Heidegger might say:

Whether the bureaucracy manages our needs or the market disciplines us through neglect, both operate within the same metaphysical structure of control and efficiency that conceals any authentic relation to Being.

Whether the bureaucracy manages our needs or the market disciplines us through neglect, both operate within the same metaphysical structure of control and efficiency that conceals any authentic relation to Being. — Colo Millz

That may be true. I haven't quite gotten to connecting political attitude to philosophy, though. If you know of a good source for that, that would be cool.

Reagan was saying that socialism inevitably nurtures a child-like mindset in the population. Ruthless apathy on the part of the government is essential to protect freedom, because it's only in that kind of climate that people retain their self reliance. It may be brutal, but this kind of neglect is actually a gift.

I agree with this — frank

Would you say the same thing about democratic capitalism with progressive safeguards? If there were an election between Reagan and Obama would you have chosen Reagan? Were Thatcherism and Reaganomics positive developments?

Both Adorno and Heidegger were extremely critical of the Weimar republic, with Heidegger basically coming out as fully authoritarian. His comments draw a picture of someone who believes that democracy is fundamentally unworkable, and Weimar demonstrated that. Adorno's feeling were just as vehement, but he viewed Weimar as a failure of execution.

I'll get into the comments both made about it, but first just a quick review of what happened in the Weimar Republic, which in some ways shaped the world we live in today.

Would you say the same thing about democratic capitalism with progressive safeguards? — Joshs

That's a good question. I would point out that to the extent that the US has centralized authority and some degree of social welfare, both are more the result of close calls with disaster. In other words, the US has had the luxury of being about the evolve organically out of an unmolested history as oppose to being manipulated by powerful neighbors, which is common in the world. The principle that rules all others is that what evolves naturally should be respected and protected: it solved a problem, so don't mess with it, whatever your sentiments may be. When events roll into the next disaster, then start thinking outside the box.

If there were an election between Reagan and Obama would you have chosen Reagan? — Joshs

No. I first saw Obama when he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention of whatever year that was. My jaw dropped. He was expressing how that though we may have differences, we are one people. He had my heart from that point on.

Were Thatcherism and Reaganomics positive developments? — Joshs

In some ways. American leftism was brain damaged at the time.

Both Adorno and Heidegger were extremely critical of the Weimar republic, with Heidegger basically coming out as fully authoritarian. — frank

In what do you think Heidegger grounded that authoritarianism? A number of thinkers influenced by Heidegger have offered their models of post-Heideggerian politics, in particular Deleuze, Jean-luc Nancy and Reiner Schumann. What they have in common is a politics longer grounded in a transcendent authority (state, law, humanism, reason). Their politics is ontologically anarchic.

In what do you think Heidegger grounded that authoritarianism? A number of thinkers influenced by Heidegger have offered their models of post-Heideggerian politics, in particular Deleuze, Jean-luc Nancy and Reiner Schumann. What they have in common is a politics longer grounded in a transcendent authority (state, law, reason). Their politics is ontologically anarchic. — Joshs

I'm going to collect Heidegger quotes to try to explain his view. Any help connecting his politics to his philosophy are welcome . :cool:

As a starting point, let's think about what Hayek said about the Weimar Republic: that democratic control over economic planning caused people to become reliant on the government, and this set the stage for acceptance of dictatorship. — frank

Could it make all the difference in the world if the words "democratic control" are replaced by "democratic constraints".

As a systems thinker, my argument is that constraints already guarantee the existence of freedoms. Whereas control has the goal only of suppressing them.

Control views causality as acting top-down to ensure what needs to happen does happen. It is indeed by nature dictatorial. As a hierarchy of order, every smallest local detail must be operating under the authority of global permission.

But constraints-based hierarchies have the opposite logic. The causality is balanced between a top-down guidance and a bottom-up creativity. Global limits are set, and what is then implicit is that all action within those bounds is made freely expressible. The system is co-created by the fact that the limits are tuned to create the kind of local actions that are desired. There is a feedback loop to keep the state of hierarchical order in a state that is dynamical and so capable of evolving.

So Hayek may have had a point about "too much top-down constraint". But that is just a complaint about a balance issue which is quite fixable in obvious ways in a democracy. A democracy is ideally a scalefree collection of its institutions. So the balance between constraints and freedoms are being dynamically adapted at all its levels from, say, corporations to corner shops, sports federations to local mah jong clubs, national public health standards to staff training in your local cafe.

Wherever one is acting in a society, one can know the logic of how democratic institution building is supposed to work.

A dictatorship is likewise a style of social organisation – a dominance hierarchy – that one can get used to finding everywhere in a society. The "dear leader" autocrat at the annual military parade, or your line-manager at work, or anywhere else one encounters a "might is right" view of social organisation.

So there is a double misstep here. A hierarchy should be fluid and not rigid. Emergent from its balance of constraints and freedoms, not fixed by its top-down chain of command.

And a hierarchy should be consistent in this fashion over all its scales of complexity or spatiotemporal reach. One should expect to see democracy everywhere, and autocracy nowhere, if living in the modern Enlightenment ideal of a society.

But autocracy is also something socially real in the sense that social hierarchies are naturally ordered in a "might is right" fashion. Social animals do run a dominance~submission game. They do have pecking orders and pack dynamics.

