Talkin’ about a Revolution

https://drb.ie/articles/talkin-about-a-revolution/

by pepys • 1 year ago

67 141 1 year ago

frightened into rationality

An oxymoron if I ever heard one. To become rational means letting go of fears (to a large extent). I fear that one reason we fail to act is that we are guided by fear. Fear makes us focus on the wrong things. And I fear that in a civilized society fear becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Fear makes us obsess about the problem and how to avoid it in the very narrow and short term. It doesn't make us very good at long term planning and execution. It's an instinct that is evolved for animals that want to avoid predators, not for civilization builders.

Building a civilization requires vision, big plans and the feeling that we can afford bold ideas. We need to take risks. But how can we take more risks when we're constantly afraid of the future? How can we build a better future when all we do all day is imagining the worst possible future? If our minds are constantly occupied by dystopia we can't plan for anything else. So that's what we build.

hmmmhmmm• 1 year ago

I'm in the same camp, and I go step further and avoid places where fear is the main tune.

lynx97• 1 year ago

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

mola• 1 year ago

As I see it, Optimism is usually unrational but drives change and Fear kills optimism.

Trust is not purely rational its emotional. Fear kills trust, making you more rational in the sense that you assume other players are rationally adversarial.

worldsayshi2• 1 year ago

As I see it, pessimism is as "unrational" as optimism. There's a big span of uncertainty about the future that is filled by our intentions and beliefs. If we commit to a pessimistic worldview we are likely to make some decisions that lead towards such a world. If we commit to an optimistic worldview we are likely to get exploited by bad actors.

We have to be able to juggle both realities. That is rational.

(But I think we are essentially saying the same thing here.)

absolutelastone• 1 year ago

I'd argue we evolved to think rationally in order to specifically advance our instinctive drives, rather than the "Triume brain" view of the neocortex and lizard brain fighting for dominance. Immediate and extreme danger enforces a realistic and calculating view of reality, when otherwise people tend to avoid thinking about or dealing with a danger.

Courage is the ability to choose an alternative besides first choice of fear. But it isn't necessarily rational either, more likely a different instinctive motivation winning out. A completely emotionless person, meanwhile, would probably be completely nonfunctional.

graemep3• 1 year ago

The world gets both better and worse. it is something that I regularly get voted down for saying here, but IMO the west is unduly pessimist because it had a golden age from winning the cold war until the late 2000s, took an overly optimistic view of the future and the inevitability of progress (remember "the end of history") and cannot cope with things going back to normal.

Things get better, sometimes they get worse. Generally people are better off materially than they have ever been, but people do not change all that much morally.

johnnyanmac• 1 year ago

and cannot cope with things going back to normal.

how do we define "normal" for society?

graemep3• 1 year ago

Very loosely?

There really is no normal - things change over time. It would be more accurate to say it was the end of an period of unusual stability and security.

krapp• 1 year ago

Normal is what we're willing to accept in exchange for our comfort.

jajko• 1 year ago

Well, WWIII or some other form of nuclear strikes may change that perception.

I agree its dangerous to be overly positive and naive, we humans are still just a notch above beasts, are easy to manipulate (always via negative emotions like greed, envy, inferiority complex and so on), but things can absolutely go to utter shit, we have more capabilities than ever to spread it across globe. Not just nuclear - drone warfare is absolutely maddening. Imagine 10 millions of them, each with their target, each going with absolute precision and on its own - thats what current armies aim for and within a decade they will get it.

What is (and always was) is that very few holds most of the decision power. Get one mental unstable vicious person there and it falls down like house of cards. Our current high tech civilization is pretty fragile to disruption. Sure, we can always revert to stone age, some would even be glad, but I strongly prefer not to.

baxtr4• 1 year ago

I talked to a history professor recently and asked him how he viewed the whole situation.

He leaned back, thought for a bit and answered:

It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives.

It’s the next 30 years I’m worried about.

PS: ofc, I have no clue if he’s right or not. But I thought it’s an interesting take to share.

dataflow• 1 year ago

"Fine"? Did the history professor consider anything other than history or politics? The way global warming and our general destruction of nature is going (not just species or climate but also e.g. depletion of groundwater in a lot of heavily populated areas), I'm not sure democracy will be our biggest concern in 200 years' time.

