In the post that Eisenstein published in 2023 when he announced that he was joining Kennedy's campaign, he explicitly described his inner process of loss of meaning, diminution of hope that his work was accomplishing much, and possible withdrawal from public life. Then he explained what was essentially his self-seduction by Kennedy's interest in him. He was revealing both about his "dark night" and his attachment to a new hope for meaning. When people engage in this sort of radical revisioning of the meaning structures in their lives, they often spring from a loss of meaning into a new meaning structure. As someone who valued Eisenstein's previous work, I feel disgusted by him—but I also feel sorry for him—and for our loss of who he used to be.
I think as Daniel points out, his 'one size fits all Story of Separation' was probably getting a little tired even then, before he joined the campaign, which might have contributed to the loss of meaning. Maybe he was feeling like his well of inspiration had dried up a bit and this was the thing to get it going. In fact quite the reverse; even though a lot of his essays do contain some wisdom and make good points, the overall trend has definitely been downwards, with the last two particularly stinking the place out.
I see western man’s movement to individual freedom, the freedom to be a selfish arsehole, as being the reason many alternative truth seakers have been found ungrounded. They have lost the village which supported us for millennia. It’s about me, not us.
In a small and less intellectually rigorous way, I'm seeing and expressing what you say. I wade in only because I see that rfk aligned voters might tip us into a T presidency, but that's not a given. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/qJ1JPdsfgUL5zkS7/?mibextid=oFDknk
It’s just too much work to wade against the current of establishment opinion- if the tv says they’re washed up kooks that’s all they have time for. Give them a proposed new way forward and they’ll take it, like Clinton, like O’bama. They don’t have time to completely overhaul their thinking, which is what Bonespur and RFK are asking everyone to do, and Nader before them, and Bernie.
I’m trying to overhaul MY thinking and have been trying for a long time, but it’s a giant task and most people cave after 5 minutes of effort.
yes, it's an all-consuming, more-than-full-time job. I sort of feel like I'm trying to be a mama bird, chewing it all up, digesting it (or whatever birds do) and then trying to find ways to put that disgested, clarified stuff back out there (as a bird feeds her young in my totally underinformed metaphor). But then I also wonder if that, too, isn't some narcissitic project. Why do I think I can be the one to do that? Who do I think I am? And it's pretty much like trying to grasp the contours of an ever-expanding universe, which is obviously physically impossible. It's hard to see where the earnestness ends and the ego begins
Thank you Daniel for your commitment these past few days to the intellectual support I/we need to steer our minds and hearts through rough water. Eagerly awaited installments. (Thank you also Vicky Robin for your comment and link.) Assuming that popular cultural eruptions might be a symptom of deeper evils/shadows messing with us, I wonder if the reality-competition shows Survivor (2000) and The Apprentice (2004) foreshadowed the voted-off-the-island and you’re-fired mindsets we now see in real reality.
I keep coming back to the work of Jay Hanson and I have yet to find any real hole in it; human beings are like a bunch of yeast- we’re going to eat all the sugar and create a toxic stew that we’re all going to die in. It’s not our fault and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Evolution is not a one way street going straight up. It’s circular. A particular specie emerges, over time reaches maximum environmental fitness, then declines, then goes extinct. That’s how it works. No exceptions, including us.
You find a particular area of vexing discordance? Pollution? Over pop? Unjustified war? The question becomes- are they human? Ok well, there’s your answer.
I have only skimmed, but I also would like to counter the "yeast theory" with a somewhat more positive articulation by Daniel Schmachtenberger: "Now we’re going through a discrete phase shift into a new lifecycle. Very much like a fetal time period. An embryonic time period is unsustainable. A caterpillar can’t just keep devastating its ecosystem without pollinating forever. But, that’s not how it works. And a baby couldn’t stay in the belly after 40 weeks and act parasitically, but that’s not how it works. It is going through a period where it’s system is fundamentally not capable of the kinds of autonomy that it will later be capable of, so it’s a finite evolutionary period of unsustainable development, to then go through a discrete phase shift, to then be in a fundamentally new period. And so, I think it’s a very fair analogy to look at humanity as having been in a kind of embryonic period. Bucky Fuller used to like to speak to it like that. Like, a chicken embryo, having finished eating the egg white, nonrenewable resources, emerge from a world it didn’t know it was in. Emerge from a shell to a world where it now has a beak that it didn’t have before when it was in the egg whites, come from plants that it’s poop fertilizes, and it’s part of this larger, regenerative process that evolved."
