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just another posted:What is the difference between educating people to have the correct opinions, and educating people to see their own good? Perhaps the Liberal and the Socialist legitimize their prescriptions with appeals to different philosophical traditions, but in either case, the claim is that there is a caste of teachers with access to a knowledge of the methods of human flourishing that, when taught, will reproduce their politics on a societal scale. In the former case, you have discovered the solution to everything a priori, in the latter you've only discovered a kind of social solution-seeking process a priori. The idea of how the process is supposed to produce and reproduce socialism is simply the hypothesis that socialism is the collective good of the people. That claim can not only be interpreted in the sense that you have discovered socialism and the people must follow you there if they understand their own good, but in the converse sense, that by understanding and being free to follow their own good, they can discover a more workable conception, not only an implementation, of socialism than you ever could have. And of course they will surprise you, and it should not be frightening or a sign of moral corruption. Socialism as a system for me is not a set of solutions to be arrived at, but a reliable process for producing solutions (there is overlap, but only the parts that are necessary for the process to start up and be defended). I only need to believe that humans are capable of coming up with what they need to flourish and productively compromising with each other to let go of myself and my own preconceptions about what exactly should be. IMO the necessary educational part is about learning to cut through ideological bullshit and rethinking the bounds of political possibility. When I said "see their own good" I didn't mean give such a thing to them, because you don't really have it in the first place, but dispel the haze that makes it hard to conceive it in the first place. Edit: I left in a bit of room for confusion that I don't have time to resolve. Basically I use the word "socialism" in two senses here: in the sense of a developed mode of production and the sense of a process to get there and beyond. You could say that there's no guarantee that the latter would ever lead to the former, but if capitalism turns out to have been something that remains while following the collective good of people or classless society otherwise is not that, then gently caress me I guess. uncop fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 05:49
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uncop posted:You could say that there's no guarantee that the latter would ever lead to the former, but if capitalism turns out to have been something that remains while following the collective good of people or classless society otherwise is not that, then gently caress me I guess. I’ve been thinking about this a couple days... Look at religious folk. “for the law of the Spirit of the life in Christ Jesus did set me free from the law of the sin and of the death” We still die. There is still separation. Think about the ways to resolve a dialectic. One can go further and make the question that creates the dialectic irrelevant. Does that make the pair, not the ideas, but the real things each side was referring to not exist? If we negate a negation, is the original thesis still around. I guess I look at it this way as a religious person. I am saved by faith. I’m still going to die. I’m still living in separation. Being free of those things doesn’t remove them from existence. I’m free from them, but they still are. It could work like that. There could still be markets. But we might be free from this externalities and the inequalities they create. We could end up free of them, but they still exist.
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Feb 28, 2020 01:18
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I’ve been thinking about this a couple days... Yeah, the parts of the old keep existing as a subdued side of the new whole. Stuff like markets and money have already shown themselves to be very resilient. But I don't consider them hard impediments to a new system in the first place, they don't in themselves necessitate economic class. They were already around in stateless pastoral and peasant societies and did not work toward creating British-style agrarian capitalism. Even the subdued existence of capital isn't threatening to the enclosing system when it faces tough limits for its expansion, i.e. people having way better options than going to work for a capitalist (or just can't due to being slaves or serfs or the like). I'd say that as long as capital isn't truly subdued, but competing for dominance as the highest determining force of the system, the attempted new system hasn't found a self-sufficient existence and so we won't be out of the woods yet. It means representatives of capital still keep rising as a political power players, like it was in the USSR and China too. And in an unfortunate way independent capital continues to be necessary, how do you exist within a capitalist world market as an exporter of something other than primary products without having competitive enough export enterprise of your own? Primary product exporting, after all, is when you tear up your nature to sell things that are steeply undervalued in relation to the labor expenditure. And the marriage of socialism and capital isn't some worker co-op at all, but more like a state-owned enterprise that gets its labor savings by the state subsidizing a low-wage workforce for it: housing, healthcare, pensions, food, education are all things that don't need to be paid in wages, and taxes can also be kept low. But that marriage also acts as a limiting force on the rest that can be, because people have to be willing to go to work there, and the capitalist world market has rules on what kind of subsidies are not fine. Small market production like worker co-ops doesn't have an expansionist and consumption-denying dynamic, more like the opposite. The consumption-denying enterprise more or less requires a class separation, where one class is in control and denies the other's aspirations while serving itself just as the others would like to serve themselves. Capital is one of those things that one can't live in separation of in the long term because it's inherently expansionist, never satisfied with anything less than exponential growth. It has to swallow you up to keep existing. Or rather, the only kind of capital you can live separated from is failing capital, commodity production and exchange whose aspirations at being capital are constantly frustrated.
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Feb 28, 2020 05:57
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uncop posted:Yeah, the parts of the old keep existing as a subdued side of the new whole. Stuff like markets and money have already shown themselves to be very resilient. But I don't consider them hard impediments to a new system in the first place, they don't in themselves necessitate economic class. They were already around in stateless pastoral and peasant societies and did not work toward creating British-style agrarian capitalism. Even the subdued existence of capital isn't threatening to the enclosing system when it faces tough limits for its expansion, i.e. people having way better options than going to work for a capitalist (or just can't due to being slaves or serfs or the like). I think we are on the same page. I’m going to focus on this: “Capital is one of those things that one can't live in separation of in the long term because it's inherently expansionist, never satisfied with anything less than exponential growth.” It’s a feed back loop. And I think this is a proven fact now, at least that’s the take away for me from Picketty. It’s also tied inherently to the advantages that scale brings in efficiency. Capital gets big for the same reason elephants or whales or sauropods get/got big. Big is efficient. So that raises the following questions: Is it possible to have an effective control on that feed back loop? No - we are probably hosed. Yes - Ok what does an effective control look like? We are going to have a bunch possible of answers here from social democracy to luxury gay automated space communism. Which ones aren’t just reorganization’s of feudalism? I mean that’s the problem with capitalism. Capital is just replaced monarchy. Nothing new was created existing parts were rearranged. I don’t think doing that again escapes the problem. And that elements in society that want to restore the old arrangement, that has to go too unless we still want class war (albeit possibly with different classes). Looking back at Christianity it has this conflict in it too. They picked the monarchy of the Father at Nicea. A lot of the problem with logocentrism are actually from monarchism. Logos Christianity before Nicea carried a risk of slipping in a paganism, in the sense of it has a risk of losing being a monotheism (a risk but not a certainty). So they bolted monarchy onto it. That symbol of monarchy is the feudal understanding of monarchy. In capitalism society was rearranged to have capital in that position of monarchy. So where can we place reason that it will not have to have monarchy? One option is what I think Zizek is attempting. Nothing and that is potentially viable. Another is in the Spirit. Which he is attempting (but I don’t think he pulls off) to make from nothing. Death of God theology tries to well, argue that the Father dies on the cross but that has the problem of “the parts of the old keep existing as a subdued side of the new whole” it is denying that with the radical absence of the Father. For those not following or off put by the religious terms you can sub the Real, or that their is a real existence we participate in (not nothing like in Zizek) for the Father. I guess where I am is that it has to be us (in the broad sense) the foundation for reason is all of us, which leaves me at a humanism (a Christian on) closely resembling Logos Christianity before the monarchy of the Father gets bolted onto that concept. I am pretty sure that’s Tillich’s fault.
