5 ms·

I think this argument actually illustrates a big issue with EA: for many people the "worse outcome" is no worse than the status quo. I'm not going to argue tha

by hnbad 6y ago

I think this argument actually illustrates a big issue with EA: for many people the "worse outcome" is no worse than the status quo. I'm not going to argue that an authoritarian theocracy or military dictatorship would be an improvement on the corporatist kleptocracy (or however we want to negatively describe the status quo). But political change is mostly not carried by those already doing moderately well under the status quo, even if they may often end up being the one implementing it. There's always a risk of existing power structures swooping in and opportunistically inserting themselves when the dominant ones are torn down but the problem isn't the tearing down of those structures but the continued existence of those that swoop in. This is btw why many leftists advocate for intersectionalism rather than hoping racism, sexism etc will go away on their own once the class hierarchy is defeated.

pcstl 6y ago
>for many people the "worse outcome" is no worse than the status quo. Is it really, though? In most cases where the worse outcome did happen, people were convinced they had nothing to lose and went with whatever radical idea was being proposed, then when things went pear-shaped they found out they did have a lot to lose. An extreme example is the Khmer Rouge.
- hnbad 6y ago
  > Is it really, though? Yes, it is. If you're an unhoused diabetic living in the US without access to insulin, it literally doesn't matter if the country is run by Ivy League graduates or uncultured generalissimos. Note that I said "many", not "most". I'm not even making a claim about proportions but in the US alone there is a large quantity of people for whom the status quo is either a death sentence or at least entails a lifetime of suffering. This isn't even taking general trends (e.g. the income gap, militarization of the police, or Climate Change) into account. Note that I said "worse outcome", not "worst outcome". Yes, almost all bottom-up political change is brought about with "populism" (i.e. saying things are bad and promising that they can be changed for the better) that doesn't mean that all populism is deceptive or false. Generally drastic changes only happen when the situation is already sufficiently dire precisely because the status quo (no matter how undesirable) feels like a safer bet than a leap into the unknown. This is why these changes are often so drastic and the means to achieve them (by necessity) so violent: incrementalism has failed and left them no other choice. Whether the outcome is better or worse mostly has to do with what power dynamics will remain in place when the existing dominant power structure is gone. The Cambodian Civil War is messy and complicated but portraying it as "people wanted political change and got the Killing Fields" is reductionist to the point of satire. The government was on a left-leaning (and even pro-communist) progressive path leading up to the fraudulent 1966 election and then suddenly snapped to the violently repressive hard right only for the monarchy to intervene by imposing "centrism", alienating both sides. Note that all this went on while the US was also wrestling for control in the region and China was trying to shake off the Soviet Union. These things don't happen in a vacuum but even without the Khmer Rouge Cambodia was unstable and spiraling into chaos. Dropping in the Khmer Rouge as if Pol Pot is a meaningful representation of all political change is absurd, even if you only consider drastic changes (i.e. revolutions, overthrows, secessions and annexations). Outside of imperialist conquest almost every nation on Earth, past or present, is the result of such struggles. The foundational mistake is believing that the status quo is stable and permanent because it never is and never has been before. Even episodes in history that are considered "stable" (like the Roman Empire/Republic) are tumultuous and only seem somewhat stable because we're looking at them from a bird's eye view often thousands of years later.
  - pcstl 6y ago
    Well, I'm pretty sure EA isn't really opposed to moderate change or stuff like organizing for, I don't know, people who need insulin or anything like that. The people who usually oppose EA are those who think that there is no solution to societal ills except fully restructuring society into something completely different, and who usually will oppose any kind of charity-based solution on grounds that it might make people tolerate the current conditions longer, thus delaying the necessary complete revolution.
    - hnbad 6y ago
      Okay, this got a bit longer than I intended so I split it up into different points: 1) But society has already been fully restructured into something completely different. It's foolish to believe that we can get from one local optimum to a higher point without interruption if the only reason we're at the local optimum is that the previous one was violently interrupted in the first place. It's also foolish to believe that history is a linear trajectory towards something good or better, though this is indeed what most schools tend to teach because it avoids the difficult questions. 