Not choosing is not an option

The question asked by serious political economy now is not ‘how do we perpetuate growth’, but rather, if it will be degrowth by design, or by disaster -- Ben Shread-Hewitt

Blind Custodians

The planet’s apex predator is too stupid to understand he’s really just the gardener -- Charles St Pierre

Interiors

Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time. -- Jean-Michel Basquiat

against a revolution that never took place

In his book The School for Dictators, Ignazio Silone famously called fascism "a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place." A core feature of reactionary (I'll use that term rather than "fascist" because people love to pointlessly debate semantics) movements is an inversion of power. They cast the weak as looming threats, and status-quo powers as the trembling victims. This is a familiar move, in macro and micro terms, in every reactionary movement. You see it in the US when they talk about gay or trans people imposing themselves on everyone, "forcing their lifestyle down our throats." Or when they talk about how white people face more racism. Or, on a grander scale, when they talk about how social justice warriors have taken over every institution in the the US, ruthlessly imposing their woke worldview. It's self-evidently ridiculous, but why do they do it so consistently?

The point is to justify their own escalating violence and lawlessness. They hate difference, they hate the status quo being challenged, they hate the existence of Others in their midst, so they need to convince one another that it's ok to cast off norms and let the violence out. This is why the only mode of moral argumentation you ever see from a reactionary is whataboutism. The point of "they did it first" (for whatever "it," censorship or voter fraud or whatever) is not that "it" is bad and no one should do it, but that it's ok for us to do it too. It's not even really a moral argument. It's just a permission structure -- they did it, so we can't be held accountable for doing it too.  So when they create this mythology about Dem voter fraud, the point is not "voter fraud is bad," the point is, "it's ok for us to do it too."

The long-running narrative about left bias in the media is not about "bias is bad," it's about, "it's ok for us to make full-on propaganda." The point about violent rioting urban lefties is not "violence is bad," it's, "it's ok for us to be violent." [Or] the classic example we're living through: endlessly accusing the left of censorship to justify banning books and rewriting history. The cliche goes "every conservative accusation is a confession," and that's kind of true, but it's more accurate to say every accusation is permission -- permission for the right to do in reality what it has worked itself up to believe the left is doing. 

It's all a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place -- a way of defending and reinforcing status quo hierarchies by exaggerating the power and efficacy of the marginalized and vulnerable, the outsiders trying to reform the status quo in an egalitarian direction. [...] that is the most primal and formative feature of reactionary psychology: the belief that everyone is selfish, everyone is out for themselves, it's a zero-sum world in which tribes compete for dominance, and all the progressive talk about universalist values is just a clever con.

They have to believe that. Their worldview has no room for people of good will trying earnestly to do good for humanity. They need for all the Others they hate to be sinister and powerful and right on the verge of taking over, and destroying everything. They need it because it gives them permission to indulge their base instincts. "We have to do this violence/censorship/lawbreaking, it's the only way to stop the gays/immigrants/professors from destroying our way of life." Every time it's the same. -- David Roberts

Up in our country we are human

Joining an Inuit hunting party in Greenland in 1910, Danish explorer Peter Freuchen was pleased to receive several hundred pounds of meat because he’d thrust a harpoon into a walrus. When he thanked the primary hunter, the man looked at him and said nothing. Back at camp he told Freuchen:

Up in our country we are human! And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. If I get something today you may get it tomorrow. Some men never kill anything because they are seldom lucky or they may not be able to run or row as fast as others. Therefore they would feel unhappy to have to be thankful to their fellows all the time. And it would not be fun for the big hunter to feel that other men were constantly humbled by him. Then his pleasure would die. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves, and by whips one makes dogs.

Freuchen wrote, “I have come to understand the truth of his words. The polar Eskimos were a free people when we met them.” -- Adventures in the Arctic, Peter Freuchen 1960 [ref: Futility Closet]

the presence of justice

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice" -- Martin Luther King

Not So Hidden Costs

I know a lot of scientists as well as laymen are scornful of philosophy - perhaps understandably so. Reading academic philosophy journals often makes my heart sink too. But without exception, we all share philosophical background assumptions and presuppositions. The penalty of not doing philosophy isn't to transcend it, but simply to give bad philosophical arguments a free pass. -- David Pearce

The Two Measures

We see again the fallacy of the conspiracy theorist. Strong evidence brought to bear on the enemy, weak evidence brought to bear on the friend. Statistics for the enemy. Anecdotes for the friend. -- Zach Weiner