CalRobert• 1 year ago

“democracy will continue to increase its footprint”

What was this based on?

sofixa• 1 year ago

It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives.

What could that be based on? Ask the people in Venezuela, South Africa for instance, things can definitely get much worse even for decently developed countries with democracy and a solid economic foundation.

Combine with the growth of religiosness in young people across multiple growing countries, and broad (sometimes related, sometimes not) anti-democracy trends, I really wouldn't be that optimistic.

What would make one think that e.g. the Coup Belt in Subsaharan Africa will some day get more democratic? The fundamentals aren't there - the populace is generally poor and poorly educated. Strongman rule over years/decades can erode the little civic society that existed, and then it's very very hard to get an effective democracy functioning.

eMPee584• 1 year ago

Oh, coincidentally, that is just the time window of the technological singularity.. where we either ascend to a peace- & powerful interplanetary civilization - or accidentally eradicate ourselves out of a collective lack of wisdom and sense of connectedness. Let's play..

nozzlegear2• 1 year ago

I have no comment on what your professor said, but reading the replies here just confirms to me that cynicism, pessimism and doomerism are certainly the mood of the current zeitgeist. Optimistic outlooks are too often met with a kind of reflexive dismissal or despair in a "I feel like things are really bad right now, have never been this bad before, and thus can never improve" diatribe.

There's a pervasive sense in online discussions these days that if it's cynical, dark or depressing, it has to be the truth. It's like Occam's razor for today's modern doomer: the bleakest explanation must be the correct one. And I'm not saying that things are easy or that democracy is guaranteed, but I am saying that pessimism isn't inherently more realistic than optimism.

Cynicism sells in the 21st century.

MPSFounder2• 1 year ago

There is a problem with this though. It is the price paid in exchange for democracy. Take Syria for example. It took huge human loss to free itself from Assad, Iran and Russian influence. Is the price justified? Of course in the long run autocracies fail. The lifespan of the ruler is one duration we can associate (Putin is on the verge of death). But the damage can often be very significant and take generation to undo. Just to be clear, I was very much in favor of removing those murderers. I just wonder if there were ways to mitigate this (here, EU and US should have stepped in, which they failed to do. However, they are doing it in Ukraine, which is great)

davedx2• 1 year ago

People do not change all that much morally

This is debatable. In fact, the US culture war is absolutely about what American "morality" should be. It's what a lot of the Project 2025 Manifesto is about:

"The document spans a wide range of policy areas, but when it comes to culture, family, and morality, it emphasizes a return to traditional values, a rollback of progressive social policies, and an assertive use of federal power to reshape American culture"

There's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a Culture Mild Disagreement.

TeMPOraL2• 1 year ago

There's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a Culture Mild Disagreement.

Culture war at this point is more than a decade old. It did not start with Project 2025. It started on the Internet.

Also, GP said people do not change all that much morally. That much is true. Organizations change fast. Societies change slower. The acted on rules are a combination of three, but it's important to be aware of the distinctions and the dynamics.

cmrdporcupine5• 1 year ago

Honestly, the way I see it: The people behind the 2025 stuff etc have been on the "losing" side of the culture war since 1969.

And they're sick of it, they're desperate, and now are just laying their cards on the table.

I grew up in an evangelical church in the 80s-- albeit in Canada -- attending "Focus on the Family" events, Bible studies, etc. that promulgated heavy socially conservative ethos -- so I feel like I have seen this narrative play out over a few decades ...

After the legalization of gay marriage they just collectively lost their shit. They see the stakes as being incredibly high. They see abortion as straight up murder. Winning the 2016 Trump presidency and taking over the US supreme court gave them a taste of blood, and a sense that they can finally reverse what they see as a profound descent into degeneracy. The trans rights stuff over the last few years has them totally incensed, as its a full-on assault (to them) on the ontological reality of family, body, identity, etc. that they consider intrinsic and holy and fundamental.

I think they're full of shit, but that's I think how this world view shakes down. It's a war because they feel the stakes are incredibly high.

People on the right or in boardrooms of various companies that are aligning themselves with these people for what they see are strategic ends are playing with fire.

bloomingeek5• 1 year ago

Your quoted sentence is an example of a group of people who have no idea of how to run a country. They are using the uneducated voter to support an agenda that is mostly unconstitutional. We Americans, just like other countries with a rule of law, determine our own culture within those laws.