If the reigning media framework (is that plural of medium? I’m thinking Petri dish) for propagating ideas - the podcast-pundit-sphere - is an engine for selecting ideas for propagation and rewarding successful ‘idea emitters’ and ‘meme-hounds’ .. then ..
Our system is rewarding certain types of ideas and presentation styles… and thus rewarding those ‘idea-emitters’ - I have no idea what the criteria for a success of these ideas is but I don’t like the results of the current ‘algo’
People that manage to ‘sound’ compelling are hurling nonsense into the noosphere…
Could our ideaspace be degrading? Just like the atmosphere.. does the noosphere have a too many toxins in it…? it seems like there is a degredation in coherence and quality of ideas I encounter - Ai algo’s reflecting back a fun house mirror of my recent musings - coherence melting into a crocodile morphed into a rocket ..
Meanwhile I keep seeing news that there is an area the size of Italy on fire in the Amazon - and my mind simulates the reactions from the different meme-camps
I search for some conceptual container or ideology I can put the whole squirming madness of ‘the world’ into and get on with my day… maybe the new normal is learning accept a certain ‘unresolvability’ nothing ‘sits right’ anymore
So it could be that’s what people are looking for and what these ideamongers are selling
Cheap relief from dissonance of late stage capitalism
What an interesting framing, to see the ideasphere as full of toxins. That's so helpful. Just as we seek cheap relief from hunger (shitty processed food), we seek cheap comfort in over-processed ideas. The thing is, neither of those really satisfy. In fact, we're often hungrier as a consequence. So the real point, to continue your metaphor, is to offer real nourishment and give people a taste of what that feels like. As David Brooks recently said, "Once you've had the fine wine, the kool aid is less appealing" (or something to that effect, talking about the choice to dive into great books that someone took 4-5 years to write vs an article that took about an hour). Of course, people have very different ideas of what feels nourishing, but at the bottom of it all, we need protein of some sort (I've been dealing with this for 10 years with my vegetarian children). When you don't have enough protein, you feel hangry and untethered. When you do, you feel grounded, anchored, relaxed. It's not as simple as that, but it's very significant. How to get protein back into the idea diet!?? Your comment really helped me to think about this in a new way. THANK YOU!
Are you familiar with Mark Crispin Miller's work on charting what he views - I agree with him - as the massive effect the vaccines have had on early mortality?
I recommend clicking around his Substack. I'm not saying that every single thing he attributes to the vaccine is from the vaccine, but he paints a rather apocalyptic picture.
Re politics it seems impossible to believe in anything anymore. Any and every system seems like it will inevitably be warped towards evil by human nature.
Neither has been discredited. For them to be discredited, there has to be a good faith and open discussion of the data in the first place. There hasn’t been one, thanks to the corruption of the regulatory process and the revolving door between the pharmaceutical industry and the regulators.
The anti-Covid vax was the consequence of Mr. Warp Speed himself, Trump, cutting out the “red tape” to get the product into the marketplace at lightning speed, due to the ostensible emergency. Without Trump and his Operation Warp Speed, there would have been no vax. It is a fact that the normal safety protocols weren’t followed, since these normally require many years from conception to delivery on the marketplace. That’s why I have a hard time seeing why RFK as harsh critic of the vax is allying with Trump, the facilitator of the vax. Trump hasn’t changed his tune, he still declares the vax a success and boastfully takes credit for it.
I think he vaccilates between taking credit for it and siding with anti-vaxers, much like his waffling on abortion. In the end he will do whatever the Heritage foundation tells him to do.
Miller's article: The question is are the increased deaths a result of the vax or of the coronavirus itself, as both nurses and wrestlers were probably exposed over and over.
Kirsch: I don't have the scientific credentials to evaluate whether his data is accurate or whether those who debunk his data is accurate. I do like "Debunk the Funk" and also Doctors I have spoken with believe the vaccine ultimately saved far more people than were harmed / killed by it. I do not know how to evaluate these claims authentically.
Love the Sovereignty angle discussed here. Very well made and I agree wholeheartedly.
Reluctant to stir up the vaccine controversy, however, I would like to make two points that maybe you’d like to explore further:
1. Regarding the role of big pharma, if the world had adopted the European pharma model over the US one in terms of regulatory frameworks, we’d be in a much better position.