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Feb 28, 2020 18:18
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I think we are on the same page. Minor point of confusion: Piketty uses the mainstream conception of capital, which means something like factors of production that aren't money or labor. When I talk about capital, I mean the process of converting money into more money, and the reason that capital grows exponentially has nothing to do with efficiency, the process simply can't exist without doing so. And its method of accelerating its growth on the level of the whole is transforming more people into its wage workers and making them work more for it. So what makes the growth bad is not just hierarchy or monopoly or the limits of nature, it's that capital must destroy all alternative ways of living that it encounters in order to live. Peoples may turn to capital for help because it produces goods more efficiently than their old ways of production, but the reason they need to do that is because foreign capital has already entered and began threatening their ways of life and they can only defend themselves by increasing their own production. I don't quite follow what you're thinking. "Capital is just replaced monarchy. Nothing new was created existing parts were rearranged." and "So where can we place reason that it will not have to have monarchy?" come from somewhere way outside my thought paradigm. What for you is the "new" that was not created? And what is the practical role of this location of reason? If I understand you at all, you're talking about how we have concentrated the basis of our decision making power into some centralized entity outside us. The literal monarch symbolically represented the will of God on Earth, and now there's an analogous abstract monarch metaphorically commanding all the people who conceive of politics as just the responsible management of the economy. And you consider the necessary "new" to be taking back the decision marking power from such centralized entities, reconnecting people with what is simply their own power. But then, you seem to imply that society is organized according to where the source of reason is thought to lie, like if people in general believe God to be the source of reason, then they must arrange society so that it follows His will. Conversely, I believe that the concept of having built society according to reason is just post-hoc bullshit. If there's a literal absolute monarch, there's basis to say that it's to a great extent being built according to their subjective reason, but the metaphorical will of capital is an emergent property autonomous from the will of any group of people. People simply must follow it because the logic of capital rewards those who obey and punishes those who rebel. It's not the source of reason, it's like some lovecraftian eldritch god and human reason simply says to seek success and avoid pain. The same human reason leads to radically different results based on the pressing demands posed by the human environment. And people will be able to produce a narrative to philosophically justify any arrangement at all that they end up in, attribute it to reason.
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Feb 28, 2020 19:20
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uncop posted:I don't quite follow what you're thinking. "Capital is just replaced monarchy. Nothing new was created existing parts were rearranged." and "So where can we place reason that it will not have to have monarchy?" come from somewhere way outside my thought paradigm. What for you is the "new" that was not created? And what is the practical role of this location of reason? It is this from an earlier post: “For Tillich the Bourgeois principle is the dissolution of all conditions relating to origin, they are to be mastered and reassembled to serve the aim of thought and action. Goals instead of being, tools instead of intrinsic values. It is objectification and analysis. To objectify is to wholly condition and to remove all relationships to origins. To objectify and subjugate everything by the reduction of all things to systems. (We could and probably should digress on the topic of systems. I’ll link to things I’ve previously written on that subject after this post.)” And this: “It dissolves things and brings them together in a new way, but does not create anything original”. To be the bourgeois principle is supported by a reality it did not itself form. It has to unite itself with the myths of origen (that it breaks!) to exist. It is a critical principle and cannot make itself a truly universal one. (Eg. To try to be universal it takes it’s universality from the prophetic in religion, it can’t be universal on it’s own). It is a “corrective not a normative principle”. He compares the relationship between feudalism and the bourgeois principle to Catholicism and Protestantism. Protestantism’s existence depended on Catholicism existing first and it attempts to dissolve and reshape it. That in Tillich's thought is the nature of the relationship between feudalism and the bourgeois principle. Bourgeois class rule can only exist because it is made up of dissolved and reconstituted feudal elements.” So we had life under feudalism. Capitalism is made up of the parts of feudalism broken down and rearranged into a new system. Like Protestantism and it’s relationship to Catholicism. Protestantism doesn’t have new parts, it’s the parts of Catholicism rearranged. Like the relationship with God. People interacted with God through the Catholic Church. So you had symbolic parts of the system: God people the church. In Protestantism you still have those same parts, it reorganizes the relationships between them. New things, new symbolic parts can only come from new origins which we only get after a total collapse. Capitalism and feudalism are like that. The symbolic parts of capitalism came from feudalism, but they are are reorganized and the relationships between the parts changed. Capital occupies the place where the symbol of King or God was. It claims not to, it makes the enlightenment claim that society and laws are from the people. But that is only ideology. The actual system has capital in charge in nearly the same manner as a divine right king, above the laws that come from itself. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Feb 28, 2020 |
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Feb 28, 2020 19:54
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uncop posted:People simply must follow it because the logic of capital rewards those who obey and punishes those who rebel. It's not the source of reason, it's like some lovecraftian eldritch god and human reason simply says to seek success and avoid pain. But that’s a theonomy. By theonomy I mean societies are structured in a way so as to produce certain conclusions and actions of those that participate in them. It is the source of reason for those participating in it, in a literal sense, because it “rewards those who obey and punishes those who rebel” and this determines their behavior. Some of this is misunderstanding because you and I are using different versions of “reason”. For me it has teleological implications. There is the existentialist assertion that existence precede essence. But that can be followed with, but thought determines and shapes. Things exist first, but what we think about them shapes and determine what exists. So what has shaped and determined our society under capitalism? Capital, which is why I would see it as the source of reason in Capitalism. But remember I’m seeing it as rearrangement of the relationships between symbols, so where we had God / Kings in feudalism that’s where capital is now. That position where a symbol can have that king/monarch relationship to the other symbols has to go. This is often but not always (and not for me) an atheism.
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Feb 28, 2020 20:29
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Tias posted:Still chewing on replies, but this approach has actually been done in depth by libertarian socialists in the so-called Anarchy FAQ, that also deals a lot with socialist questions in general, like private enterprise, property conceptions etc. Holy crap, maybe I am truly hopeless because this sounds positively exhausting. I feel utterly overwhelmed and panicky at my workplace due to the fact that I'm supposed to pretty much manage myself only to receive a vague mediocre performance review. This sounds like it would extend that to my entire life. I just don't understand the idea of being responsible for its own sake. If you want me to do something, reward me for it. I don't feel rewarded for my work, I only go because I am paid and I can use that money to avoid doing other things, like cooking or cleaning. I do acknowledge that this is not normal and is likely depression (or maybe because the last time I felt truly happy was when I did well at grade school and everyone would constantly praise me for how smart I was for getting good grades with so little effort) but as it stands right now, this is no way I would like to live. Would most people want this? AceOfFlames fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Feb 29, 2020 |
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Feb 29, 2020 16:34
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If being given a job in exchange for money is unfulfilling and the opportunity to develop your own meaning is also terrible sounding then I think what you want is either a cult or a dominatrix.
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Feb 29, 2020 16:43
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OwlFancier posted:If being given a job in exchange for money is unfulfilling and the opportunity to develop your own meaning is also terrible sounding then I think what you want is either a cult or a dominatrix. If I believed in God, I'd definitely join a monastery. Unfortunately I think religion is just another way for people to abuse and bully each other.
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Feb 29, 2020 16:49
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Well... yes that's how hierarchy works, you set one up and let it become self sustaining and it starts sacrificing people to maintaining itself. If you don't want that, you have to get rid of that, and that requires, like, participation. There is no society that will just tell you what to do and also it'll always be something that makes you happy...
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Feb 29, 2020 16:52
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Men like Epicurus were called soters, saviors, because they liberated people from fear by their philosophy. All this shows what a serious thing philosophy was at that time. . . It’s like people are the same as they’ve ever been. AOF you probably have an anxiety disorder. You’ve let us know about it and that you’re going to goto a therapist for it. This isn’t a new problem to the human condition. Withdrawing isn’t a good response to it. Find what matters to you and go for it and really really make sure to goto therapy. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do these things.