To use federal power to reshape our culture is both arrogant and, since Project 2025 is how they want to do the reshaping, is against the New Testament principle of "live and let live". (another way to state this principle is: "Christian, mind your own business and stay in your lane.")

fransje26• 1 year ago

and cannot cope with things going back to normal.

I would argue that we worked our way to the post cold-war golden age, and then destroyed it with greed, which led to financial pain, which led to political nonsense, which led to the rubbish we are in right now.

So the period we are in right now is not the "back to normal" phase, but an actual decrease of human evolution. Not dissimilar to things that happened in the past, for example with the collapse of the roman empire.

127• 1 year ago

I would add pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. (CatGPT did a pretty good job: https://dpaste.com/HTS9DWRNZ-preview)

AnimalMuppet• 1 year ago

"People do not change that much morally."

Greed is part of what humans are. It's part of what destroys societies. Building a society that can survive human nature long term is an unsolved problem.

You sound like you expected that, after the end of the Cold War, we had a perfect society, and then we fell from a state of grace and ruined it. No, after the end of the Cold War, the pressure was removed that had been keeping us from acting on our worst impulses. Turns out that many of us were worse than we expected.

WillAdams• 1 year ago

Yeah, we need a better take on society and education --- see the discussion of Ursula K. LeGuin's essay "The Child and the Shadow":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525079

dfxm12• 1 year ago

The world gets both better and worse.

It doesn't have to get worse. Conversely, it doesn't have to get better, either, but at this point, we've got a lot of history that shows us what has and hasn't worked. I think the measure of how people are doing worth focusing on is how much of their potential they've fulfilled. I'm not really interested in how generally well off someone is today compared to someone in some random point in history because there are too many outliers on both ends of that one.

barbazoo• 1 year ago

cannot cope with things going back to normal.

Interesting take on "normal" by Canadian physician Gabor Maté.

https://drgabormate.com/book/the-myth-of-normal/

harimau7774• 1 year ago

I think that sort of analysis ignores the things that we gave up to get our golden age; such that a return to normal would actually mean ending up worse than we were before in many ways. We accepted Capitalism's race to the bottom in exchange for the benefits of consumerism. Now we are being asked to give up consumerism but there's no indication that we will also go back to a time before everything was cheaply made plastic crap.

keiferski3• 1 year ago

Good article. The point about contemporary philosophers not having grand theories is something that comes up frequently in philosophy spaces (i.e., /r/academicphilosophy or https://dailynous.com).

The problem is that the academic system is really not designed to select such individuals, instead optimizing for specialized publications, pedigree, etc. The average philosopher has zero incentive for constructing grand theories and indeed is typically ridiculed for even attempting to do so.

And so instead the best "public intellectuals" the world of philosophy can offer are either obsessively focused on particular issues rather than the field as a whole, (e.g., Peter Singer) or are entirely philosophically-uneducated charlatans who want to sell books and make money, not discover truth (e.g. Sam Harris, talking heads on Twitter, Substack, etc.) that unfortunately get an audience. The closest we get are probably Charles Taylor (big scope, but unfortunately too verbose and abstruse) or Zizek (too niche and far into his own entertainment career.)

I'm not sure what the solution is, but it probably involves a brilliant (and credentialed) philosopher that is also savvy with YouTube and willing to disregard the academic philosophy social milieu.

nonrandomstring3• 1 year ago

The problem is not limited to philosophy. All of academia is broken this way. Sadly, we think the only alternative is "industry", an equally broken set of incentives. That limits fronts of human progress to two types. We either get committee-driven institutional science leveraging huge resources, supercomputers, particle accelerators - blighted by cutthroat competition, opaque "publishing" and fraud - or radical populist individuals and small unaffiliated groups of thinkers able to operate without material resources. The Goldilocks zone of quiet, contemplative science, of whimsical, "high-risk" enquiry reminiscent of the Enlightenment, is gone in the 21st century.

keiferski3• 1 year ago

Agreed and that is a really good, but simple, point that I didn't realize as clearly before: there is no real alternative to the academia vs. industry dichotomy. What is needed might be a third option that allows for exploration without the pressures of profits or publications.

econ3• 1 year ago

I won't call it a grand theory but I like this solution to the puzzle.

https://gaby.wordpress.com/2025/03/20/wilde-democracy/

judahmeek• 1 year ago

I would like the idea of voting diplomas, but ensuring that such gate-keeping can evolve over time without being gamed to slowly strip a larger & larger fraction of the population of representation over time is a really tricky problem.

