I have nothing to object to in some of these assertions, but I sincerely believe that it is precisely philosophy, in its characteristic manner of undermining the fundamental principle or being amazed by the self-evident, that is capable of somehow resolving the current crisis. Or rather, not resolving it once and for all, but creating the groundwork for future crises.

if philosophy simply means critical thought, then sure. Why not.

But history would suggest that ideologies are better evolved than invented.

The USSR collapsed not because it was too Marxist but because the vigour and paranoia of the liberal west out-competed it. The USSR functioned reasonably well and at least achieved the main aim of clambering aboard the rapidly industrialising world. But it was fundamentally inefficient rather than fundamentally a lie. — apokrisis

Okay, but part of the lie that kept the USSR afloat was the idea that it was flourishing inside its walls. The lie was that it was out-competing the liberal west. Then reality crept in, the lie was seen to be false, and the boat sank.

I would argue that one cannot believe something and not believe something at the same time. Or that it will at least lead to problems. — Leontiskos

That is why we have ambiguity. Logic demands that we don't. But then that is why Peirce had add vagueness to logic. That to which the PNC does not apply.

Between absolute belief and absolute disbelief. I would say in practice that is where we all should sit. Even if the counterfactual grammar of logic doesn't like it. — apokrisis

I don't grant that we have ambiguity because we need to lie to ourselves with fictions and both believe and not believe something at the same time. In the Thomist tradition vagueness is usually captured by the notion of analogical predication (which derives from Aristotle's "pros hen" ambiguity). So we do need to account for vagueness in a quasi-logical way, but I don't see how this changes what I've said about the lie that is uncovered. If I have to believe that my country is out-competing the liberal west even when I know it is not true, ambiguity isn't going to save my boat. The power of vagueness only extends so far.

Dominance~submission may be the natural dynamic. But it plays out with all the variety of its many different settings.

So the dynamic has the simplicity of a dichotomy. And then also the variety of the one principle that can emerge as the balancing act that suits every occasion. — apokrisis

Okay, thanks.

Liberal democracy clearly promotes discussion about the socially constructed nature of society. That is the liberating thought. Hey guys, we invented this system. And if it seems shit, we can therefore invent something better. — apokrisis

Okay, fair enough. Like I said, the arguments you present are reasonably strong. I need to pick my battles.

By neutral, I mean in the dynamical systems sense of being critically poised. Ready to go vigourously in opposing directions as the need demands. So we have to have some central state from which to depart in counterfactual directions.

Neutrality is not a state of passivity. It is the most extreme form of potency as you can swing either way with equal vigour. Which is what makes you choice of direction always something with significance and meaning.

A passively neutral person is a very dull fellow. An actively neutral person is centred and yet always ready to act strongly in either direction. Be your friend, be your enemy. Act as the occasion appears to demand and then switch positions just as fast if something changes.

So neutrality at the level of an egalatarian social democracy is about promoting equal opportunity for all, but then also allowing everyone to suffer or enjoy the consequences of their own actions. Make their own mistakes and learn from them.

Within then socially agreed limits. A social safety net below and a tax and justice system above. A liberal society would aim to mobilise its citizens as active participants of that society, yet still impose a constraining balance on the overall outcomes. Winning and losing is fine. Just so long as it is kept within pragmatically useful bounds. — apokrisis

Okay, thanks. More specifically, you said, "[Neutrality is about a balance that needs] the always larger view that can encompass the necessary contradictions." This "always larger view" is the transcendent fiction. So what are the contradictions and what is the fiction?

Equal opportunity combined with an allowance of consequences can seem like a contradiction, but I think we agree that this is only true when one is thinking about equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. The "socially agreed limits" might signify the contradictions you have in mind, given that a safety net is in tension with an allowance of consequences. But perhaps there are other contradictions? And again, what precisely is the transcendent fiction of liberalism that relativizes these contradictions?

Well my argument is that "liberalism" is the promise of that kind of world. Or rather pragmatism. — apokrisis

Okay, and I can agree with much of this.

We are socially constructed. — apokrisis

...Although I would say that we are only partially socially constructed. There are important "constraints" on the theory that we are socially constructed.

Well you seem to be calling social constructions fictions. So I can go along with that. — apokrisis

If I recall, I originally said that liberalism requires the lie of value-neutrality, and you said that such a thing was the transcendent fiction that undergirds liberalism. I think that's where the language of "lies" and "fictions" comes from. One might use "fiction" without implying falsehood, but much of what we have discussing as "fiction" presupposes falsehood. When I use "fiction" I mean something like a "noble lie," i.e. a lie that is meant to have a beneficial effect.

