House of Eratosthenes

I’ve been complaining for quite awhile about people who go through the motions of presenting coherent arguments, and then when you think critically about what they’re saying you realize they aren’t saying anything because there’s so much that requires further definition and so little definition being done. Now here in California we’re up to our eyeballs in “little laws” — to which, near as I can figure, very few people actually pay any attention, either in terms of compliance or enforcement — and every now & then a debate will erupt in any one from a variety of different forums, about why we have this dumb law. And it has not escaped my attention that there is a thought process of “Let’s just keep passing dumb laws that have no consequence and eventually life will become perfect,” that overlaps almost perfectly with this other thought process of “I want to win the argument without actually arguing anything or even defining what exactly it is I’m saying.”

I guess it stands to reason. My dumb little law will make life perfect…just accept it, I don’t want to have to explain how it works.

Well, I’ve noticed something else…

One of the fundamental concepts that are being bifurcated by this disagreement, is “we.” I, along with other people who are capable of thinking like responsible adults, do not believe life automatically becomes better when we have more rules. I’m more of a believer in what Tacitus said, “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.” Gun control offends me, partly because it’s right in our Constitution that we aren’t supposed to have gun control of any kind. But it offends me even more when I recognize what it is: Something bad was done by a bad person, and so we come up with some restrictions to be placed on the ones who did not do it.

The great-granddaddy disagreement that appears to inspire all of the other disagreements, is this: I think life gets better when I’m allowed to do more things. For me, immediately, and if I exercise good judgment, for others as well. And I know my judgment is good. If, in some isolated case it isn’t good, I shall strive to improve.

Versus:

I’m not sure what, exactly. Seems to be something like “The cause of all our miseries is that we can do too much,” or “Happiness in the future begins with us being stopped from doing things,” or “We need to be controlled.”

It is the difference between the positive and the negative. The difference between hope & fear.

When I use the word “we” I’m talking about some class of person, and I am included in that class. Those people on the other side don’t seem to be going along with this. They say “We need to be stopped from doing things” or “We need to be told ‘no’ more often” or “We are a pestilence upon the planet”…near as I can figure, they are not including themselves in the “we.”

There can be some difficulty in noticing this within certain issues. On the gun-control thing for example, people who want more rules about guns usually have no intention of ever owning a gun themselves. Many of them are protected by armed bodyguards, and intend to continue enjoying the benefits of this weaponized perimeter after they’ve won their latest victory and gotten the laws to work the way they want them to work. But on social justice issues and/or environmental issues, the man-is-outside-of-nature types don’t include themselves in the “we” when they speak of how toxic “we” are. Guilty-white-liberals droning on about white privilege, do not include themselves in the complaint even though I notice many among them are, and have been for awhile, quite privileged.

What’s truly fascinating about liberalism is not just that it imposes more and more rules just for the sake of having rules, while claiming to have derived its name from “liberty.” Although that by itself is sufficiently intriguing that a lot of people who claim to be following the politics, but only casually, should be inspired to ask a few more questions. No, what really captivates me about it is that so much of it — but not all of it — can be blamed on the benefits of technology. Labor could think about organizing and having more of a voice, after a man’s worth came more from measures of his time and less from the acres he owned & plowed. We don’t have to spend fifteen hours a day doing that plowing anymore. And so people have time for dumb ideas. You’ll notice a common theme within those ideas is that we have to give more influence to people who cannot claim products or services in the marketplace, and this is usually — not always, but usually — because they don’t do much to help anyone else. Being a political effort, The Left requires electoral support and so they need underclasses of clingy, desperate people.