Thus, I think that the freedom to vote & to hold office should be enshrined in the constitution for everyone, regardless of criminal history or citizenship.

matrix872• 1 year ago

The average philosopher has zero incentive for constructing grand theories

I mean, considering Hegel's grand theory indirectly lead to the deaths of tens of millions in the 20th century, maybe that's not a bad thing?

nonrandomstring3• 1 year ago

The key argument I read here is that, due to specialisation, academic philosophy is currently unfit to apprehend today's problems. It is no longer capable of incorporating politics, and politics itself has escaped rational discourse. Historians are enjoying some new limelight, and popular value-revisionism is in the air, at least if Lucy Worsley's BBC series is anything to go by.

The question is: "What is progress, really?"

hawkjo• 1 year ago

Nice article, but framing it around the doomsday clock felt like the author just needed to express his angst on whatever page was in front of him

benzayb2• 1 year ago

"Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation."

-- Schopenhauer

bryanrasmussen• 1 year ago

Schopenhauer! He's one of the guys in the quotes of the big time jerks article!

https://medium.com/luminasticity/quotes-of-the-big-time-jerk...

matrix872• 1 year ago

"Moreover, when this non-conceptual, substantial knowledge professes to have sunk the idiosyncrasy of the self in essential being, and to philosophize in a true and holy manner, it hides the truth from itself: by spurning measure and definition, instead of being devoted to God, it merely gives free rein both to the contingency of the content within it, and to its own caprice. Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of the divine substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams."

-- Hegel

benzayb2• 1 year ago

“May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays of Schopenhauer

MrsPeaches• 1 year ago

Excellent book on the theme using Zambia in the 70s as a case study:

Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to a prolonged period of sharp economic decline. [1]

"From now on, it's just down, down, down..." sighed one informant (p. 13). As Ferguson argues, "Zambia's recent crisis is not only an economic crisis but a crisis of meaning, in which the way people are able to understand their experi- ence and imbue it with significance and dignity has (for many) been dramatical- ly eroded" (p.15). [2]

Not that long afterwards there was a revolution.

[1] https://www.ucpress.edu/books/expectations-of-modernity/pape...

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002190960303800...

dachworker2• 1 year ago

What strikes me is how much of these current geopolitical events are driven by singular individuals whose current inclinations were shaped by their very arbitrary past encounters. For example, if you take the current US administration's hostility towards Europe. That might just be the result of the Vice President being at Yale and encountering a few snobby children of European old money, and they might have been a bit too mean to him, and that might be the sole reason he has so much antipathy towards the whole of Europe.

jalapenos• 1 year ago

All a bunch of narcissists who's whole MO is showing off how smart they can be with words, with net negative to society.

Literally if all the morally righteous smartarses from Marx to Hegel to whichever modern university-produced cretins had done the world a favour and died nice and young the world would be a far better place.

api• 1 year ago

It’s a story of the unfolding of human progress told by an idiot, full of sound and fury that signifies nothing if you pay attention to what the idiot thinks is important.

damnitbuilds2• 1 year ago

History stopped being useful and became a meaningless recreation when it moved away from the fact that facts are absolute, not relative to the observer.

vintermann• 1 year ago

Find me an absolute point, and I'll move the world.

alabastervlog7• 1 year ago

You're relying on something that's not a fact, to make this post.

damnitbuilds2• 1 year ago

The fact that people disagree with something does not make it false.

farts_mckensy• 1 year ago

Idealism sucks ass.

20after42• 1 year ago

Ideally, it sucks the most ass of all.

lenerdenator• 1 year ago

China, Russia and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernise their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation.

An annoyance of mine is that this person is from Europe and seems to ignore that the UK[0] and France[1] are modernizing and, at least in the UK's case, expanding their stockpiles.

There seems to be a continental myopia towards the European role in adding to the problems of the world.

EDIT: You can downvote me all you want, it doesn't make me wrong.

[0]https://fas.org/publication/delays-deferment-and-continuous-...

[1]https://thebulletin.org/premium/2023-07/nuclear-notebook-fre...

Talkin’ about a Revolution

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