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Feb 29, 2020 17:45
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OwlFancier posted:If being given a job in exchange for money is unfulfilling and the opportunity to develop your own meaning is also terrible sounding then I think what you want is either a cult or a dominatrix. Or therapy. Possibly I'm projecting, but it sounds similar to my old situation: people with issues around control often seek positions where they have more control over their schedule and work, only to find that control itself isn't actually gratifying in any meaningful way and that it's really just a means to achieve other goals. So either you double down on the need for control and start trying to control people and the environment around you, or your own body and mind state, or you question the need for control and where it arises from. There is probably a political analog here in that authoritarian tendencies stem from a need for control over things which ultimately can't be controlled (like people's thoughts). Douglas Rushkoff wrote an article a while back about how billionaires almost always want immortality, because they're nervous wrecks who are terrified of losing control of their estates. In my experience with the kinds of people who become billionaires (startup founders, VCs, et al) they always, always have some weirdness around control, which would probably be healthier if it was channeled into, say, BDSM or woodworking.
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Mar 2, 2020 02:24
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So I haven’t been updating, but I’ve been thinking about this thread quite a lot and I think I’ve come up something related to the larger situation and Tillich. Hopefully I’ll get it done here soon and maybe get another couple chapters out.
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Apr 4, 2020 23:28
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Reznor posted:Is it a useful distinction? I think the store manager of a McDonald's is more like a worker than the owner. Yes they can hire or fire, but they also have to worry about being hired and fired. I think in most cases though their bugging and firing power comes from upstairs more than their discression. Further to my knowledge most lower management types are paid salary and not in a profit shared manner. So in a real way they have similar lived experiences being constrained by forces out of their control. Chain dollar store managers get hosed harder than anyone else in the company because they're put on the exact minimum salary to be labeled overtime-exempt (455/wk IIRC) and then expected to stock and unload trucks alone 60+hrs/wk. Not to mention that when my mom was doing thia back in 2000 the company was too cheap to pop for armed car service or a safe at a $3mm/yr gross store so they just had her making cash bank deposits by herself at 11:00 every loving night shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Apr 5, 2020 |
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Apr 5, 2020 00:45
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My dad has 40+ years in retail grocery. His take on salaried grocery management positions is : Salary is slavery.
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Apr 5, 2020 00:47
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What if Job is a story of Becoming? So we have this question of dialectics. Let’s ground that poo poo and not be abstract. Look at the current response to the pandemic. In our romantics we have stories not grounded in reality. Chloroquine, manufacture of the virus by government labs, not sheltering in place, the cure is worse than the... these are things unreal. Lies. Then there is what really is. ( or nothing, again structural identical ontologically inverted). When there is talk about truth and lie, being and non-being, material and ideal. This is what that is about. Navigating this is existential and possibly universally existential, if we exist we face this question. Tillich in his later thought well after this book roots existence in the Ground of Being, ( which answers heidegger’s question, Why is there something rather than nothing?) Tillich’s Ground of Being is the event of Jesus as the Christ, important in his thought Jesus becomes the Christ on the cross. This is likely too religious to be a viable solution to most of the readers of this thread. Which brings me back to the question at the top of this post. What if Job is a story of Becoming? Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. I find there very something very much analogous to: “I neither know nor think that I know” What if Job is a story of Becoming? As capitalism destroys our origin myths and alienates us from each other, where we are from, and ourselves we face a choice between accepting the unreal ( and possibly become political romantics) or the real ( and possibly become socialists). What if we have to go further than that dialectic. What if Job is a story of Becoming?
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Apr 9, 2020 05:41
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Bar Ran Dun posted:What if Job is a story of Becoming? I like what you're thinking, if I understand it. Let's take this religious dialectic (that I hope approximates Tillich's take closely enough to make sense) of God as the universal universal: everything real is of God, and is because it is of God. Christ is the human universal, the human aspect of the universal universal, and a symbol of a dialectical becoming of God: first, humanity became a thing that exists through God, but later on God became a new kind of human through human society. This signaled a new stage of humanity, beginning to transform all the individual people through its universality. The word of God and the word inspired by God are the mechanism through which the universal human developments are transmitted to individual people. The last part, I assume, is why we are interested in a story of becoming for the current times in the first place. The attempt to secularize the grounding of being just makes this a more general idealist dialectic, where word may exist independently of God's existence but its historical appearance nonetheless signals the progressive stages of humanity and human individuals become part of the new universal stage through assimilating the word. Perhaps universality gets questioned and is transformed into smaller generalities, if rather than word of one true God there are multiple competing lineages of word without any of them having special supernatural privileges over one another. Let's turn the dialectic on its head: instead of the structure where God/word is first, humanity becomes out of God/word and developments of human individuals follow developments of God/word, start from a naturalist evolutionary viewpoint where first nature produced a pre-humanity, then it developed language, and finally became humanity proper through the use of language. Things change a lot with that inversion, but they don't change in a critical way that would invalidate the point, that universal stories of becoming are meaningful to produce. People first engage in new forms of practice and only then produce the word to describe themselves in that practice, but the spreading of word is still the mechanism through which particular human developments transform into general human developments. Roughly speaking, progress follows the kind of word that can generalize novel and beneficial developments of real practice, reaction follows the kind of word that defends old practice against the former kind of word. Here IMO is the root of why reaction is unable to ground its narratives in reality: it's engaged in defending itself from people recognizing and applying something that is unquestionably real. But progress is still just people dealing in narratives, it doesn't follow reality directly but basically always mediated by word, i.e. also simply placing their faith in a narrative of reality. As I understand the story of Job, it's a story about dealing with uncomfortable reality as it comes at you and not pretending to be able to take things as signs of some kind of karmic judgment of the way you're living. Doing what you have fundamental reasons to believe make a good person and a good life and not taking what is immediately happening in your life as a necessary consequence of doing it and sign that you were wrong. Not a story about understanding reality, but rather acting in awareness of not really understanding it. Believing in things that are not necessarily real because of judging the proof against them to be a special case and the proof in favor of them to be overwhelming even while personally living the special case for far longer than is bearable and believable to others. I think you are right about it being a story of becoming, about representing something that is to become universal while in present reality it's still exceptional and counterintuitive. I think it's a misjudgment in the first place to think that it's enough for socialists to believe in what is real: they're even better characterized as people who believe in something that is not real. Socialists are very much in that position where it definitely does not look like they're right to most people, and at times it gets difficult to believe that themselves, because they don't actually represent the real directly but rather the dialectical opposite of present reality that is merely implied by that present reality. To be socialist without socialism is principally a matter of faith. The difference between progressive and reactionary faith is just that while reactionary faitth is dogmatic and denounces reality when it doesn't agree with the faith, progressive faith is humble enough to let reality inform it of its misunderstandings and then judge whether the misunderstanding is fundamental (requiring change of position) or of an exceptional special case (requiring perseverance). I think the term "scientific ideology" really captures the dialectic of the socialist. The contradiction between the study of reality and the faith in making what is real, unreal, and what is unreal, real, pushes the socialist forward, alternately in terms of transforming reality and transforming their own faith.