You can have political parties divided by left and right. Liberal and conservative. Working class and managerial class. But then the system as a whole is free to pick and choose how it acts from this range of options. Identities aren't tied to particular solutions. Everyone can see that pragmatism is what is winning in the general long run. Life doesn't feel broken at the social level, and thus at the individual level. — apokrisis

So if liberalism (or else pragmatism) is a thing that exists in some places and not in other places, and if its central tenets are the points you outlined about equality of opportunity, consequences, etc., then is liberalism something that ought to be sought or not? In other words, you are implying all sorts of arguments for the normative superiority of liberalism while at the same time resisting the conclusion that liberalism is normatively superior. This goes back to the fatalism point, where one is apparently allowed to attribute all of the boons of liberalism to its high quality as a social narrative, and yet at the same time say that whatever works is what is best, and that therefore if a society falls away from liberal tenets there is nothing to worry about. (NB: Of course one need not say that liberalism is best in order to say that it is good or superior.)

Put differently, if we fall away from liberalism you will apparently just "switch" from liberalism to pragmatism. Analogously, someone who champions motorboats might move from motorboats to sailboats when the gasoline runs dry, but then protest that what they really championed was not motorboats but rather boats in general. Still, to argue in favor of a political philosophy is to favor its success and to be averse to its failure. So even if we switch from motorboats (liberalism) to sailboats (pragmatism), there still must be criteria for success and failure; for being right or wrong about one's thesis. If pragmatism is just whatever happens to currently be occurring, then it doesn't make sense to argue for or against it. It must be a falsifiable thesis, so to speak.

I don't grant that we have ambiguity because we need to lie to ourselves with fictions and both believe and not believe something at the same time. — Leontiskos

That's not it at all. Vagueness comes before counterfactuality. Ambiguity is what counterfactually intends to clean up. We are requiring of ourselves that the truth has to be either this or its "other". Ww are breaking our world into its structure of fact and fiction. Its counterfactual narrative.

But vagueness always remains despite the narrative. The same words can't strike every listener in exactly the same way. Or even the same listener listening twice. As Heraclitus said about stepping into a river.

We are telling ourselves a convincing story. Whatever the ideology. And we need to remember it is that kind of story. A sieve on possibility. An argument attempted in the style of counterfactual logic.

If I have to believe that my country is out-competing the liberal west even when I know it is not true, ambiguity isn't going to save my boat. — Leontiskos

Well I visited Moscow as a child in 1967. And I saw the mostly bare shelves of the department store in Red Square with its crude wooden toys and yet massive queues. I swapped Japanese bubblegum for Soviet badges on the blackmarket bridge. I experience the almost performative level of Marxist forbearance with which the USSR would out-do the soft and decadent West. The narrative that the ordinary person would be able to accept as if it was reasonably true as an ideology. Russians out-toughing the Western blow-hards.

And after experiencing the public narrative, we went back to the baroque gilt splendour of our hotel suite to swig champagne and jest loudly for the microphones before heading down to join the elite in the dining room with its marble fountain and carp pond as its fin de siecle centre. Army officers popping off more champagne corks at the chandeliers. Thick fur coats everywhere. The giant stuffed bear that stood at the entry. The other truth of this Marxist state.

As a foreigner, it was easy to see both sides and arrive at the conclusion that the USSR was genuinely in competition with the West in that the population were sold on out-toughing the West and the elite were living it up in the way you would expect. They were on-board with the narrative too.

Reagan and Thatcher had to turn up the narrative heat for the elite to confront the contradictions and limits of the Soviet system. To make some changes – that quickly turned into a slippery slide into chaos that even Reagan and Thatcher never expected.

This "always larger view" is the transcendent fiction. So what are the contradictions and what is the fiction? — Leontiskos

Not sure that you can insist on it being fictional. And certainly as a Peircean, I would take constraints or mathematical symmetries to be as real as the "contradictions", or degrees of freedom and broken symmetries, that they would generate in the word.

So are you trying to win the argument by semantics – seizing on other meanings to what I might have intended? Holding words hostage rather than seeing then as words I might accept in the spirit of having some common ground – some larger and vaguer view – from which to launch into the dialectical task we seem to have agreed to?