2. If the other big pharma companies had done what Astra Zeneca originally did and offered the vaccine for free, the arguments on either side would not have been enmeshed in the money problem.
Sorry I missed our catch-up at Medicine Festival but hope we catch up somewhere soon
It’s simply a philosophical choice we are faced with as to the fundamental nature and destiny of human beings and how they should be led.
Currently I’m in a masters program studying Eastern History and philosophy and this is a parallel I’m noticing of a greater evil than libertarianism. Looking at 2000 years of dynasty successes and failures in The Record of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian here are some interesting patterns:
In ancient China the empire building military conquest of states was supported by a legalist philosophy.. that emphasized obedience to laws versus guidance by morality or virtue.
Legalist philosophy like modern materialistic philosophy and political totalitarian control is based on a cynicism about human nature which it sees as purely egotistic and motivated solely by the thought of reward and punishment.
In the view of Mencius and traditional Chinese philosophers humans are basically moral creatures, who are inspired by virtue.
The essential nature of human beings is goodness. Though these philosophers recognized that that goodness can be conditioned out of human beings by custom and leaders.
“No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the sufferings of other”
“Benevolence is the high honor bestowed by Heaven and the peaceful abode of man”
Mencius
Mencius view is more like our country’s founders otherwise democratic processes are absurd.
Dialogue , discourse would be useless repetition of misinformation. Voting would be an unnecessary and unreliable way to govern.
At best voting would be a useful fiction, to be shaped as needed through multiple means by those with the money, power, influence and “superior knowledge” to do so.
Legalists are authoritarians who see the will of the people as rule by the ignorant rabble. They constantly question, mold, gaslight, disparage, threaten, punish or undercut the perception of the people and their will. The direction and actions of the nation are best determined in private by those experts who are in the know. The survival of the nation is too fragile to be left to un- curated public opinion.
Granting freedom of speech or privacy to the people can only lead to dangerous abuses that destabilize governmental control. Democracy is an outdated, unscientific ideal. There are far better more scientific and more measurable ways to govern and create the “greatest good”. AI ,big data, and complete surveillance of the population make complete control possible.
Hence all the Democratic Party arguments about us having too many freedoms and that the rights granted by the constitution should be seen by all reasonable / modern people as outdated and dangerous.
I love this comment but not sure where you see this: “ Democratic Party arguments about us having too many freedoms”?
I’m looking into the free speech issue at the moment - will post a podcast with Matt Stoller tomorrow. Stoller believes that this idea of “free speech absolutism” is also flawed and undemocratic: the platforms like Facebook and TikTok need to be regulated by the government to prevent horrors. A recent example is the TikTok lawsuit around the 10 year old girl who died due to an asphyxiation challenge that was posted on TikTok. Just as cigarettes need to be regulated, we can’t allow for companies like Meta to benefit from attacks on human rights (Myanmar) etc. This has to be addressed at the platform level. I think this makes sense. Nobody is legislating against your freedom to say what you want at home but you shouldn’t be allowed amplification for destructive speech that leads to criminal outcomes.
I really like Matt Stoller and look forward to this talk, but disagree wholeheartedly. There are new policy and laws in the making around social media and children, which are necessary and long overdue. See Jonathan Haight. But this is separate from the Free Speech conversation. Who constitutes what is violence? Who constitutes what speech leads to violence? This is impossible.
Daniel, I so appreciate your willingness and courage to jump into the swamp that is our current political scene and try to filter out meaning and purpose out of all of the muck. Your explorations are thought provoking, even if I don’t always agree with your conclusions.
On the topic of turncoats, I think we need to beware of the way we can be manipulated to turn on ourselves, when in fact the source of the problems we face lies beyond and above all of us. I would love to see you and Charles and Russell and Zach and around a round table, respectfully sharing your views and ideas for solutions for the more beautiful world, we all know in our hearts is possible. ( as Charles has written)
When someone I follow changes their stance and/or alliances, I am curious and intrigued about their motives, and yes, sometimes it's as crass as them just trying to get more clicks and followers. But in this case, the “turncoats” may be choosing the only other option—-less than ideal but look at it this way, Trump and the Trumpers are now being “influenced” by former liberal idealists who actually can envision a better world, even if they don’t have viable solutions yet. On the other side, they have the endorsement and support of Dick Cheney and other Neo-cons, and that is worrisome.