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Apr 9, 2020 13:01
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uncop posted:I think it's a misjudgment in the first place to think that it's enough for socialists to believe in what is real: they're even better characterized as people who believe in something that is not real. Socialists are very much in that position where it definitely does not look like they're right to most people, and at times it gets difficult to believe that themselves, because they don't actually represent the real directly but rather the dialectical opposite of present reality that is merely implied by that present reality. Truth and lie is probably the better pair to think of than real and unreal. Real and unreal, I’m comfortable with something that materially doesn’t exist still being real. That confuses the he’ll out of people. Present existing reality can be either truth or lie as can things that do not materially exist. But the other thing is the need to go further. The tendency is to try to resolve the pair to one or the other side. I mean that’s Heideggar’s question why is there something and not nothing. We immediately think x or y. It is more something/nothing. Another way I’ve seen it is from NGE you can(not) progress. Way back when I was first discussed Tillich with my wife (good God that was decades ago), she described his view as people being sliced up being both being/non-being simultaneously. In other words I agree with this: uncop posted:To be socialist without socialism is principally a matter of faith. The difference between progressive and reactionary faith is just that while reactionary faitth is dogmatic and denounces reality when it doesn't agree with the faith, progressive faith is humble enough to let reality inform it of its misunderstandings and then judge whether the misunderstanding is fundamental (requiring change of position) or of an exceptional special case (requiring perseverance). I think the term "scientific ideology" really captures the dialectic of the socialist. The contradiction between the study of reality and the faith in making what is real, unreal, and what is unreal, real, pushes the socialist forward, alternately in terms of transforming reality and transforming their own faith. But here is the problem. Something I learned in practical term about explaining complicated ideas to people is : if you come up with a securing arraignment Willie the meth head down a the warehouse has to be able to understand it. Or to reference a colleague, the expert in his subject matter regarding his book : it is written for drunks with a fifth grade education. Socialism is trying to be the class consciousness of the proletariat. But to do that it has to speak in their language and symbols Tillich used the symbols of Christianity, and that translation is why I am where I am. But those religious symbols do not carry the weight and are not universal in the US in the way they were sixty years ago. Right now what I see is that socialists put the burden of translation onto the audience. They have great resources but those resources are in their symbols and language. In personal terms, years ago I gave my father a copy of the Communist Manifesto. It didn’t do much. It describes things he has talked about from his life experiences as a retail worker of forty years. But it didn’t speak to him, because it wasn’t in his language. To get me to understand the “dialectic of the socialist” it had to be in religious language. Some one had to do the work of apology. Here lies my take away from the book. Socialism has to present itself in the languages of myth of origin that people are going to turn to as capitalism tears itself apart. A negation of a negation creates a multitude, and the various myths of origin are going to make up that multitude. To correlate them to get them all pointed in the same way, socialism has to do apology to them.
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Apr 9, 2020 20:25
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Truth and lie is probably the better pair to think of than real and unreal. Real and unreal, I’m comfortable with something that materially doesn’t exist still being real. That confuses the he’ll out of people. Present existing reality can be either truth or lie as can things that do not materially exist. But the other thing is the need to go further. The tendency is to try to resolve the pair to one or the other side. I mean that’s Heideggar’s question why is there something and not nothing. We immediately think x or y. It is more something/nothing. Another way I’ve seen it is from NGE you can(not) progress. Way back when I was first discussed Tillich with my wife (good God that was decades ago), she described his view as people being sliced up being both being/non-being simultaneously. I don't see how truth and lie actually make a pair of opposites though, without implicitly lumping untruth believed earnestly into either category. Truth and untruth are pretty analogous to real and unreal as a pair, except operating on the level of statements rather than forces. But I roughly agree that trying to resolve the pairs to one or the other is a mistaken tendency, to strictly wall being being and non-being off from one another. Forces phase out of and back into reality as they're eliminated by counter-forces that later are eliminated the same way themselves, and that phasing is a continuous rather than discrete change so there must be a conceptual "in-between" state. It has become kinda intuitive for me to think of reality in general as organized unreality, that nature is composed of what wouldn't be recognizable as anything at all without being organized in complex forms. Like, all the chemical and physical particles we discover turn out to be composed of <1% some types of subparticles and >99% nothing. But the nothing is very important, it provides the space without which the form of the actual thing would not be possible, so is it not a genuine part of the not-nothing? And then, hit that form with the sort of energy that causes it to fall apart, and most of what it was composed of returns to nothingness. Probably all that we think about complex arrangements of such forces are in some in-between state of truth and untruth because we haven't dealt with all the complexities, all the states the system can find itself in. I mean even if our statements are very close to true, the untrue side is revealed when the system it describes moves toward some unexpected state, and starts looking more true again once the system starts moving back toward an expected state. Also, no mass religion could be a mass religion without being based in truth in the sense that they understand reality in some meaningful fashion. But they disagree so at least all but one must also be simultaneously untrue. And if they stand still while the world moves, they have to become less truth-based over time. quote:But here is the problem. Something I learned in practical term about explaining complicated ideas to people is : if you come up with a securing arraignment Willie the meth head down a the warehouse has to be able to understand it. Or to reference a colleague, the expert in his subject matter regarding his book : it is written for drunks with a fifth grade education. Socialism is trying to be the class consciousness of the proletariat. But to do that it has to speak in their language and symbols Yeah, I'm painfully aware of this and it sucks how hard it's to speak in a language that speaks to the listener while also not giving an overly distorted picture of what's being described. You outright can't do it without having done the work of understanding who they are and what they do. The internet with its anonymity and detachedness is definitely not a very good environment to reach to people, when you think about it. But lol, this is making me think about the people who manage to describe anything in some Harry Potter (or other hit pop culture work) analogy. Is that where we are as a society now that no one has read the Bible but everyone has seen lots of Marvel movies?
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Apr 10, 2020 05:34
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y'all are overcomplicating this nobody needs to navigate dozens of marvel flicks searching for analogy, everybody knows The Lion King. Worker, you've been trained to hide yourself in carefree escapism and holding yourself down with a lie that's been sold to you, meanwhile the forces of greed lead your kingdom to ruin. Seize the means of production, Simba.
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Apr 10, 2020 05:54
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Shame on an IGA, while that particular story is non viable, yes that’s basically what I’m asserting needs to be done. It’s the process of this symbol not that symbol, this story not that story.
