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Bar Ran Dun posted:But socialism can take the bourgeois understanding of human nature that people are reasonable and can be educated. This causes an under estimation of charismatic individuals. It also causes a dearth of impressive symbols ( an anti religious tendency). But to not do this can justify authoritarian tendencies. Surely the belief that "people are reasonable and can be educated" invites its own sort of authoritarianism.
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Feb 25, 2020 03:37
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I don't mean to derail with pedantry but I am trying to interpret these equations in a way that doesn't break down under any scrutiny and I am failing. Let's say "educated" is taken to mean "ample subject-specific knowledge committed to long term memory", and "reason" to mean -- what? "The general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do," or, generally, the ability to reach rational conclusions with reference to discernible facts. Okay. Given those definitions, "people are reasonable and can be educated" is trite, and true. It does not follow, though, that a properly educated populace would vote "correctly." I don't see any inner conflict at all unless you presuppose that Reason, acting on perfect knowledge, tends towards socialist conclusions. But that is an enormous leap of faith.
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Feb 25, 2020 07:01
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uncop posted:The claim that people are reasonable, in its soft form, means that they can be educated to believe what you do, and in its more radical form means that when they don't believe what you do, they are not being led to their conclusions by lack of knowledge or inability to reason like civilized men, but precisely knowledge that you don't have and ability to reason based on it. I see, thank you. This is a distinction without a difference, though: quote:The former is to try to educate people to have the "correct" opinions, the latter is to to try educate people to be able to see their own good and the need to arrive at collective good clearly and take as "correct" opinion the understanding that their democratic debates and clashes produce. 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.
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Feb 25, 2020 19:17
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