I think you should send your How Soon Is Now Book to both the Trump and Harris campaigns and see if and how they respond. We have to find ways to break out of our echo chambers! https://youtu.be/mHFusD9xuH4?si=FzfhG6ts-sDzyHfE
There’s a fractal quality to it too: an individual life, family, group, tribe, state, nation, species. Genesis, general unfitness, survival, to fitness, reign of fitness, to fall and unfitness, to entropy, to extinction. Breaking that cycle I assume would be a Sisyphean task, likely unreachable by one single individual, like Mithra or Lenin say.
Take the following with a grain of salt: obviously I can't confirm if this is true, but if it is, it provides a window into how J.D. Vance and RFK Jr. both wound up in an alliance with Trump despite previously being vehement detractors:
"Carlson is the issue not just because he’s got a massive audience; it’s because he’s a prominent figure in the Trumpified, MAGA-fied Republican party. He had a prominent speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. He has reportedly grown close with members of Donald Trump’s inner circle, including Donald Trump Jr. Carlson reportedly lobbied for JD Vance, a frequent guest on his show, to be selected as Trump’s running mate and helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr."
Tucker Carlson I had a certain amount of wary, guarded respect for in the past, for his apparent willingness to rethink some of his own positions, but recently he's welcomed a Hitler-loving pseudo-historian onto his show. This ostensible "historian" sounds no different from David Irving, who is probably the source of his own "research."
In the post that Eisenstein published in 2023 when he announced that he was joining Kennedy's campaign, he explicitly described his inner process of loss of meaning, diminution of hope that his work was accomplishing much, and possible withdrawal from public life. Then he explained what was essentially his self-seduction by Kennedy's interest in him. He was revealing both about his "dark night" and his attachment to a new hope for meaning. When people engage in this sort of radical revisioning of the meaning structures in their lives, they often spring from a loss of meaning into a new meaning structure. As someone who valued Eisenstein's previous work, I feel disgusted by him—but I also feel sorry for him—and for our loss of who he used to be.
I think as Daniel points out, his 'one size fits all Story of Separation' was probably getting a little tired even then, before he joined the campaign, which might have contributed to the loss of meaning. Maybe he was feeling like his well of inspiration had dried up a bit and this was the thing to get it going. In fact quite the reverse; even though a lot of his essays do contain some wisdom and make good points, the overall trend has definitely been downwards, with the last two particularly stinking the place out.
I see western man’s movement to individual freedom, the freedom to be a selfish arsehole, as being the reason many alternative truth seakers have been found ungrounded. They have lost the village which supported us for millennia. It’s about me, not us.
"lost the village" is a powerful articulation of that
In a small and less intellectually rigorous way, I'm seeing and expressing what you say. I wade in only because I see that rfk aligned voters might tip us into a T presidency, but that's not a given. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/qJ1JPdsfgUL5zkS7/?mibextid=oFDknk
love this post! We are fighting the same battle here, Vicki! And it was great being on stage with you in NYC!
It’s just too much work to wade against the current of establishment opinion- if the tv says they’re washed up kooks that’s all they have time for. Give them a proposed new way forward and they’ll take it, like Clinton, like O’bama. They don’t have time to completely overhaul their thinking, which is what Bonespur and RFK are asking everyone to do, and Nader before them, and Bernie.
I’m trying to overhaul MY thinking and have been trying for a long time, but it’s a giant task and most people cave after 5 minutes of effort.
Who was “Bonespur” again?
You are a funny, funny man, sometimes, but not often enough. Smart people are the funniest. Thanks
The orange fella
yes, it's an all-consuming, more-than-full-time job. I sort of feel like I'm trying to be a mama bird, chewing it all up, digesting it (or whatever birds do) and then trying to find ways to put that disgested, clarified stuff back out there (as a bird feeds her young in my totally underinformed metaphor). But then I also wonder if that, too, isn't some narcissitic project. Why do I think I can be the one to do that? Who do I think I am? And it's pretty much like trying to grasp the contours of an ever-expanding universe, which is obviously physically impossible. It's hard to see where the earnestness ends and the ego begins
Earnesty doesn’t always invalidate ego. Does emotion invalidate truth? Why do boys have nipples? Did the goddess make a mistake?