The Fallacy of Anachronism

I will repeat this point again until I get hoarse: a mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point -- Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Priorities

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust -- John Derbyshire

Incentives

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution -- Clay Shirky

Ethics as virtue signalling

The precautionary principle is being used to shut down EU's largest source of zero-carbon electricity, block the most promising route to agricultural productivity, and impede the distribution of vaccines during a pandemic. Paying lip-service to safety while perpetuating harm. -- Michael Liebreich

Arsenal

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. -- Stephen Biko

Inheritance

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant. -- Epictetus

Working the Questions

When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the questions right, then you go answer them, and that's typically not philosophy, that's one science or another. Anywhere in life where you find that people aren't quite sure what the right questions to ask are, what they're doing, then, is philosophy. -- Daniel Dennett

Forced Déjà vu

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. -- André Gide

Rule

There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust. -- Ran Prieur

You do what you have to do

Chu-p’ing Man studied the art of killing dragons under Crippled Yi. It cost him all the thousand pieces of gold he had in his house, and after three years he'd mastered the art, but there was no one who could use his services. -- Chuang Tzu

So he decided to teach others the art of killing dragons -- René Thom

Self-inflicted myopia

I do think that at a minimum, if you believe that one person’s interests are intrinsically more important than another’s (or as the more sophisticated versions play out, that ethics is agent-relative), then something has gone fundamentally wrong, and this, I think, is the core of the distinction between left and right. Being a rightist in this sense is totally indefensible, and a sign that yes, you should give up on attempting to ascertain any sort of moral truth, because you can’t do it. -- GCUPokeItWithAStick

Bondage

Why is there irony in "the truth shall set you free"? The irony is that all the truth gives you is a longer chain. The cost is that you better know the length of your chain. Most people are on short chains, and imagine they are free. -- Charles St. Pierre

Truth

An observation by Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” (Evolution as Fact and Theory, pp.254–55)

I'm fond of that quote because every word counts, and because it makes clear that physicists are not after truth, but instead quantitative rules of thumb for dealing with the behaviour of the universe. The most useful such rules are those we have repeatedly tried to falsify by observation, but which have nevertheless proven reliable (either universally so, or in a well-defined set of limited circumstances). Truth we leave to the mathematicians, who are welcome to it. -- Tom Yates

Simplying Assumptions

The purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. -- Anthony Stafford Beer

One rule, two standards

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. -- Frank Wilhoit

Selection Bias

Our headlines are splashed with crime, yet for every criminal there are 10000 honest decent kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up, business could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries -- but it is a force stronger than crime -- Robert Heinlein

Then we are doing science.

The truth lies directly before us in the reality surrounding us. However, we cannot use it as it is. An unbroken description of reality would be simultaneously the truest and most useless thing in the world, and it would certainly not be science. If we want to make reality and therefore truth useful to science, we must do violence to reality. We must introduce the distinction, which does not exist in nature, between essential and inessential. In nature, everything is equally essential. By seeking out the relationships that seem essential to us, we order the material in a surveyable way at the same time. Then we are doing science. -- Jakob von Uexküll

In the end

In the end,
we will remember
not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

no moral guarantees

The correct decision, given a trolley problem, is to switch the track, then wonder for the rest of your life whether you made the right decision. Anyone who could confidently switch the track and then never think about it again is a sociopath, as is anyone who fails to switch the track and believes his decision entirely exculpates him. Trolleys and certain deaths don't reflect moral decisions in the real world. Not only do you not know precisely the consequences of your actions ahead of time, you certainly don't know the consequences of the counterfactual. [...] The universe offers no moral guarantees. We make decisions, and live with them, and never know the results of the decisions we didn't make. This is the best we're offered. -- Andreas Schou

Applied Stoicism

Stallone turned down the huge sum of money [for another actor to be Rocky] because he had "establish[ed] business relations with poverty," as the Stoic philosopher Seneca put it.  "The trick is,” Tom Rothman (CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group) says, “to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless." [As Bill Cunningham  said:] "If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid… Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty, freedom is the most expensive.” -- Billy Oppenheimer [link]

Ecology, not Economy

The earth has, in principle, unlimited resources. They are just limited in the rate of sustainable extraction. And, of course, extraction costs put a limit on useful access to mineral resources -- Charles St Pierre

Fascism

Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place. -- The School for Dictators, Ignazio Silone