But then there are aspects of liberalism that have nothing to do with technology, that have taken root in mankind’s inherent flaws, in man’s propensity to sin. I imagine if some strain of liberalism could have gone all the way back to the stone age, with cavemen coming together to share a kill, the liberal caveman would’ve said something like “Og killed the animal, Blorg skinned it, Iggy built the fire, and my contribution to the feast is to come up with some rules about who gets how much.” And if he claimed this “job” just in his capacity as a peer, not as the tribal leader, I suppose he would have worked this little scam — easily, maybe — by way of guilt. “We aren’t worthy of this.” Eh…maybe not. Maybe the cavemen had to spend their fifteen hours a day hunting the wild boar, and so such thoughts wouldn’t take root back then like they do today.

But we do know if it didn’t happen then, it came along a little later, well before Karl Marx was born. “We’re not worthy!” — not in a Wayne’s World, genuflecting kind of way, but rather in more of a “false we” kind of way, in a “we means you it does not mean me” kind of way. “We” are a pox upon the planet, and so me & my friends get your stuff!

The false promise they hold for the rest of us, is the peace that is to come at the end of whatever mini-revolution they’re proposing to have at any given time. The Left cannot deliver us to any kind of Nirvana, and the rocking of the boat they want to do is always going to be the initial salvo in an extended and unnecessary era of turmoil, not the climactic engagement at the end of such an era that will unfold into a lasting calm. The logical reason for this has to do with this exclusion of themselves, from the “we.” They have to have some reason to stand on the pedestal. What is it about that caveman that entitles him to say this other caveman can only have so much meat, and some other caveman can have more? When they get elected to things, they can avoid this because they have a fake answer…but they don’t always win elections, and when they don’t, they want to keep imposing rules on the “we” that doesn’t include them.

And that’s when the real answer to the question rears its ugly head: They expect to have the final word on who gets how much, because…they simply haven’t ever bothered to expect anything else.

They are the inept caveman-hunter, who was never guided by reality to understand he needed to get better at hunting. This makes them think they are entitled to enjoy privileges. In a rougher, less forgiving environment, it is the opposite that is true. They are continually proposing and advocating for strange, new unproductive rules — so that they can avoid learning new things. That’s the point and that is how the rest of us should be treating these proposals. They are cries for help, from people who haven’t often had to significantly change their worldview, and they want to enjoy the luxury of humming along through the daily routine, receiving benefits and protection and privilege, again still without changing that worldview.

Which is exactly the caricature they draw for us of their opposition. The over-privileged aristocracy and middle-class who don’t want to change their worldview even when reality requires it.

“Something bad was done by a bad person, and so we come up with some restrictions to be placed on the ones who did not do it.”

That line just made a little light come on. Too bad liberals never…EVER…notice their own hypocrisy. One individual with a gun killed people…ban ALL good guys with guns and get them guns out of the country! Millions of illegals break the law coming across the border, hundreds of them murder innocent people…We can’t blame those poor souls for breaking the law and murdering our hard-working conservative citizens, keep them in the country so they can continue to vote and punish those evil-dead conservatives for the Naught-zee fastcysts they are!
- P_Ang | 03/08/2018 @ 08:33
I call this way of thinking The Asterisk. All Liberals’ statements should be read like so*

*except for me, and everyone who agrees with me.

The late great Australian philosopher, David Stove, called this “The Ishmael Effect.” In philosophy, he says, it happens when your train of thought gets so larded up with jargon and circumlocutions that you forget — or, usually, “forget” — that your neat new theory entails something self-contradictory. The most famous one, as Stove points out, is Marx’s: “It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Now, how could Marx know that nobody could transcend the cognitive limits of his “class situation,” unless he, Karl Marx, had transcended the cognitive limits of his own class situation? Marx at least was a serious thinker with a deep classical education. We aren’t, so we fall victim to obvious Ishmael fallacies like Postmodernism: “It is a fact that there is no such thing as a fact.”

Worst yet are the Kids These Days ™, who protest things they have no idea about (witness any YouTube video of “Antifa” being asked to define Fascism).
- Severian | 03/09/2018 @ 08:18

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What They Mean by “We”Thursday, March 8th, 2018

What They Mean by “We”
Thursday, March 8th, 2018