ITT We disclose our political biases

[zarus tathra]

I'm reading a book "The Menace of the Herd: Procrustes at Large" written by Erik Ritter von-Kuehnelt Leddihn, a former Austrian nobleman who became an American professor. He spent his career criticizing democracy (but not the republic) and the egalitarian strain in political thought. His criticism boils down to this: democracy is a political economy that can easily turn into an illiberal campaign against individuality, and that the desire for equality will in almost all instances degenerate into a bureaucratic desire for conformity.

When looking at bourgeois democracy and Marxism in particular, he believed that the former was a regime in which the ruling classes sought to engender a general sense of mediocrity by integrating all other classes into the bourgeois/bureaucratic classes, while the latter sought to engender a general sense of inferiority by tearing down everything that made humans better than mere animals.

To be perfectly blunt, much of my motivation for creating this thread was a vague but unmistakable sense that most of the people on this forum (and this subforum in particular) were either at one of the poles of democracy/communism in terms of aesthetic and cultural tastes, or somewhere between them. The reluctance with which you divulge your cultural biases implies a sense of embarrassment over them and really only confirms my opinion.

With that said, I'm done with this thread.

[DunkleSeele]

The reluctance with which you divulge your cultural biases implies a sense of embarrassment over them and really only confirms my opinion.

With that said, I'm done with this thread.

Or maybe the reluctance is due to the fact that we don't care to divulge our position to someone who, from day one, has always displayed an elitist attitude and a sense of self-proclaimed superiority. You never come here to discuss, you only want to massage your huge ego and take cheap shots at other members to make yourself feel better than your fellow members. Why would we want to feed your misplaced sense of superiority?

(Note: I'm not talking as a mod, but as a member of this community)

[Hakurei Reimu]

ZT, I think you've been on this forum long enough to know that I value what works (pragmatism) and as much as possible society should be based on fairness, because we all know the universe isn't. If you're not clever enough to pick up on that, then you have no business asking about anyone's cultural/political biases.

[Jason Harvestdancer]

I think claiming "pragmatism" is a cop-out.  Pragmatism is merely the path to a goal, the goal is dictated by ideology.

If you want higher unemployment, there is a pragmatic way to achieve it.
If you want lower unemployment, there is a pragmatic way to achieve it.
If you want racial integration, there is a pragmatic way to achieve it.
If you want racial segregation, there is a pragmatic way to achieve it.
If you want (insert anything here), there is a pragmatic way to achieve it.

[Hakurei Reimu]

You'd be surprised how many people think their unachievable ideologies are of higher value than workable policy.

[zarus tathra]

So you're a conservative in the general, academic sense?

[the_antithesis]

You'd be surprised how many people think their unachievable ideologies are of higher value than workable policy.

Yeah. It's kind of like believing in god.

[SGOS]

Yeah. It's kind of like believing in god.

Ideological thinking does seem very much like religion.  It offers an eventual utopia by following strict rules to get there, but the half baked theories of preference have never been tested, and just like the religious zealot, the ideologue can claim the goal has not been reached because the implementation is always corrupted by the outside forces of non-believers.

[zarus tathra]

That's why you need small-scale implementations or reforms of existing systems before you can get anywhere. Even in engineering the best methodology is to start by implementing a vital subset of a whole feature set before you try to build EVERYTHING

It's one thing to say that changing this or that institution will improve things. It's another thing to go full Marx and say that you have a theory of how EVERYTHING works.

And this is actually part of what inspired me to say that terms should always be given hardened definitions before they're given any weight at all. It is absolutely vital to quantify desired performance when you're building software or machinery. It should be doubly so when you're talking about the goals and methodology of a political movement, not only to give a standard by which critics can judge a movement, but also to allow it to succeed and gauge its own success (or more often lack of it).

This will sound a bit mba-ish, but according to a book I have called "Superconnect," it's important to have a wide array of weak connections. If all you have are strong connections to other people, even if you have a LOT of them, that will probably end up stunting the growth and development both of you and the people you work with. And it seems like all the utopian philosophies have in mind a society in which every interpersonal connection, whether of master/slave or worker/comrade to worker/comrade, is "strong." And if you look at history, this is born out. Greece was built on strong relationships and well-defined roles, and it failed to grow. Rome, on the other hand, had very loose coupling between the different classes and it grew very stably until the Imperial era, when all power was consolidated in the hands of the army and later the Emperor and any separation of concerns was destroyed.

You also see this in poor communities in the US of all races. Whenever their community is too tightly coupled and lacking in loose connections to the outside world, there is great poverty and lack of education. Everybody needs a buffer of people they kind of care about and kind of don't. It's maddening if everybody has to live like Communists, perfectly in touch with all those who they come into contact with.