more juice from this imperial lemon. Nixon and Kissinger dropped the gold standard and made the dollar a debt-backed instrument. It tamed the oil producers by turning them into petrodollar investors in the US system. And it reacted like a scalded cat to the Soviet military threat, and that was only partly political theatre given that nuclear power trumps even hydrocarbon power when it comes to its energy density and explosive potential.

Anyway, this was the liberal democratic world order much as we knew it. American getting so rich on dollar hegemony and humming factories that even the working class felt that heady entropic power surging through their veins. Everyone could drive a gas guzzler, feast at the take away, holiday at Disneyland. The rest of the world, bobbing along in the US's wake.

But then things started to come apart in bigger ways. Neo-cons turned up the heat on the communists and their regimes to varying degrees collapsed. The oil trade wars became oil real wars as running a resource economy is the kind of monopolistic enterprise that sets an oligarchy against its people. Autocrats have to found so the wealth can get properly plundered.

Neo-liberalism also followed as the oligarchs demanded that the global political restrictions on capital – ie: debt creation – should be lifted in the the same way that the local political restrictions on resource exploitation were being systematically dealt with.

So the capitalist beast was constantly evolving. The US working class had been the winners of a phase of greater social democracy. But the US oligarchy eventually shed any pretence of a social conscience and financialised its own people too. The US debt was allowed to explode. House ownership became leveraged speculation. Life became whatever minimum wage would get you, or how much the new financial recklessness felt you could afford to borrow.

All this sets us up for the modern day. The true coming apart of the oligarchs vs the idiocracy.

The fall of Communism saw Russia turned into an autocrat-run oil exporter with a new oligarch class who had stolen the state infrastructure for its monopolistic profits. Putin was KGB and had just done his 1997 doctorate on oil politics. Literally. "A degree in economics at the Saint Petersburg Mining University [where his thesis was] on energy dependencies and their instrumentalisation in foreign policy." Putin had a political vision and his gang of thieves.

This oligarchy had its own idiocracy in the form of information autocracy. Putin just had to make his voters believe that they lived in a well-run country, with an ancient identity, and where the vote wasn't rigged, the media not managed.

China went a more traditional route based off its own long history. Trade it understood. Manufacturing it could learn. Financialisation was right up its street and it was quite happy to run up a national debt at a rate way exceeding even the US. Oligarchy was sort of managed by kinship relations and purges. Then the same kind of informational autocracy was practiced, backed by relatively competent rather than wildly corrupt secret policing.

The US meanwhile was not a mere natural resource play, nor a Johnny come lately manufacturing play. It was now a full on capital play. And on top of that, an information technology play. The US citizen, and indeed the world citizen, was there to be tapped for their debt creation and now their personal data. There was a virtual world being born where anything was free to be the case. An apparently costless and frictionless world where money and resources no longer really mattered.

The price of entry was only the tiniest fraction of a few cents, or teaspoons off a barrel of oil. But the catch was that it was now a price extracted across the entirety of absolutely everything that was making you feel like a private and free individual – a paid-up member of the liberal democratic compact. Social media in particular gets to grab your body and soul. And the new super-oligarchs were the ones who had those information tech monopolies.

So the US has the dollar and that – as debt creation – drains the wealth out of every area of life it touches. We live in housing developments and eat at fast food joints that are as drained of social capital as they are of physical substance. Then tech comes in over the top of that with its promise of the new infinite frontier of a cyber reality. It becomes predatory even on the financial level of oligarchy as any kind of sensible stock market pricing and CEO salary setting gets tossed out the window. Wall Street gets taken for a ride and crypto currency mops up the rest.

And so the new politics of the idiocractic state come into view.

Russian and China have informational autocracies where the citizens must to some genuine degree believe in the world as it is being painted for them. Incredible competence is required to maintain the collective fiction that as a society, it is winning bigly. And something has to be delivered for real as evidence. In China's case, actual economic power in return for a shittier life – although one still much freer and more prosperous than that of its recent memory under Mao. And in Russia's case, a few decades of US investment in jacking up its oil fields coupled to a steady rebuilding of its suddenly abandoned Soviet empire, until Ukraine became the step looking like the one that went too far.

But the US is in a quite different position. Sure, it also has always been a propaganda state. It had to cement its own identity having been started rather abruptly without a solid history. It had its founding myth of being the home of the free and the dispossessed. Raise the flag and swear your allegiance.

It rode the liberal democratic good times and grabbed the reins from Imperial Britain when it really didn't even have another sensible choice. It struck a deal stacked in its own favour, and off things went for another 50 years.

The post-war paradigm of responsible corporations and unionised labour gradually evaporated. The ownership of the world financial and military apparatus started to fall into the hands of a new oligarch class – a mindset with its own political and social theories. The information revolution was now in full swing and out-pacing the manufacturing revolution. What the US debt was financing now was not merely a world based on consumers, but on a world based on an influencer and drop-shipping economy.

Life lived as a reality show. Life as you would live it in a costless and frictionless Universe. Life lived where violent polarisation was the daily entertainment rather than a rationally-framed dialectic. The life lived as an idiocracy of opinions and alternative facts. A life drained of the pragmatic realism which had been connecting the two sides of the existential equation – the physical energy consumed for the social meaning extracted – in some degree of flourishing balance.

So the current recipe is oligarchy and idiocracy. Life as unbounded resource extraction and a soul-devouring reality show. A disconnection that looks fatal, but which could run on for as long as a big enough narcissistic incompetent fool can be found to front it. The illusion of a strong man in charge.

Putin was a strong man with a vision of how to glue things together. Pump the oil and don't alarm the voters. As long as they believe that it is only oligarchs now falling out of windows, and the state barely touches on their lives as the oil and gas gets piped abroad, then the system ticks along in some sort of stable equilibrium.