Great post
Thank you Daniel for your commitment these past few days to the intellectual support I/we need to steer our minds and hearts through rough water. Eagerly awaited installments. (Thank you also Vicky Robin for your comment and link.) Assuming that popular cultural eruptions might be a symptom of deeper evils/shadows messing with us, I wonder if the reality-competition shows Survivor (2000) and The Apprentice (2004) foreshadowed the voted-off-the-island and you’re-fired mindsets we now see in real reality.
I think Michael Hirschorn just wrote an op Ed to that effect in The NY Times. Part of the general “race to the bottom”!
I always agree with just about everything you write. Thanks for being a beacon of light.
You are most welcome! Please share widely. ❤️
I keep coming back to the work of Jay Hanson and I have yet to find any real hole in it; human beings are like a bunch of yeast- we’re going to eat all the sugar and create a toxic stew that we’re all going to die in. It’s not our fault and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Evolution is not a one way street going straight up. It’s circular. A particular specie emerges, over time reaches maximum environmental fitness, then declines, then goes extinct. That’s how it works. No exceptions, including us.
You find a particular area of vexing discordance? Pollution? Over pop? Unjustified war? The question becomes- are they human? Ok well, there’s your answer.
Whats a link to the yeast theory?
I have only skimmed, but I also would like to counter the "yeast theory" with a somewhat more positive articulation by Daniel Schmachtenberger: "Now we’re going through a discrete phase shift into a new lifecycle. Very much like a fetal time period. An embryonic time period is unsustainable. A caterpillar can’t just keep devastating its ecosystem without pollinating forever. But, that’s not how it works. And a baby couldn’t stay in the belly after 40 weeks and act parasitically, but that’s not how it works. It is going through a period where it’s system is fundamentally not capable of the kinds of autonomy that it will later be capable of, so it’s a finite evolutionary period of unsustainable development, to then go through a discrete phase shift, to then be in a fundamentally new period. And so, I think it’s a very fair analogy to look at humanity as having been in a kind of embryonic period. Bucky Fuller used to like to speak to it like that. Like, a chicken embryo, having finished eating the egg white, nonrenewable resources, emerge from a world it didn’t know it was in. Emerge from a shell to a world where it now has a beak that it didn’t have before when it was in the egg whites, come from plants that it’s poop fertilizes, and it’s part of this larger, regenerative process that evolved."
https://civilizationemerging.com/media/future-thinkers-podcast-phase-shifting-humanity/
I looked it up. https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/requiem-by-jay-hanson/
This post got me thinking genetic algorithms …
If the reigning media framework (is that plural of medium? I’m thinking Petri dish) for propagating ideas - the podcast-pundit-sphere - is an engine for selecting ideas for propagation and rewarding successful ‘idea emitters’ and ‘meme-hounds’ .. then ..
Our system is rewarding certain types of ideas and presentation styles… and thus rewarding those ‘idea-emitters’ - I have no idea what the criteria for a success of these ideas is but I don’t like the results of the current ‘algo’
People that manage to ‘sound’ compelling are hurling nonsense into the noosphere…
Could our ideaspace be degrading? Just like the atmosphere.. does the noosphere have a too many toxins in it…? it seems like there is a degredation in coherence and quality of ideas I encounter - Ai algo’s reflecting back a fun house mirror of my recent musings - coherence melting into a crocodile morphed into a rocket ..
Meanwhile I keep seeing news that there is an area the size of Italy on fire in the Amazon - and my mind simulates the reactions from the different meme-camps
I search for some conceptual container or ideology I can put the whole squirming madness of ‘the world’ into and get on with my day… maybe the new normal is learning accept a certain ‘unresolvability’ nothing ‘sits right’ anymore
So it could be that’s what people are looking for and what these ideamongers are selling
Cheap relief from dissonance of late stage capitalism
What an interesting framing, to see the ideasphere as full of toxins. That's so helpful. Just as we seek cheap relief from hunger (shitty processed food), we seek cheap comfort in over-processed ideas. The thing is, neither of those really satisfy. In fact, we're often hungrier as a consequence. So the real point, to continue your metaphor, is to offer real nourishment and give people a taste of what that feels like. As David Brooks recently said, "Once you've had the fine wine, the kool aid is less appealing" (or something to that effect, talking about the choice to dive into great books that someone took 4-5 years to write vs an article that took about an hour). Of course, people have very different ideas of what feels nourishing, but at the bottom of it all, we need protein of some sort (I've been dealing with this for 10 years with my vegetarian children). When you don't have enough protein, you feel hangry and untethered. When you do, you feel grounded, anchored, relaxed. It's not as simple as that, but it's very significant. How to get protein back into the idea diet!?? Your comment really helped me to think about this in a new way. THANK YOU!
