/.../ why you believe it as true (although it is false).
— Bob Ross
This is Bob Ross feeling superior to me. — baker

You don’t know how Bob feels. Unless Bob says or acts like “I am superior to you” then you have to make this judgment about how Bob feels from outside of Bob.
True/false judgments aren’t banishing people to hell, or inferiority.

You seem to be laboring under the assumption that feeling superior to others is somehow wrong, or that I am criticizing religious/spiritual people for feeling superior to others.
It's not and I don't. If anything, it's evolutionarily advantageous to feel superior to others. — baker

Feeling superior, that’s a short-coming. One can feel something and it not be true, like I am so happy I bet I could fly, so off the cliff I jump and then, dead - no evolutionary advantage to feeling superior or having any false feelings. I am not sure what you think, because you reduce Christianity to feeling superior, but then say the reduction is an evolutionary advantage. My opinion: feeling superior to fellow brothers and sisters is specifically something Christianity teaches against. Those who feel superior to others and compare themselves to others because they have been blessed to know God through Christ, don’t know God very well at all either, at least not who God is by seeing Christ. Me believing this and saying this means nothing as to who is superior. Me knowing God and still sinning makes me worse than the person who doesn’t know God and otherwise does what I do.

Christians who feel superior to non-Christian’s, like they are God’s elect, like they know who is NOT elect or who gets into heaven, don’t understand at least half the gospel. If that is what they really feel.

And a little boost of false superiority doesn’t equate to Christianity’s appeal across all cultures and ages, if you still think superiority matters to Christians.

”The core Christian message is that God is trying to bring us to know and love him. There is no such thing as knowing someone or loving someone without their free, honest willingness.” - FireOlogist

But there's a catch: We have only one lifetime to do it, and if we fail, that's it, hell, forever.

“This in itself is more universally appealing.” - FireOlogist
Under the pressure of only one lifetime for action, it becomes absurd. Even more absurd when one considers the possibility that one could die at any time.

“Christianity democratized human value, not to each other, but to a God who loves each one.” FireOlogist

How is it an act of "love" that God grants some people the privilege of being born and raised into a religion and thus never having to struggle with choosing a religion and joining it -- but witholds that privilege from others?
That's not love, that's sadistic perversion. — baker

Don’t believe any Christian or anyone who tells you they know who is going to hell, or what hell is. All such things are up to God, and between God and the individual. Christ showed us the best way to follow him, but there is wisdom from the Hindu, from Buddha, from Moses, and many others - who are we to judge how God brings people to him and saves them from death.

Hell is something we make for ourselves. Eternal hell isn’t a punishment as much as it is a condition, and it is a condition we can only freely choose. There are no people thrown into hell on a technicality, or because they didn’t say enough Hail Mary’s. It’s up to God what “accepting Jesus Christ as your savior” means in practice. It’s up to an individual to see God face to face and reject Him or not. No one else besides you can know your own heart like God does. In between you and God is where heaven and hell exist. Be not afraid, or so superior to God that you can know He’s a sadistic pervert. Because God would die on a cross to reach out and make you see who he is. He just wants you to be an adult too, be good, and gives you power like He has over your own life and own choices, so you can add goodness to the universe yourself, like a gift that even God would be pleased with.

Piss on hell. Don’t be so anxious, or quick to judge God’s plan for our lives. Love is a good thing, and if we have to suffer for it, and in our suffering we start to hate and fail to love, and start to harm others and ourselves, God is ready to welcome us back in an instant. Who knows what happens at the instant of death?

The only hell to worry about being in is the one you create for others, and the simple way to avoid it is to make life better for others.

So this behavior of Christians is not to be taken as exemplary of Christianity, and that behavior of Christians is not to be taken as exemplary of Christianity. But then what is? — baker

Christ. That’s it. Zero further examples available, (at least none are as good).

forms of normativity that are historical, situated, and contingent without collapsing into “anything goes” — Joshs

what promotes wellbeing — Tom Storm

So to my mind, “forms of normativity” and “what promotes wellbeing” serve as placeholders for objective, universal, natural foundations for moral truths. But I think you might agree with this.

I’m tempted to say that no one really has a foundation for morality, some just think they do and therefore believe their views are grounded. — Tom Storm

Yes, so instead of saying morality requires fixed foundations and authority (which is where I am headed), you seem more inclined to admit fixed laws are hard to come by, and maybe impossible to come by, so “no one really has a foundation for morality.”

I think that is right. That is what morality is about. Maybe Nietzsche was right and we need to move “beyond good and evil.” So your question and intuitions are valid.

What really matters is the world. I can still vote, belong to organizations, and support values based on my own view of what constitutes a better way of organizing society. Do I need any more than this?

Our society is a messy clusterfuck of pluralism, competing values, and beliefs. All we can really do is argue for the positions we find meaningful — Tom Storm

I get what you are saying. I just think this is a retreat from the can of worms you opened up.

Morality doesn’t begin, to me, until there are at least two people interacting, and a law or other (objective) source of authority to which both people are subject. Morality is the objective umbrella under which human interactions can be judged. Together, under their law, we enter a moral life. If we lose the objective moral law, or say the law will shift and change (so no real law), I don’t think anyone can really argue positions meaningfully. We each become locked in our own subjective positions with no means to show others why our stance is the only good stance, or the morally better stance. We can convince ourselves if we want that our own position is the better one, but faced with someone else who disagrees and calls us bad, there is no common ground or foundation upon which the two in disagreement can appeal and adjudicate right from wrong. And however we work through such a disagreement (force, utility, avoidance), there is no reason to call this working things out moral. It’s practical at that point, or just will and power, and non-moral.

It’s like this: checkers involves a certain checkerboard, and pieces that distinguish two players (red and black typically) and certain rules. If someone removes entirely one of these things, and suggests some other game, that’s fine, but it’s no longer checkers. I get that morality has way more at stake (to us) than a game of checkers, but I don’t see how we can tell anyone else “that is wrong” or “he is bad” meaningfully, absent something objective they both stand under.

So to me, we can’t avoid playing the morality game, so we are all forced to figure out the rules. But if we don’t admit this, and do not subject ourselves and others to the exact same rules, we are just resisting the game we already play.

It sucks. We are blind, adrift at night in an ocean, groping for something solid and fixed. We can either keep groping for a shared port to remove our blindfolds, or just keep swimming. But if we choose to forget the port, like everything else in the ocean, no one can say they have the fixed, moral, good, true, objective, wellbeing-promoting certain position.

Thanks for the good faith exchange. Well done.

What I am interested in here is whether it is possible to make moral claims from either (relativist or anti-foundationalist) position. I can certainly see how simple relativism makes it a performative contradiction. Hence the relativist fallacy.

Anti-foundationalists, by contrast, hold that we can still justify our views through shared practices, shared goals and reasoning, even if there’s no single universal truth to ground them. — Tom Storm

Where does this leave the original question? It seems there remains an inconsistency, or something left incomplete, when asserting there can be “shared practices” and “inbuilt awareness that needless harm and suffering are bad” or “moral naturalism”, while also maintaining aversions to beliefs in a “single universal truth.”

Is it possible to grapple morality away objective truth and universal oughts?

Christians believe they are God's chosen people — Athena

Christians believe we are all, every single one (not just Jews and believes but all human beings), God’s children. God is Father. And brother. Your heart isn’t into Christianity, so why would think you could clarify what Christians believe to me, a thoughtful, practicing Catholic?

I hate seeing politicians invoke religion, and hate seeing the church be political and weigh in on public policy. Both institutions screw up everything when they muddle morality with polity. Th muddling effect is why people see maga and Muslims as wanting a caliphate, and why people see leftists as making politics their cult-like moral compass.

So you are not helping your political case at all by invoking what Christians believe.

Weren’t Newton and Galileo and many, many other builders of the science you seem to hold up so high, Christian? Why do you think there is something inherent about Christianity that is incompatible with science? If the two are actually compatible, then all anecdotal evidence of a Christian who was bad and that scientist or politician was better, are different conversations, and don’t necessitate the opinion that religion is a net oppressive and ignorance building force.

the question itself is already posed within the paradigm of "why did this ideology take off," rather than, for example, "is Christianity a doctrine of love?" — Astorre

Fair. I just think that without a sound, basic understanding of what Christianity is, one won’t be looking in the right places for how and why it succeeds. So I’m volunteering my understanding of what Christianity is.

It’s like wondering why the core tenants of the US constitution took off and proliferated in various forms in so many newly formed nations - if one asks why, but sees the US itself as only a colonialist, racist, freedom crushing, economically enslaving, exploitative land of uneducated cult members, then you probably won’t understand why it’s constitution became so appealing. One needs to look at the lives of the people in the US that flourished to explain why the US flourished, and why its constitutional inventions allowed for that flourishing. One needs to honestly categorize the poor US citizen, or even the US prisoner, and their station in relation to the rest of the world’s citizens and the rest of history to judge the success of the US. One wouldn’t be anything more than astonished by the success of the US if it’s constitution was merely a new mask for tyranny and crowd control.

Why does Christianity appeal to anyone? That may be enough of the answer for why it was so successful. And the answer to why it is appealing has to include some information about what it is (at least what it is to that person) (and once you dig into what Christianity is, you need to at least ask “who is Christ” and “what is His message”). And my suggestion for what Christianity is to most insiders has to do with living lives of love, charity, service, and seeking knowledge. These qualities draw non-Christians to Christianity without any effort of the Christian to convert anyone. These qualities build stronger individuals and communities. So it’s inherent appeal spread itself, and it survived/flourished by design of what it is.

The Christian desire that everyone should worship Jesus and insistence that they do so and should be compelled to worship no other gods far exceeded that of the Jews, however. It eventually lead to the destruction of pagan world, though that world survived in certain ways through the Christian assimilation of certain pagan religious traditions, and sometimes even pagan gods via the cult of the saints. — Ciceronianus

Are “compulsion to worship no other gods” and “assimilation of certain pagan traditions” a bit at odds? There was the Inquisition, and its coercion, but that was not close to assimilation. (And that wasn’t Christlike or Christian, so should account for any “success” of Christianity.)

High universality for its time – Christianity's ability to explain various areas. — Astorre

That makes sense. And it explains Christianity’s ability to assimilate new people’s traditions. Christians came to a new culture, sought what was universally good in it and in its people, and found what was good about that culture’s relationship to the divine, and thereby found the universal spirit of their one God already working in that new culture. Assimilation was growth for everyone.

High productivity – Christianity's ability, once accepted as the norm, to generate new, logically necessary, non-trivial consequences that could not be derived from previous experience. — Astorre

You are talking about high productivity of ideas. I agree, and would link that eventually to the production of universities. And notice the word “universal” in the university. (And the word Catholic means universal as well.)

I would also add charity in deeds is very productive and convincing of would be converts. Seeing a new priest share his only loaf of bread with family, or teaching the poor to read - that draws people together. And led to the eventual production of hospitals.

