I can’t speak to how things were, but in my life, ideas have made the difference, and last time I checked, I was human, which means it may be possible for other humans as well.
It’s important to remember that the battle of ideas is about the sustainability of positive change as much as the creation of change itself.
Twenty years ago, this conversation could only take place in person at a cafe or something or possibly as pen pals. Clearly, we’re already doing precisely what you’re talking about. Look at Flash animation, for example. Complain about the technical problems with it all you like, it’s an amazingly flexible medium and individual people are doing things with it that would have required big-budget teams of animators and other talent just twenty years ago. Consider this xtranormal animation, for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cFXRFlvE3s
Clayton -
The easiest and most powerful reform that could be undertaken now with the least opposition is abolishing the zoning system. It is extremely poorly understood, which is what makes oppposition to changes weak at the moment. I’ve already pushed this publicly; but, my coverage is not broad enough and I haven’t gotten the chance to properly explain the reason.
Are you sure that it’s not just a bunch of unneccesary complexity?
Could you elaborate?
Who exactly are the modernists?
“Sterilized”?
Who exactly made those claims, and why are you highly skeptical of them?
Just as long as they’re still “natural” languages?
Are math symbolism and musical notation “natural” languages?
You’re alive and breathing, aren’t you? Your ancestors back hundreds of generations spoke natural language. Evolution is a merciless economizer, how could that all be “unnecessary complexity”??
Watch this lecture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU&playnext=1&list=PLAAD760E2C6B8DE8E
If you don’t come away with a new appreciation of natural language, then there’s nothing more I can say.
Russell, Wittgenstein and the like. Basically, the whole gang of late 19th/early 20th century philosophers who imagined that we could transcend human language with something more powerful (i.e. pure logic/pure formal language).
By “sterilized” I mean “cleansed of attachment to the messiness of real human language evolution”.
Many thinkers have proposed searching for an “alphabet of human thought”, starting at least with Leibniz. I’m not opposed to such a search but any formal language by its very nature consists of a restricted vocabulary and fixed syntax. A frequent goal of such formal languages is to eliminate grammatical ambiguity or enforce type associations (only this verb can be applied to that noun by virtue of their construction and the rules of the language). The number of artificial formal languages in existence is impossible to count.
In the all-encompassing sense of “natural”, yes, but in the sense of having arisen through day-to-day speech communication between non-specialist persons, no.
Clayton -
Of course.
Okay.
People make mistakes all the time. Sometimes they make them systematically. Think statism.
I watched that a few months ago, but I don’t remember coming away with any sort of new appreciation.
Okay.
Why does any of that make you highly skeptical of it?
Which sense was this point in?
CrazyCoot replied on Thu, Mar 24 2011 8:41 AM
We can’t. Start drinking whiskey. It helps, trust me.
whiskey helps. it really does. build a still. ive got good recipies for all.
I sure as hell would like to know where the evidence is.
When things get bad people will not be looking for new ways that involve voluntary cooperation and the removal of coercion as a justifiable element in human interaction. They’re going to be looking for people to blame and throw off cliffs. People are usually more persuaded by a gun to their heads than ideas. I wish I could believe in the constant progress of ideas, or that people will be convinced… but I´m not.
It is a contest of ideas; but it is false to assume that peoples ideas can be shaped to fit libertarianism. People do what they do because of ideas, but they’re not going to drastically change their outlook or piss-poor critical thinking no matter how much we harp on them.
You’re fighting biology; which is pretty hopeless. I wish libertarians would just accept that. I find their street preaching annoying.
Yes, it is a contest of ideas.
I don’t know, we’re fighting biology, but is it really hopeless? Humanity learned other counter-intuitive concepts, like heliocentrism or evolution, it just takes time to seep in. And why couldn’t we turn that weakness into a strength? The main lesson of libertarianism seems to be that we want people to grasp that it’s not 100.000 BC any more, that the world is not what our evolutionary hardcoding tells us it is. If we’re fighting evolutionary prejudges, that makes us modern and scientific. We should be making that argument more. A lot of ideologies are successful because they managed to present themselves as the antidote for superstition. Yet libertarians never make that appeal.
I don’t know, we’re fighting biology, but is it really hopeless? Humanity learned other counter-intuitive concepts, like heliocentrism or evolution, it just takes time to seep in.
Did they, really? Or do they just parrot the prevailing dogma? Many people deny human evolution, and the liberals who argue for it often deny its consequences; like genotypical variations in human beings. Stephen Jay Gould was openly dogmatic that he would not even consider human biodiversity because it contradicted his political prejudices. Further, these things are far less in tension with their prejudices than a mysterious indirect coordination of production; or minding their own goddamn business.