Are you familiar with Mark Crispin Miller's work on charting what he views - I agree with him - as the massive effect the vaccines have had on early mortality?
https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/32-nurses-died-suddenly-in-us-this-past-week-19-pro-wrestlers-dropped-dead-this-year
I recommend clicking around his Substack. I'm not saying that every single thing he attributes to the vaccine is from the vaccine, but he paints a rather apocalyptic picture.
There's also Steve Kirsch's work: https://kirschsubstack.com/p/breaking-record-level-data-from-czech?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Re politics it seems impossible to believe in anything anymore. Any and every system seems like it will inevitably be warped towards evil by human nature.
I will look but I have a sense he has been discredited… moved into the maga camp, unfortunately. But I will look!
Neither has been discredited. For them to be discredited, there has to be a good faith and open discussion of the data in the first place. There hasn’t been one, thanks to the corruption of the regulatory process and the revolving door between the pharmaceutical industry and the regulators.
The anti-Covid vax was the consequence of Mr. Warp Speed himself, Trump, cutting out the “red tape” to get the product into the marketplace at lightning speed, due to the ostensible emergency. Without Trump and his Operation Warp Speed, there would have been no vax. It is a fact that the normal safety protocols weren’t followed, since these normally require many years from conception to delivery on the marketplace. That’s why I have a hard time seeing why RFK as harsh critic of the vax is allying with Trump, the facilitator of the vax. Trump hasn’t changed his tune, he still declares the vax a success and boastfully takes credit for it.
I think he vaccilates between taking credit for it and siding with anti-vaxers, much like his waffling on abortion. In the end he will do whatever the Heritage foundation tells him to do.
Miller's article: The question is are the increased deaths a result of the vax or of the coronavirus itself, as both nurses and wrestlers were probably exposed over and over.
Kirsch: I don't have the scientific credentials to evaluate whether his data is accurate or whether those who debunk his data is accurate. I do like "Debunk the Funk" and also Doctors I have spoken with believe the vaccine ultimately saved far more people than were harmed / killed by it. I do not know how to evaluate these claims authentically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTTtmJxjZyw - Debunk the Funk episode (one of several) on Steve Kirsch
Love the Sovereignty angle discussed here. Very well made and I agree wholeheartedly.
Reluctant to stir up the vaccine controversy, however, I would like to make two points that maybe you’d like to explore further:
1. Regarding the role of big pharma, if the world had adopted the European pharma model over the US one in terms of regulatory frameworks, we’d be in a much better position.
2. If the other big pharma companies had done what Astra Zeneca originally did and offered the vaccine for free, the arguments on either side would not have been enmeshed in the money problem.
Sorry I missed our catch-up at Medicine Festival but hope we catch up somewhere soon
It’s simply a philosophical choice we are faced with as to the fundamental nature and destiny of human beings and how they should be led.
Currently I’m in a masters program studying Eastern History and philosophy and this is a parallel I’m noticing of a greater evil than libertarianism. Looking at 2000 years of dynasty successes and failures in The Record of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian here are some interesting patterns:
In ancient China the empire building military conquest of states was supported by a legalist philosophy.. that emphasized obedience to laws versus guidance by morality or virtue.
Legalist philosophy like modern materialistic philosophy and political totalitarian control is based on a cynicism about human nature which it sees as purely egotistic and motivated solely by the thought of reward and punishment.
In the view of Mencius and traditional Chinese philosophers humans are basically moral creatures, who are inspired by virtue.
The essential nature of human beings is goodness. Though these philosophers recognized that that goodness can be conditioned out of human beings by custom and leaders.
“No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the sufferings of other”
“Benevolence is the high honor bestowed by Heaven and the peaceful abode of man”
Mencius
Mencius view is more like our country’s founders otherwise democratic processes are absurd.
Dialogue , discourse would be useless repetition of misinformation. Voting would be an unnecessary and unreliable way to govern.
At best voting would be a useful fiction, to be shaped as needed through multiple means by those with the money, power, influence and “superior knowledge” to do so.