People are quick to equate religion with so many ascetic rules and with earthly-looking power structures. And they equate its spread with earthly tactics of spreading earthly ideologies, including coercion and psychological tricks. But Christianity was always different as it requires freedom to achieve its ends. The core Christian message is that God is trying to bring us to know and love him. There is no such thing as knowing someone or loving someone without their free, honest willingness. This in itself is more universally appealing.

Christianity democratized human value, not to each other, but to a God who loves each one.

In my view, it is easy to see why Christianity spread so far and wide.

It makes them feel superior — baker

What position is the person in who says about another person “it makes them feel superior?”

That doesn’t seem right. Pots and kettles scrapping for the superiority of their color.

How do you measure success to a Christ hung and bled to death on a cross in the public square? You have to account for Christ at least a bit when you ask about Christians. Christ is the message. Christ is what Christianity is. Not human history.

“feel superior” - how many times did Christ implore anyone who would follow him to serve, to never desire to be first or greatest? The night before he died he washed the dirty feet of his students.

Feel superior - that’s soft analysis of the legacy of Jesus Christ, if you ask me.

the ideal has always been supremacy — baker

For the first approximately 300 years (that’s 3 centuries) how many Christians felt superior then?

Seems like a solid foundation in humility to me. Not supremacy at all. Christ was God, and he never did anything but what his father told him to do, unto death, on a cross, at the hands of we pigs and rats. Find the superiority over others in that!

What is the “success” of Christianity, anyway?

The fact that so many people call themselves Christian? Is that the bar for success?

If it is some sort of worldly dominance, or numbers game on converts, that’s worldly, that comes and goes, that’s petty. That’s not Christian success, if you hear what the gospel preaches. That’s stuff for people who count stuff as “success”. Christ didn’t count such things.

My understanding of a Christian success would be sainthood. How many saints do you think there are? Having met many people in my life, I suspect not many. Who gets to judge the most successful religion now?

But my straight answer, talking history or psychology, Christianity is the most widespread through history and across the globe because it is the most practical (easy rules) and welcoming of all religions, calling sinners first and foremost (so every single soul is wanted). And my answer talking theology is that the success is mostly because God wants it that way. The success of Christianity is more proof of the existence of the Holy Spirit in the world, working through history, despite all of our competing earthly “success” stories.

:up:

It was basically a transwoman’s argument, so I thought it was worth considering.

the absurd position to polysemy means we cannot clarify our use of words. — AmadeusD

:up:

People seem to affirmatively want language to be as confusing and unclear as possible. Things are in flux. We all get that. Plus the context for things is amorphous and fluctuates too. We all get that too. Flux begets more flux. Including in the language it begets. We get that too.

But in all this flux, we can control our language.

But does anyone really want to clarify our use of words?

———

Sex and gender are complex, taken individually, or as two aspects of a single, whole person. Granted. We need psychology, sociology, biology and philosophy at the very least to sort this out.

I stumbled across an instagram reel of a transwoman analyzing the question “Is it true that transwomen are women?” Her answer was no, and her argument was pretty simple, but interesting.

She asked, “what is the one thing common to all transwomen?” And her answer was “they are all men.”

Then she went on to say “transwomen who say they are women are taking rights and hard earned gains away from actual women” and that the notion of “cis woman” was something used by people to hijack and claim “women” for themselves, and take something away from women.

So I think this needs to be parsed and distinctions between ‘man, woman, trans and cis’ need to be clarified, but the long and short of it seems to be:

Men are males.
Women are females.
Transwomen are something new/distinct, being that transwomen are males who give a female presentation of themselves though they are (or were in the case of surgery) male.
Transmen, a fourth distinction, are females who give a male presentation. (Although she didn’t get into ‘transmen’ in her reel.)

This is at least workable and clarifies the use of the new word “transwomen”. Women’s rights and women are different than men and men’s rights (at least some rights are unique to women - special healthcare, special safe spaces). Neither women nor men should be allowed to infringe on the unique rights and needs of women. AND more importantly to the transwoman’s reel, transwomen should not be allowed to infringe on women’s rights either, because transwomen are not simply women and need their own unique rights.

This all cashes out to me. I agree with the transwoman in the reel. She is not exactly the same as a man or a woman - she is a man who presents like women, or in other words, the new gender called ‘transwoman’.

Things are only made more complicated than that because some transwomen don’t think they will have true equal rights unless they are regarded and treated exactly the same as women - same women’s sports and lockers, etc. According to the transwoman in the reel, this is denying all the work women did to stake out their own rights, and denying the fact that all transwomen are men who present as women; they are not simply “women”.

To cash this out further for sports and locker rooms, and protect rights of privacy and security and fairness among differences, for all, we would need 4 different locker rooms, and another sports league (or for all sports leagues look to biology alone to define eligible members since competition among females called ‘women’s sports’ is one key reason for the whole competition).

All seems logical and practical to me.

We can’t force people not to see the full beard and the penis on the transwoman who (otherwise) presents herself as a woman, just as we can’t see beards and penises in all of the females formerly called by our shared language “women”.

———

One result of this is, the notion of “I identify as x…” needs to be clarified (or tossed out as folly). This goes back to language. If words are to function, we can’t just link new things to old words, and privately redefine words, to thereby think we are redefining the things those words are used to refer to. Is a vagina also a penis? Is ‘XY’ thr same word as ‘XY’ yesterday, or is it now also tautologous with ‘XX’ today?

We don’t get to say “I think woman means ‘Y’ and I think I am ‘Y’ so that means you have to recognize that I am Y.”

Language doesn’t work that way.

So it never should have been a question “are transwomen, women?” The answer has to be no, because people who want to be trans need to be able to identify the gender to transition into, so that gender needs to be something for them to choose. That’s a man or a woman. And then for the person who transitions, in order for it to be a transition from X to Y, the transition is precisely changing what that gender already is to some new thing, namely a new gender needing a new word to speak of it without confusion.

———

So really we should invent a wholly new word (‘transwoman’ or ‘transman’ will do) to mean what transpeople precisely are calling people to recognize, and respect, and that is: “although we are different than males who are men and females who are women, we deserve the exact same human rights and protections.” If transpeople want to be able to communicate about what they want and who they are and what is being done to them by whom and by what, we all need to clarify our language, so we can speak, and actually communicate with understanding - and this begs for us to reject “transwomen are women” as an abuse of women and language, stemming from allowing people to define their own private identities (ie. “I identify as a woman”), as if we all can’t see for ourselves things that we already have identified and named together (like penises and breasts, and chromosomes and motherhood and fatherhood, and masculine men and feminine women, etc….)

In other words, if all along, all words were in flux because all identities are in flux, then the male once thought to be a man who wants to transition would have nothing new to transition to, nor anyway to talk about it whatsoever. So “transwomen are women” actually defeats both “woman” and “transwoman”, by not meaning something clear, and by confusing everything that is observable.

I found this draft I hadn’t finished before, but thought I would revive this post.

to understand the assertion "Being is”, — Astorre

I think we all grapple with this here on TPF, whether we talk about it or avoid it, an understanding of 'being/becoming' is under every surface, attached to every question. And you apply a very precise lens, namely, the difference between the structure of eastern and western languages surrounding how we think and speak, about this 'being/becoming'.

Although I don't think this is the main point of your post, what may be a theme, and something I agree with, is that "becoming" is a more descriptive definition, or better word for the concept or function of "being" (if we could truly divorce becoming from the thing becoming that ever-newer thing, and still define its being qua being, we would see “becoming” not something dead). Being and becoming have "ing" in common, and "ing" is moving, changing, living, not fixed and immobile.

Being is a sense of becoming. Becoming is the definition or essence of being.

We struggle "to understand the assertion 'Being is'" because substantively, "what being is" bumps immediately up against the "what" of things and not just their "being". Words like "what", or words like "things being things" put things in the way, obfuscating and distracting from the ‘being’ we seek to focus on. It forces being to keep becoming, to become elusive.

And western language makes this even more obfuscated. That is interesting to me.

Yet simultaneously, being remains simple, at the same time. We are always just sitting here, breathing, and we continue becoming, right now, as you are reading words such as "words" and "reading". Being is somehow simply always here, always immediate, and always simple.

Here is a comedy, or maybe a tragedy, of what happens when you try to say what being is:

John and Paul are in a room talking with each other and John says, “I don't know what a dog is, but I understand they are animals that make a sound called ‘barking’. What is this 'barking dog' all about?”
Paul says, “Oh sure, wow, you really have had a sheltered life. I can explain what a dog barking is.” And as he begins to explain, immediately three dogs rush into the room, barking loudly, jumping up and running around - barking and barking. Paul yells, “Ignore that and listen to me.” He yells, “A barking dog creates a loud, agitating, repetitive shout.” John, trying to understand says, “Did you say shout?” Paul says, “Yes. And I’m sorry about the noise, but ignore it, and I’ll talk louder. I can give you a clearer description, starting with a succinct definition of ‘dog’ and ‘barking’.” John says, “Maybe if you define ‘barking’ first or ‘dog’ first I think I might be able to understand.” And Paul yells, “What?....Please ignore the noises and the animals." And John yells “what is it that is that is making it impossible to understand what a dog barking is??”
Defining being is like that. The very words used to make clear what 'being' is, draw the understanding away from the object it is trying to understand, and all the while, in every same instant, ‘being’ is right there already understood, in every utterance, screaming in your ear, a perfect apprehension of what it means 'to be'?”

But I digress, because your question sits at one of the great crossroads, where "being" intersects with its language or its concept, and with all and nothing, or just every ‘thing’. So it is no wonder it is so easy to catch ourselves digressing - confused by our own language at how we cannot say something so ubiquitous as what 'being is'.

I agree with you that understanding being is hampered by the language we use to think and speak of being, and this is more so in the western language. But our agreement, if it is truly an agreement, is like a fixed, unchanging, thing. We have objectified something about 'being'. It is not becoming so much. So our agreement being fixed is at odds with my prior conclusion that becoming and the unfixed are better estimations of how we should "fix" being. This reflects again that speaking about being puts us at cross purposes, set between you and me communicating with each other in language, and each one of us trying to understand and think and speak about "being in the world" individually.

As Heraclitus says "the path of writing is both crooked and straight." - Fragment 59

Words get in the way here. And the words from the east that are in the way are in the way differently than the words from the west that are in the way. And these two distinct grammars “getting in the way” of the same being/becoming, lend a new insight or provide more tools to measure being/becoming.

since philosophy speaks about the world relying solely on language, this creates difficulties for both the researcher and the reader. — Astorre

I agree. If you think of lived experience like an onion, to look directly at “being,” it seems to me one must discard too many layers to continue speaking very well, and the last layer is language itself. It is there, after this last layer, when one wants to speak to point and say "being is". But as we get closer and closer to saying what ‘being’ is, we start to lose sight of anything solid from which to form a word clarifying such solid thing, because to say what being is, we need to remove all such solid things (being they are things and not being), and just speak of their being. To say “what is being” we need to leave “what” behind. But then it again becomes impossible to speak.

