Month: December 2019

entry 12

Many prominent & vocal leftists condemn successful capitalists as greedy, and this moral accusation of greed plays a major role in leftist polemic. Billionaires and bosses are called ‘greedy’, and so-called corporate greed is criticized.

However, it is not greed – at least not in any relevant or non-trivial way – that drives capitalists and corporations to do what they do. Moral defects or character defects aren’t really the cause of capitalists’ problematic behaviour patterns.

The true cause is the reality within which they live and within which they actually try to do the best they can. What I mean by that is: like most normal people they are believers, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, in mainstream reality and its principles – principles that produce a specific, fixed structure of culture and morality within which they try to behave and do well, and especially try to behave rationally. If their reality is flawed at a deep level and thus behaving according to its culture ultimately must produce problematic results, then this is not due to them, but rather due to history.

And indeed the notion that greed is the problem – that the problem is that each bad actor has this problematic personality trait – is itself individualist thinking as opposed to collectivist/structural thinking, i.e. it is anti-leftist and both reinforces individualism and provides a very easy way for the criticised to counter the polemic with individual justification that is provided by standard rationalist ethics.

So the left should focus on the structural critique – criticizing the ideology that produces the capitalist reality that capitalists are unwitting and dogmatic agents of.

 

And if one insists on making an individualist criticism of capitalists, greed wouldn’t even be the most fitting criticism: It would be that capitalists lack the awareness and courage to notice that their reality and ideology are fundamentally flawed. But, again, that would be a flawed criticism, as it consists of stating facts that are easily explained by the structural factors: Capitalists are normal people who, like other normal people, grow up in and are formed by capitalist realist social structures – a culture that is so dominant and all-pervasive that it would simply require statistically infrequent levels of rebelliousness or alternativeness for a random mind to thoroughly resist, traits which of course tend to result in marginalization.

entry 11

de-mystifying the term ‘unconscious ideology‘ – a term that may sound esoteric or meaningless or unscientific etc. – what it means and how it occurs:

Some material change occurs, and that change means that different strategies/behaviour patterns are now viable [to different degrees].

In these new circumstances, those agents have an advantage whose dispositions (which are unconscious structures of the mind) are better compatible with the new set of more viable behaviours.

And those agents who possess advantageous unconscious traits rise in success/power relative to others, and thereby those unconscious traits spread through [higher levels of] hierarchies of success/power/respect etc. .

And this proliferation constitutes an emergence of common/shared [similar] unconscious traits [- and a shift in the makeup of unconscious traits within certain social/hierarchical groups/levels].

And those shared unconscious dispositional traits at the same time are a shared causal foundation/base for common sets of rationalizations – in other words, now that minds with certain shared intuitive/unconscious aspects/traits have grouped together, this leads to certain [new] sets of rationalizations finding group appeal & acceptance and becoming prominent and standard.

This kind of complex of such sets of group rationalizations with a shared unconscious causal basis that comes about through material change interacting with unconscious mental traits is what I mean by ‘unconscious ideology’.

And of course such sets of rationalizations can build/produce more complex structures of rationalizations over time, thus more obviously becoming ideologies or systems/structures of common thinking.

entry 10

individualism & rationalism* as social & theoretical-philosophical anti-structuralism** respectively

individualism:

Individual freedom is seen as freedom from social structures… & freedom to use money to do whatever one wishes – and this monetary liberalism at the same time erodes, disintegrates, dissolves and liquefies social structures.

rationalism/rational tradition:

on the linguistic level: Under rational methodology, ones tries to reduce statements to such that can be defined and used independently of any [theoretical] context that might be too broad to be tangible, definable & explicable, and to such statements that consist of components whose meanings/functions are independent of any intangible, unconscious, impractically complex contexts. Put more simply, words and statements are isolated out of the complex structures they are/were parts of.

on the level of object/reference domain: When considering an object or a question, one can often find that this object is actually embedded in a more complex structure that is beyond practical rational analysis, and that the object’s properties and identity are dependent on a larger structure. The rational method tries, when tenable, to put aside such more complex structure in order to isolate and focus on an object that is a tangible, bounded, comprehensible piece of the universe. And rational objects of analysis thus tend to be physical and of theoretical dimension (- i.e. of [minimum] number of relata of the object’s predicate -) low enough to be reducible or definable using the available/accessible [mainstream] theories & theory levels.

on the level of belief/truth: At the same time rational theorizing tries to be free from dogma and bias by trying to be free from ideology, i.e. ideological idea structures. And this manifests in tending to minimize the positive content of theory structure, being opposed to theory structures that contain positive beliefs/determinations/propositions, instead aiming to build a purely technical/mathematical structure of neutral sets of possible choices. And this keeps the theory structure from growing in minds***, and thus minimizes the dimension and complexity of the theory structure, i.e. minimizes the extent of structure.

