Could democratic societies have a unique susceptibility to tyranny?

DirtyDan674 · 7 months

Plato thought democracy leads to despotism because the majority of voters couldn't be bothered with understanding the issues at hand and could easily be manipulated through sophistry.

Chomsky thinks democracy can be easily controlled by concentrations of private capital, which can set the agenda and frame the public debates for their own interests, at everyone else's expense.

pjh11 · 10 months

I want a society that has a strong economy and is politically relevant.

It sounds a lot like what you want is a society where people exist for the sake of the economy and the state instead of a society where the economy and the state exist for the sake of the people.

But, perhaps, I misunderstood. I certainly don't understand your assertions about resources. Anyplace has access to the amount of resources it has access to. You can not increase the amount of existing resources. What you can do, however, is decide how those resources will be used.

And I have no interest in using our resources to aggrandize big business or the state. Resources should be used for people, not institutions, and the better educated a populace is, the better it can decide how best this may be done.

pjh11 · 10 months

China will be crushing countries soon, while nobody cares what Finland wants

And, yet, the standard of living in Finland is excellent, while it's awful in China. So, what do you want from your society? Stressed workers or smart citizens?

I think that employers should train employees, and schools must educate citizens. Education should be about making your society better for everyone, not more profitable for businesses.

whoisearth · 1 year

Men rule the world women may rule the households but their control is limited beyond that. They hold minimal power in politics and in business.

People exercise minimal power in politics and business, and I suspect it has always been this way. Very very few people hold these positions in the first place, and institutions tend to exert far more control over their proxies than vice versa. You may get a cool title and an absurdly-large paycheck, but you're about as in-control as a rider on a roller-coaster.

And, as several studies have already demonstrated, women do not take up most of these sort of positions because they'd, generally, rather do saner things with their lives, and this is considered to be a perfectly acceptable choice. Men, however, in certain social circles, are expected to pursue these positions, at any cost, often to their own detriment.

Also, although men are derided in the mass media and in the court system we also are engaged in a fairly good counter-attack against women with unrealistic body image and ideals of what a perfect woman does via porn.

I'm not engaged in any sort of attack against anyone, and the idea that the world is involved in some sort of men vs. women conflict is part of what is creating the problems we're discussing.

And if you think men are somehow immune to pressures from unrealistic body images or ideals of what a "real man" is, then, I suspect, you're not paying much attention. But, then, most of our society isn't paying much attention either, and this is another part of the problem we're discussing.

Part of me is thinking if there is a market out there to start a new club where it's boys only with no intent of girls joining equality lawsuits be damned.

I don't think this would be the case, however, I do know that it's perfectly acceptable to have women's-only gyms, clubs, schools, and even women's-only government social programs. Ask yourself, how many programs can you think of for men's health, men's employment, men's education, or even programs for attempting to understand the problems men may face in our current society?

You probably can't think of any, can you? Yet we all know men live shorter lives, are far more likely to be injured while at work, will face a much higher chance of being a victim of violence, and are facing serious problems with employment opportunities and educational opportunities.

whoisearth · 1 year

So this is a 1/2 hr video and I'm curious on peoples opinions. The gist is that what it means to be a man is changing for good or bad and we as a society don't seem to be equipped for this change.

I'm afraid I only made it 1/3 of the way through the video. I think the speakers are correct in that men, in general, are in trouble in our society, but most of their assessments about why this is so are actually part of the reason this is so.

Discussion, as is brought up by one man on the panel, is hard because it is still a man's world and any attempt to try to create male focus is deemed "sexist"

Except, it obviously isn't a "man's world," and it probably never was. What happened was that women were, largely, freed from restrictive gender roles while men weren't.

The argument was that men's roles were actually "better" than womens roles, because men were expected to spend all day working and managing a household's finances, or fighting in wars for "noble" causes, or, for a very few, administering powerful institutions. Look! Money, excitement, power! That's got to be better than, say, watching over and spending time with the family, managing domestic tasks, pursing hobbies or getting involved in the community, or, for a very few, participating in charitable activities, right?

