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I will agree with you up to a point. Almost everyone in the West has long since abandoned the dispassionate search for truth. The problem being that truth is unkind. Most of the truth is unkind. The narrative denies that there can be bad cultures and that some should be at least reformulated into something civilized. It denies that talent exists, that not everyone is smart enough or capable of doing anything they want. It denies that some behavior should be condemned because it leads to terrible outcomes not just for individuals but for civilization as a whole.
I no longer believe in democracy because frankly it seems to lead directly to this rot. The credo of democratic politics is “your ignorance is equal to my knowledge.” The votes of people who actually know things are swamped by the votes of people who form opinions from Twitter, Bluesky, instagram or Facebook. It’s the ultimate in feels over reals, in which the key to getting into office is to lie convincingly. At least with a monarch you can teach someone to look to facts and listen to experts who have earned the right to have influence.
But you realise that this is exactly what the left says about you, right? It doesn't mean you have to retreat into pure relativism, but sooner or later two 'dispassionate searchers for truth' are going to run into the issue that both of them are interpreting the same facts differently. Or that they are both naturally, legitimately interested in certain true facts that uphold their particular hobby horse and less interested in doing a deep dive on facts that contradict it. And that's before you get into the chaos that erupts when one man's 'legitimate inference' becomes another's 'obvious delusion', as has happened to me many times in both directions.
Ultimately we have never disproved Descarte's assertion that the only thing you know 100% for sure is that you yourself exist, and we have never discovered how to dispassionately turn an 'is' into an 'ought'. Post-modernism survives because its skepticism is backed up by history: different societies and different subcultures have held very different things to be obvious facts and very different people to be 'experts who have earned the right to have influence'. And these judgements are ultimately affected consciously or unconsciously by the interests of those making them.
Truth seeking is good, but you can't do it dispassionately and so you are going to have to exercise official, ideology-driven judgement at some point. You're going to decide who's an 'expert' and who's merely highly-educated and credentialed. You're going to have to decide what's a fact, what's a controversial assertion backed up by insufficient evidence, and what's a lie. Doing that is good (again, I'm not a relativist) but you should be clear-eyed about what you're doing and you should be prepared to hold onto power while you do it.
I too am pro monarchy, not because you can teach them to listen to an expert but because you can't. Mostly, our kings and queens in the UK have been slightly thick, old-fashioned, hunting-and-shooting types who aren't particularly interested in what the weirdo with the sheepskin is saying. That's not always good, but it gets you through most of the 'you have be really clever to think something that stupid' crises we have today.
And I’d argue we both have a point. On both ends we have the dumbest possible people who show up to vote, people who can’t handle their own finances deciding on what they want in the budgets for the government to be like. Or people deciding foreign policy who can’t find the countries in question on a map. Monarchy at least allows for the experts to handle the issue under the direction of someone raised from birth to know how to run a government.
Actually existing executive monarchies tend to avoid the kinds of absolutely brain dead ideas democracies are a bit more prone to(socialism, getting in pissing matches with the USA, etc), but also underperform comparable countries unless they have oil.
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There are definitely leftists who know things, they're not the biggest problem with democracy! A democracy off Matt Yglesias and Ezra Kleins would have different problems from today's democracy, and the biggest problem with democracy is all of the low-information median iq voters, half of whom are left wing.
I wasn’t just pointing at leftists, a right-winger can do just as much damage. Ignoring the Holocaust, Hitler ran Germany into the ground and by all accounts Mussolini wasn’t much better.
My point is that the low-information median iq voters are far from perfect, but they tend to be instinctively low-c conservative and have to deal with the realities of life at some level. To really cock things up you need a smart guy with a terrible idea. It wasn’t the median iq voters who came up with One Billion Americans, Greed Is Good, or Socialism.
I think you can cock things up well enough with a dumb guy with terrible ideas. We get close to that with Corbyn.
I was never sure how bright Corbin was, because on the left you only read hagiographies and on the right only vitriol. But in any case I consider Corbin essentially a delivery mechanism for Karl Marx.
Corbyn’s personal intelligence is interesting. He was born to a high school math teacher and an electrical engineer, which suggests a good inheritance, and he went to grammar school, but as the press regularly repeated, he got 2 Es at O/GCSE level and then dropped out. From his speeches and writing, I think he was of pretty middling intelligence. It was quite interesting in that all three of the leading triumvirate under Corbyn - himself, McDonnell and Abott - were all academically very unimpressive.
As for socialism in general, I don’t think Marx was particularly intelligent. Hegel was, Lenin certainly was, Stalin probably was. Marx? Not really, his writing doesn’t have that spark.