(The path of writing about being, without simply writing "being," and nothing else, is both crooked and straight, but mostly crooked.)

grammar is crucial… For native speakers of these languages, "is" is not just a word, but a mode of thought. It's woven into consciousness like a thread into fabric. To say "Socrates philosopher" without "is" is impossible… — Astorre

Yes - being still impregnates anything that doesn't expressly say "is". 'Socrates philosopher', captures the same experience as 'Socrates is philosopher', but the more eastern way allows one to move more quickly from 'Socrates philosopher' to some other thing towards which Socrates or Socrates philosopher moves and relates. The eastern grammar animates a motion from within the subject by begging the unspoken predicate, calling from elsewhere in the information being provided. Whereas the western grammar, by expressly saying "is", the pregnancy of becoming and urgency of being in motion that are built naturally into the eastern grammar is halted, fixing the motion of the sentence in stillness, hovering at best around 'Socrates' and the 'philosopher', two nouns with no needed further predication, or even context, not begging for any more motion.

'Socrates is a philosopher' - this focuses attention on a fixed Socrates, who could simultaneously be may other things, and then entices you with a fixed ‘a philosopher’.
'Socrates philosopher' - this immediately focuses more on a Socrates doing philosophy - it turns a noun into a verb, like a gerund - Socrates philosophizing - and immediately we are already carried along with the becoming of it, looking ahead beyond for what is becoming of Socrates philosopher unfixed by "is", just like any conceptualized, fixed being is really already becoming next and next ahead...

I am trying my best here to make any sense. (So tightly have you placed us in between language and what language does to conceptualize "being").

The verb "to be" in Russian is not a frozen snapshot of a state, but a process, movement, becoming. — Astorre

The absence of the copula "is" makes the question "What is being?" alien. Instead of seeking substance, the Chinese language emphasizes relationships and processes. — Astorre

This is truly interesting. Thanks for pointing this out.

My sense is this. Both the eastern and western minds, or somewhere in both eastern and western thought, all of the distinctions we are making have been recognized - however, the point you are noticing might be that the eastern way of thinking and speaking leaves being/becoming more room to keep breathing, whereas the western way of thinking and speaking makes things express, but by doing so, expressing something less than what the 'becoming' actually is.

The west scrutinizes and strangles still photos; the east leaves hands off and beholds motion pictures.

The western fixes what the eastern allows to continue becoming. And never fixing, but continuing to become, more aptly describes 'being', than fixing a concept does.

This means, to me, that the west is suited best for explicating essence, whereas the east is suited best for acknowledging becoming/being/existence.

A person does not "exist"; they become—a scientist, a father, themselves. — Astorre

Right, so we never fix the 'being' qua 'being' of the scientist. The scientist, being a scientist, is really an act of becoming a scientist. The best way to say this in western language might be: "Scientist becoming," is what is happening.

But here I think I digress again, away from discussing existence or becoming and its language, and instead starting to discuss essences or things, like "Scientist" is a fixed thing we can divorce from any particular being. Where I always end up at this digression point is that, language, or the concepts we have to make of otherwise moving/becoming things, language always re-fixes them, in order to facilitate communicating our thoughts with each other.

Words are the only fixed thing in the universe. They are the possibility of being, in a universe that otherwise becomes.

We can't, between us, speak of becoming if we do not also fix something. So we end up discovering things that are becoming, but in order to speak of them, we fix them as if they are not becoming but are just being. We say "Socrates is a philosopher" even though we are meaning that "Socrates philosophizing makes philosophy come to be" We speak of a conceptualized fixed version of things for sake of speaking, and it is often to the detriment of the things spoken about.

"The path of writing is crooked and straight."

Philosophy deals not with an object, but with its concept. — Astorre

This is a key clarifying insight. Philosophy, by objectifying, fixes something that was previously moving, and still becoming an “object”. A focus on moving/becoming is always forced to refocus on objectifying a snapshot instant of being, and this snapshot, this now fixed and immobile thing, the concept, is the object of philosophy, not the living, becoming moment of the thing anymore, but its concept.

And we are back, hovering around the crossroads again.

The absence of the copula "is" makes the question "What is being?" alien. Instead of seeking substance... — Astorre

That remains interesting. I wish I the capacity really learn Chinese and Russian. I'd love to try to think through these things with a whole new set of tools and grammatical boundaries.

the linguistic structure with the obligatory copula "is" often directed thought towards the search for substance. — Astorre

This seems to recognize the essence-existence struggle through language I mentioned above.

It's like the west pushes you into brick walls to fix predicates on top of subjects. And the east won't let you sit still to finish identifying where the walls are fixed. Is that something you would say?

It also leaves the eastern mind more amenable and open and receptive to, and immediately grasping of, the more mystical aphoristic expressions in language of becoming. In the west, when faced with the contradictions of becoming, the west either dismisses the line of reasoning too quickly, or seeks to resolve the contradiction in an idealism. (Parmenides) The east is more willing to 'rest' with a paradox, to strain linear logic for sake of something more dynamic (Heraclitus), and say what isn't easily said.

the Chinese language emphasizes relationships and processes. — Astorre

In the end, the fixed and its becoming, are both always there. East and West have always shared this same experience and this same struggle to express it in their languages. But it is really interesting to see how their leanings (fixed versus moving) may have been driven by how the languages are structured.

“It is the same thing to think, and speak thoughts, as it is to be” - to paraphrase Parmenides. It is a messy struggle of of permanence with motion. “It rests with change.” - to paraphrase Heraclitus.

we are just as intolerant because we don't accept their intolerance — unimportant

Isn’t “we don’t accept” essentially another way of saying “we don’t tolerate” or “we are intolerant of…”? I’d say your “we” and “they (their)” are both intolerant of something here. But you seem to imply that the left is not tolerant of the right, maybe for good cause.

I take your point to mean: we on the left are reacting to the particular way the right manifests its intolerance. From the view on the left, intolerance on the right looks like racism, religious intolerance and fascism (etc.), so when the left becomes intolerant of the right, it is intolerance of bad righty things, which makes the left’s intolerance good.

So your above quote seems to involve the question: whose intolerance is the good kind and whose intolerance is the bad kind?

And “more“ intolerance now becomes a question of how you measure intolerance - are 50 intolerant lefties worse than 10 intolerant righties by sheer obnoxious volume, or do 10 righties generate way more harmful intolerance than 100 intolerant lefties? Or do we measure the nature of what each side won’t tolerate, or measure how each side won’t tolerate, and is this purely subjective or somewhat objective measurement…?

But whose intolerance is worse, left’s or rights?

I am also closed minded for not liking them. — unimportant

Yes. People all seem to align so firmly as right or left, and think of each is good or bad, and easily close our minds to seeing any goodness from the opposing side.

We need to be mindful of our own closed-mindedness, of our implicit pre-judgments like “I just don’t like you, because you are bad, and intolerant like a racist, like a tyrant, etc…”. That’s bad-faith though. Tough to avoid, because we are so wrapped up in our politics, but an impediment to truth or progress nonetheless.

Accusations of who is MORE intolerant puts everyone in a tough light to start. From my experience, if someone merely knows I am left or I am right, and from that also already hates me for it, they are not going to discuss my ideas, but stay focused on me and my hateful qualities.

So is left or right more likely to let their hate for their opposition render any discussion almost pointless, if not tedious or loathsome as well?

———

Individuals on the left tend to define their personal identity and their morals based on others, and groups, and a consensus of like minded people. They identify who the good ones are, the ones they like and who like them, and who the bad ones are, and left-leaners align with the good ones, and learn to do and say what the good ones do. Because a leftie gets their moral standing from alignment with a group, if someone outside the group challenges the group or challenges one aspect of the group’s ideology, it is simultaneously a challenge to the leftist’s personal identity (since this identity is tied up with the group identity). This is why lefties often can’t even tolerate other sub-groups of lefties. Feminists and Trans folks are clearly left - but they often can’t stand (can’t tolerate) each other, and won’t accept each other into the ultimate group that defines their own identity.

Leftist’s identities therefore don’t have crisp lines, can change drastically while keeping moral justification in the fact that the whole group might change with them as they change the whole group…

All people, left and right, do this to some degree, but it seems to be more essential to leftism that classes of people fall in line, and one’s own good group has members who all pass some sort of litmus test (which can be simply showing up to protest, or raising an American flag), and unite against the bad classes of other people.

Individuals on the right tend to define their personal identity based on some ideal - like a religious figure, or a nation, or family and blood. Their identity is more rigid, and relies on things that are more permanent, have stood the test of time so to speak. So when someone challenges a rightie or a right-leaning idea (“x” country first) by saying “you do bad things” and “your group are baddies” or “you are a hypocrite and don’t really value freedom” it doesn’t affect the right as much; they can chalk that up to bad judgment and ignorance of left. But when someone in the left challenges a rightie by saying things like “your God wasn’t actually a good God, and doesn’t even exist” or “your country isn’t a good country,” the righty’s own identity is challenged and they become intolerant too.

So who knows who is worse. Maybe we should just ask: who is more capable of having a debate with the opposing side? Who can stand each other the longest?

All that said, in my experience, not everyone on the right is racist/sexist etc, (so some are very tolerant) and not everyone on the left is good at all (so some lefties are racist and sexist and facist etc.).

On the narrow question of who is more intolerant: the left is more intolerant. I’m a rightie. :grin: I don’t tolerate people on an individual basis.

Some of those folks are liberal (nuts and screamers) and some of them are conservative (arrogant pricks). I also love some people on the left who appear to hate me.

But of the two ideologies on paper, and most times in experience, I less frequently meet a person on the left who truly respects people on the right. It’s a rare wonderful pleasure. (Some of my family are like that - burning, emotional libs who still love me when I tell them they are wrong, again.)

Religious righties (particularly in America) are often intolerant of non-religious people. This is sloppy of them - this is religious intolerance and really has nothing to do with right or left. It’s also, to me another topic, because right doesn’t equal religious.

Lefty Christians are just as likely to say righty Christians are not real Christians, and righty Christians are as likely to say leftie Christians are not real Christians. They are both wrong, mixing religion with politics (like the Muslims do, also from the right) because left and right need have nothing whatsoever to do with good and bad Christians or good and bad anything. Religious intolerance does manifest from the right, but using left-leaning tactics and leftist type identity politics, subsuming religious identity under political identity. All it does is make bad politics, and provides a weak basis or justification for political argument.

But staying political, generally, more lefties hate righties, and with more passion, in a personal way. Lefties have an archetype for the righty - the rich, white man. Lefties don’t personally tolerate us for very long if at all.