So humans do bring that genetic or ethological legacy with them when trying to do things in a more enlightened fashion. We have to recognise that and be able to deal with it at all levels too.

Trump is a good example. How is his dominance being met with so much submission? What is going on there if we want to diagnose the failures of politics. What is really breaking down in the modern democratic system that sees it sliding into its various forms of autocracy?

A systems view helps remind what a liberal democracy is suppose to be about. A society composed of its institutionalised interests. Not the rigid opposition of state and individual – the top versus the bottom – but instead the natural expectation of finding a dynamical hierarchical state of order obtaining at any level one can move in a society. A top and bottom always connected by the democratic feedback loop that establishes a collective state of purposeful action.

Notorious Nazi Heidegger
Whom Hitler had made all-aquiver
Tried hard to be hailed
Nazi-Plato, but failed
Then denied he had tried
With great vigor

Nice summary!

Thank you.

Reagan was saying that socialism inevitably nurtures a child-like mindset in the population. Ruthless apathy on the part of the government is essential to protect freedom, because it's only in that kind of climate that people retain their self reliance. It may be brutal, but this kind of neglect is actually a gift. — frank

Personally, I prefer capitalism to have socialist brakes, like in Australia, where there is free healthcare and a welfare safety net.

Our system isn’t perfect, and it’s too conservative for my tastes. I guess I’m a communitarian in the Michael Sandel sense of the word.

Heidegger, like any philosopher, can be taken up by anyone and twisted in any way you want. But where does his work stand politically, in itself? Who can say for certain? I think one would need a high level of expertise to answer that.

Was Hitler right-wing or extreme left? What exactly do we mean by left and right?

Journalist Andrew Kenny wrote a great piece on this many years ago. Here’s the opening:

Is Osama bin Laden left-wing or right-wing? How about Robert Mugabe? Who has a more left-wing approach to women’s sexuality: Pope John Paul or Hustler magazine? Consider Fidel Castro. He persecutes homosexuals, crushes trade unions, forbids democratic elections, executes opponents and criminals, is a billionaire in a country of very poor people and has decreed that a member of his family shall succeed him in power. Is Castro left-wing or right-wing? Explain your answer.

With the nazi element brought into view, Heidegger can be sharply distinguished from the "libertarian" formulations of Hayek, Reagan, Thatcher, etcetera who at least pretended to object to the exercise of state power. The unfolding of the Weimar Republic is interesting in that regard.

The "hunger games" aspect of the OP reminds me of N Land putting all the weakness of society on the results of democracy. For instance:

Democracy might begin as a defensible procedural mechanism for limiting government power, but it quickly and inexorably develops into something quite different: a culture of systematic thievery. As soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the ‘public purse’, and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson’s) ‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft. Worse still, since people are, on average, not very bright, the scale of depredation available to the political establishment far exceeds even the demented sacking that is open to public scrutiny. Looting the future, through currency debauchment, debt accumulation, growth destruction, and techno-industrial retardation is especially easy to conceal, and thus reliably popular. Democracy is essentially tragic because it provides the populace with a weapon to destroy itself, one that is always eagerly seized, and used. Nobody ever says ‘no’ to free stuff. Scarcely anybody even sees that there is no free stuff. Utter cultural ruination is the necessary conclusion. — N Land, page 58

It is a delicious bit of argument but does not acknowledge how the results also fill the pockets of owners of markets and the owners of debt. The age-old question reemerges, who benefits?

Postscript: Using the language of N Land, Heidegger resembles a Cracker more than the other parts in the play.

Thanks for the comments guys! I'm moving on to a description of the Weimar Republic, which will be a focal point for placing Heidegger and Adorno on a political spectrum:

The Weimar Republic is Germany between the world wars. It starts in chaos, goes through a brief period of stability, which is undermined by the Great Depression, and it ends in a fascist dictatorship. As you may recall, WW1 was a particularly crazy war. The battlefields have been described as flesh shredders that soldiers were being fed into. The French army just left and went home. The Russians went home. The French government managed to get the French military back on the field, but the Russians never came back. The war ended due to a mutiny in the German navy.

This scene, which historians say permanently mangled the European worldview, is the womb of the Weimar Republic, which went through defeat and revolution on the way into the world. And as it steps out of the bloody operating room, it's a democracy whose people have no experience with self government. What could go wrong?

The delegates come to Weimar because there's unrest in Berlin. In 1918, The Great War had been lost, the emperor had been overthrown, and now the communists are hustling for power. In January '19, there's an uprising. It is crushed brutally. For the first time, women are allowed to both stand and vote in this election for the National Assembly. Parties pushing for a parliamentary republic receive a two-thirds majority. The SPD becomes the strongest party. Its leader, Friedrich Ebert, becomes the first president of the Weimar Republic.

After many months of deliberation, the delegates enact the so-called Weimar Constitution. Germany becomes a democratic republic. The government is no longer responsible to the emperor, but to parliament. For the first time in German history, government authority emanates from the people. The constitution follows on from the failed Revolution of 1848 and the ideals of the Paulskirche Assembly. Black, red and gold, representing the German liberal tradition, are the chosen colors of the Weimar Republic. But the new state must bear the consequences of the war. The Treaty of Versailles allows victors to dictate their terms. Germany loses one-seventh of its territory, and must pay reparations. — Encyclopedia Brittanica

Next: An overview of Weimar's history.