Really? He wrote a social critique that resonated for centuries, I thought that he would be obviously intelligent. I had always understood that the more thick-headed elements of Marxism came from Engels and the Communist Manifesto. But reading at least a bit of Marx in the original is on my to-do list, so I’ll find out for myself someday.
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Calling Corbyn "dumb" on my part may not have been fair, but I think he's about as low-end as you're realistically going to find among leaders of major parties in western democracies.
No, I agree with you completely.
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You can if and only if you agree on some values. If you want X to happen, then you 'ought' to take action Y. You need assumptions to have any truth at all (for the same reason you need axioms to have mathematics), and you need subjective values in order to rank possible future states and deem one of them better than the other.
The only problem here is that people are naive and rely on theory which only gets the first-degree consequences correct "I don't want birds to suffer, so I'm going to feed them", yeah but now there's more birds to feed, and more suffering if you stop giving them food (simple example)
In a naive way, that's true. But when has a successful post-modernistic society existed? As far as I know, the answer is "never". A culture which has a coherent set of values and beliefs, and strict social norms to avoid various bad spirals from occuring, will be successful. A culture which knows that no culture is more correct than any other ... Well, such a culture will probably destroy itself. And by its own logic, this is fine, for it's no better than what it replaces, right?
I disagree, but you need something similar. I don't subscribe to any ideology, but I do have my own preferences. Whoever thinks you can succeed in life by being completely neutral is simply wrong. Biases exist in the first place because they aid survival.
Anyway, I trust reality, by which I mean that if a culture does X and it's nice to live in said culture, then said culture should continue to do X. Japan has strict borders, and Japan is perhaps the most civilized population in the world, so no other country has the right to tell them to open their borders.
This happened because we assume that "expert" means "nice credentials", that "intelligent" means "educated", and because appearance is starting to have more value than substance (Real nerds tend to have worse social skills, but now even Tech has become a normie space in which connections and good verbal skills are king. In fact, "wokism" seems to correlate with verbal skills and social skills, but most great scientists have been sort of autistic and controversial)
Will write a longer reply later if I can manage, but for now:
Yes, that’s what I meant by saying that you can’t dispassionately go from is to ought. You have to insert some values of your own and then you’ve lost everyone who doesn’t share those values.
Yes. Any culture that is successful must rely on a set of agreed beliefs that cannot be proved from first principles. It’s a cult, in a good way. A shared delusion. AFAIK this is what post-modernism says also. And once a hostile outsider applies skepticism to those values and isn’t beheaded for their presumption, the whole edifice crumbles.
By idiology I mean a set of beliefs and values.
IMO it happened because genuine intelligence and knowledge gives more wiggle room for justifying your preferred delusions. I have known a lot of genuine experts. In my experience they were often much more confident about much stupider things than normies.
No pressure! Reply if you want and whenever you want
What I meant to say was "It's not just that we don't know how, it's that it's impossible". I don't subscribe to the idea that no humans have figured this all out yet, for I pretty much have. But the conclusion is that humans (myself included) are stupid. I believe that things work out because of human instincts and the laws of nature, and not because we actually know what we're doing.
I think this perspective comes from the modern belief that everything must be justified or proved in order to be correct. I simply don't impose such rules on myself (and reality itself doesn't either). What I want to convery here is that preferences and beliefs aren't "illusions" in the sense that they're false or fake, and that there's no unique, more "real" underlying reality to discover. I'm "calibrated" for the world through my DNA (darwinism), through a process which made us to adapt to reality itself in a sense, so I will simply trust this process.
Anyway, it seems that beliefs influence reality. That your confidence influences your success (and that this applies even if you're entirely alone). Even if a belief is false, it may influence reality and become true. In other words, a belief seems to be an act of creation, making it "real".
I do have those, but everyone must have them, or else they simply don't live very long (since they don't prioritize future states in which they are alive). Even the belief that beliefs are bad is a belief, so there's no easy way out.
A lot of highly educated people don't seem all that intelligent to me, they just seem good at memorizing things. That said, I'd prefer it if people simply stopped believing that they were smarter than nature (including their own nature). There's so many things about life which are unintuitiv, one of them is eustress, and not knowing about it has caused a lot of damage (helicopter parenting etc). But there's a lot more. Thing seem to go better when one is not so antagonistic towards existence, nature and oneself
Oh, sorry. I agree with you on most of this. In fact, it's basically what I wanted to say originally.
OP wrote that the West has abandoned "the dispassionate search for truth" and I wanted to say that such a search is impossible. You have to put something of yourself in, and that will colour what you get out. This is true at both a personal and a societal level. I differ slightly from you in that I do believe there is some objective reality in the moral dimension, some true "oughts"; God knows them, we don't, and we won't understand until he shows us personally. But that's not going to happen in this life so it's not super relevant to actual interactions between people.