Xi is another strong man – although rumours of his demise grow daily – who tightened up on China's mercantilist exploitation of the US's 1940s free market play. And competent implementation keeps that show on the road. Manufactured goods flow freely and China's population has full bellies. Things work on a level that is tolerable, and the scope of dissent severely limited.

Trump is then exactly what a idiocracy might wish for. Although his oligarch backers didn't quite bargain for his actual level of incompetence, and all those that he would appoint to jobs in his second term.

But then also, the US oligarch class is itself marked by its own grave incompetence. Whether tech bro left or Christo-fascist right, it lives in the same idiocracy. The same detachment from the pragmatic reality of what actually makes for a well-functioning society. We see this in Musk and Vance. We see this in the Supreme Court. We see it in the guy who sells pillows and all the other idiots who suddenly get promoted to multi-billionaire hood by the simple fact of living in an economy structure to be a wealth and debt ratchet. The idiots who never had a clue feel they get to have the super-sized vote on how the world ought to be run.

And why not if you believe that reality is a costless and frictionless realm? Your hopes and fears are what become must populate that limitless landscape. Idiocratic society where narcissistic incompetence become something that works. Something that is fast becoming implemented over all scales of US society as hierarchy theory says it must.

Trump is just giving away the Imperial US Empire you would think. And why not? Idiocracy seems the bigger prize now. The costless and frictionless landscape where polarisation drives the clicks. The new owners of the means of production are getting rich beyond imagination as the cost and the friction has been matchingly shrunk below the level of popular comprehension.

The reality show is eating the voters alive. The real world still exists somewhere in the middle of all the information and entropification. But capital flows and the entropic flows are now a dance taking place over the socially-shared horizon. The cost and the friction can't be seen. And that creates the stability – at least for a while – of a collective state of delusion.

but I think Hobbes' is the most central, coherent, and enduring philosophical basis of liberalism — Leontiskos

I agree. To be sure, a lot of liberals get away from his particularly dire anthropology, but even if they pivot to a more Kantian, abstract "choosing agent," they still end up with something very similar (i.e., an atomized utility seeker). Others try to layer in that man is an essentially social animal, but they still ultimately end up falling back on a combination of contract theory and utility maximization/satisfaction for their justification of the political system (Mill, Smith, Rawls, etc.).

Personally, I think Hume, and more broadly empiricism and skepticism, are key here. Hume's grounding of morality (and so the foundations of law and justice) in sentiment seems to naturally privatize and atomize the citizen. Empiricism also has a sort of atomized knower built in to it from the get-go (sense data being private), and so judgements about the good will have to be privatized as well, particularly if they are grounded in sentiment rather than the extended/quantifiable. The metaphysics that have tended to go along with empiricism and naturalism have generally placed all goodness and beauty (presumably the ground for organizing society) within our individual skulls (even in realist theories). Goodness is locked in private, individually accessible experiences. Skepticism about human nature (or any natures) springing from this metaphysics is important too, since it cuts out any foundation for a bridge across this gap. The later move towards an "anti-metaphysical stance" (IMO, just another metaphysical position), with its tendency towards unresolvable pluralisms also suggests a procedural contract theory.

All these factors make it very hard to escape the privatization of values, which in turn makes it very hard to escape an atomized anthropology. Atomization in turn lends itself to contract theory. As an aside, it's funny just how much of this stuff Plato considers (particularly in the Republic) and rejects, because he doesn't have these starting points.

In terms of the genealogy of these ideas, I think theology is very relevant here, as guys like John Milbank and Brad Gregory have shown. That's one of the ironies of liberalism, the source of its anthropology comes, at least in its origins, from one of the "forbidden sources" of justification.

In terms of what could come next, it's very hard for me to see because I don't see the presuppositions that lead towards liberalism being significantly challenged any time soon. We may be in a "metaphysical turn" in analytic/scientific thought, but it's a fairly weak one. Liberalism is literally built into many scientific disciplines (e.g., its essentially a dogmatic presupposition of political economy, in the same way Marxism was for Soviet bloc political economy, and it has deep roots in psychology). Any change would be "revolutionary" in the same way the Enlightenment was.

the content of hidden pillars was revealed to me
— Astorre

Can you say more about the "hidden pillars" of liberalism? Presumably you are thinking of the pushback that comes from civil society, but I am curious about the nature of those hidden pillars. — Leontiskos

Of course, I've said this a bit too loudly, perhaps a bit more emotionally than I should have. But the thing is, in my opinion, if we're given the ability to critically analyze reality and the foundations of human understanding, why not use it in the realm of social organization? Why should something be done one way or another, and who determined it in advance? These questions lead to various unconventional thoughts. The first step towards resolution is to acknowledge the problem, identify its aspects, and assess its depth. In my opinion, this is a purely philosophical endeavor. On the other hand, if we look at history, it becomes clear that any social system is preceded by a theoretical foundation, which is then implemented by the apostles of the doctrine: Hobbes and Rousseau (among others) founded liberalism, Marx and Engels founded communism, and Gobineau founded Nazism. Even Putin has Ivan Ilyin.Trump has Curtis, and the globalists have Walzer or Fokuyama.


Therefore, I believe that philosophy can and should provide the tools for future generations to organize their societies.

This reminds me of Byung Chul Han's theory of autoexploitation in the "achievement society." I wrote about this before: — Count Timothy von Icarus

I must admit that I was not familiar with the works of this philosopher. I will be happy to familiarize myself with his works

In terms of what could come next, it's very hard for me to see because I don't see the presuppositions that lead towards liberalism being significantly challenged any time soon — Count Timothy von Icarus

What would you argue is a realistic and beneficial alternative to liberalism? Would you include MacIntyre’s communitarian approach?