2) The status quo is unstable and will inevitably lead to accelerationism. You can not overthrow injustice without violence as those benefiting from the injustice have no interest in giving up those benefits without violence. Maintaining the status quo if it is unjust is in itself a violent act. The status quo isn't stable, most of us are just sufficiently detached from its injustices that it feels stable and safe to us. 3) That political action is violent doesn't mean it has to manifest as a revolution or civil war. We like to glamorize the suffragette movement as a non-violent political struggle that mostly consisted of women holding up signs but suffragettes were literally performing actions we would today label as terrorism. We like to appeal to MLK as the voice of reason and imagine that he ended racism by talking in a kind voice but his protests were literally portrayed as riots at the time no differently from how we portrayed the 2020 BLM protests today. The US itself was created in a violent revolution and had to fight a war against its own people to prevent a secession only a century later. Not every instance of social progress requires a complete overthrow of the entire system but the more intrinsic an injustice is to a system, the more violent will those benefitting from it defend it against anyone trying to change it and the more violence will be necessary to overcome this resistance. 4) Revolutions and civil wars are often not caused by a desire for things to better but as a reaction to governments actively making things worse. Cambodia is actually a great example in that the sharp turn to the ultra-right was a direct response to incremental progressivism that preceded it and this in turn necessitated a violent revolution because there was no way to recover from this shift without it. Incrementalism had not only failed but was violently halted and reversed by those benefitting from the existing power structures. By trying to undo the incremental changes they drove progressives into the arms of the Khmer Rouge who had positioned themselves as the opposition and were now seen as justified in overthrowing the system as a whole. 5) The question isn't whether we should oppose charity, the question is whether charity can solve problems created by the power structure that enables a tiny minority to engage in charity in the first place. And the answer is clearly no because it hasn't and there's no reason to believe it will. Charity is a form of wealth redistribution but it is extremely inefficient in more ways than just the obvious bureaucracy involved in maintaining charity organizations to develop and implement social works projects to actually help people in defined and limited ways. That's just food stamps with extra steps. The problem is that charity is itself replicating the top-down hierarchical dynamic by forcing "interest groups" to compete for scraps: whether the money goes to breast cancer research, education for people living in poor areas, treatment of AIDS patients, or exterminating the mosquitos that spread Malaria is entirely up to the market, i.e. the few extremely wealthy shopping for a philanthropic cause to support while saving taxes, indirectly transferring money to business partners, or legally bribing officials. --- I don't oppose harm reduction in itself. Voting for the less bad political party is probably better than allowing the more bad political party to win. Billionaires funding technological innovation is probably better than billionaires spending the same money on union busting or propping up totalitarian governments. But the question isn't whether we want the revolution or not, the question is when the revolution will come and who will win. And how we prepare for that.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
A simpler answer is that these people aren't actually leftists.
- hnbad 6y ago
  I'm not sure whom you are referring to when you say "these people". Intersectionality (which btw refers to almost the exact opposite of what most people think of as "identity politics") is absolutely compatible with (and arguably necessary[0] for) leftism. Class reductionists OTOH certainly think of themselves as leftists and can be instrumental to leftist politics. They however run the risk of also being useful to other political permutations (e.g. they might be more open to "red-brown alliances", which generally lead to non-leftist "red" ideologies like national bolshevism and ultimately fascism). Not every intersectionalist is a leftist (e.g. liberals often acknowledge intersectionality to some degree but don't see private property as a social power structure) and not every leftist is an intersectionalist. I would argue that leftism without intersectionality is leftist, but in an incomplete form. That said, "leftism" is a somewhat arbitrary label as its original meaning simply referred to opposing the monarchy in France, so policing who gets to call themselves that is probably pointless. [0]: An example for how racism and class warfare can intersect is how the widespread racism in the early 20th century US prevented Black workers from joining unions, resulting in them becoming strikebreakers and thus undermining the collective bargaining power of those unions.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    I'm using the definitions of left vs right as being how much power should the lower classes get ("opposing monarchy" kind of already fits, though AFAIK after the revolution farmers quickly lost most of their power to the profit of citizens). It has been pointed out decades ago that capitalism would try to subvert some of the left by evacuating the class issues to the profit of ethnic issues and then pitting ethnic groups against each other. In fact you could say that this dates at least back to Marx' "On the Irish question." IMHO this is what is happening currently - it's really sad to see supposedly left parties to ally themselves with people pushing ethnicist and sexist ideologies (but where white or man = "worse" instead of the previously common ethnicist and sexist ideologies where it was "better" - that "all lives matter" ended up being considered an ethnicist slogan is probably making Martin Luther King roll in its grave !)