Legalists are authoritarians who see the will of the people as rule by the ignorant rabble. They constantly question, mold, gaslight, disparage, threaten, punish or undercut the perception of the people and their will. The direction and actions of the nation are best determined in private by those experts who are in the know. The survival of the nation is too fragile to be left to un- curated public opinion.
Granting freedom of speech or privacy to the people can only lead to dangerous abuses that destabilize governmental control. Democracy is an outdated, unscientific ideal. There are far better more scientific and more measurable ways to govern and create the “greatest good”. AI ,big data, and complete surveillance of the population make complete control possible.
Hence all the Democratic Party arguments about us having too many freedoms and that the rights granted by the constitution should be seen by all reasonable / modern people as outdated and dangerous.
I love this comment but not sure where you see this: “ Democratic Party arguments about us having too many freedoms”?
I’m looking into the free speech issue at the moment - will post a podcast with Matt Stoller tomorrow. Stoller believes that this idea of “free speech absolutism” is also flawed and undemocratic: the platforms like Facebook and TikTok need to be regulated by the government to prevent horrors. A recent example is the TikTok lawsuit around the 10 year old girl who died due to an asphyxiation challenge that was posted on TikTok. Just as cigarettes need to be regulated, we can’t allow for companies like Meta to benefit from attacks on human rights (Myanmar) etc. This has to be addressed at the platform level. I think this makes sense. Nobody is legislating against your freedom to say what you want at home but you shouldn’t be allowed amplification for destructive speech that leads to criminal outcomes.
I really like Matt Stoller and look forward to this talk, but disagree wholeheartedly. There are new policy and laws in the making around social media and children, which are necessary and long overdue. See Jonathan Haight. But this is separate from the Free Speech conversation. Who constitutes what is violence? Who constitutes what speech leads to violence? This is impossible.
*Jonathan Haidt
Daniel, I so appreciate your willingness and courage to jump into the swamp that is our current political scene and try to filter out meaning and purpose out of all of the muck. Your explorations are thought provoking, even if I don’t always agree with your conclusions.
On the topic of turncoats, I think we need to beware of the way we can be manipulated to turn on ourselves, when in fact the source of the problems we face lies beyond and above all of us. I would love to see you and Charles and Russell and Zach and around a round table, respectfully sharing your views and ideas for solutions for the more beautiful world, we all know in our hearts is possible. ( as Charles has written)
When someone I follow changes their stance and/or alliances, I am curious and intrigued about their motives, and yes, sometimes it's as crass as them just trying to get more clicks and followers. But in this case, the “turncoats” may be choosing the only other option—-less than ideal but look at it this way, Trump and the Trumpers are now being “influenced” by former liberal idealists who actually can envision a better world, even if they don’t have viable solutions yet. On the other side, they have the endorsement and support of Dick Cheney and other Neo-cons, and that is worrisome.
I think you should send your How Soon Is Now Book to both the Trump and Harris campaigns and see if and how they respond. We have to find ways to break out of our echo chambers! https://youtu.be/mHFusD9xuH4?si=FzfhG6ts-sDzyHfE
There’s a fractal quality to it too: an individual life, family, group, tribe, state, nation, species. Genesis, general unfitness, survival, to fitness, reign of fitness, to fall and unfitness, to entropy, to extinction. Breaking that cycle I assume would be a Sisyphean task, likely unreachable by one single individual, like Mithra or Lenin say.
Take the following with a grain of salt: obviously I can't confirm if this is true, but if it is, it provides a window into how J.D. Vance and RFK Jr. both wound up in an alliance with Trump despite previously being vehement detractors:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/tucker-carlson-and-the-beer-hall-putz-darryl-cooper#:~:text=Carlson%20is%20the,F.%20Kennedy%20Jr.
"Carlson is the issue not just because he’s got a massive audience; it’s because he’s a prominent figure in the Trumpified, MAGA-fied Republican party. He had a prominent speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. He has reportedly grown close with members of Donald Trump’s inner circle, including Donald Trump Jr. Carlson reportedly lobbied for JD Vance, a frequent guest on his show, to be selected as Trump’s running mate and helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr."
Tucker Carlson I had a certain amount of wary, guarded respect for in the past, for his apparent willingness to rethink some of his own positions, but recently he's welcomed a Hitler-loving pseudo-historian onto his show. This ostensible "historian" sounds no different from David Irving, who is probably the source of his own "research."