I would call this the standard post-modernist worldview. It works fine for a confident person or a confident civilisation, but the problem is that it devolves when you have a second actor who doesn't share the majority of your beliefs. Since there is no "dispassionate search for truth" that will inevitably lead those people to the same place, it's not necessarily possible for A to justify their beliefs to B in a manner that B finds convincing. So you end up in a power struggle where both sides use the incentives available to them to bend the other to their perspective. Even in liberalism or post-modernism this occurs on the meta level - both sides must agree on the base principle of liberalism in order to agree to disagree on the concrete issue.
Again, I agree with much of this. But, if you will forgive the standard dig, I presume you aren't living in a cave wearing furs from something you killed. Which parts of our society are an improvement over nature and which are not is hugely contested: you have the degrowthers, the anti-vaxxers, the Liver King, the socialists, the anti-feminists, etc. all criticising different aspects of our society for not being an improvement over nature while fervently defending other parts.
Ah, I see! And "You have to put something of yourself in" is a great way to put it! I do think that there's an objective reality, but that it cannot be described or modeled. If I make a mental model of you, that model would reveal more about myself than it would reveal about you. As for oughts, there seems to be actions which bring better results than others. Any process which is not sustainable will eventually cease, so that which wishes to stay in existence must play by certain rules, or make sure not to step too much out of line for too long. I don't really believe in something like morality, but my personal preferences looks a lot like what people call morality, and finally, it would be bad taste of me if I attacked your moral beliefs since it wouldn't benefit you.
Is that so? I don't like post-modernists though. Do you think they understand any of these things? Average people who are post-modernists likely don't know about axiomatic systems or the incompleteness theorems. Human perception is very malleable, they got that much right, but they want reality to be malleable as well, and they think we can achieve this if we simply agree that we can. We could agree that people were equal, and that would largely succeed, but IQ test results would remain entirely unchanged.
Like spiritualists say, everything we need to be happy is already inside of us. We have incredible power over our own reality. We only really need to deal with objective reality enough that we can meet physical needs like nutrition and shelter, which is quite easy. But treating reality like it's malleable is just immaturity, for social methods like "If I just complain enough, I will get my way" only work on other people, they do not work on reality. And treating reality like fantasy is dangerous, it very quickly leads to ruin.
I don't think the issue is necessarily diversity of though, for that actually works well to the extent that everyone is self-sufficient. When people are "enough in themselves", it doesn't matter much if there's other people who also have their own worldview. It's only when people are incomplete that they need other people to be coherent enough that the sum of whoever is present exceeds one person who can live independently. Of course, shared language and such is highly useful, but the more mature and developed you are, the bigger distances you tend to be able to cope with (which is why the old internet used to have many wildly different people co-existing somewhat well, while the modern internet is intolerant of differences as disagreement immediately results in drama and hurt feelings)
But what OP meant was probably "People are now valuing feelings over correct information, and their mental defense mechanisms kick in when they encounter evidence that their precious beliefs aren't workable, and they get hostile towards you if you cause them to reflect on themselves or if you ask them questions which makes them comfortable" and I can only agree with this. What he said wasn't exactly true, but what he meant still carries a good point.
While this is true, you can increase the tolerance for differences in beliefs by about 10 times by focusing on terminal values. For instance, two groups might be in a conflict, both claiming "We're civilized, while you're uncivilized!" very well, but they're in agreement in this: Both groups prefer civilized behaviour to uncivilized behaviour. They merely need to learn how to communicate better to resolve this issue. The reason communicating (talking about things) can resolve conflicts in the first place is probably because most peoples terminal values are highly similar, or because it allows people to understand eachothers perspective in a way which they can respect (in other words, it doesn't conflict with their core values, as that would likely be irreconcilable). Mentally immature people get triggered and misunderstand others quite easily, over minor perceived differences which tend to not be differences at all (at least not as you get closer to terminal/core values)
I don't think they're honest, even if they don't realize it. They will likely criticize the aspects in which they are at the bottom rather than at the top (meaning that they just want more power). And to be honest, I might enjoy society better if I was in the top 1% myself, or if I felt more compatible with the modern society than I do now. But besides a bit of technology (Computers, virtual reality, dishwashers, washing machines, driers, ovens, fridges and freezers, medicine and the ability to communicate over long distances with voice, video and files) I don't really need any aspects of the modern society. The modern society fulfills my physical needs better, but not my psychological needs. I like civilized people more than uncivilized people, but civility now seems to be decreasing as society gets more modern. In any case, what's important to me is peoples actual character. I've recently read some of the guodian bamboo strips from about 500 BC, and they resonate better with my own values than modern ideologies do. So civility does not necessarily require modernity nor scientific thinking.
I wrote quite a lot here, but I think we agree on most of it?
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