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Apr 10, 2020 16:28
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So I haven’t been able do chapters cause kids, home with the kids all the time. Anyway this sermon is from 1955. Many of the ideas in it are from this book. The Shaking of the Foundations I look out on earth. . . lo, all is chaos; I look at heaven . . . its light is gone; I look out on the mountains . . . they are trembling; and all the hills are swaying! I look out . . . lo, no man is to be seen; all the birds have flown! I look out . . . lo, the sown land lies a desert; and the towns are all razed by the Lord's rage. For thus has the Lord said: The whole land shall be desolate. And for this shall the earth mourn and the heavens above be black. I have purposed it and will not repent. Neither will I turn back from it. At the noise of the horsemen and the archers the land is all in flight, men taking refuge within woods and caves, and climbing upon the rocks. Every city shall be abandoned, And not a man dwell therein. You ruined creature, what will you do! JEREMIAH 4:23- 30. For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed. But my kindness shall not depart from thee; neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that has mercy on thee! ISAIAH 54:10. The foundations of the earth do shake. Earth breaks to pieces, earth is split in pieces, earth shakes to pieces, earth reels like a drunken man, earth rocks like a hammock; under the weight of its transgression earth falls down to rise no more! Lift up your eyes to heaven and look upon the earth beneath: For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke. And the earth shall grow old like a robe; the world itself shall crumble. But my righteousness shall be forever, And my salvation knows no end. ISAIAH 24:18-20 It is hard to speak after the prophets have spoken as they have in these pronouncements. Every word is like the stroke of a hammer. There was a time when we could listen to such words without much feeling and without understanding. There were decades and even centuries when we did not take them seriously. Those days are gone. Today we must take them seriously. For they describe with visionary power what the majority of human beings in our period have experienced, and what, perhaps in a not too distant future, all mankind will experience abundantly. "The foundations of the earth do shake." The visions of the prophets have become an actual, physical possibility, and might become an historical reality. The phase, "Earth is split in pieces," is not merely a poetic metaphor for us, but a hard reality. That is the religious meaning of the age into which we have entered. The Bible has always told us of the beginning and the end of the world. It speaks of eternity before the world was founded; it speaks of the time when God laid the foundations of the earth; it speaks of the shaking of these foundations and of the crumbling of the world. In one of the later books, Second Peter, it says that "the heavens will vanish with a crackling roar, and the elements will melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works therein shall be burnt up." This is no longer vision; it has become physics. We know that in the ground of our earth, and in the ground of everything in our world that has form and structure, destructive forces are bound. Laying the foundations of the earth means binding these forces. When the unruly power of the smallest parts of our material world was restrained by cohesive structures, a place was provided in which life could grow and history develop, in which words could be heard and love be felt, and in which truth could be discovered and the Eternal adored. All this was possible because the fiery chaos of the beginning was transformed into the fertile soil of the earth. But out of the fertile soil of the earth a being was generated and nourished, who was able to find the key to the foundation of all beings. That being was man. He has discovered the key which can unlock the forces of the ground, those forces which were bound when the foundations of the earth were laid. He has begun to use this key. He has subjected the basis of life and thought and will to his will. And he willed destruction. For the sake of destruction he used the forces of the ground; by his thought and his work he unlocked and untied them. That is why the foundations of the earth rock and shake in our time. In the language of the prophets, it is the Lord who shakes the mountains and melts the rocks. This is a language that modern man can not understand. And so God, who is not bound to any special language, not even to that of the prophets, spoke to the men of today through the mouths of our greatest scientists, and this is what He said: You yourselves can bring about the end upon yourselves. I give the power to shake the foundations of your earth into your hands. You can use this power for creation or destruction. How will you use it? This is what God said to mankind through the work of the scientists and through their discovery of the key to the foundations of life. But through them He did even more. He forced His Word upon them, as He had forced it upon the prophets, in spite of their attempt ever to resist it. For no prophet likes to say what he has to say. And no scientist who participated in the great and terrible discovery liked to say what he had to say. But he could not but speak; he had to raise his voice, like the prophets, to tell this generation what the prophets told their generations: that earth and man, trees and animals, are threatened by a catastrophe which they can scarcely escape. A tremendous anxiety expresses itself through the words of these men. Not only do they feel the shaking of the foundations, but also that they themselves are largely responsible for it. They tell us that they despise what they have done, because they know that we are left with only a slight chance of escape. Wavering between little hope and much despair, they urge us to use this chance. This is the way in which God had spoken to our generation about the shaking of the foundations. We had forgotten about such shaking. And it was science, more than anything else, which had made us forget it. It was not science as knowledge, but rather science for the purpose of hidden idolatry, for the purpose of persuading us to believe in our earth as the place for the establishment of the Kingdom of God, to believe in ourselves as those through whom this was to be achieved. There were prophets of this idolatry -- false prophets, as they were called by Jeremiah -- who cried: "Progress, infinite progress! Peace, universal peace! Happiness, happiness for everyone!" And now what has happened? That same science, in the saving power of which these false prophets believed, has utterly destroyed that idolatry. The greatest triumph of science was the power it gave to man to annihilate himself and his world. And those who brought about this triumph are speaking today, like the true prophets of the past -- which is to say, not of progress, but of a return to the chaos of the beginning; not of peace, but of disruption; and not of happiness, but of doom. In this way science is atoning for the idolatrous abuse to which it has lent itself for centuries. Science, which has closed our eyes and thrown us into an abyss of ignorance about the few things that really matter, has revealed itself, has opened our eyes, and has pointed, at least, to one fundamental truth -- that "the mountains shall depart and the hills shall be removed", that "earth shall fall down to rise no more", because its foundations shall be destroyed. But still we hear voices -- and since the first shock, they have been increasing -- which try to comfort us, saying: "Perhaps man will use the power to shake the foundations for creative purposes, for progress, for peace and happiness. The future lies in man's hands, in our hands. If we should decide for constructiveness instead of destruction, why should we not be able to continue the creation? Why should we not become like God, at least in this respect?" Job had to become silent when the Lord spoke to him out of the whirlwind, saying, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding!" But our false voices continue: "Perhaps we can answer where Job could not. Have not our scientific discoveries revealed the mysteries of the ways in which the earth was founded? Are we not, in thought and knowledge, able to be present at this event? Why should we be afraid of the shaking of the foundations?" But man is not God; and whenever he has claimed to be like God, he has been rebuked and brought to self- destruction and despair. When he has rested complacently on his cultural creativity or on his technical progress, on his political institutions or on his religious systems, he has been thrown into disintegration and chaos; all the foundations of his personal, natural and cultural life have been shaken. As long as there has been human history, this is what has happened; in our period it has happened on a larger scale than ever before. Man's claim to be like God has been rejected once more; not one foundation of the life of our civilization has remained unshaken. As we read some of the passages from the prophets, we might easily imagine that we were reading the reports of eye- witnesses from Warsaw or Hiroshima or Berlin. Isaiah says: "Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down and scattereth its inhabitants. . . . Towns fall to pieces; each man bolts his door; gladness has gone from the earth and pleasure is no more. The cities are left desolate; their gates are battered down; and few are left. . . . For earth has been polluted by the dwellers on its face ... breaking the Eternal Covenant. Therefore, a curse is crushing the earth, and the guilty people must atone." Every one of these words describes the experience of the peoples of Europe and Asia. The most primitive and most essential foundations of life have been shaken. The destruction is such that we, who have not experienced it, cannot even imagine it. We have not experienced it; and we cannot believe that we could be caught in such a destruction. And yet, I see American soldiers walking through the ruins of these cities, thinking of their own country, and seeing with visionary clarity the doom of its towns and cities. I know that this has happened, and is still happening. There are soldiers who have become prophets, and their message is not very different from the message of the ancient Hebrew prophets. It is the message of the shaking of the foundations, and not those of their enemies, but rather those of their own country. For the prophetic spirit has not disappeared from the earth. Decades before the world wars, men judged the European civilization and prophesied its end in speech and print. There are among us people like these. They are like the refined instruments which register the shaking of the earth on far-removed sections of its surface. These people register the shaking of their civilization, its self- destructive trends, and its disintegration and fall, decades before the final catastrophe occurs. They have an invisible and almost infallible sensorium in their souls; and they have an irresistible urge to pronounce what they have registered, perhaps against their own wills. For no true prophet has ever prophesied voluntarily. It has been forced upon him by a Divine Voice to which he has not been able to close his ears. No man with a prophetic spirit likes to foresee and foresay the doom of his own period. It exposes him to a terrible anxiety within himself, to severe and often deadly attacks from others, and to the charge of pessimism and defeatism on the part of the majority of the people. Men desire to hear good tidings; and the masses listen to those who bring them. All the prophets of the Old and New Testaments, and others during the history of the Church, had the same experience. They all were contradicted by the false prophets, who announced salvation when there was no salvation. "The prophets prophesy falsely, and my people love to have it so", cries Jeremiah in despair. They called him a defeatist and accused him of being an enemy of his country. But is it a sign of patriotism or of confidence in one's people, its institutions and its way of life, to be silent when the foundations are shaking? Is the expression of optimism, whether or not it is justified, so much more valuable than the expression of