by hnbad 6y ago

pcstl 6y ago

>for many people the "worse outcome" is no worse than the status quo. Is it really, though? In most cases where the worse outcome did happen, people were convinced they had nothing to lose and went with whatever radical idea was being proposed, then when things went pear-shaped they found out they did have a lot to lose. An extreme example is the Khmer Rouge.

hnbad 6y ago
> Is it really, though? Yes, it is. If you're an unhoused diabetic living in the US without access to insulin, it literally doesn't matter if the country is run by Ivy League graduates or uncultured generalissimos. Note that I said "many", not "most". I'm not even making a claim about proportions but in the US alone there is a large quantity of people for whom the status quo is either a death sentence or at least entails a lifetime of suffering. This isn't even taking general trends (e.g. the income gap, militarization of the police, or Climate Change) into account. Note that I said "worse outcome", not "worst outcome". Yes, almost all bottom-up political change is brought about with "populism" (i.e. saying things are bad and promising that they can be changed for the better) that doesn't mean that all populism is deceptive or false. Generally drastic changes only happen when the situation is already sufficiently dire precisely because the status quo (no matter how undesirable) feels like a safer bet than a leap into the unknown. This is why these changes are often so drastic and the means to achieve them (by necessity) so violent: incrementalism has failed and left them no other choice. Whether the outcome is better or worse mostly has to do with what power dynamics will remain in place when the existing dominant power structure is gone. The Cambodian Civil War is messy and complicated but portraying it as "people wanted political change and got the Killing Fields" is reductionist to the point of satire. The government was on a left-leaning (and even pro-communist) progressive path leading up to the fraudulent 1966 election and then suddenly snapped to the violently repressive hard right only for the monarchy to intervene by imposing "centrism", alienating both sides. Note that all this went on while the US was also wrestling for control in the region and China was trying to shake off the Soviet Union. These things don't happen in a vacuum but even without the Khmer Rouge Cambodia was unstable and spiraling into chaos. Dropping in the Khmer Rouge as if Pol Pot is a meaningful representation of all political change is absurd, even if you only consider drastic changes (i.e. revolutions, overthrows, secessions and annexations). Outside of imperialist conquest almost every nation on Earth, past or present, is the result of such struggles. The foundational mistake is believing that the status quo is stable and permanent because it never is and never has been before. Even episodes in history that are considered "stable" (like the Roman Empire/Republic) are tumultuous and only seem somewhat stable because we're looking at them from a bird's eye view often thousands of years later.
- pcstl 6y ago
  Well, I'm pretty sure EA isn't really opposed to moderate change or stuff like organizing for, I don't know, people who need insulin or anything like that. The people who usually oppose EA are those who think that there is no solution to societal ills except fully restructuring society into something completely different, and who usually will oppose any kind of charity-based solution on grounds that it might make people tolerate the current conditions longer, thus delaying the necessary complete revolution.
  - hnbad 6y ago
    Okay, this got a bit longer than I intended so I split it up into different points: 1) But society has already been fully restructured into something completely different. It's foolish to believe that we can get from one local optimum to a higher point without interruption if the only reason we're at the local optimum is that the previous one was violently interrupted in the first place. It's also foolish to believe that history is a linear trajectory towards something good or better, though this is indeed what most schools tend to teach because it avoids the difficult questions. 2) The status quo is unstable and will inevitably lead to accelerationism. You can not overthrow injustice without violence as those benefiting from the injustice have no interest in giving up those benefits without violence. Maintaining the status quo if it is unjust is in itself a violent act. The status quo isn't stable, most of us are just sufficiently detached from its injustices that it feels stable and safe to us. 3) That political action is violent doesn't mean it has to manifest as a revolution or civil war. We like to glamorize the suffragette movement as a non-violent political struggle that mostly consisted of women holding up signs but suffragettes were literally performing actions we would today label as terrorism. We like to appeal to MLK as the voice of reason and imagine that he ended racism by talking in a kind voice but his protests were literally portrayed as riots at the time no differently from how we portrayed the 2020 BLM protests today. The US itself was created in a violent revolution and had to fight a war against its own people to prevent a secession only a century later. Not every instance of social progress requires a complete overthrow of the entire system but the more intrinsic an injustice is to a system, the more violent will those benefitting from it defend it against anyone trying to change it and the more violence will be necessary to overcome this resistance. 4) Revolutions and civil wars are often not caused by a desire for things to better but as a reaction to governments actively making things worse. Cambodia is actually a great example in that the sharp turn to the ultra-right was a direct response to incremental progressivism that preceded it and this in turn necessitated a violent revolution because there was no way to recover from this shift without it. Incrementalism had not only failed but was violently halted and reversed by those benefitting from the existing power structures. By trying to undo the incremental changes they drove progressives into the arms of the Khmer Rouge who had positioned themselves as the opposition and were now seen as justified in overthrowing the system as a whole. 5) The question isn't whether we should oppose charity, the question is whether charity can solve problems created by the power structure that enables a tiny minority to engage in charity in the first place. And the answer is clearly no because it hasn't and there's no reason to believe it will. Charity is a form of wealth redistribution but it is extremely inefficient in more ways than just the obvious bureaucracy involved in maintaining charity organizations to develop and implement social works projects to actually help people in defined and limited ways. That's just food stamps with extra steps. The problem is that charity is itself replicating the top-down hierarchical dynamic by forcing "interest groups" to compete for scraps: whether the money goes to breast cancer research, education for people living in poor areas, treatment of AIDS patients, or exterminating the mosquitos that spread Malaria is entirely up to the market, i.e. the few extremely wealthy shopping for a philanthropic cause to support while saving taxes, indirectly transferring money to business partners, or legally bribing officials. --- I don't oppose harm reduction in itself. Voting for the less bad political party is probably better than allowing the more bad political party to win. Billionaires funding technological innovation is probably better than billionaires spending the same money on union busting or propping up totalitarian governments. But the question isn't whether we want the revolution or not, the question is when the revolution will come and who will win. And how we prepare for that.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