Equal opportunity combined with an allowance of consequences can seem like a contradiction, but I think we agree that this is only true when one is thinking about equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. — Leontiskos

Well exactly. It somehow seems both fair and unfair at the same time that liberalism would give everyone the same opportunity and yet not deliver the same outcome.

At least Marxism promised both – "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" to quote Marx.

So Marxism seems to win in its simple equation. We can see the balance implicit in this complementary and dialectical framing of how a society ought to be.

Which is why I say liberalism only makes better sense as it speaks to a dichotomy that can scale. The one where the complementary dynamic is to each, compete as hard as you can while also cooperating as fully as possible. Do the Christian thing of treating others as you would have them treat you.

Every ideology needs its dialectical algorithm that requires you to see social interactions as always inherently not just dyadic but complementary. An inversion or reciprocal relation where both sides of the equation are "good, just, fair, beautiful, divine, etc".

And that is what an ideal ideological algorithm achieves. A win-win blend that scales.

Christianity got to take over the Roman empire and eventually much of the world. It had the clever trick of owning the souls and allowing the secular everyday get on with its business. A trickle up economics where the church could become a rich and powerful political enterprise with a sideline in social services.

Soviet Marxism could do OK for a while as a police state and information autocracy. Western liberal democracy just went mad on it productivity growth. Go fully secular and worship money creation. Or go turbo-secular and start believing in the supreme good of debt creation and now the infinite money glitch of AI and Crypto.

OK. What was I saying about needing a win-win algorithm to anchor society? What happened to the good thinking there?....

...Although I would say that we are only partially socially constructed. There are important "constraints" on the theory that we are socially constructed. — Leontiskos

Well yes. I only stress the social constructionism as when I launched into evolutionary psychology I found that everyone else was going down the genetic route to the exclusion of the social level of semiotic structure.

I had already studied the ethological science, so that covered the genetic basis of things pretty well. It was the difference that language makes that was the weakly explored area of Western philosophy and science. It was Marxist Jews like Vygotsky and Luria who had the stellar insights on that side of things.

Western liberal democracy actually does human psychology shockingly badly. Damagingly badly. Worse than the Catholic Church. That in itself should tell us something.

Not about what works. But about the need for a social narrative so powerful it does turn the individual into the kind of psychological being it needs that individual to be.

Really be. But if they just have to wear a social mask and suck it up as a dubious fiction, then that is OK. Good enough if less than ideal.

If I recall, I originally said that liberalism requires the lie of value-neutrality, and you said that such a thing was the transcendent fiction that undergirds liberalism. ... When I use "fiction" I mean something like a "noble lie," i.e. a lie that is meant to have a beneficial effect. — Leontiskos

Yes. I realise you meant a white lie or a noble lie or a necessary lie. And so not really a lie. Or at least a lie absolved of some of its original sin. :wink:

So if liberalism (or else pragmatism) is a thing that exists in some places and not in other places, and if its central tenets are the points you outlined about equality of opportunity, consequences, etc., then is liberalism something that ought to be sought or not? In other words, you are implying all sorts of arguments for the normative superiority of liberalism while at the same time resisting the conclusion that liberalism is normatively superior. — Leontiskos

What works is what works. So sure, you can claim tautology.

And if what works is what works at particular times and places in history, that is now instead the breaking if that tautological symmetry. You have some general ideology that works. And you have its particular instances that this also work – or now counterfactually don't. Something new is perhaps revealed by things becoming properly developed into a hierarchical structure. Some system of constraint and its degrees of freedom. A state and its people. Doing their thing. Discovering how that goes, especially in the face of others doing their own thing.

To be honest, I never really think in terms of normative arguments and is/ought dichotomies. I have to look up what they might mean nearly every time someone wants to discuss them. Just not really a distinction that means much from my pragmatist point of view. Way too simplistic.

Put differently, if we fall away from liberalism you will apparently just "switch" from liberalism to pragmatism. Analogously, someone who champions motorboats might move from motorboats to sailboats when the gasoline runs dry, but then protest that what they really championed was not motorboats but rather boats in general. — Leontiskos

You see, all this sounds silly to my ears. Pragmatism makes sense as the most all-encompassing and general viewpoint. As Peirce argued, even the Cosmos is pragmatically structured. And life and mind share the same self-organising causal logic – just with the added self-referential semiotics.