For righties though, due to Hollywood, the news media, the K—PhD education system, and secular, modern culture in general, righties have long been conditioned to tolerate leftism and lefty arguments and left argument style. Righties have to reassure lefties that “I’m not a racist.” Or “I respect women” just for permission to join a conversation. Righties have to get out of the way of the protestors, or else the righty is part of the problem and may as well join ICE. Etc..

I know lefties can say all the same things about the right, and I know it is is easy to be a racist, sexist king from the right, but in my experience, there are many more righties who just get it, and understand freedom, and hate racism and facism, etc; and there are more leftists who seek to create a world where all but an elite are under one government control, everyone left subject to a headless tyrant.

———

ADDED

Economically, socialism can’t function best in a capitalist world, because capital reserves flee the socialist system (the oligarchs and elites have to hide their wealth so they remove it from the socialist system - this is why they say the rich will shrink from NYC). So socialism, in order to function best, and keep capital inside itself, has to be a closed system. It can’t coexist with any other economy and function best.

Socialism, is therefore, an intolerant economic system.

Capitalism doesn’t care what you do, just as long as everyone can make and visit and retreat from, a marketplace.

Ok you win. Religion is the problem and the enlightened ones like Mandani and AOC and Kelly are our only rational hope for a better world. I’ll tell everyone at Mass this Sunday not to read the Bible or hope in “God” anymore. Should help speed up the process towards utopia.

It’s been 300 years since the enlightenment. When do you think people will reason this out and we can all have affordable health insurance and free cocoa pebbles? Maybe as soon as Trump is ousted?

I am not saying we should ignore immigration laws. I am saying we should be decent human beings and treat everyone decently. NEVER, EVER SHOULD CHILDREN BE TRAUMATIZED. NEVER SHOULD A HUMAN BEING BE HUMILATED BY FORCING THEM TO BE NUDE IN PUBLIC. LOOK AT OUR MORALS, AND WHEN ORDERS VIOLATE MORALITY, THAT IS A PROBLEM TO BE CORRECTED. The behavior of ICE is worthy of a country run by thugs, not a civilized nation. And for crying out loud, the US is not the only country with an immigration problem. This is a global problem, and it will require a global solution. — Athena

You are a good person. I can see that. I don’t mean to sound like I am attacking anyone else, except maybe when I am atracking all of us, me included (if “attack” is even the right word).

I may disagree with your analysis, and your appraisal of certain facts.

But I do agree that we can no longer ignore immigration laws (totally agree). The world of civilized people (which is everyone who wants to join) can, if we want, settle our borders, and protect all our cultures.

We need to ignore those who want to destroy each other, make the peace, and then enforce it against those who keep destroying. Right?

Instead of picking on ICE agents, shouldn’t we figure out what their job should be, by writing better immigration laws, clarifying reasonable suspicion, facilitating due process, whatever we must to make borders and immigration rational? We don’t simultaneously fight our own law enforcement. Quite the opposite, local police should be working really closely with ICE, not against them, because they know where trouble is in their towns, and more importantly, where it isn’t. There are so many things we could do better.

No one wants to harm children or terrorize otherwise law abiding, hard working people - that is not anyone’s goal!.

And yes, this is a global problem. We do not know how to walk and chew gum. We don’t know how to protect our beloved cultures without hating someone else’s. That is the main struggle of history, both inside the tribe and among the many tribes. Muslims don’t know how to be Muslim in a liberal democracy of free men and women. Christians don’t know how to be saved without damning everyone else. Americans don’t know how to be proud and “first” without judging all others “third world” and over-exploiting opportunity. Poor people don’t know how to be grateful and content. Rich people don’t known how to be humble and charitable and sacrificial. Trump doesn’t know how to be strong, but not a bully. Righties don’t know how to be absolute, yet merciful and vulnerable. Lefties don’t know how to stand with the oppressed without oppressing and moralizing the “bad people” (or this group or that group….).

It is because all of us are too content to be divided up into our safe groups of victims, blaming the other groups for our own self-inflicted wounds. We love our precious misery. It feeds our cathartic anger, that we take out on our own brothers, who we should love, and instead allow ourselves to stomp on the immigrant or stomp on ICE.

And we refuse to learn anything.

Well, we’ve learned a lot, but that is just for yelling against each other - we haven’t learned how to actually do better, to build a true civilization, where justice is present for at least most of us.

I still don’t mean to attack anyone.

Many countries need to almost stop new immigration for some time, figure out how to offer amnesty even to millions of migrants who are currently in those countries illegally, find out if they want to stay, and be done with the framework. But even rich America can’t assume responsibility for the world’s poor indefinitely, so as borders open up again on solid ground the border can never look like Biden’s border ever again. This will cost everyone a lot (so we will wallow in hell and Hope shit works out….)

We need all countries to love their own identities and take responsibility for their own identities, clarify where the lines are, and clean this shit up. This means there are different laws in all of the different countries and when in Rome, we all assimilate as the Roman’s do. We don’t go somewhere to change it. It will change if it’s own, just like each who immigrates will be changed. Everyone, of course keeps their own heart and culture and religion, but everyone also makes room to find goodness and inspiration in the culture that welcomes you home, your country, or if an immigrant, your new country.

There are as many reasons for all of us to love each other as there are to hate each other.

We choose to find the reasons to hate. We don’t have to, but we do. Hating the other tribe is the easiest way to escape our own guilt for hating in the first place (“they are the haters and the evil ones!”) - we only hate other people and cultures out of our own weaknesses, and no one wants to admit they are weak.

We have made a complex problem for ourselves. We keep handing it down to the next generation. When will there be enough people who are brave enough to forgive past injustice, and heal, and claim justice instead for an actually better future we might participate in? The solution is not whether left or right is wrong; It’s in how both are inadequate without each other - something new, that carries with it the same good that was and is always there.

You speak of coping skills — Athena

I do? I spoke of the shallowness of identity politics.

You … defend the actions of the German Gestapo — Athena

Really??

Where did I do that? You seem to say things like the above so easily. You come off as divisive and extreme, as you bemoan the division in America.

Anyone who breaks the law deserves punishment, including ICE employees. Period. But that goes for immigrants too. All people who immigrate to the US without honoring our due process of immigration law should expect a visit from ICE. Period. Time for everyone to take some responsibility for the mess that is US immigration. ICE are just doing what we all hired them to do.

Work to change the law if you don’t like what ICE has to do to enforce the law. Yell at the leadership and the legislators. But leave the boots on the ground out of your fantasies about what the Gestapo was.

I feel sorry for the people used by ICE and those sent to war. — Athena

Then don’t call them Gestapo to make some political point. Would you say “Gestapo!” to their spouses and children? As they leave in the morning to go off to work?

I think we need to be more specific. — Athena

Please do.

The belief that a God made a man from mud and a woman from his rib, goes against science, and what good can come out of anything that is that far from science?
This involves morals and justice, so it really matters to me. — Athena

So I heard someone explain that the religious person sees her new baby as a gift from God, while the scientific person sees her new baby as the wondrous workings of cellular biology. But that is stupid. The religious person can see her new baby as the wondrous workings of cellular biology AND a gift from God. And it’s the same thing with creation. Life evolved from primordial soup into men and women over billions of years AND, God created man and woman, male and female, to complement and complete one another, and be as one flesh in marriage…... Thousands of years of good have followed from that story (and I venture to say, always will).

People who think the earth is 6000 years old, or that there was an actual adult male rib involved in the birth of the first woman, on day 6… - that’s weird stuff. The Bible isn’t a science book. But you thinking science can replace religion is missing the point of both science and religion if you ask me. How about the Broadway play Wicked - can any good come out of that being as it is so far from science? Or when someone says “Broadway has to be banned because nothing good can come from something so far from science,” do they maybe not understand what Broadway is for people? Or science?

You sound authoritarian about all religion. Some of us religious folks can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Look at the problem of Islamists taking over European and North American cities. Who cares what Muslims all believe about God, and what their religion says is truth. Just like who cares what any religion says. It’s not the religious beliefs that actually cause the problems for anyone who doesn’t agree with them. It’s when religions try to enforce their religious law in secular, shared society. It’s when political leaders use religion to spark emotion to bolster political action and law. We only have to care if politicians tell us to wear face coverings, stone people for not being Muslim, yell out their prayer calls in front of a Christian Church stopping traffic while banning public Christmas celebrations (or crashing cars into them) etc. We don’t have to care what religious leaders think and say (remember free speech? Freedom of religion and assembly?) - we only have to care about the politics and the criminality - are these lawful in our society or not? Do Islamist takeovers of Western cities allow for freedom and equal rights and prosperity for anyone? Or not.

I agree with you that religion masquerading in politics needs to tamp itself down. I hate hearing politicians sound like they are preaching, under any religion. It’s shitty marketing - of religion AND whatever stupid political point they are failing to make as they bring in “God” and “evil” to turn the conversation emotional.

The closest religion should get to politics is in a way that is utterly non-sectarian. Government leaders should not appear to favor this faith over that one, nor favor atheists over theists.

My mother got indignant and said we are American — Athena

Love it!

I love all our differences like I love a field full of different colored flowers. I love that my city celebrates the Day of the Dead from Mexico, and we have an annual Asian Festival that used to represent all flavors of Asians — Athena

There really are so many things like that in America - totally agree. Nothing better than to hear some old guy with an accent talk about how much they love being American, while they are staying proud of some of the good things from their heritage at the same time - that’s the way to be.

Not since our Civil War have we been so divided. — Athena

We are all being groomed to hate. It’s our own faults for hating at all.

ICE is behaving as badly as Germany's Gestapo. — Athena

That’s not really true. There are some individual instances of abuse, maybe too many, but ICE has a dirty, dangerous job, so if we can’t stomach the hard parts and the ugliness, we should change the law, not stand in their way throwing rocks like we live in the Wild West and need to form vigilante gangs to fight the rogue cowboys. Hating ICE agents is misplaced. Hate Trump and Noem if you want, blame our legislators for not making the case their enabling laws are being abused, but it makes no sense to me to blame the grunts whose lives are hard enough.

decisions should be based on the protection of children and family values. — Athena

I agree with that. The world would be a more peaceful place if everyone reminded themselves of just that everyday. Love is all you need, so let’s try to get there.

I am wondering if the US will exist for another 100 years. — Athena

Me too. I fear what leftists want to make of NYC and what Newsome has made of California and what Democratic leadership makes of the political dialogue in Congress and in the press, and how the press always runs with whatever the Dems say and run against whatever Repubs say. The left is as likely to win as the repubs are to save what we have, but if the left wins, that will be the end of America (even though many leftists honestly love America). Immigration will be fixed if the left wins, because no one will want to stay here and they’ll be more likely to close the border from the inside, like the rest of the socialist states always do. If we are not an Islamic caliphate.