Well, no, those roles probably weren't better. Work is usually unpleasant, finances are tedious, warfare is nasty, and politics is ugly. But, still, men were expected to do these things, like it or not, and were discouraged from taking on any other roles at the same time that women were encouraged to take on whatever roles they wished, and would even be preferentially selected for activities associated with traditionally male roles.

While it was great to free women from their gender roles, leaving men in theirs while selecting against them for the positions those roles required effectively started pushing men out to the margins of society. Men are, increasingly, left with the stuff no one wants to do, and, even worse, most of that is being outsourced.

And, to top it all off, men are increasingly characterized as brutish, aggressive, oppressive dolts who are to blame for society's problems. And anyone who doesn't play into that stereotype get characterized as "not being a real man."

The situation has become absurd. As the video points out, most of the jobless, and homeless, are men. Only about 1/3 of students in college are male. Jobless, poorly-educated men are becoming incarcerated are ever-larger rates. Men, in general, are mocked and derided in the mass-media. And still we pretend like it's a "man's world" and are afraid to even consider the possibility that the deck just might be stacked against men in our society.

I have a 9 month old son and I worry about his security in his gender as he gets older and becomes a man.

Wouldn't it be nice if he could look forward to a future where he wasn't restricted to ancient gender roles, wasn't derided in the media, and wouldn't be selected against in whatever activities he wished to pursue?

NotPhil · 1 year

Number6 read the essay as intended. Nowhere did I say that math and science are not part of an education, instead I said that presidents' calls for more math and science are generally, and accurately, interpreted as calls for students to be trained in finance and engineering.

I also said nothing which should be interpreted as saying that finance and engineering training are bad things. I only said that a school system focused on training employees for employers isn't doing the job it should be doing.

Maxcactus · 1 year

Did we have privacy back when we lived in tribes?

Privacy is at least as old as civilization. I can't think of a culture which doesn't have, and value, that concept.

Happydespair · 1 year

Initially, I wasn't going to read it, because the two subtitles led me to believe it was just going to be another set of just-so stories from evolutionary psychologists.

What I found was certainly less silly than that stuff, but, really, it wasn't very insightful:

The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q.

This really required three decades of research from scientists? Didn't we already know people have emotions, act in a social environment, and make use of intuition?

The several thousand years of literature which spoke of, and considered the implication of, these things before these researchers "discovered" it, would seem to indicate that this is nothing even remotely new.

I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances ... Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. ... Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.

So, these researchers just now figured out that nature, culture, society, and community have an effect of individual thought and behavior?

This is kind of scary, in a way that the usual "researchers discover the obvious" stories aren't, because, while this stuff isn't blatantly obvious, it is extremely well-known, and has been for a very very long time.

Everyone from poets to playwrights to philosophers to an entire discipline called sociology has been discussing it and its implications for millennia, and, somehow, our brightest researchers were completely unaware of it?

It's a nice article, and all, but, honestly, what's going on here?

rmeddy · 1 year

Here's a text-only version: Six Signs of Scientism.

Ayotte · 1 year

It sounds like you're talking about the anthropic principle.

Conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist.

greenRiverThriller · 1 year

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Infinite_Circle · 1 year

It sounds like you're asking about the problem of personal identity. It's certainly an interesting problem.

You might want to check out Staying Alive: The Personal Identity Game.

myndecho · 1 year

Look through Project Gutenberg's Philosophy Bookshelf.

Also, Volumes XIII and XIV of The World's Greatest Books, at the same site, contains extracts from the works of many influential philosophers.

foocs · 1 year

[the goal is ultimately] to buy and sell us

trying to wrap my head around this. was it meant to be metaphorical or not?

I'm pretty sure what's meant is that, ultimately, our institutions have been designed to see things only in terms of monetary value. People, not surprisingly, can only go along with this so far, but institutions, being nothing more than sets of rules, aren't bothered by this; they're just bothered that they have to go through all the promotion and distraction and control to get people to either accept or ignore the situation.