truth, even if the truth is deep and dark? Most human beings, of course, are not able to stand the message of the shaking of the foundations. They reject and attack the prophetic minds, not because they really disagree with them, but because they sense the truth of their words and cannot receive it. They repress it in themselves; and they transform it into mockery or fury against those who know and dare to say that which they know. In which of these two groups do you consider yourselves to be? Among those who respond to the prophetic spirit, or among those who close their ears and hearts against it? I have always felt that there might be a few who are able to register the shaking of the foundations -- who are able to stand this, and who are able, above all, to say what they know, because they are courageous enough to withstand the unavoidable enmity of the many. To those few my words are particularly directed. Why were the prophets able to face what they knew, and then to pronounce it with such overwhelming power? Their power sprang from the fact that they did not really speak of the foundations of the earth as such, but of Him Who laid the foundations and would shake them; and that they did not speak of the doom of the nations as such, but of Him Who brings doom for the sake of His eternal justice and salvation.. As the 102nd Psalm says: "Thy years are throughout all generation s. Of old thou has laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They vanish, but thou shalt endure; they wear out like a robe, thou changest them like garments. But thou art the same and thy years shall have no end." When the earth grows old and wears out, when nations and cultures die, the Eternal changes the gannents of His infinite being. He is the foundation on which all foundations are laid; and this foundation cannot be shaken. There is something immovable, unchangeable, unshakeable, eternal, which becomes manifest in our passing and in the crumbling of our world. On the boundaries of the finite the infinite becomes visible; in the light of the Eternal the transitoriness of the temporal appears. The Greeks called themselves "the mortals" because they experienced that which is immortal.. This is why the prophets were able to face the shaking of the foundations. It is the only way to look at the shaking without recoiling from it. Or is it possible to be conscious of the approaching doom, and yet to regard it with indifference and cynicism? Is it humanly possible to face the end cynically? There are certainly some among us who are cynical toward most of that which men create and praise. There are some among us who are cynical about the present situation of the world and the leaders of the world. We may be cynical, of course, about the true motives behind all human action; we may be cynical about ourselves, our inner growth and our outer achievements. We may be cynical about religion and about our Churches, their doctrines, their symbols and their representatives. There is scarcely one thing about which we may not be cynical. But we can not be cynical about the shaking of the foundations of everything! I have never encountered anyone who seriously was cynical about that. I have seen much cynicism, particularly among the younger people in Europe before the war. But I know from abundant witnesses that this cynicism vanished when the foundations of the world began to shake at the beginning of the European catastrophe. We can be cynical about the end only so long as we do not have to see it, only so long as we feel safety in the place in which our cynicism can be exercised. But if the foundations of this place and all places begin to crumble, cynicism itself crumbles with them. And only two alternatives remain -- despair, which is the certainty of eternal destruction, or faith, which is the certainty of eternal salvation. . "The world itself shall crumble, but, my salvation knows no end," says the Lord." This is the aternative for which the prophets stood. This is what we should call religion, or more precisely, the religious ground for all religion. How could the prophets speak as they did? How could they paint these most terrible pictures of doom and destruction without cynicism or despair? It was because, beyond the sphere of destruction, they saw the sphere of salvation; because, in the doom of the temporal, they saw the manifestation of the Eternal.. It was because they were certain that they belonged within the two spheres, the changeable and the unchangeable. For only he who is also beyond the changeable, not bound within it alone, can face the end. All others are compelled to escape, to turn away. How much of our lives consists in nothing but attempts to look away from the end! We often succeed in forgetting the end. But ultimately we fail; for we always carry the end with us in our bodies and our souls. And often whole nations and cultures succeed in forgetting the end. But ultimately they fail too, for in their lives and growth they always carry the end with them. Often the whole earth succeeds in making its creatures forget its end, but sometimes these creatures feel that their earth is beginning to grow old, and that its foundations are beginning to shake. For the earth always carries its end within it. We happen to live in a time when very few of us, very few nations, very few sections of the earth, will succeed in forgetting the end. For in these days the foundations of the earth do shake. May we not turn our eyes away; may we not close our ears and our mouths! But may we rather see, through the crumbling of a world, the rock of eternity and the
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Apr 29, 2020 04:19
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Relevant to the thread titles question:
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May 24, 2020 07:10
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[Ardennes posted:Again, the issue is about options. At a certain point, what is going to be the alternative to an autocrat? You can say there should be better, but that isn't how history works. It doesn’t work. Bar Ran Dun posted:Tillich says this the following way: “ In the face of the split between classes, the democratic belief in harmony as held by the bourgeois is shattered; in the face of bourgeois class rule, democratic belief in harmony as held by socialism collapses.” Here Tillich again asserts that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat rises (with the risks of that concept as discussed in the last chapter.) It also raises a question he addresses in the following chapters, how can socialism deliver on the promises of equality, progress, and democracy as these things collapse in the face of class struggle? Y’all barking up a tree that doesn’t work.
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May 27, 2020 22:15
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The Inner Conflict in the Socialist Concept of Society. So in bourgeois thinking a universal will, reason, emerges from society, either by natural means or education. In socialist thinking a class’ will emerges and claims to be that universal will. That class creates an ideology that looks like a universal will, but in actuality the class pursues it’s own interests. In otherwords the reality of class shatters the myth of harmony. The bourgeois true to escape this by making its class interest, the class interest of all society. Socialism sets the proletariat against this because they are the victim of that struggle. The proletariat is against the division that would division that will eventually destroy society because they first experience the consequences of it. The proletariat struggles for society, against what destroys society. “What in the third estate was only an intention- the rule of reason in society - becomes a reality in the fourth estate.” This causes issues with power (because powered is needed to oppose power) and education. There are also class divisions within the proletariat. And we certainly see those in our society now. So the reality of the rule of reason is still conflicted with internal differences within the proletariat of power, education, and class. But again here they are conflicts rather than the contradiction of the bourgeois thinking.
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Jul 8, 2020 19:11
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Thought this was relevant to the thread topic. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/books/review/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-joseph-henrich.html?referringSource=articleShare Sorry I haven’t been progressing on the book.
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Sep 13, 2020 04:15
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ah, the west, notable for not being obsessed with nationality
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Sep 13, 2020 04:25
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Yeah he’s so close, yet so drat far. My wife and I spent an hour or so poking holes in his thesis tonight. Had to think of something other than the out of town fascists that decided to breath smoke (AQI ranged from 250 to 350) we could see from our living room that decided they needed to do half assed drills and pt in a public park. That’s probably the real reason I haven’t picked this up again. It’s very concrete now. Edit: this is to say I don’t have to concretize the abstract concepts anymore. Helsing you around, the loving president called for militia violence today. You got an opinion?
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Sep 13, 2020 06:01
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Oh, so this book is why a very specific catholic discourse appeared recently! That type of book is necessarily going to be "yet so far", but I'm intrigued by the basic thesis about how breaking down kinship bonds has been this huge cultural turning point. Christianity, especially protestantism, really seems to have become uniquely suitable to be the superstructure of capitalism in development. And I think the classical marxist discourse on socialism has always assumed this sort of westernization or weirdification: that the path from kinship bonds to a sort of socialist universal kinship would go through a kind of cultural individualisation of the people. And acting third world communists have by and large continued the same trend of individualisation first, they've built a lot of support by catering to people who have an interest in breaking from the restrictions of local traditions and responsibilities, such as women and LGBT people. The original third-world people who took up the ideology had a pretty weird mindset and looked toward western ideas because they spoke to them in a way unlike local ones. Sampatrick posted:ah, the west, notable for not being obsessed with nationality "Nationality" is actually a very peculiar form of semi-universalist kinship. Much like mass religion, it's an imagined community that's most eagerly taken up by people who already had their concrete familial and tribal kinship bonds broken. The obsession with nation and religion specifically speaks in favor of the basic thesis IMO (remember how today's crazy religious excesses are a rather new phenomenon, as well as the modern conception of nationhood). uncop fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 09:29
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uncop posted:"Nationality" is actually a very peculiar form of semi-universalist kinship. Much like mass religion, it's an imagined community that's most eagerly taken up by people who already had their concrete familial and tribal kinship bonds broken. The obsession with nation and religion specifically speaks in favor of the basic thesis IMO (remember how today's crazy religious excesses are a rather new phenomenon, as well as the modern conception of nationhood). I mean, the thesis that nationality is a relatively modern conception has never seemed particularly convincing to me. It's always seemed, much like the Rousseauian idea of societies moving from egalitarian hunter gatherers to authoritarian agrarian societies, to be mostly a thing people say is true but is mostly not the case based on actual evidence. I don't see why modern nationality is in any way distinct from tribal identities that existed beforehand. Maybe I just don't fully understand some essential distinctness between the two, but I've never really understood the idea.