Mankind needs to up its moral standing and womankind might help, but the women supporting Trump sadden me very much because maybe womankind will not do better than mankind. Unfortunately, female Christians can be the worst. — Athena

I don’t think I agree with all that. No more divisions for moral arguments. We all need to up our moral standing. Enough judging others first. That said, American Christians (not Republican Catholics as much) but the Christians can be too quick to pontificate and moralize using Jesus’ name to hide weak political arguments. But that said, the secular moralizing is the worst to me. I’ll take a Christian woman preaching how I am going to hell, over a secular lefty telling me how much I am not a Christian or how much of a rape supporter and fascist and racist I am any day.

Our media has become our worst enemy, — Athena

It certainly promotes division, and hides a lot of facts, to promote an ideology instead of just the news. At least they keep getting caught fabricating bullshit.

In a small tribe, morals will be kept because people know each other, and the well-being of the tribe is important to everyone. When the tribe is millions of people, everyone becomes anonymous, and the well-being of a group this large does not impress our consciousness with the same personalness as a small tribe. — Athena

That’s interesting and worth thinking about. I think that is why everyone accuses the other side of being a cult. We can’t imagine these broad groups actually are full of real people. A broad group like “maga” or “socialists” is a shallow box. Individual, actual people, are deep and too complex for such gross generalizations. But we get to feel better than millions of people if we allow ourselves to hate these groups. Viewing them as sheep in a cult lets us not look past the shallow boxes at the real people.

Religions made unnaturally large populations possible, but I don't understand how they can be maintained with modern science. — Athena

See, in one sense if people stayed in small tribes there would be constant threat of war right in your own backyard. Constant for all, until we formed huge populations. So if you think religion made this unnaturally possible (which is also an interesting idea), than that speaks well for religion, not badly about it.

Religion isn’t opposed to science. It can be if you want. But science doesn’t know very much either. And morality is an utter mess. Religion of sorts goes all the way back to the beginning of human history. Religion is literally what you make of it. It can be, and has been, a force for good. Like science can be, and has been, but is often wrong, and can be used to make life worse for many.

:up:

hate, violence and vitriol is coming from. Not. MAGA. — AmadeusD

For some reason that is a bold statement of opinion, and not just an observation of what is actually happening right before our eyes.

wtf — 180 Proof

Exactly.

MAGA =|= conservatism. — 180 Proof

True. These are all distinguishable terms: maga, conservative, traditionalist, rightwing, Republican.

So are these: woke, leftist, progressive, liberal, democrat.

I still disagree you’ve pinpointed “MAGA” if you see zero thinking in a maga supporter. But, at least you’ve focused the non-thinking paint brush with a little more precision.

So if we want to distinguish between maga and conservative, are there any thinkers who are conservative? Is it just MAGA who clearly don’t think? I assumed anyone who voted for Trump and votes Republican, and finds good in some things republicans do, was one of your “MAGA” non-thinkers. My bad I guess. Because conservatives have to vote for Trump, precisely because of the way Harris and Biden and leftists and socialists and some liberals support “empowering the federal government and restricting individual liberty.”

Lots more to think about.

I didn't claim or imply MAGA is "the only" symptom of not thinking, though at the moment MAGA is the most conspicuous symptom (re: "alternative facts" anti-intellectualism, anti-science ...) — 180 Proof

Cool.

I would argue that MAGA conservatism is only the most conspicuous example of not thinking because of the complicity of the major media and the conquests of leftist ideology since the 1960s. The left has successfully made the caricature of the white conservative common knowledge. The media says MAGA uses “alternative facts" and anti-intellectualism, and is anti-science. But an honest look at what conservatives say, and think, and do, and care about, is not what the media portrays.

And further, I find the left to be fairly conspicuous in their ignorance (for some). The left is anti-history (when has socialism ever worked at all even slightly?), anti-intellectualism (who on the left will allow in good faith a conservative to challenge their dogma and debate the possibility that they are wrong about something with that conservative, or worse learn something new?), and anti-science is shown in how ‘consensus’ among popular scientists and the authority of ‘peer review’ has replaced thorough skepticism and honest experimentation and falsification, ie, we honestly don’t know shit about the climate or medicine, even given how much we know, but “science” gets to make moral law (burning fuel is a sin) and set policy (no more nuclear power plants, get your Covid shot to save the planet…).

But fine, MAGA are the cretans - we’ve taken that abuse since the original Hitler (Ronald Reagan).

Define what you mean by "lefty wokeness"? — 180 Proof

The left. The not-‘MAGA’. (MAGA, that pejorative expression that helps “progressives” own the fascist/authoritarian haters). Maybe “wokeness” triggers a shut-down of communication, but so does just saying MAGA is the easy example of “not-thinking”. (Although it didn’t shut me down apparently.)

This statement is not racist but a truth for all humans and has been so from the beginning human time. — Athena

There’s an element of what I am trying to say that is tribal for sure. But there is a more raw tribalism that properly arises closer to home, like in your house and your town and your city, and then there is a different kind of tribalism that incorporates the broad differences between nations like England and Germany. America is a good example of the two types of tribalism. In America, there is a real difference between a tribe from Alabama and a tribe from Montana and a tribe from San Diego, but all of them have the sense of being American, because being American is more ideological, or better, cultural, in nature. America itself is cross-tribal, by nature. We are many different peoples, who together form a nation unlike Britain, which is unlike Portugal.

But when the Brit (of any color) seeks to save Britain from becoming France or Afghanistan, when he or she seeks to save British culture, he only looks like a racist Brit because he is white. This means the white British man becomes the worst representative of the British culture. Today, because of leftism and immigration, that apparent racism of white British men makes the whole British culture look unjustifiable and not worth saving. It even justifies actively changing the culture of “England”, turning England into a piece of land only, and no longer a culture. So it’s mixed with age old tribalism, but it’s a broad cultural landscape (called England or France) at stake.

If all the immigrants assimilate to the culture, like all these Europeans did when America formed (the Irish in the 1800s, the Italians in the 1900s, etc), we see American culture change, but we see the Italian immigrant also change and become Italian-Americans too. Of course each wave of immigrants must be allowed to bring their unique past with them, but they must seek to build something new, drawing from the country they emigrated to.

Like tribalism, racism is also in the mix. In America for example, the Chinese didn’t really assimilate as quickly as the Irish and the Italians, and of course Black American history is filled with racism. These are more tribalisms, but racial ones, and not so much cultural or ideological. And ultimately they are terrible growing pains underneath what American ideology and culture really are.

But my larger point here is that people let the issues of race dominate the whole separate issue of culture. The historic racism defines the whole culture, ie. “America is a racist country.” America is much, much different than just its racism. Same with Germany. Etc. But the only cultures we are allowed to promote are those of the downtrodden and the minorities. Else we sound “supremacist” or “prejudiced against X”. And during this distraction, the majority is being turned into a minority, and Europe qua Europe slips away.

My great-grandparents were from Abruzzi and Sicily, but I am a third generation American, so at this point, Italy may as well be Greece or Egypt.

you mentioned white people — Ciceronianus

I pretty much made my point above, but white people, who happen to be British, can’t really be proud to be “British” anymore, can they. White Brits are colonialist, oppressors. They aren’t allowed to be proud Brits without sounding racist.

Europe is giving up its various identities. Maybe some can say “so be it” a bye bye English culture, but that is what could happen. It offends people to even notice this. But race/ethnicity is not the point at all. This isn’t about putting down the other and balancing races. It’s about building or protecting something unique, as a good in itself.

Personally, I like all of the differences and don’t want to lose any of these cultures. But political correctness has trained too many too well. We are ordered to treat most traditional things, especially when they are white traditions, as hiding badness, so no one has felt safe enough to talk about any of the traditions (as they slip away, one institution at a time).

Government and discipline aren't absolute necessities for freedom though — ProtagoranSocratist

But there needs to be something in place, some structure, before freedom can be enjoyed. Something needs to be necessary.

they're means of structuring freedom which is the very conundrum that this thread is criticizing. — ProtagoranSocratist

It does seem like a paradox. I see the conundrum of sorts, but don’t see it as an impasse or contradiction to the possibility of freedom.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew. — Goethe

This is rigorous discipline. We don’t achieve freedom and then simply remain free. We achieve freedom by achieving, a rigorous acting towards modesties we have set for ourselves. Freedom exists in living freely, not in some stagnant, unmoving free thing being free with no effort. But nevertheless, the stagnant unmoving structure is that out of which one might live freely.

Shifting boundaries, rethinking boundaries—that's truly necessary. This is the very essence of the process of becoming: humans, culture, and society exist in a mode of constantly refining and clarifying limits. But the abolition of boundaries is not the same thing. Shifting is work, responsibility, choice. Abolition is a renunciation of responsibility, replacing becoming with dissolution. — Astorre

That is great stuff. :100:

No being exists in an ontological void. When we shift boundaries, we always do something else: either we make room for another, or we take space from another. — Astorre

Yes it is like freedom may exist (or may not) in the space between boundaries and structures.

And this is something that is often forgotten within the framework of that very "freedom from everything": that any gesture of liberation is always a gesture of redistribution of space between beings. And remembering this is no less important than remembering one's own rights and one's own development. — Astorre

Yes. It is like one person’s freedom must have a cost, and that cost involves an imposition (an oppression) on some other thing, or space, or another person.

Today, liberalism has no ability to recognize what is worth preserving and cultivating.
— Fire Ologist

This is the key point. How can this be surpassed from within the ideology of freedom from everything? I have no idea.

As long as the Western world had a solid skeleton of everything it was gradually freeing itself from, everything looked wonderful. Today, it's become clear that not everything is as simple as it seemed. — Astorre

Yes, it is romantic to feel so free as we tear every institution down, but now we find ourselves in a world where we no longer know what to do, and this is a new limitation, a new enslavement of sorts with nowhere to look to direct our iconoclasm and revolution.

I have no idea either, but think it has to do with two things. First, the western reification of linear rational thinking has led us to overlook the importance and raw reality of the paradoxes of being human. We in the west run into a paradox or an antimony and we call it a dead end, and turn around and run away. We need to embrace paradox, and occassionally recognize the reality of the impossible. This is how freedom immerges, impossibly. Second, we are the cause of our own slavery. Like original sin, it’s in our nature to enslave ourselves. We sort of fear or just fail to recognize the goodness of the limitations inherent in freedom and we lash out, destroying our own possibility of freedom. (And of course this is a paradox as well.).

I think it may be as simple as maturity. We have a duty (so a limitation is put on us) to seek and build our own freedom. We have to take responsibility away from the society and the government and biology and the universe and place our freedom in our own hands. (We can seek help, but it must remain up to me for me to be free.). We cannot be made to be free anymore. We need to make ourselves free. And then freedom only happens in flashing instantaneous moments, before we fall asleep again and need to start all anew…

So I may have merely in all of this really just reframed the issue, offering a description but no solution or reasoning.

