None of which, at least initially, a result of his voluntary choice. — Tzeentch

But this is senseless. A 'voluntary choice' can only be made by an agent which can rationally assess options which are available to them, on the basis of motivations, desires, wants, etc. You think people pop-out ready to do that? That's more Cinderella-world stuff.

"Man is born free" is one of those grand sounding phrases that sounds immediately stupid as soon as anyone actually says it out loud.

Both ownership and indebtedness are economic relationships (although I realize that some people have no other vocabulary to describe things; and let's not mention the enormous social infrastructure that needs to be in place for any economic relationship to hold), but pretty much any human is born into webs of social, political and even ecological relations which pretty much everything around it, webs upon which they are dependent upon for their very existence. One may rightfully contest the quality and composition of those webs, but to imagine they don't exist - we are 'free' in the fantasy manner you imagine - is Cinderella and the 7 Dwarves nonsense.

One would assume that the denizens of this forum would be intelligent enough to understand that the phrase "Man is born free" does not imply that babies are born in absolute physical freedom.

Man is born unindebted, under possession or moral authority of no state, society or individual. — Tzeentch

But this is not true of any existing human being. It's a literal fantasy.

Hence the stilted and artificial conception of 'freedom' that individualism has: the idea that freedom is emanative from some subjective core rather than environmental and dialogical, almost entirely conditioned by the world around any one person.

Living in place where covid is effectively non-existent thanks to a combination of lockdown, mask wearing, and social distancing measures, I am free as fuck right now. Almost none of those measures are currently in place anymore, and mingling in crowds is life giving rather than taking right now. And I can do this because the environmental and social conditons under which my freedom can be exercised have, to a large degree, been secured.

Incidentally and with reference to the idea that 'humans are born free', the only people who can get away with saying that are people who have never so much as laid eyes on a child before. There are few creatures as so hopelessly dependant and subserviant as children. Kant understood this well: that any measure of freedom was the result of a great deal of discipline and tutelage, such that, having mastered our abilities and rational capacities by way of education, only then could anyone be called free. The individualist notion of freedom is literally infantile.

Trash, all of it.

Individualism is basically a ruling class ideology 'trickled down' onto the working class to stave off solidarity and class consciousness. And it is trickled down because it helps preserve the power of that capitalist class who are the biggest collectivists on the planet, and whose level of class organization and institutional cooperation would make any 'individualist' drop dead. It's the opposite of exactly what works to accrue political and economic power, so of course, it is propagandized as exactly what the working class ought to aim for. It doesn't help that the epicentre of its intellectual development is the US, which is among the most dysfunctional societies on Earth whose ideational offerings ought to be resisted along with the rest of any trash that comes out of that shithole country.

It's a bit of a fine line. Speaking only for myself, I tend to let those threads fly - but not all the time - because I think they offer opportunity for public correction by those who do know what they are talking about. I almost want to say - when there are particularly egregious mistakes, I would almost prefer to keep those threads around because they can be so easily dispatched, as it were, by someone who might in fact know what they are talking about. It becomes a learning opportunity.

That all said, can we name names (threads?). Like, eyeballing it - there's a weird one about entropy which I probably would have gotten rid of had I caught it earlier (report things people!), the other one about physics equations which went exactly as planned, as it were (precisely by those who know their physics), and... well.. am I missing something?

No, but this one I do.

Nah, I don't like treating sexual abusers with kid gloves. But feel free of course.

I don't believe I did.

What exactly is your brilliant non-psychological solution to the questions which inevitably hinge on how people are likely to react to their social and environmental circumstances? — Isaac

Well communism obviously. But barring that, literally anything else but psychology. Seriously. Want people to live good lives? Give 'em good public transport and social services. Design cities with well integrated zoning. Fund schools and public housing, tax the fuck out of the rich and out of cooperations, greenify all public space, and dincentivize, to the point of strangulation, carbon emissions. Rethink the monetary system. Do the utmost to ignore psychology because all of this ought to be indifferent to it. Or maybe use a bit of psychology to pick out the right colors for public infrastructure or something. Maybe for some interpersonal problems we can use a few of you. But most of the funds ought to go to psychiatrists, and you all ought to get whatever is leftover. Maybe. But only once the public parks are fully funded and maintained. You can have some input on how they are designed, but your opinion comes in last, after the children, who will be taken far more seriously. You get final say between picking either pirate ship or fire truck design. Otherwise, rigorously ignore psychology, or better, actively exclude psychologists from any and all consideration of any good life, ever.