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Sep 13, 2020 18:31
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uncop posted:Christianity, especially protestantism, really seems to have become uniquely suitable to be the superstructure of capitalism in development. It’s not just Protestantism it’s also reason. Well it’s reason and reason. Tillich talks about the prophetic breaking myth. A historical example would be Martin Luther and the Reformation. A one can the breaking apart and reforming that and how that works in that historical event. Yeah that’s what capitalism does too, and it does take it from religion. But it also does it with reason and rationality taken from the enlightenment. But those two ways of breaking myth are at odds within modernity. And one can look at Luther to see this in his Well gently caress Aristotle and his bullshit line of thought. Here’s the thing both are reason they don’t have to be a contradiction. Way back when my wife was an undergrad at a small college in the Midwest they had mandatory classes on historical criticism and historical Jesus scholarship. So you get freshmen from unsophisticated often evangelical influenced backgrounds and dump them into academic study of how the Bible was written and what we conclusively know about Jesus (not much). Anyway this crushes the myth they participate in. And they aren’t left with anything. The ones that go to specific religion majors get alternatives, feminist theology, liberation theology, dialectic theology, existentialist theology, etc. but that’s not most of them. Most of them just get broken myth. They’re left with: well what am I now? with no follow up. Her professors insist that was the way it has to occur. It’s not, but that’s the way modernity and capitalism does it. And taking this to the question of kinship. That gets broken in a similar way. Our national myth that gets broken in the same way. People get left with nothing. That’s the problem with individualisation first. Not having kinship to support them or nationality or religion is untenable because they are left alone. There is an assumption that because these myth were broken that they’ll participate in the current dominate synthesis, but it doesn’t work that way. So that’s where reaction and romanticism enters. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 18:53
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Sampatrick posted:I mean, the thesis that nationality is a relatively modern conception has never seemed particularly convincing to me. It's always seemed, much like the Rousseauian idea of societies moving from egalitarian hunter gatherers to authoritarian agrarian societies, to be mostly a thing people say is true but is mostly not the case based on actual evidence. I don't see why modern nationality is in any way distinct from tribal identities that existed beforehand. Maybe I just don't fully understand some essential distinctness between the two, but I've never really understood the idea. Nationality does differ in some important ways from tribalism, in that the modern concept of geography has changed our concept of tribal membership. The borders of a country being a national boundary, and thusly, as a portion of nationalism is distinct from the basis of a tribal grouping. A nationalist grouping being geographic, and a tribal grouping being familial.
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Sep 13, 2020 19:25
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Goodpancakes posted:Nationality does differ in some important ways from tribalism, in that the modern concept of geography has changed our concept of tribal membership. The borders of a country being a national boundary, and thusly, as a portion of nationalism is distinct from the basis of a tribal grouping. A nationalist grouping being geographic, and a tribal grouping being familial. But how does that reconcile with the irredentist claims of nationalist movements? It seems just as true that the geographic borders of nationhood have just as much to do with the actions of the state to undermine any competing identity as it does with anything else. With states engaged in this direct nation building, doesn't that kinda turn this type of argument? Nations aren't distinct from tribes because of their geographic borders, they encompass most of the geographic borders because states squashed out any competing national identities via ethnic cleansing. At least, that's my understanding of how these more or less fully nation encompassing identities came from; maybe I'm not entirely understanding the history.
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Sep 13, 2020 21:26
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Sampatrick posted:I mean, the thesis that nationality is a relatively modern conception has never seemed particularly convincing to me. It's always seemed, much like the Rousseauian idea of societies moving from egalitarian hunter gatherers to authoritarian agrarian societies, to be mostly a thing people say is true but is mostly not the case based on actual evidence. I don't see why modern nationality is in any way distinct from tribal identities that existed beforehand. Maybe I just don't fully understand some essential distinctness between the two, but I've never really understood the idea. Well, real social formations are defined by their consequences, how they act in reality. I think we can kinda apply the category of "nation" back in time, but the category becomes a bit hollow and metaphorical because of how different the practical dynamics of the modern nations and past pre-nations are. Of course there are serious similarities as well, like shared language and closer interrelations than with outsiders, but the whole is quite different. For instance, modern nation monopolizes the land, it doesn't really permit other nations to exist on its territory, it tries to force them into the role of national minorities. The law is (roughly) the same for all, and gets pretty deep into how people should live their lives. It forces everyone to learn its language and customs. It frowns upon everyone on its territory who reject its cultural norms and try to preserve something totally different. I see the arrival of nation as analogous to the arrival of mass religion when society was in upheaval from domestic formations to tributary formations. Countless people were painfully ripped from their kinship ties and joined cults, causing specific cults to swell into mighty powers that could topple states. The whole purpose and social role of religion was changed, it wasn't really the same as previously existing religion even though it utilized the same spiritual tendencies people had. Ancient religions were localized and defended custom, the new religions were universalized and demanded everyone submit to religious law. A religion couldn't be used as a base of social power that could unite millions of people before that period of social upheaval, but once it could, it became the glue of the dominant societies around the Mediterranean sea. Similarly, nation couldn't unite a massive number of people before a definite historical period, but once it could, it knocked religion down from its position as the primary social glue of the dominant societies, and acquired its modern social role. That new role, those new dynamics, are the actual empirical reality that made mass religion and nation something new, while comparisons to similar historical formations must be metaphorical because the same definitive roles didn't exist at all back then. Bar Ran Dun posted:And taking this to the question of kinship. That gets broken in a similar way. Our national myth that gets broken in the same way. People get left with nothing. That’s the problem with individualisation first. Not having kinship to support them or nationality or religion is untenable because they are left alone. There is an assumption that because these myth were broken that they’ll participate in the current dominate synthesis, but it doesn’t work that way. So that’s where reaction and romanticism enters. Great point about the mythbusting that modernity did. It kinda does have to be like that though, doesn't it? Kinship is a bit of an all-or-nothing affair, it dissolves rather quickly once certain bonds get broken. Imagine a tribal leader who becomes a general bureaucrat and is pressed between their social responsibilities to be shamelessly nepotistic and to not be "corrupt" from an egalitarian perspective. It doesn't work out very well. Modern society demands that the same rules be applied to everyone, and "kin" should correspond to governmental structures (region, locality, party...). I suppose setting up society along the lines of the old kinship structures can ease the pain somewhat, but even then common law is going to trample over local customs. And historically there have been and still are lots of horrible customs that people have demanded protection from! There's a similar huge issue between many individual rights that we treat as nonnegotiable and old patriarchal rights like filial piety and so on. Lots of people have felt so oppressed by patriarchal rights that they would leave them even at the expense of being left with nothing, and put their relatives in distress. How can there be amicable reconciliation? Without reconciliation, of course reactionary sentiments are going to set in at least for those people who were left by the others. Their whole world would be upturned. I'm genuinely curious how the worst pains could be avoided without doing basically liberal centrism where justice for the oppressed is indefinitely postponed so that the rest of society can feel safe and comfortable.
