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"so we'd better do nothing" The idea that there is a 'we' and that 'we' 'better do something' is the very ideology that got us here in the first place.
by 23B1 3y ago
"so we'd better do nothing"
The idea that there is a 'we' and that 'we' 'better do something' is the very ideology that got us here in the first place.
- ben_w 3y agoThere are as many "we" as there are audiences. "We'd better do something" can be both true and false at the same time and for a single something, depending on the audience.
- 23B1 3y agoSure, my point is that "we" is presumptive, as in "what do you mean 'we', white man?" The neoliberal instinct to assume 'we' and then decide 'we' 'must do something' from atop our ivory towers is why we have industrial ag robbing the future to pay the present. 'We' were better off when centralization was limited to the distance you could walk in a day.
- ben_w 3y ago> 'We' were better off when centralization was limited to the distance you could walk in a day. When centralisation was genuinely that limited, ploughs were drawn by animals rather than engines, something like 90% of us lived in conditions comparable to the modern idea of extreme poverty (up to $2.47 per day in 2022 dollars), we hadn't yet invented synthetic fertiliser (and of the immediate predecessor, the Guano Era[0] hadn't even yet started), and the world population was 750 million or so. The only "we" that were in any sense better off back then were the aristocrats, and even then only in very limited dimensions like relative (but not absolute) power. Even the worst-off places today that are still on $2.47 per day in 2022 dollars, are at least no worse off than that era, and there's fewer such people now than then even in absolute terms let alone as a percentage of the world population. > neoliberal instinct That feels like you're mistaking political punditry for a point. This kind of thought process works just as well with proud card-carrying Communists, Whigs, old-school (rather than neo-) liberals, Monarchists, the literal Mussolini National Fascist Party of Italy, big-C Conservatives, little-c conservatives, … basically everyone except the various flavours of anarchism. Even Thatcher's famous quote "there's no such thing as society" still came with the practice of doing things about issues, she was trying to assert that people couldn't just expect a government to solve all their ills as the government could only do things through the hands of the very people who were complaining. [0] With a big G, the actual stuff was known since antiquity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Era
- 23B1 3y agoYou've actually picked up on the point I'm making, but drawn the wrong conclusions. The ideologies you've listed work in some ways, fail in others – namely that every time they decide that 'we know best' they crumble – especially when it comes to trying to force change in behaviors deeply ingrained in our culture. Trying to peanut-butter a solution as deeply-rooted as food – across an entire society – is (thankfully and rightly) bound to fail, regardless of how altruistic 'we' are being.
- ben_w 3y ago> The ideologies you've listed work in some ways, fail in others – namely that every time they decide that 'we know best' they crumble – especially when it comes to trying to force change in behaviors deeply ingrained in our culture. I was attempting to list all the ideologies I could remember the names of. That things eventually fail is only trivially correct because all empires eventually fail, except for the ones which still exist, which is tautologically always true from the point of view of any finite observer. But it is absolutely 100% false to say that their failures occur "every time they decide that 'we know best'", as this is not only what it even means to have laws (and thus will happen instantly regardless of how long a nation state or empire lasts), it is even demonstrated by the internal group dynamics in various primates and wolf packs.