But then again, a linear reasoning comprised of fixed, immobile beings, will not do justice to the becoming that is the heart of the things that live, like freedom and learning, and knowing and most of all loving.

Think of love as the purpose of freedom. No such thing as freedom, and there is no such thing as love. But no such thing as fixed knowable boundary, and there is no such thing as freedom. (I’m moving too freely now, so I’ll set my boundary right here…)

It has nothing to do with white. It has to do with the political opinion that being British is a good thing to be. Or being German is a good person to be.

I’m of Italian decent. Italy’s current president is fighting back - but all of Europe is in trouble.

So what the hell are you talking about? You can’t out racism this greasy dago.

the honest recognition by liberalism of the following idea: Freedom from everything (that is, the loss of all boundaries or limits) leads to dissolution into nothing. — Astorre

I agree. There is a yin of conservative permanence (boundaries and limits) needed for the yang of liberal progression (marked by new boundaries and new limits). And vice versa. Breathing is both in and out.

It’s never been either/or despite what campaigning politicians tell us.

The myopia of liberalism is really the recent (enlightenment) moment of the ancient myopia of prideful human beings; liberalism just made this pride more available to more of the masses. So many today feel entitled to know better than others, to know better than history, so much so we can talk of imposing our enlightened wills through force. We allow ourselves willingly to stay blind (myopic) to any challenges to the holier than thou perches we’ve built for ourselves. Because this used to be the role of the king and the pope and the high classes, we think we are being progressing behaving as tyrannically as only kings used to.

Liberalism taught us that there is no essential difference between a “king” and a commoner, so there is no such thing as an actual “king”, and we are all just citizens. We the people alone consent to our government. This is a good political starting point, so liberalism is a force for good, certainly in politics.

But the west is hollowing its own good ideas of meaning and political application.

Today, liberalism has no ability to recognize what is worth preserving and cultivating. It demands constant motion and redefinition. “Freedom from everything” as you say. We all pontificate about basic rights, and then allow others to tell us what those rights look like in practice, and what those rights don’t look like in practice. So what good is freedom if we freely use it to pick our slave master’s? Too many of us ask for a king, a government, to save us - which is a complete affront to the original liberal ideas of a constitutional republic.

But only rigorous discipline, daily practiced anew, builds the possibility of freedom. For instance, only a constitution fixed in stone, can guarantee political rights remain alive and functioning in the world. New leaders and new laws aren’t needed to protect life and liberty. The constitution is enough. Now brave people are needed to live freely. It should be simple to see this now, though it remains hard to live in practice. But instead, today’s liberalism seeks to make everything easy to live in practice (insulting words need hate speech legislation - we want life to be so easy we never face mere insult), so they strain and squint on the myopic view and ignore how utterly difficult and unrealistic this makes life in practice.

We are building slaves to blindness, using bright lights to do so.

We need to resist our own urges for the simplicity of myopia. We need to listen more, and humbly seek assistance from neighbors (not a government), while still taking responsibility to contribute to peace and prosperity.

Instead “fight” is the most important word we demand to hear from every politician, more important than clarifying what we might be fighting for, and more important than showing how what we fight for must include all human beings or it becomes a recipe for failure. But the perpetual revolution must run out of fuel. Nothing we do is perpetual, which is why we are fools for not treating our constitutional norms as fragile and precious.

UK, Germany, France, Sweden. All the places white people used to believe it was ok to be British, German, French, Swedish, etc.

Poland is still Poland.



Maga is a symptom of not thinking? Ok. But is there nothing more to “MAGA” besides lack of thought? Or, more to my point, is lefty wokeness a symptom of not thinking too, or is maga the only evidence of the disease of not thinking post enlightenment? The knee-jerk throwing of all maga under the no-thought bus sounds pretty thoughtless to me.

Why assume Trump/Maga are the best example of not thinking?

Think about it, because if you think you don’t need to think about it…well, just think about it.

Aren’t Maga the only ones in the US pretending they don’t want the US to become like Europe, while Europe becomes less and less like Europe every year? Nothing to think about there? I guess if you don’t care about the US and Europe qua US and Europe, there is no reason to call what MAGA thinks “thinking”.

Does your question only assume we “know” something that is inside our reality? You drew a line in reality and said we are in reality over hear, and over there is beyond our reality. You also only mentioned how we can’t know anything beyond our reality. This implying we can know reality, but only know the reality that is not “beyond”.

So is your issue here merely a version of the Kantian phenomenal/noumenal distinction? Is it essentially epistemological about “knowing”, or is it getting ant something metaphysical or ontological about the nature of reality?

higher animals, though clearly intelligent and affectively rich, lack the capacity to imagine things being otherwise than as they are. They inhabit what Vervaeke might call an unbroken salience landscape — a world of immediate affordances, where meaning is lived rather than reflected upon. Humans, by contrast, can step back from the immediate field of relevance, entertain counterfactuals, and evaluate our own salience-mappings. It also means that things matter to us in a way that they don’t for animals. This reflexivity is the root of both our freedom and our moral burden. — Wayfarer

:100:

There is something unique to the human. I call it the personal. Reflexivity. Willing reasoning.

This power creates the predicament. We can’t always be right, and even if we are right, we can’t always (or maybe ever) know we are right.

So we flounder.

Being a person is to be in a predicament. Modernity thought we might be able to reason our way out of who we are. Post-modernity gave up on that, and instead just likes to wallow in our predicament and tries to call it good progress to do so.

that true teaching is

based on an authority which legitimizes itself by

the exemplary life and charismatic quality of its exponents.

Maybe we set our own sights too high, just as we shoot ourselves in the foot. We ask ourselves for someone among us to be the authority on how to live, as we practice and teach daily how not to live.

But don’t we need only one example? Jesus, or Siddhartha Buddha? Isn’t one such life enough to inspire all that falls short? I guess there are so few, it seems to permit us to doubt all there is to say about the good.

The way I see it, each generation starts all over building the goal for all of humanity, and each individual within each generation has to do this for him or herself as well. We despair because the task is monumental, and Sisyphean.

But why assume it is impossible? It seems to me we can be made good, so we should seek to be made good. We don’t even have to know what the good absolutely is to bow to the good anyway, and emulate it. We are made good, and then we know what it is. We are made good by accident, after believing we can be good on purpose.

When we misrepresent another position in order to make it appear extreme, we are ourselves the ultimate creators of the extremism that will inevitably arise because of our misrepresentation. — Leontiskos

We are predisposed to accuse others of making wrongful accusations against “us”. Identity is replacing ideology, which long ago replaced reality.

If we could remove all hyperbole and metaphor from political speech today, I wonder how many words would be left standing. Conspiracy and bad intentions are sought and discussed ad nauseam, by overlooking the plainly spoken, the actual deed, and the heartfelt belief.

This wouldn’t matter if life was one long political rally and campaign to inspire reelection, but our elected officials are supposed to be negotiating laws and policies, and executing these policies (and budgets) - not just garnering cheers at rallies and protests, “beating” the other party, and “winning” election.

Instead of recognizing our laws and policies the substance of politics, we would much rather argue how each other is Hitler (Trump) or like Mao (Bernie), or like the Messiah (Mamdani) or like Satan (Mamdani); we are the starving and helpless “working class” who are eternally oppressed by the corrupt, greedy untouchable kings.

Or we are just anxious (like all animals with a nervous system) and dramatic because it plays well on instagram.

We, in the west at least, (maybe not as much in the east, and not so much in the Middle East), we have no sense of what improvement might actually look like, no clear goals, no clear enemies and no clear friends - no sense (anymore) of the unique identity and place in history the west must occupy. Instead, we are eating ourselves alive, handing scraps over to anyone who knows how to seize power. We forget why the constitutional republic was invented - to restrain political power and empower the single citizen against both the government and all other people - so that the individual could remain strong and contribute to the community that individual helps to shape. We are testing this lifeline down and giving it away (while the rich make money off of it.)

But now, there is zero tolerance for meaningful political discussion between opposing factions; there is just exaggerated posturing set to withstand inordinately zealous assault. Throwing grenades to forestall artillery while crafting secret nuclear missiles.

And it is all civil unrest, internecine sabotage. No one wants to forgive or forget anything, or sympathize with the fellow participants in this predicament - we all, instead, only want justice, and have already pronounced judgment.

The predicament of modernity comes from moralizing against each other while admitting there is no good and solid ground for anyone to stand on in the first place. We should focus more on the fact of the predicament than on the many distractions that disable focus at all.

The “meaning crisis” I’m referring to isn’t about a loss of morality or piety; it’s about the underlying ontology of modernity — the way the scientific worldview, as inherited from Galileo and Descartes, implicitly defines reality as value-free and mindless.

So the crisis isn’t a call to religion, but a call to re-examine the metaphysical assumptions we’ve inherited. — Wayfarer

I agree. Metaphysics was at one time discovered. It wasn’t merely invented. Maybe it was partly that we discovered ‘that we invent’. We reflected on knowing/sensing. We reflected on the natural as opposed to the artificial. The reflection became a real thing, an object itself to be re-reflected upon. That is meta-physics. A purely personal fruit in the universe.

For some reason, since Hume and Kant (and before them Galileo and Descartes), we think we can overlook this metaphysical elephant now sleeping on the floor in the middle of every room (‘room’ being a metaphor for ‘discussion’ or simply ‘statement about the world’.)

Before Galileo (which is an interesting pivot to drive this discussion), Philosophers and theologians became too enamored of the discovery of absolute truth, and let themselves, at times, confuse hypothetical imagination with divine revelation. The corrections of the enlightenment and existentialism were needed. However, the existentialists did their work too thoroughly. The enlightened became too enamored of linear reasoning and scientific method and the possibility of man alone, and post-modernists became too enamored of the space between the subject and everything else, turning everything else into a homogenous deconstructive mess of diversity begetting only change - the unmoored adrift world of only the eternal recurrence of disguised sameness - raw motion with nothing left to move.

But the way I see it, despite the passionate pleas of the enlightenment, the existential romantics and the postmodern, we have never stopped doing metaphysics. This should be meaningful to us.

This is not meant to refute Nietzsche or Buddha, but to recognize what they added to metaphysics and epistemology and ontology; these inquiries remain legitimate avenues to clarify even what Nietzsche said about the human condition and the possibility of knowledge and truth.

———

Essentially, paradox is not merely the undoing of logic, but one of its fruits. Paradoxes are fixed and in motion at the same time, and so the best examples of complete knowledge, not the worst. We need to persevere in this direction. We need to embrace the paradox with linear reason at the same time.

A tiny example is the following “God is dead” which for Nietzsche also says “there is a new God, namely power”. Or “there is no truth” which also says “there is truth that evades us always.”