Otherwise we can replace all psychologists with a coin flip machine considering you guys can replicate only about half of what happens in that 'science' anyway. Would be cheaper too.

It's identity politics with extra steps.

Now with a shiny veneer of pseudo-science to make it seem legitimate!

The meaning of the transcendental, as well as the psychologistic, has undergone substantial change since Kant. — Joshs

Oh I'm well aware. The best working to purge it ever more of any residual psychologism. Considering psychology is largely a garbage science anyway, one has to admire the foresight of philosophers in ditching it early on.

Franco Moretti — Maw

I've been mildly curious about this bloke but you should read him while keeping in mind that he is a prolific sexual abuser.

No, psychology is uniquely bad at understanding anything - especially politics - because it does not admit of a transcendental perspective. This is why philosophers as diverse as Kant, Husserl, and Frege went out of their way to erase any trace of psychologism from their work. Rightly so.

Philosophy is an anti-psychology and that is its essence and greatness. Politics even more so.

Would it be that it was it's only sin.

I pulled the trigger on that too quick, deleted my post, my mistake.

In any case, I'm not here to argue metaphors. I'm sorry to see you on the side of Nazi sympathizers who babble shit like 'the left is characterized by high degrees of narcissism' just because you get paid for your shamanism.

Awesome.

But holy shit people take this voodoo seriously smh.

It's crystal healing for political dilettantes.

the reduction of political ideology and attitudes to innate personality traits appeals to non-revolutionary types (i.e. non-Leftists/Socialists etc.) because existing political structures become justified based on "innate traits" and act as a barrier to structural change. — Maw

More than this too: is allows liberals and others to ignore any substantive engagement with issues. Why take seriously questions of poverty or corruption or tax when "oh you believe X because of personality trait Y". It's claptrap that personalizes the political and bypasses questions of coalition building, consensus, material conditions, or systemic analysis. It takes the political out of politics. Which is a wonderful relief for these people who now have to no longer think about any of this stuff and they can leave it to medical journals to ask about why the poor are complaining so much about wage theft or some such. The psycologization of politics is a cancer.

One has to recognize a certain normative autonomy of organism-environment functioning that doesn’t just treat political action as arising out of an anonymous plural’we’. — Joshs

Sure, but it's environments all the way down. Even the organism is an environment. If there's autonomy - and I agree there is - it's an environment with different thresholds and with different relative speeds in constant loopy feedbacks and feedforwards with other environments across membranes at different scales.

Studying the mind to help explain behavior — praxis

You can study the mind to explain behavior but you can't study the mind to explain the ends to which that behavior will be put ('behaviour' here being a weasel word meant to capture apparently literally any action at any scale in any circumstance, presumably). Politics is an ecological phenomenon first and foremost, and the idea that it is built up of units of psychologies - as it were - is to completely misunderstand both the mind and politics. Psychology acts as a constraint on how politics plays out (one can speak of crowd phenomena or susceptibility to attention-capture say), but it sure as hell has no determining role in what kind of politics comes into play. Not to speak of anything as crude as 'left' and 'right'. Americans don't even know what the fuck 'left' means, to even begin with. Anyone who thinks they can wring 'hates refugees' or 'wants more social security' out of studying phenomena at the scale of the mind is, I repeat, a moron. If you can get paid for it, more power to you.

You're welcome.

@Maw is entirely right and anyone who looks to psychology to explain politics is a moron.

Oh to be young and innocent.

I had a similar intuïtion... interestingly enough if you look at the etymological roots of the words it seems to have been the other way around historically.

Happiness comes from luck (happ), being fortunate, which points more to the material state of a person in relation to the world, rather than a psychological state... something that 'happ'ens to someone.

Joy then seems to have been associated throughout history with an inner feeling, a pleasurable sensation... which would be more in line with 'hedonic'.

Don't know if this necessarily has any bearing on how we use the terms now, maybe it has, but I thought it interesting at least, if only because of the shifts in meaning. — ChatteringMonkey

That's super interesting!

If one is happy in the historical meaning of the word (lucky, fortunate) one would probably be more inclined to turn a blind eye to the injustices of a system that has benefited you more than most. — ChatteringMonkey

Part of what motivated the OP was discussion I had elsewhere, in which I articulated the thought that in an environment that overwhelmingly deadens human flourishing, a sense of joy can almost function as an ethical imperative. Joy as a militant practice. Inspired in part by Audrey Lorde: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." So this is a kind of motivated joy, one diametrically opposite to happiness as contentment. A joy that specifically cuts against the given, rather than tries to settle amongst it (as with one that would turn a blind eye). I'm mostly trying to think about how to articulate or conceptualize these two notions of happiness and joy.

I'd be satisfied with being "interested" in something, that is, being taken in by a subject, or person or event or place. It need not reach the "burden" of being in a positive emotional state necessarily. — Manuel

I can totally dig that. I've always felt that being 'taken' by things - even when they challenge, frustrate, and grate against one's self - is sometimes a far more desirable state of being than any sort of happiness (give me a good challenge and I'll give up all happiness!). In that sense I think hedonism is a totally dead end, as a doctrine of say, ethics. But nonetheless - I am specifically interested in the 'downsides' of positive emotional states. Something like a 'toxic happiness' or happiness which stifles rather than expands the possibility of action. Or happiness which mocks, degrades, and incites violence. I'm trying to conceptualize joy as something that cannot be taken along these lines - a positive positivity.

This was a hook used by Thatcherites. It was meant to help shift attitudes toward acceptance of privatization and the abandonment of protection for labor. — frank

Not to mention alliteration appeals to the lizard brain in us. A lowest common denominator thing. In place of, I dunno, substance.

Orson Welles put it like this and I am paraphrasing, "A warthog can be happy. Joy is a great big electrical experience." — Tom Storm

Yeah this too! Joy as contagion, ecstatic (in the etymological sense of going outside 'ex'), and infectious. Wanna contast this with the centripetal notion of happiness.

This has been my view for years, which I think of in a Spinozist sense as 'active & passive affects' corresponding, IIRC, somewhat to Nietzsche's 'active & passive nihilisms'. (I'll dig up some quotes if you like for you interpretation but they're probably easy enough to find yourself.) Ecstasy vs contentment. Joy vs happiness. Eudaimonia vs hedonia. Dionysus vs the Crucified. Playing guitar vs playing "Guitar Hero".... — 180 Proof

Yeah, this philosophical inheritance is definitely in the background here. And thinking about it, of course I left out the linking of joy and potential for action (capacity or power).

I guess I'm looking for a way to be critical about joy, such that not all joy is 'good'. I'm interested in how happiness qua contentedness can be aligned with a certain self-contentedness in an almost pejorative sense. The political part of me wants to call it 'bourgeois happiness', a happiness that allows one to turn a blind eye to injustice and even active maliciousness. Killers can enjoy, and it's clear that - for instance - the Trump cult was built on a edifice of enjoyment that most people - including myself - still struggle to get our heads around. You can find it too in the almost alimentary effects visible in say, the rhythm of marching of the SS, in uniform, bursting with pride. How to be critical about that kind of joy?

Without some formalized distinction, "joy" and "happiness" are interchangeable in many contexts. — baker

For sure. But I'm trying to isolate tendencies and forge a vocabulary out of them, as it were. To see where it may lead.

And what makes us so defensive when discussing opposite views? — Apollodorus

Why is “the Left” called “loony”? — Apollodorus

:chin:

Just one of those mysteries I guess.

ANZAC day ought to be an important day, deeply engaged with by all.

Specifically, it ought to be a day of rage, reflecting on the horrors of imperialist ambition, our slavish aping of European - and now American - power plays, and on Australia's shameful and irredeemable colonial past. Never again indeed.

Jairus Banaji - A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism
Jairus Banaji - Theory As History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation

Thanks! If I have time I might try and write a slightly more in depth review with a bit more meat on it.

So anyway, yes, Harvey says neoliberalism is quasi-independent of states. I've just been trying to understand how. I'm going to read Mark Blyth's book Great Transformations next. — frank

The idea, I imagine, is that neoliberalism - although frankly I would prefer to talk here simply of capitalism - has interests and imperatives that simply do not coincide with states. So like, if you take the primary function of the state to be either say, the consolidation of sovereignty over a territory, or uncharitably, to extract the resources of a territory for the purposes of an exploiting class, the interests of capitalism - endless expansion of accumulation - do not coincide that of states.

With respect to neoliberalism in particular, you can see how this operates when states enter into commercial agreements with regard to the privatization of public resources. In these cases states cede sovereignty so that private companies take control of public resources - sometimes with 'perks' like reduced tax rates, laws that restrict competition, exceptions for environmental controls etc. And more than half the time these companies are multinationals which end up funnelling money offshore, so your population is left holding the bag of increased living costs while profits leave the country.

As an aside, Wood's Empire of Capital, which I'm reading now, is working towards making the case that "capitalism is unique it its capacity to detach economic from extra-economic power, and that this, among other things, implies that the economic power of capital can reach far beyond the grasp of any existing or conceivable, political or military power. At the same time, capitalism's extra-economic power cannot exist with the support of extra-economic force; and that extra-economic force is today, as before, primarily supplied by the state". I'm just on the early, historical bits (dealing with the Roman, Spanish, Arab, Dutch empires etc), so I haven't got to the meat of the argument just yet, but I thought it was relevant.

(If you want to get mad, read this shit: "Virginia’s 2006 contract with two private firms to build toll lanes on the Capital Beltway requires the state to compensate the companies whenever carpools exceed 24 percent of traffic in carpool lanes for the next forty years—“or until the builders make $100 million in profits.”; In 2008, the private consortium that owns the Northwest Parkway in Denver, Colorado, opposed improvements to a nearby public road, pointing to contract language that barred improvements—for 99 years—on city-owned roads that might divert traffic and “hurt the parkway financially.”; The state of Indiana had to reimburse the private company operating the Indiana Toll Road $447,000 in 2008 because the state waived the tolls of people who had to evacuate during severe flooding. The company also refused to allow state troopers to close the toll road during a snowstorm because it would hurt profits.")

This discussion was merged into (Poll) Sabellian Heresy versus Orthodox Trinitarianism

Ellen Meiksins Wood - Empire of Capital

--

@frank: So I finished reading Hudson's Super Imperialism and like I thought, it really isn't about neoliberalism at all. It is very much a history and account of state action, focusing on international monetary and trade policy (along with the institutions I mentioned). An alternative subtitle to it may have been: how the US has financially bullied the rest of the world - including and especially it's 'allies' - into economic submission from WWI to the 70s and beyond. It's even explicitly written against Marxist accounts (Hudson is a Keynesian) by trying to show how the American state has functioned as an autonomous agency at a remove from (just) class politics in order to effect a world economy oriented around American trade and foreign policy interests (particularly - getting the rest of the world to pay for America's wars and debts). If anything, neoliberalism piggy-backed off this success and developed into its own, subsequent autonomous force. In any case, I don't quite see it as a 'competition' - both state and capitalist power can and do function autonomously and in interaction with one another, at points complimenting, at other points clashing with one another.

While it's probably fair to say that the state has been progressively subsumed by neoliberal interests, it's also the case that the state worked to incubate and foster those interests in an environment in which the state was very much in the driver's seat. That all said, it's a great book to understand exactly how world finance shaped up post-WWI, and exactly what happened with the gold standard and the legacy that its abandonment left.

@Maw and @180 Proof - love your recent reads.

@Wayfarer's reply does not address your friend's response. Your friend specified that his belief in the efficacy of observation comes from observing the efficacy of observation. This does not put him in the same position as the verificationists, for whom the principle of verification is not subject to verification. Your friend's point was quite literally the opposite of that: that it is on the basis of verification that he believes in the efficacy of verification.

To the degree that your friend's response is a certain kind of empiricism, it is empiricism 'all the way down', as it were. What is sometimes called fallibilism. This kind of thing is arguably open to a certain kind of attack from induction (Hume), but this doesn't have much or anything to do with the verificationists Wayfarer is talking about.

I'll let you know when I'm through it a bit more. Just started.