And why couldn’t we turn that weakness into a strength? The main lesson of libertarianism seems to be that we want people to grasp that it’s not 100.000 BC any more, that the world is not what our evolutionary hardcoding tells us it is. If we’re fighting evolutionary prejudges, that makes us modern and scientific. We should be making that argument more. A lot of ideologies are successful because they managed to present themselves as the antidote for superstition. Yet libertarians never make that appeal.
That they lie to themselves is precisely what people don’t want to hear. To accept these views they would have to accept that so much of what they do is just social signaling and herd mentality; yet their brains are constructed precisely to not let them see that because it undermines the whole system.
You’re absolutely right, they only parrot the prevailing dogma. But why did it become the prevailing dogma? Why don’t people still think it’s unavoidable to have slavery, look into the sky and think it’s “obvious” that the sun goes around the earth or think that central planning is clearly more efficient than a private enterprise system? All these cultural changes happened somehow. Even though it may only be a tiny elite that actually understands them, and most people just parrot whatever sounds enlightened at the moment, I see no reason why this wouldn’t continue to a point where free market economics is generally accepted. Maybe not libertarian philosophy in all it’s facets, but the support of statism is largely based on economic ignorance. To have a pretty libertarian world, it would be enough for basic economic literacy to become generally accepted. I do know that libertarianism wins in the end, because the prevailing dogmas in 2011 are vastly more libertarian than those of 100 or 200 years ago. I agree with what you say in the other thread, that libertarian preaching is largely useless. Rather this progress happens spontaneously. But if there was no social evolution towards a more individualist order, humans wouldn’t have better technology than chimpanzees. I just thought I’d counter your pessimism.
The meme ‘evangelical atheism’ seems to do fine with one of it’s main messages being that people lie to themselves. People want to feel elitist and tell others that they lie to themselves. Elitist self-congratulation seems to be part of any successful modern ideology, and I think a sense of superiority is part of the appeal of libertarianism. They should try to market that more. Libertarians are just bad at appealing to heard-mentality because they are the individualist fringe.
I’m with EmperorNero on this one, I think that we can adapt because we have a prefrontal cortex, that is, humans have a means of adapting much more rapidly than their genome changes. This is why rape is uncommon despite the fact that rape is an excellent reproductive strategy and common in other species. However, the trouble with changes to humanity through social evolution (by this I mean evolution in the “social landscape” that pushes and pulls our mental levers forcing us to behave this or that way, irrespective of our genetic wiring) is susceptible to sabotage in a way that our genes are not*. And I think that the long struggle of the State to battle social developments that threaten its status quo is evidence that such sabotage works and matters.
However, I think the evolutionary pressure towards greater rationality in social structures will, over time, keep bulldozing the attempts of the State and its ilk to sabotage social evolution. Each new measure works for a while then is eclipsed by bigger social changes that swamp out the effects of the old system. Consider the cartelization of broadcast media in the US. It definitely worked and the US government scored several major successes in propaganda, simply consider the effectiveness of WWII propaganda, for exmaple. But like a drug, the effect wears off with repeated use and a resistance is built up. Then larger changes come along (e.g. the Internet) and make the whole thing obsolete. News rags and broadcast news stations are going belly up left and right.
Clayton -
*Though, with the development of genomic technologies, even our biology is now becoming susceptible to sabotage
This may be the appropriate time to ask everyone here to have more children than his/her national average. In Western Europe it should be easy
This may be the appropriate time to ask everyone here to have more children than his/her national average.
Do you mean genetic children, or memetic ones?
look into the sky and think it’s “obvious” that the sun goes around the earth
I will reply in full later, but I just wanted to respond to this because it’s a pet peeve:
Sol DOES orbit the Earth. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this statement. Likewise, the Earth IS the center of the Universe. Both of these are utterly correct from the viewpoint of our relative frame of motion. People often mention these ideas as though they had been refuted or were silly, but no, they are in fact correct. Relativity refuted heliocentrism; your real ‘center’ is your reference point. There is no absolute center or absolute motion.
Also, the ether was never refuted. It is just impossible to detect for relativistic reasons, and therefor useless in our present SMPP framework, but there is no reason it couldn’t exist.
Lastly, it was mainly Mesopotamians who thought the Earth was flat. A goodly number of educated Greeks, Indians and Chinese have known for millenia that the Earth is round for a variety of reasons.
I mean genetic. Libertarians are, at least to some extent, born, not made.