A simpler answer is that these people aren't actually leftists.

hnbad 6y ago
I'm not sure whom you are referring to when you say "these people". Intersectionality (which btw refers to almost the exact opposite of what most people think of as "identity politics") is absolutely compatible with (and arguably necessary[0] for) leftism. Class reductionists OTOH certainly think of themselves as leftists and can be instrumental to leftist politics. They however run the risk of also being useful to other political permutations (e.g. they might be more open to "red-brown alliances", which generally lead to non-leftist "red" ideologies like national bolshevism and ultimately fascism). Not every intersectionalist is a leftist (e.g. liberals often acknowledge intersectionality to some degree but don't see private property as a social power structure) and not every leftist is an intersectionalist. I would argue that leftism without intersectionality is leftist, but in an incomplete form. That said, "leftism" is a somewhat arbitrary label as its original meaning simply referred to opposing the monarchy in France, so policing who gets to call themselves that is probably pointless. [0]: An example for how racism and class warfare can intersect is how the widespread racism in the early 20th century US prevented Black workers from joining unions, resulting in them becoming strikebreakers and thus undermining the collective bargaining power of those unions.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  I'm using the definitions of left vs right as being how much power should the lower classes get ("opposing monarchy" kind of already fits, though AFAIK after the revolution farmers quickly lost most of their power to the profit of citizens). It has been pointed out decades ago that capitalism would try to subvert some of the left by evacuating the class issues to the profit of ethnic issues and then pitting ethnic groups against each other. In fact you could say that this dates at least back to Marx' "On the Irish question." IMHO this is what is happening currently - it's really sad to see supposedly left parties to ally themselves with people pushing ethnicist and sexist ideologies (but where white or man = "worse" instead of the previously common ethnicist and sexist ideologies where it was "better" - that "all lives matter" ended up being considered an ethnicist slogan is probably making Martin Luther King roll in its grave !)