After all, if people didn't accept or ignore it, then more human values might end up prevailing, and this would pose a threat to our institutions and all those who have become dependent on them. So, the worse the situation becomes, the more promotion, distraction, and control are needed to keep the situation stable. In other words, the goal is, ultimately, to keep people from rejecting a society where buying and selling (anything and everything) is the only activity that matters.

NotPhil · 1 year

It's a paradox. It's difficult to understand by its nature.

The Wikipedia page on the Boltzmann brain paradox explains it better. The 2nd law of thermodynamics allows us to explain some of the order we see in the universe, but it also implies that this order is very unlikely and becomes even more unlikely over time.

So, universes ordered enough to allow for the evolution of billions of brains, like ours, should be vastly outnumbered by universes with so little order that brains can arbitrarily pop into existence.

How likely is it that we're really in our exceedingly-unlikely very-highly-ordered universe? And where are all those unordered universes which are occasionally occupied by Boltzmann brains?

Theoden · 1 year

It seems to be just thinly veiled and poorly conceived anti-democracy pro-white propaganda.

I'm pretty sure he's arguing for different regions maintaining their own cultural heritage and against a homogeneous world-wide culture. You may not agree with everything he says — I know I don't — but his essay is more than just "poorly-conceived ... propaganda."

The contemporary West is engaged in a global counterinsurgency campaign as a final, desperate effort to affirm the permanence of the liberal order, to prove that history has indeed come to an end. Yet no more than savage bands of Pashtun mountain men have exploded that myth, as well as its pretensions to universal validity.

So, was it a myth before or after the mountain men shattered it?

I'm sure he's referring to both Francis Fukuyama's The End of History? and Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations?.

By "end of history," he means the end of ideological disputes, with secular, capitalist, representative democracy the last ideological combination left standing. By "myth," he means that different "civilizations," or ideological combinations, still exist and will "clash" with each other, guaranteeing that "history" will continue, for the time being.

And of all the goals of the ruling elite is the "end of history" really one of them?

I can't speak for the ruling elite, but you have to admit that both the Cold War and the War on Terrorism could be interpreted as "clashes of civilizations" over which ideological combination will "end history."

they will be unrepentant and undeterred in their redemptive materialism.

Does this guy know history? How could anyone think this hasn't been a trend since recorded history? It is [...] not something that arose in the last 100, 200 or 300 years

Materialism is a recurring theme in history, but, really, materialism as the dominant world-view is pretty recent. As the author says, this started with the Enlightenment.

So, in order to destroy Christendom and usurp the Old Order (which apparently has been the US's plan since after WW1) the goal is first to destroy Islam? Then the world will be safe for democracy? An incoherent linking of ideas, to be sure.

I think he's saying that dominant religions, whether Christian or Muslim, pose a threat to secular democracies, in that religious ideals would determine public policy instead of the populace's representatives determining policy. I suspect, however, that the real threat he's referring to is that both Christianity and Islam are very non-materialist.

I guess the real problem is he apparently doesn't want a variety of viewpoints, religions and gasp races intermingling peacefully.

Well, he does seem to want peace, but, you're right, he doesn't seem to want much cultural intermingling.

This seems a little ironic, because the "clash of civilizations" over who will "end history" — which he despises — is also about ridding the world of cultural intermingling. It just wants to establish a world-wide culture instead of the isolated regional cultures that the author seems to want.

NotPhil · 1 year

i haven't seen the division between types of power described as based on authority, reference, resource or coercion before. is there a scholar that idea comes from?

I think Michael Mann created the IEMP (ideological, economic, military, and political) model of power, but it closely resembles French and Raven's theory of five power bases: legitimate, referent, expert, reward, and coercive.

NotPhil · 1 year

Aren't we all sheeple, just for different things? It's impossible to read consumer reviews for everything.

I think it's even worse than that. It's unreasonable for anyone to be expected to know even the basics about what's offered for sale now.