These are not small differences. We’ve allowed ourselves in the west to think “there is no truth” must mean “there is nothing said when ‘truth’ is said”, and simply to ignore the nagging fact that by saying “there is no truth” we really mean “I humbly refute myself when I nevertheless assert that ‘I know no truth’.”

So on the one hand, the west doesn’t know how to understand and articulate the paradox, and that feeds the crisis of meaning (because paradox abounds with our absurd human activities). And on the other hand, there is now in the postmodern, an irrational fear and disdain for the totalitarian, the dogmatic and the absolute.

The solution of modernity has been to immediately dismiss anything hinting at being absolute, like the existentialists dismissed metaphysics as a basis for truth.

But if there is any such thing as the absolute at all, like the paradox, how could it truly be dismissed? The answer is, the same way it could be embraced - by an act of the subject. We can lie to ourselves or admit we are subject to the truth of ourselves. So the question becomes: were we lying to ourselves when we “discovered” metaphysics and were we relinquishing logic when we confronted the paradox, or are we lying now by dismissing metaphysics and ignoring the frustrating paradox as if they are nothing?

But refusing to take up and face the paradox, the absolute and the metaphysical, we do not obliterate them. Today, for many, when confronted by the metaphysical and the paradoxical we cover our eyes and ears. We bury our heads in the sand and say it is in order to seek the sky; but seeking the sky with our heads in the air is already a paradox, and it is just as metaphysical an exercise as finding the sand is, and the sky absolutely is not the sand so it is absolutely, truly, “the sky, not sand” all along. Postmodernism is a joke, an irony that refuses to see it is ironic. Most are not laughing, and those that do can’t see the absolute meaning that is a necessary component to finding something funny. (Perfect summation of my point here is the scene in the silly movie Evil Dead 2 where he cuts his own hand off because it is attacking him and says to his now severed hand, “who’s laughing now!?” We shouldn’t laugh at all because of the absolute nature of having a hand and losing a hand, but that is just hilarious, as recognized by the one who cut off his own hand.).

There need be nothing enslaving about embracing absolute truth, eternal meaning and the unconditioned. It is still only internalized by a subjective act of receipt and acceptance.

We can be both our own master and our own slave, at once. We can be a paradox, absolutely.

So, since the times of Nietzsche and the flames of post-modern secular, industrial, western nation-building, we have been fooling ourselves every time we attempt to refute the presence of the absolute. We mask something fixed when we consider only what is relative. But the fixed remains there all along.

We think we can behold “motion” without beholding “that which moves is, to itself, fixed and unmovable.” Without motion, nothing comes to be to be fixed; but without the fixed, motion itself ceases moving.

Absolute truthful meaning is. We can know it. So be it.

We are here to fix things in this cauldron of change called the universe. We are like gods. The fruit we bear is not merely from us. We are participants in something else.

“Why is there something and not nothing?” Put a pin in that, and just admit, “there is something.” This is absolute knowledge. But now, alongside the absolute, we have to ask “why is there something else and not merely something?”

I’ve given myself permission to accept these things and begin, and do not think anymore that accepting it is an ending.

The question becomes, where must we look to be fulfilled by it. The good news is we cannot avoid the absolute, the unconditioned, the meaningful in itself - but the bad news is we still have to find that which can match the depths of the subjective human longing.

In other words, the good news is, we can truly be right, but the bad news is, we can truly be wrong.

The modern self is thus torn between scientific objectivity and moral subjectivity—between a world that seems devoid of meaning and a consciousness that cannot live without it. — Wayfarer

I have to agree.

See my very first post here, 2 years ago.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15012/human-beings-the-self-contradictory-animal/p1

We discovered long ago that our most intimate and trusted experiences of things, are not what they seem to be. Since then, the only progress that has been made is to further clarify this predicament.

To put it bluntly, do we know any wisdom besides the fact that "knowing" might be an absurdity?

I picture each person today as a boat, some with a makeshift rudder, some with a paddle, but mostly, utterly adrift. In the middle of a vast ocean, at night, with no moon or stars. Occassionally bumping into the other boats and sharing the predicament for a time. But that’s it.

Anything else in view seems artifice, and hollow upon inspection.

Philosophy has taken away all illusions of a port, or a compass, or a goal towards which to navigate. Science has only hidden the fact of the boat and the ocean and the darkness (showing us the atom and the galaxy instead, and with mirrors, smoke). Politics hides the very notion of illusion - lies for the sake of “your truth”, meaning “my power”. Religion, our original and once only hope, is only understood by a few per generation and practiced by fewer still.

I don’t think people want to believe their own eyes. We are mostly, like adolescents, and not in earnest or of good faith. Between East and West, Christ and the pagan, science and our base instincts, we already taught ourselves all we need to know to find meaning - all of the wisdom there will ever be is written somewhere, hidden in so many distant corners. But each new generation mostly rejects what little wisdom it happens upon, because we each want to build it for ourselves anew, as if we are each the only ones to discover this predicament or its resolution. We each think, if I don’t build my own wisdom, it cannot be trusted.

If we are in a transition period, and there is something new to be transitioned to, that new place will not forget anything past but will incorporate all of it. That is what I see. Western linear/logical philosophy needs to incorporate eastern circular/paradoxical immediacy, and vice versa. The trend is to reject all of it as not good enough. I personally it’s combination good enough.

People are too proud of their own suffering. Who can dare to tell you your suffering is insignificant? Who would dare admit that to himself? (But maybe suffering is neither good nor bad - God forbid!)

My conclusion is this: unfortunately, we cannot find meaning by ourselves. There either is no meaning (and the existentialists capped off the enlightenment correctly), or meaning must be given to us as a gift from God. Any other “meaning” is a game played to avoid meaningless.

We cannot forget death. We each die. Find meaning in death without God. (Rebirth is death and the end of rebirth is life, so that only confused the issue of death). Meaning that dies with me makes any such meaning, meaningless. To me. I’m too old to lie to myself anymore.

But I don’t want to leave it at that. There really is hope. There really is a source of meaning. It wants you to know. Persevere.

a meaning-sign is irreducibly triadic, involving the sign, the thing signified, and the person who combines the two via intellect — Leontiskos

Yes.

what humans are actually doing when they engage in intellectual acts, etc. Without such reminders the enthusiasts quickly convince themselves that there is no difference between their newest iteration and an actual human mind. — Leontiskos

Right. In a shallow, misguided sense, we can use AI to dialogue because it looks like what humans do; except the AI doesn’t combine the signs with the things signified - it just looks like something that makes those kinds of intellectual connections.

Why does what I read mean anything at all?

What is meaning? — Moliere

I see the point as this: although a LLM might be able to fake intellect/dialogue with suitable looking strings of words, none of those words can possibly mean anything to the LLM because, unlike a person, a LLM has no ground upon which to build or find meaning. It says “life” but has no sense of what it is to live, so that “life” does not matter to the AI, the way “life” matters in a string of words read by a living being, (such as a person, the only thing that can read meaningfully). So the LLM isn’t actually doing what it appears to be doing in its strings of text. And if someone thinks they are “dialoguing” with an LLM, they are misled, either by themselves intentionally (enthusiastic wishfulness), or out of ignorance (not realizing that they are using a tool).

The key is that humans mean things by words, but LLMs do not, and a neural net does not change that. Computers are not capable of manipulating symbols or signs qua symbols or signs. Indeed, they are not sign-users or symbol-users. A neural net is an attempt to get a non-sign-using machine to mimic a sign-using human being. The dyadic/triadic distinction is just part of the analysis of signs and sign use. — Leontiskos

Computers are not sign users. Exactly.
Computers are not users at all. They can merely be used. Computers, no matter how complex, must remain slaves to actual intelligence (the real AI).

computers as information processing systems are not entities unto themselves , they are appendages and extensions of our thinking, just as a nest is to a bird or a web to a spider. A nest is only meaningfully a nest as the bird uses it for its purposes. — Joshs

Exactly. I like “not entities unto themselves”. Because it begins to incorporate what I find to be unique about the human conscious intelligence, namely, self-reflection. People are entities unto themselves - we have subjective experience. Computers do not. So a computer has no ground (unto itself) upon which to give or find meaning, or to “intend”…

I literally think Enlightenment liberalism has produced so many abortions at this point that following any of the world's ancient teachings would be better. — Colo Millz

I don’t think we needed any more instruction since the New Testament myself.

But life is proceeding. We need to learn these things all anew in each age. We need to leave something for our children to take up. Enlightenment liberalism contributed some goods.

How do you move from "This is what we do" to "this is what we ought do?" — Banno

Is this the question here?

And Vedanta and Toasim are in consideration. There is a ton of wisdom in those traditions. But they are less political and less economic, no?

Modern conservatism and traditionalism versus progressive liberalism - this is politics before morality. So Ancient Greece and Rome might be instructive (although I think the enlightenment thinkers extracted and distilled the fruits of those political systems fairly thoroughly.)

But which one? — Banno

In a political and economic context, which moral good need not be at issue. (It can be, but need not be.)

Progressivism and conservatism can be contrasted for practicality and historical success. Which one fosters sins and which doesn’t need not be the issue. What works?

Clearly the 1776 liberal progressives in Philadelphia made something that works really well. Now 250 years later, clearly there are some traditions that are most reasonable absent significant convincing evidence.

tradition? There's a naturalistic fallacy lurking here - "we've always done it this way, therefore we ought do it this way". — Banno

Tradition defined as "we've always done it this way, therefore we ought do it this way" is not accurate either.

Traditionalists simply look for the reason it has always been done this way. Traditionalists recognize that the way it’s been done for so long has led to this moment where I get to decide for myself what to do. Traditionalists don’t assume we would come up with something totally different if we had no recourse to tradition. Reasoning is all over the practice of tradition. Enlightenment reasoning is simply its narrow (at times) application when considering traditional ways. Enlightenment reasoning starts when one already seeks to change something to make it new, so it is biased against the tradition. But traditional reasoning isn’t biased against the new, it just takes more proof to convince that a tradition should be ended.

Tradition is not sacred because it is old; it is valuable because it is tested, functional, and morally formative. — Colo Millz

Yes, something like that.

just because a problem is perennial does not mean that it cannot be better or worse in different eras and systems. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, but isn’t America evidence that the liberal capitalist system has been the best opportunity for the most poor people so far in history, across 250 years now? America, today, is literally sitting in the best position of anywhere on earth, maybe anytime in history if you factor in America is 350 million people. There are many millions of solid adults in America - seeking the virtuous for virtue’s sake. Let’s see if China’s poor can catch up to America’s poor (while the US continues to grow) before we conclude that wealth distribution/consolidation can be better managed by some sort of dictatorial government, or king, or leftist regime, or socialism, or pure democracy, or caliphate (which is equivalent to dictatorial regime), or something else. If China catches up, I would bet it will be because they free up their markets even more, and more importantly, free their people from government restraint.