Liberalism is then a rather general and grab-bag term for talking about human social and economic order. It is the new pragmatism that arose in the Enlightenment, along with the Romantic reaction the Enlightenment engendered. You can read the books of that time and assemble some kind of semi-coherent narrative of what this unholy secular mess was all about in spirit.

For the sake of a discussion, I go along with this loose, rather vague, jargon. Seeking to get precise where its starts to seem to matter.

So perhaps I am more a builder of boats who sees pragmatism as the lake or sea that would even need a boat. And it wouldn't be the end of the world if there never were any boats. Or at least boats where folk might imagine they were there for the fun of it – whether under sail or thrust along by motor.

When it comes to boats, I would thus have a well developed hierarchy of perspectives for sure. Boats can move stuff from place to place in a way that is good. Boats for pleasure always struck me as nuts.

I come from a seafaring family. My dad built me a first dinky sail boat when I was seven. I wasn't the faintest bit interested. I would rather body surf any day.

So no. I don't just switch simple categories as if everything exists as a plurality of choices on a single plane of contingency. I go up and down levels of hierarchies. There is the rigour of a dichotomous order which can aim to become fully developed as a systems narrative. The generality that frames the particularity. And the particularity that likewise retains the ambiguity to challenge that habit of generalising.

Do I like boats? It depends.

Do I like boating? Yeah, nah. Too much faffing around with gear and time. Going around for the sake of going around.

Is liberalism a brand that is fundamentally "me"? It depends. Well, yeah nah. Call me a pragmatist. Or maybe more specifically a Greenie – though no longer much of a believer that humans could organise under that particular ideological banner.

How time flies!!

I haven't encountered a classification of types of individualism. — Astorre

It's simply an observation of mine.

There is a lot of criticism of individualism going around, especially from religious/spiritual circles. I find, though, that much of that criticism is cruel and heartless, as the religious/spiritual refuse to acknowledge that individualism is a much more complex phenomenon than they give it credit; and more, that it is precisely the religious/spiritual with their practices (or "malpractices") that are in part or fully causing this same individualism that they are so criticial of.

At the same time, let's try to connect these levels. For example, the "defensive" type is possible precisely in societies where individualism is already ingrained: in a primitive community or collectivist culture, self-isolation would lead to exile or death, but in a liberal world (where "I don't care what John does"), it becomes a rational survival strategy. Thus, even defensive individualism rests on the same foundation—freedom from collective obligations.

Defensive individualism is a consequence of when the collective refuses to take any obligation toward a particular individual or a particular category of individuals. Illegitimate children, orphans, widows, the poor, people who, often by no fault of their own, ended up on the "wrong side of the track".
It's when the "community", the "collective", "society" ostracizes a person or a category of persons that these ostracized people resort to a defensive type of individualism. They're not happy to be individualists at all, but they have no other choice, as society has rejected them.

This type of individualism has an entirely different motivation than the entitled individualism ("I'm so wonderful, get out of my way, you worthless bug") that people usually mean when they criticize individualism.

In general, developed countries' propaganda toward their geopolitical rivals is based, among other things, on the idea of ​​conveying to citizens beliefs about personal uniqueness, inimitability, and individuality. For example, Voice of America and Radio Liberty, US-funded broadcasters, broadcast programs emphasizing individual rights, freedom of speech, and personal success. For example, they told stories of "independent" Americans who achieved success without state control, contrasting this with the Soviet system, where "everyone is responsible for everyone else."

Such American propaganda in favor of individualism is, in my opinion, actually just another effort by the upper class to absolve themselves from any and all responsibility toward the lower classes.

This sowed the seeds of rebellion: "Why should I depend on the collective when I can be independent?" Such broadcasts reached millions of listeners in the USSR, contributing to the rise of dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.

Somehow, I'm not convinced by this explanation. I've lived in a country that used to be "socialist/communist" (with a strong " "). Now that the country is not in that system anymore, it's evident what many people hated about it and what they really want. Many want the same old overt class system that has existed for centuries (and even during the time when the country was nominally "socialist/communist").
People, especially those of the upper class and those trying to become the upper class do want to "depend on the collective" -- but only as long as it is within their own upper class. They don't want to show any respect to someone who is of a lower class than they are.
It's always about classism.

Today, a similar tactic is being used against China and Russia, where the emphasis on individualism is being used to criticize authoritarian systems. Propaganda focuses on "personal uniqueness" as a universal value to provoke internal conflict: "Why should I be responsible for the affairs of the state or the collective?"