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Sep 14, 2020 13:04
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uncop posted:I'm genuinely curious how the worst pains could be avoided without doing basically liberal centrism where justice for the oppressed is indefinitely postponed so that the rest of society can feel safe and comfortable. Literally just keep a lid on things until the left behinds have died of old age.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:11
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Yeah he’s so close, yet so drat far. My wife and I spent an hour or so poking holes in his thesis tonight. Had to think of something other than the out of town fascists that decided to breath smoke (AQI ranged from 250 to 350) we could see from our living room that decided they needed to do half assed drills and pt in a public park. Yes Trump is a bad President and his rhetoric and actions are contributing to domestic instability in the USA as well as enabling some bad actors abroad. However, you won't find a President within living memory who didn't actively encourage the material conditions giving rise to paramilitary violence across the world, quite often with direct aid and comfort. American military aid tends to directly correlate with massive human rights abuses in recipient countries and has been carried out on a catastrophic scale over many decades. In many cases these activities are carried out in direct coordination with American corporations and are specifically aimed at securing proper conditions for investment, which in practice means suppressing locals and empowering death squads and imposing the favoured economic policies of Washington. Does none of this counts because it is happening outside America's boarders? Are previous Presidents any less awful than Trump just because their victims were more concentrated in foreign countries that the US was grinding under its heel? Is Biden's role in Plan Colombia somehow less awful because he remembered to mouth the correct platitudes about pretending to "help" the country being looted? As for how any of that fits into this thread; the current social, political and economic breakdown afflicting the United States is an outcome of how it managed both its domestic economy and its global 'grand strategy' since 1945 and it speaks more to the underlying tensions in America's political economy. You allude to these factors when you refer to the American "myth", though you're unclear on precisely what you mean by this (in a previous post you cited the related but very distinct concepts of neoliberalism, capitalism and postwar foreign policy as examples of the myth). But your analysis is vague on the particulars and appears largely disinterested in the concrete material factors. Your emphasis on "myth" seems to end up obscuring those factors in a way that conveniently makes the United States seem far more benign as a global actor.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:06
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Helsing posted:Does none of this counts because it is happening outside America's boarders? Are previous Presidents any less awful than Trump just because their victims were more concentrated in foreign countries that the US was grinding under its heel? Is Biden's role in Plan Colombia somehow less awful because he remembered to mouth the correct platitudes about pretending to "help" the country being looted? extremely liberal answer: no of course it doesn't count, and biden showed true statesmanship right then and there 
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Sep 15, 2020 09:23
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uncop posted:I'm genuinely curious how the worst pains could be avoided without doing basically liberal centrism where justice for the oppressed is indefinitely postponed so that the rest of society can feel safe and comfortable. Tillich gives answer much later while he’s at Harvard, this is with a explicitly Christian context in a Divinity program so it’s in more b religious language than the Socialist Decision “Now when you want to hear now, at the end of this whole lecture, my own answer, then I say: Synthesis never can be avoided, because man is always man and at the same time under God. But he never can be under God in such a way that he ceases to be man. And in order to try a new way beyond the former ways of synthesis, I try what I call the way of correlation, namely to accept all the problems which are involved in self-criticizing humanism - -we call it existentialism, today; it is self-analyzing humanism - -and then, on the other hand, to show that the Christian message is the answer to these questions. Now that is not synthesis, but it is not diastasis either; it is not identification nor is it separation: it is correlation. And I believe that the whole history of thought as I tried to show it to you, points today in this direction.” Separate out the explicit Christian context there and look at the alternative method to synthesis. When presented with serious critiques, correct critiques of the myth one participates in, one can do something different. One can accept those critiques and not falsely or inauthentically. Then answer them with and within the myth. This is different from individualization, By turning to one’s origin myth one is a member of a community that shares the that origin myth. By accepting the critique, one accepts the questions that arise from our material existence now. Visually it’s a circle rather than a spiral (thesis antithesis synthesis). Helsing posted:Yes Trump is a bad President and his rhetoric and actions are contributing to domestic instability in the USA as well as enabling some bad actors abroad. However, you won't find a President within living memory who didn't actively encourage the material conditions giving rise to paramilitary violence across the world, quite often with direct aid and comfort. American military aid tends to directly correlate with massive human rights abuses in recipient countries and has been carried out on a catastrophic scale over many decades. Unrelated. You haven’t been posting a lot, rather I haven’t seen you posting a lot. I’m glad you’re still posting. At no point in my life before now could I watch fascists assembling from my living room. You are abstracting something rather concrete. I need you understand this I’m being completely literal here, I watched fascists drilling, 20 or 30 of them, from my living room in a park built by the CCC. Helsing posted:In many cases these activities are carried out in direct coordination with American corporations and are specifically aimed at securing proper conditions for investment, which in practice means suppressing locals and empowering death squads and imposing the favoured economic policies of Washington. Does none of this counts because it is happening outside America's boarders? Are previous Presidents any less awful than Trump just because their victims were more concentrated in foreign countries that the US was grinding under its heel? Is Biden's role in Plan Colombia somehow less awful because he remembered to mouth the correct platitudes about pretending to "help" the country being looted? Eeeehhh what about... Previous presidents did bad things. This is fascism Helsing, here. Ya ain’t seen nothing yet. This is going to ring very hollow if the next few months go poorly. Helsing posted:As for how any of that fits into this thread; the current social, political and economic breakdown afflicting the United States is an outcome of how it managed both its domestic economy and its global 'grand strategy' since 1945 and it speaks more to the underlying tensions in America's political economy. You allude to these factors when you refer to the American "myth", though you're unclear on precisely what you mean by this (in a previous post you cited the related but very distinct concepts of neoliberalism, capitalism and postwar foreign policy as examples of the myth). But your analysis is vague on the particulars and appears largely disinterested in the concrete material factors. Your emphasis on "myth" seems to end up obscuring those factors in a way that conveniently makes the United States seem far more benign as a global actor. Which relates to the discussion with Uncop Helsing. Something I don’t think you get... when I am talking about these myths they aren’t just ideas the story alone. When one talks about kinship, that’s a material thing. I can ask my family for money. A family might decide something a member is doing is unacceptable or not. The myth is the symbolic representation of the thing. The forums like to use  when talking about toxic family relationships. When I say a myth is broken by the rational think about it like . A symbolic relationship with other people is being broken. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s not. We use these things to support ourselves and to support our societies. Capitalism uses some of them to support itself. It’s not incorrect to look at our national and myth and go holy poo poo look at all bad poo poo this has been used to do. But it is also possible to look at it and go well what good things can we redirect it to support instead.
Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Sep 15, 2020 |
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Sep 15, 2020 21:47
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Okay, that was a great answer, thanks. It doesn't sound like a silver bullet (and he doesn't present it as one), but it sounds familiar in a good way and like it should usually be the preferred aim. Reality can change radically without necessarily requiring total re-evaluation of the relevant mythology. And when the oppressive content of familiar symbols can be changed, shattering the symbols themselves is just unnecessary cruelty. It's just too easy for people who don't have deep connections to those symbols to imagine that they are simply helping the others see through illusions that constrain their lives, and that they're just backward if they don't appreciate the "help". The analogy is a good one: sometimes it's the best option available because of social limitations, but one would prefer not to have to do it to improve their situation.I think this topic really is concretely useful for the anti-fascist struggle. I mean you can think of leftism as a collection of myths and leftists as people who participate in those left-recognized mythologies. You can see how leftism is currently associated with sort of demanding everyone to give up what they used to believe in and take a baptism to wash themselves of the sin of their previous selves. It hasn't been terribly easy to contribute to progressive struggles without being much of a leftist. On one side, there is organisation that is hard to work with, and on the other, organisation that is unprincipled and unfocused. (Note: I don't really consider spontaneous grand mass movements like the current BLM uprising "leftist" or "organisation", they just contain leftists and organising. Imagine if committed antifascists were nearly as easy to work with as such movements!)
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Sep 16, 2020 14:21
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