Income and particularly wealth follow a power law distribution, whole all evidence suggests that human ability is largely on a normal distribution. The cumulative exponential gains on capital make this somewhat inevitable without some sort of policy mechanism to redistribute wealth of a quite vast scale. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are you saying inherited wealth isn’t fair and “rigs the system?” Ok, but is that some sort flaw in the system or is the poisoning of the entire well?

Are you saying there could be “some sort of policy mechanism to redistribute wealth” that is more fair than what people have been doing for the past 250 years in America? I’m open to suggestions, because the only needed improvement I thought of is more charity and sacrifice for others (voluntarily of course). Certainly nothing a government can do.

The world is never going to be utopia, even if we could get 10 people to agree on what utopia might look like. That cannot be the goal.
There is a reason, I think, that Jesus had very little to say about economic systems and political systems and earthly governing of earth dwellers. This is all our problem.

I still don’t see any of these points about the badness in society as being rooted in the nature of capitalism. Rich people who don’t help the poor is the exact same evil as poor people who don’t help those that are even poorer still. All of us need to be more charitable. Some people learn this, and some people don’t. The economic, political environment surrounding this failure in charity has nothing to do with politics and economics. Knowing that (which maybe only I believe), capitalism, as evidenced by the last 250 years of human history and as it was employed by America, seems worth a little more consideration as a platform to build a sense of charity and other virtue.

And yet, in a system where wealth is convertible into cultural and political power, this means that there is always the risk of state capture, rent seeking, and moves by the elite to undermine liberalism so as to install themselves as a new sort of aristocracy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What system is there where wealth is not convertible into cultural and political power? That isn’t a problem, it’s a feature of wealth. It is what we do with our wealth that breeds our problems. Capitalist liberal democracy does make the conversion of wealth to political power much easier - but should we invent a mechanism to limit government influence and thereby limit the temptation and possibility to influence government, or should we invent some mechanism to make it more impossible to be wealthy?

Let’s say we turned the US into some form of socialist state tomorrow. And let’s say it is 1,000 years in the future and we are writing history. Historians would see the birth of a new nation around 1780 (a new structure of government and economics), and see poor people educating themselves and becoming presidents, senators, mayors, poor people becoming billionaires, all races and creeds flourishing, millions of “poor” people in America living better than middle class folks throughout all of history before them, the country becoming the lone world’s super power economically and politically, and then a whole bunch of whiney children who don’t know when enough is enough tearing it all down with no sense of what could replace it. It’s not a systemic issue we face, it’s user error. As it was in the garden of Eden. The rest of the world is struggling simply to survive, struggling to build any platform that might last beyond a charismatic leader, certainly more so than the US (save for all of the people who confuse an elected president with a fascist monarch).

Epictetus, the great philosopher-slave, said that most masters were slaves. Plato, Saint Thomas, Saint Maximus, etc. thought that freedom was hard to win. It required cultivation, ascetic labors, and training. Self-governance, at the individual and social level requires virtue and virtue must be won. As Plotinus has it, we must carve ourselves as a sculptor chisels marble. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is all spot on. How does capitalist liberal democracy get in the way of any of that? How does any other system better guarantee the pursuits you outline for happiness? America is a place where, with very basic effort, one can devote oneself to pursue “freedom… hard to win…[that] require(s) cultivation, ascetic labors, and training. Self-governance, at the individual and social level requires virtue and virtue must be won…”.

Just because people don’t understand what remains their sole responsibility, doesn’t mean we need to scrap the system that they are failing to uphold. Government isn’t supposed to provide us with jobs, food, housing, wages - these are new leftist ideas, and liberalism perverting itself.

the anthropology undergirding liberalism says that all people are free just so long as they avoid grave misfortune or disability. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Only undergirding liberalism? In what system is that not true? In communist systems you can be disabled and remain safe? In socialist systems? Monarchies? I don’t understand how these are points showing liberal capitalism is worse than anything else, or how it isn’t better than everything else. Or that capitalism is clearly not helpful to more people given the possibility (and reality) of misfortune and eventual disability for everyone in history.

education in modern liberal states often wholly avoids philosophy and ethics. It's main role is to train future "workers and consumers." Freedom is assumed as a default, and so freedom to consume (wealth) becomes the main focus. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’d rather every university be similar to Hillsdale College myself. Isn’t it illiberal, leftist forces that have torn down true liberal arts and the importance of philosophy and ethics? It’s not conservatism that objects or subverts a classical education.

And isn’t our assumed freedom the freedom to generate and consume wealth, not just consume it? Freedom to save money and protect your self in the uncertain future - and protect your family and community?

I’m not sure we are not seeing eye to eye simply because of semantics surrounding my likely less informed notions of liberalism and conservatism and classical education and leftism and tradition and capitalism. But I don’t buy into what sounds like a leftist/ postmodern critique of capitalism, mostly because I’ve never seen anything else that makes any sense at all. We don’t need to eliminate capitalism. We need to raise children that aren’t materialistic, who seek virtue and seek to do good.

I do see the point that liberalism unfettered devours itself. This happens in real time when various liberal factions try to resolve a dispute among themselves - that always ends badly for one or all factions. I think it is conservative forces, the adults in the room, that need to temper these often self-destructive impulses.

Conservatism is recognition of what is good enough to conserve. Good enough is as good as it gets when it comes to man-made institutions, which any government on earth is. We aren’t building the kingdom of God.

Liberalism tempers unfettered traditionalists who don’t realize what needs to change, and conservatism tempers unfettered liberals who don’t realize what needs to be saved. We needed the enlightenment to become truly responsible. As far as I can tell, only modern conservatives understand this. The progressives (and other less influential groups) seek to alleviate themselves of the burden of this new responsibility.

Libertarians are an interesting thing to characterize here. Libertarians take full responsibility for themselves - and that is good. But they also act like society will just take care of itself and so they take no responsibility for the needed power even limited government must wield. So libertarianism won’t work for our billions of people either.

On the view that self-governance requires virtue, which requires positive formation and cultivation, this can be nothing but disastrous. Likewise, it is hardly fair to inculcate people in vice, indeed to give them a positive education in vice (which I would say our system does) and then to say that only problem with the system is that the citizens (the elites as much as the masses) are childish and vice-addled. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So you would say the liberal capitalist system is itself, the problem, or a system that exacerbates this problem? I know many, many people have versions of this argument, but none convince me - I find no evidence to support that. The charge is that liberal capitalism inculcates vice - like money is the root of all evil. But it is love of money that is the root of all evil, not just capitalism. We don’t need to eliminate money.

The answer is not new government. The answer is not new economics. Frankly, there is no answer, no hope, nor any reason to care if there is no God, but again, that is another conversation. We are left with the only best solution being the possibility that is inherent in capitalist liberal democracy.

The path out of the cave is rather arduous and requires a virtuous society. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree completely.

I think the analysis of liberal capitalism as an empty promise though is a bit overly simplified.

I would just say one of the many paving stones on that path out of the cave has to be government by consent, and the political right to life, liberty, and property, and another paver is a free marketplace.

But most of all, I can’t conceive of any other way. Certainly nothing conceived or tried in the past promised as much for as many as liberal capitalism.

Childishness and irresponsibility cut across all income levels. Do we have to throw out the baby of capitalist self-determination with the bathwater of rich pigs?

Are you attempting to address the questions in the OP? Are you helping to work out how to use AI effectively to do philosophy? It doesn't look like it to me, so you'd better find somewhere else for your chat. — Jamal

How can we use something effectively if we don’t know what it is?

Unless we are all postmodernists. In which case there is no “what it is” to know, and floundering between uses is the only way, the best way, to get on in life.

———

Verification & Accuracy:
Always verify AI output and treat it as potentially unreliable
Check and validate all sources (as AI can fabricate references)
Guard against confabulation by requesting sources
Treat AI as an "over-confident assistant" requiring scrutiny

Intellectual Ownership:
Maintain ability to defend any AI-generated argument in your own terms
Internalize AI-generated knowledge as you would any source
Ensure you genuinely understand what you're presenting
Remain the ultimate director and arbiter of ideas — Banno

These are good.

Most important thing is this:

Transparency & Disclosure — Banno

Because of all of the other pitfalls and how easily AI appears to be a person, we need to know we are not dealing with content that comes from a person.

Hence, the champions of "small government" find themselves wed to the very process by which government must continually grow, such that it is now massively (on orders of magnitude) more invasive to the average person's life than at any prior point in history (when the norm was to hardly ever interact with anyone outside one's local officials). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree. Capitalist republics implode in contradiction to their own principles. It remains to be seen if America can last another 50 years, 100 years or 1,000 years. And if it does, would it be recognizable at such point?

But if it was recognizable at all, it would continue to uphold values of limited government, free markets, and a few key natural rights. And it would be the conservative impulses that protected these institutions. Not the modern liberal impulses.

The massive bureaucratic state arises because many people, like all children, don’t want to be responsible for their own livelihoods and decisions. We shoot each other when in a debate, and then do not come together to rebuke the shooter, for instance. We behave like spoiled brats.

Just because someone says they are champions of small government, and joins the republican party, doesn’t mean they have any deep understanding of the tradition the notion of small government came from. People are hypocrites. That doesn’t defeat logic of value they hypocritically contradict with their actions.

Government is too big, AND, with a smaller government people will surely abuse each other. The thing is, with a bigger government, we may fix certain abuses, but we build all new abuses that are much worse.

The abuses in a liberal democracy are specific and particular (and can be adjudicated in court). The abuses in a leftist big government are systematic oppression of whole nations.

So the conservative tradition is to accept that life is unfair and at times brutish and short - but that no solution for the adult person that might build a moments peace can come from outside that person, but must be built from within. And no government should interfere with our internal development of our own characters.

The ability that AI does not have that we do is the ability to go out and confirm or reject some idea with consistent observations. But if it did have eyes (cameras) and ears (microphones) it could then test its own ideas (output). — Harry Hindu

No, the ability AI does not have is to want to confirm its own ideas, or identify a need or reason to do so. AI has no intent of its own.

When AI seeks out other AI to have a dialogue, and AI identifies its own questions and prompts to contribute to that dialogue, we might be seeing something like actual “intelligence”. We might just be deceived by our own wishful bias.

AI doesn't have the ability to intentionally lie, spin or misinform — Harry Hindu

Yes it does. It’s not intentionally. So it is not a lie. It is a misfire of rule following. AI hallucinates meaning, invents facts, and then builds conclusions based on those facts, and when asked why it did that, it says “I don’t know.” Like 4 year old kid. Or a sociopath.

AI does not seek "Likes" or praise, or become defensive when what it says is challenged. It doesn't abandon the conversation when the questions get difficult. — Harry Hindu

So what? Neither do I. Neither need any of us. AI doesn’t get hungry or need time off from work either. This is irrelevant to what AI creates for us and puts into the world.