—

Now, the idea of freedom from social structures is of course false – a naive rationalist denial of unnoticed, unconscious structures that humans are embedded in – structures of class, hierarchies, traditions, genders, etc. And this situation of naive ignorance of causally active social structures is open for exploitation by reactionary paternalism.

And analogously, the assumptions underlying rational methodology are also naive and exploitable.

*I’m not yet sure whether to say ‘rationality’ or ‘rationalism’ or something else here – and this isn’t simply a matter of looking up which term is the one closer to what I mean, it’s a matter of a longer process that involves exploring the logical and historical relationships between these terms and contemporary ideologies/traditions and developing a terminology that can most effectively be used to let a reader see the connections and distinctions I am trying to make or explicate. Suffice to say here that I mean ‘rationalism’ in a very broad, undefined, exploratory, speculative sense and not exactly in the sense of any particular existing historical definition of ‘rationalism’. Some other of many terminological candidates for what I’m thinking of are ‘rational tradition’ and ‘rational methodology’ and ‘rational-analytical methodology’.

**I use ‘structuralism’ here in a broader sense than the common usage of the term, especially than the sociological usage: By ‘structuralism’ I roughly mean: a meta-theory/philosophy that says that structures and relations actually exist and need to be taken into account for correct analysis of any single part of the world.

***I expect to write much more on this in other notes concerning the connection between rational-analytical method and nihilism.

entry 9

Minds that try to be rational nevertheless have some feelings/intuitive thoughts that lack a rational foundation/reason/justification. But under rationalism, it is not ok to have a purely emotionally or intuitively grounded conviction – to state a thought as true with no rational explanation/argument for it – with nothing to make it rational.

One of the natural and common reactions a mind that is trying to be rational has in this situation is to come up with* a rational reason which can replace the intuition – aka a rationalization. This lets the mind hold the originally emotionally/intuitively grounded thought/conviction [or a satisfyingly compatible one] in a rationally acceptable/permissible way.

Now, the original sub/un-conscious structures of mind – the ones that produced the feeling/intuition – are still there, and in fact become hardened and perpetuated [over time] by the presence of static rationalization that is fixed over them.

now to the main point of this note:

A potential problem arises for the mind here: If the current rationalization is rescinded/removed**, then rationalism dictates the mind negate/remove the conviction, which is a painful assault on that subconscious part of the mind that still supports the conviction.

And so, somewhat ironically, the mind trying to avoid this problem develops emotional attachment to rationalizations***, which then leads to fear, entrenchment and defensiveness…

And in my experience philosophical training implicitly shows that rationalization in this very broad sense is folly and that calmness & trust & patience & openness are more effective: one observes, in repetition ad nauseam, that even the seemingly strongest, most convincing arguments and rationalizations eventually turn out to be flawed.

And it is actually ok to have a purely emotional-intuitive [theoretical/philosophical] conviction as long as one sees and says it as such instead of rationalizing it… This is especially obvious when one considers that no conviction has a completely rational reason/justification/rationalization – if one logically follows reasons ever deeper to and into the foundations, one will always find something non-rational or a dogma…

This is part of an anti-rationalist or non-rationalist philosophy.

*which, by the way, is usually a completely intuitive/non-rational/unconscious process, and always has at least some unconscious components or base even if the [conscious] mind doesn’t notice this (the mechanism relies on the mind not noticing this, and the mind usually doesn’t.).

**and not in that moment replaced by a different rationalization with the same conclusion… hopefully I will write more related to such smooth rational transitions in later posts.

***to be clear: I use ‘rationalization’ here in a very broad and more value-neutral than usual sense, including rational theories in general – scientific theories that meet the standards of rationalist methodologies.

entry 8

Surplus [of production] isn’t bad per se. The question is what the surplus is used for/transformed into:

Is it transformed into

a) more energy, light, consciousness

or into

b) more power? – with power here meaning power over others & the environment, & appearing in the form of money in its most general sense: money as credit that ideology-society-state make to function as power-over by guaranteeing the holder of the credit a freedom [& practical ability] to do something that is in logical conflict with another agent’s freedoms (Deutsch: Befugnis)

– maybe relevant to marxist theory