Maybe, up till the end of the Middle Ages, you could see what you were getting just by inspection, but now, well, that nice red meat in the supermarket's fridge is only red because it's been gassed with ammonia, that nice looking desk probably isn't really made of the solid wood it appears to be made from, that nice new hybrid car won't get nearly the gas mileage it says it will, the nicely-typeset contract with your rotating credit company is deliberately unintelligible (and unilaterally modified every two months anyhow), and that nice-looking food in the bakery came from grains genetically-modified in ways you couldn't possibly understand, because not even the genetic engineers paid to muck around with it really understand, and so on and so on.

pooya72 · 1 year

Let me put, what I think is, a much more important question to you: Why, really, does anyone need to know, right then, right there, whether or not a student has mastered the material? If, at some point, someone actually needs to know whether someone else groks something or not, then Whywait and Lukkas have already pointed out how that can be done, without any sort of formal testing at all.

What really matters is whether the subject matter is being presented in an engaging and comprehensible manner, and whether students are encouraged to assess it in both a critical and creative manner. And you'll never get the answers to those questions from testing and grading students. You might need someone to assess the classes themselves, but you won't be able to do that with a Scantron™ either. You'll need actual people engaged in actual thought.

Unfortunately, our test-to-teach system is discouraging any sort of thought at all.

pooya72 · 1 year

And, of course, their solution is more standardized testing.

A portion of our A and B students were not the ones who were gaining the most knowledge but the ones who had learned to do school the best.

Which means memorizing the standardized test answers instead of figuring out the course material.

This has gotten absurd. Testing has become both the means and the end in schooling, and has turned into a huge industry that won't let us move away from it, no matter how much damage it does to the education system.

We need to get away from grading altogether. The point of education is students learning to understand, not testing firms profiting from grading.

socialistme · 1 year

I looked on WP's site - no mention that I can find of this.

It's in last two paragraphs of a story about political opposition to a federal trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed:

Administration officials also think that they will probably not secure the funding and legal authority from Congress to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and transfer any remaining detainees to the United States. There are 174 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, down from 241 when Obama took office. Diplomatic efforts continue to reduce that number through the resettlement or repatriation of detainees cleared for transfer by an interagency task force.

But, one official said, "Gitmo is going to remain open for the foreseeable future."

DarkDeath · 1 year

What's with the down-votes?

mjklin · 1 year

It sounds like he's describing group conformity and the concentration of wealth. Neither of these are new, and both are very powerful forces in America. They just happen to contradict what we've all been told about life in the States.

Really, he's denigrating people just because they don't like to watch MMA and didn't happen to grow up in a rural area? He might want to take a look at the definition of chauvinism before he starts throwing around terms like elitism.

warkin · 1 year

The article didn't mention evil methods; it mentioned "negative" personality traits, specifically: "narcissism, being dramatic, being critical and being extremely focused." Also:

The moderation-in-all-things rule may apply here.

At extremely high levels, the characteristics become pathological and can lead to career derailment, Harms said, but can be positive in smaller doses.

And the study was done at a military academy, which probably isn't the most typical career environment.

NotPhil · 1 year

To me, this submission comes too close to "Haha, I always knew that religious people aren't competent".

Wow. You're reading a lot into both the article and the submitter. Both of us were trying to provide some context to the current public debate over religion in America.

Maybe I was just primed by your last submission, but I don't feel informed. I get some facts but no background information.

You didn't like this submission because you didn't like my last one?

In the last one, the background information came after the first few paragraphs. And, in this article, the facts are background information.

Look, I'm sorry if religion and bacteria are hot-button issues for you, but, as moderator, you might want to follow your own advice and read through the article before voting, discuss the topics themselves, and not vote based on personal likes and dislikes, but on content.

Honestly, you're not setting a very good example for these new subscribers you seem to be worried about.

I just think that one should think twice about submitting news agency texts as they most likely miss the context.

If you read that article, then you'll know that it's based on an Associated Press investigation into news-reading habits. It explains why some people like to complain about things not being recent enough to be "news" (it's almost a week old!) while secretly yearning for context, which they ignore because it's too much trouble to read through to the end of the article when they're being bombarded with so much "new" stuff all the time.

NotPhil

TROPHY CASE

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