Tag: individualism

48

a daost-adjacent(?) principle for [utopian/humane] economy

One should only do what one is best at – even the best at

One should commit ones life to what one is the best at – one shouldn’t choose an occupation/career if one knows that someone else will be better than one at it.

If there is no profession that one can be the best at, one can still find something that one is the best at – whether this means opening a [unique] new path or performing a roll (better than anyone else could, due to your identity) in your community/family, in your unique position relative to your specific web of relations…*

Imagine this world, where things are only done by those who are best at them.**

Every individual going that path that fits them, as opposed to being forced down a path that fits the demands of capital/reality – thus equal opportunity for fulfillment of ones desire for life and meaning.

*Or if you want, think of this analytically and more generally in the typical way: as increasing the number of relata in the relational ‘best at’ predicate…

**All but the very best worker, i.e. the master of craft, replaced by machines [and of course apprentices…But do those apprentices simply learn the same craft in the hopes of becoming the best, or simply learn it because it’s what one feels one could do best in among all things one considers doing? Or does apprenticeship change its meaning, so that in every apprenticeship it is implicit that the end of the path is not doing the same as your master, but doing something at least slightly different, something that you will be better at than even the master?]?

February 11th,

a [quasi-]corollary occurred to me:

[whenever possible,] One should only give attention to something if there is no other person who is more interested in that thing…

Obviously, this has particularly weird consequences for mass-media/social media and cultural content.


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 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.