But these Western propagandists don't seem to understand that esp. a culture like the Chinese has no beef with either individualism or collectivism. These nations are extremely mercantile, competitive, capitalist to the extreme, and they have been this way for millennia. The reason these people at large don't feel responsible for the affairs of the state or the collective isn't individualism (for they're not individualists of this kind), it's that their primary focus is on making money, and they're not shy about it. In those cultures, money is no something dirty, the way it is often portrayed in the West (although recently less so).


The Western idea of individualism usually conjures up an image of a solitary person, somewhere alone.

If an average Westerner sees images like these:







they probably think how these people are "sheeple", a "nameless mass", people with "no individuality".
And yet what such a Western view fails to acknowledge is that in order to successfully participate in those mass dances where everyone is doing the exact same thing, or in order to practice religious worship in such mass events, one needs to be able to be supremely focused on one's task at hand. One cannot do those things by following others; if one did that, the whole performance would fail.
I think that those Easterners are actually far more individualistic than Westerners, for they are able to perform their tasks and duties, successfully, while surrounded by others, without allowing themselves to be distracted by them. This requires a kind of focus and ability that we in the West are just not trained to have. For us, in order to focus, we normally need physical solitude (which can be very expensive and hard to obtain).

As a further example, I have heard that in a classical Korean music school, all musicians practice in the same big room at the same time. They train themselves to focus on their own instrument, their voice -- while in the middle of everyone else doing the same thing for themselves. Imagine the noise that one needs to block out! What could be more individualistic!

Our discussion seems to be about 50 years too late. Although, I'm convinced, it must have been a very interesting time, with two diametrically opposed ideologies debating directly and sharply, contrasting themselves with one another. In the end, liberalism prevailed.

And you know, no matter what anyone says, the USSR, in my opinion, lost honorably. It simply admitted its inability to compete and disappeared, fragmenting into separate states. Vanished into oblivion, without taking tens of millions of lives with it.

What happened next is another matter. And what's happening now. Recently, I studied opinions in post-Soviet Russia on this issue. I was intrigued by one of them. I don't want to go into details, but one opinion voiced at the time was: To become a liberal country and end communism, Russia must undergo a revolution. Otherwise, the elites will simply change their colors, and what was already there will continue under a different name. And so it happened: in a number of post-Soviet countries, where there were no major reshuffles or large infusions of money, only the signs changed, while the discourse remained the same. All that remained of the USSR was the worst, and to this was added all the worst of liberalism.

Today, this conflict between collectivism and individualism takes on new colors, although not as acute as before. But in a completely different way – and we see that there are now grounds for criticizing modern liberalism from within Western societies. It seems humanity has become confused. Postmodernism has also mixed in.

These are very interesting times: what's happening now and in the next five to seven years will determine the world order for decades to come. So much is happening that we can't even name it (we're drowning in arguments), let alone develop any solutions.

All that's left is to stock up on popcorn...

A lot of people are stocking up on AI shares. The U.S. stock market has risen 30% in the last six months. AI is stealing people’s jobs all over the place. Not to mention large quantities of electricity and water in drought stressed regions. Most other industries are struggling with a combination of higher material costs, inflation and tariff wars. In the U.S. soya bean is the largest cash crop, half of it was exported to China, who stopped all imports of U.S. soya bean when the tariffs were imposed. Now they are buying it from Argentina and other global south suppliers. Trump has just bunged Argentina $20 billion dollars to prop up their collapsing economy.

What’s not to like, if you’re rich.

I can perfectly understand your feelings, especially since my family members live in the United States, where they moved in search of a better life. I worry about them, and although they supported Trump, at the time of his election, I predicted the outcome of his presidency would be either a severe domestic political crisis or an unleashed war (as a means of preventing this crisis and achieving consolidation). Only God knows how this will ultimately end, but I continue to maintain that the next 5-7 years are crucial.

For myself, I have chosen the path of minimal reflection regarding political events, as this allows me to preserve at least some remnants of myself.

The thing is, the world is finite, resources are finite, and to believe that a world of equality and brotherhood throughout the world is possible simultaneously is, in my view, false. There will always be centers that will live at the expense of others, and peripheries without rights, without money, without hope. Perhaps what is happening today is a reconsideration of the current centers that has begun.

What can I do in these processes? I think many of us ask ourselves this question. My answer is that I can generate meaning, re-evaluate the given, criticize and offer new lenses, and do other idle things. :grin: