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On July 13 2015 10:00 Jerubaal wrote:
This complaint is that they wish some Marxists were more zealous, not that they have somehow failed to inculcate the attitude of the viewpoint. This is a complex comparison and the problem is partly a classification and semantic problem. Being a Marxist is (usually) only an intellectual position, whereas you could be a Christian in a number of senses- socially, intellectually, spiritually. Unless you're a politician, maybe, being a Marxist doesn't require much other than saying you're a Marxist. Christianity purports to expect more. There are generally more people that walk around under the label "Christian" that don't really fit the same definition. It's also funny because Marxists are some of the prime abusers of the "they really aren't a Marxist" card.
Nah, I've heard the phrase used for both reasons. And Marxists come in many flavors - intellectual, social, "spiritual," and every combination in between. (Just as there are Christians who are intellectual Christians, but not social or spiritual Christians.)
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i'm so misunderstood
dj - you seem to have some definition of pragmatic which is technical and not something i care about so i'm not quite sure what the stakes are. I have no idea what you mean by this word. and I have literally no idea what jerubaal's comment means.
i'm sorry if i'm assuming that these guys were smarter than they are. the point is- international food aid is deeply fucked up
On July 13 2015 11:24 Djzapz wrote:
But you'll also have killed all those people because they needed food and you were changing the world.
shrug. if you're not willing to commit violence in order to create a better world, you're complicit with the violence that already exists. it's a lose lose situation. welcome to reality. this is what i mean when i say there are real problems with the world. both you and your interlocutors are trying to pretend like you have the solution. I think your word 'pragmatic' is just a code for conformity with the status quo. nothing more. you choose the evil that exists over the evil might be. they choose the opposite. i don't see how either of you are obviously on a moral high ground. you are just on opposite sides of a war.
by the way, i sometimes employ hyperbole because TLers don't always grasp subtlety very well and it amuses me becuase i am a bad person, but i never, ever am "just being contrary"
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Being against altruism because you are humanly unable to evaluate the absolute impact of every action is meaningless. It is a futile an argument that can be used against any action/philosophy and it paralyzes you into inaction. What’s even worse is that you can neither foresee the outcome of your inaction which might end up as “inherently” worse than your potential altruism.
Asking for a real-life example of an altruistic action actually being “bad” is anecdotal and pointless. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it should never lead a person’s future choices. Refusing to save the young drowning Hitler is completely crazy. It amounts to saying you shouldn’t save any drowning person at all, as you never know if they might turn out to be serial killers. Also, let’s abort all babies. Just in case.
As for altruism, it is theorically the ideal objective any society should ever strive for. However, its effectiveness is directly countered by the presence of selfish individuals who short-circuit the common reward pattern. If you live in a selfish tribe of 100 where everyone cares for himself, every individual gets a single person to ensure his well being. If you take the same tribe with selfless altruism as its core value, every member gets looked after by 99 persons. Scale up to the size of contemporary communities and this driving force can never be matched by a single entity. Yet, if one member sees the opportunity of gain and turns back to his selfish ways, he will be thriving with all his own ressources and time combined with those of his 99 mates. This is dangerous, as others will lose one of their benefactors and will be inspired to do the same. This is where the perfect ideal collapses.
At this point, you are to ask yourself what kind of person you want to be, and more importantly look at the people around you. It is impossible to live a complete altruist and selfless existence as it is socially inefficient to live a perfectly selfish life. As vast and complex our social networks are, you have to gauge when is the best time to be altruist or selfish, and towards whom. Eventually, you figure out that altruism trumps selfishness most of the time and you become a building block for a better community, making sure selfish individuals do not leech on yourself.
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Damn Tina, you got smart after you left Ike.
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On July 13 2015 14:47 bookwyrm wrote:
shrug. if you're not willing to commit violence in order to create a better world, you're complicit with the violence that already exists. it's a lose lose situation. welcome to reality. this is what i mean when i say there are real problems with the world. both you and your interlocutors are trying to pretend like you have the solution. I think your word 'pragmatic' is just a code for conformity with the status quo. nothing more. you choose the evil that exists over the evil might be. they choose the opposite. i don't see how either of you are obviously on a moral high ground. you are just on opposite sides of a war.
"Shrug"? See I understand where you're coming from but we'll never agree because unlike you I'm not willing to let millions of people starve to death while waiting for a revolution. Let alone your "shrug", as if those people were completely dispensable so that we could reach your ideals. And so I admit I'm complicit in the horror. I do not have the moral high ground, nor did I ever pretend to be. My concerns in this matter are not moral, though they are motivated by my sense of morality. My concerns are practical.
You asked what I mean by pragmatic and I think it's pretty clear, what do politicians mean when they say they're pragmatics? They mean they realists who will look at what is in front of them, collect information and then act upon the problem using this information. An ideologue might, for instance, assume that we should ignore the problem because it'll be automatically solved when we beat capitalism. And that's not to say that ideology is bad, but like I said before I think that many people are pragmatic and it's not worse. We need them.
There are two types of people, you and some of my colleagues who look at this problem and come up with theoretical notions that are not applicable in reality and therefore useless (to my senses), unless you're a pragmatic about it and you make shit happen, which you won't because like me you're just some dude with a keyboard. And then there's people like myself, who view the world in terms of problems that can be solved given resources (financial, human, political, administrative, etc.). Now I'm not particularly good at what I do I don't think, so I can't actually solve complex problems, but I know enough that it's clear to me that world hunger is not a problem which can be fixed in our current framework.
So while I see the value in explaining that theoretically capitalism is ill-suited in matters such as solving world hunger, I also live in reality where I myself cannot change that, and so I am indeed complicit in it, and the best I can do is within the framework of capitalism try to choose measures which are better than outright sending food. Building wells was an example, building up the harvesting capacity of those countries. Building lasting things like Bill Gates does. AND sending food. But all of these things are pragmatic measures. So no I'm not willing to say we should stop sending food in the offchance that we could pull off a paradigm shift wherein people suddenly were willing to commit to solving the world hunger problem for good. And yet even then you'd have bureaucrats (apparatchiks?) pulling off concrete and pragmatic measures to get it done.
So I don't think they were necessarily wrong, but again, all I'm saying is that outside of an university and outside of a library, you need the pragmatics. It doesn't mean they can't think, we'd be a sad bunch if we were all pragmatic all the time, and we'd be idiots too, but that's not the point.
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Yeah we deeply, deeply disagree. I dont think you are practical at all, I think you are living in a fantasy world
Are you really giving me the tech billionaire hagiography line? So silly
basically I think you are intellectually complicit with a bad system that keeps getting worse and worse and making peiple more and more dependent, in the service of an imperial project, papered over by a bunch of feel good liberal claptrap
Basically your position is equivalent to the liberal finance doctrine under which the solution to a bubble is to blow an even bigger bubble so when it inevitably fails ita catastrophically bad as opposed to just really bad
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I don't see it working in general.
I see when people are in the need of help and you help them free of charge it can be good.
But if they are not in the need of help or pretending you corrupt them even further.
For example in the movie Dogville, while it is not a not a typical atruistic motive, we can see that people are inherently flawed and want more and more if you give them something for free.
Basic human predatory instinct is if someone gives for free he is weak and you can abuse it.
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On July 13 2015 17:41 TinaTurner wrote:
Being against altruism because you are humanly unable to evaluate the absolute impact of every action is meaningless. It is a futile an argument that can be used against any action/philosophy and it paralyzes you into inaction. What’s even worse is that you can neither foresee the outcome of your inaction which might end up as “inherently” worse than your potential altruism.
Asking for a real-life example of an altruistic action actually being “bad” is anecdotal and pointless. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it should never lead a person’s future choices. Refusing to save the young drowning Hitler is completely crazy. It amounts to saying you shouldn’t save any drowning person at all, as you never know if they might turn out to be serial killers. Also, let’s abort all babies. Just in case.
As for altruism, it is theorically the ideal objective any society should ever strive for. However, its effectiveness is directly countered by the presence of selfish individuals who short-circuit the common reward pattern. If you live in a selfish tribe of 100 where everyone cares for himself, every individual gets a single person to ensure his well being. If you take the same tribe with selfless altruism as its core value, every member gets looked after by 99 persons. Scale up to the size of contemporary communities and this driving force can never be matched by a single entity. Yet, if one member sees the opportunity of gain and turns back to his selfish ways, he will be thriving with all his own ressources and time combined with those of his 99 mates. This is dangerous, as others will lose one of their benefactors and will be inspired to do the same. This is where the perfect ideal collapses.
At this point, you are to ask yourself what kind of person you want to be, and more importantly look at the people around you. It is impossible to live a complete altruist and selfless existence as it is socially inefficient to live a perfectly selfish life. As vast and complex our social networks are, you have to gauge when is the best time to be altruist or selfish, and towards whom. Eventually, you figure out that altruism trumps selfishness most of the time and you become a building block for a better community, making sure selfish individuals do not leech on yourself.
I agree with everything you said, but I want to dive deeper into one of your last points:
Eventually, you figure out that altruism trumps selfishness most of the time and you become a building block for a better community, making sure selfish individuals do not leech on yourself.
I'm fascinated with the idea of how we can measure whether or not we should be altruistic or selfish. I think your first point, that we cannot measure action, is important here. I agree we cannot measure the impacts of our actions. However, I do think we can measure with a far greater degree our selfishness vs how our actions could benefit others. I would argue that because everything we understand arises from the self, that the self is what we are best able to understand. To figure out the "so what", let me present a thought experiment.
There is a given person with a given life in two alternate realities. In one reality, the person is 100% selfish. In the other reality, the person is 100% altruistic. After they die, the two convene and share the story of their lives. Let us ignore contradictory arguments impugned upon us by fate, like the selfish man being killed early because he offended the wrong person, or the altruistic person giving of themselves to the extent they starve to death. Let us focus on what each person would learn.
I think one thing that both sides would marvel at almost every time would be the variety of individual expression achieved by the selfish individual. I think the other thing that both sides would marvel at would be an understanding of how little we do not know about the world around us. This would come from the altruistic individual, and I believe it would exist with such strength because of how many pains and hungers the altruistic individual sought to solve.
I think if you repeated this thought experiment many times and imagined it for many people in many contexts, you would find a similar pattern.
It is a motherfucker of a question to answer -- when should we be selfish and when should we devote ourselves to others? Not only that, but how do we optimize our lives so that we can live as well as possible, creating a symphonic blend of selfishness and altruism? How can we be better people?
I think the knowledge from my thought experiment above is useful because it shows us (I at least feel it shows me) what we should pay attention to in ourselves. When we ask if we should or should not be selfish, I believe we should ask of ourselves how this selfish actions expresses our beliefs to the world. When we follow things we are passionate about, when we catalyze our personal growth, when we bring insights to things that only we could bring to them, when we create a better world through our individual power, we demonstrate the power of being selfish.
I do not think we should ever ask if we should or should not be altruistic. Instead, I think we should develop the ability to sense the pains, needs, hungers and desires of those around us. You could call this an altruistic awareness. As a human being, there are certain things I think we should make sure those around us have: food, water, shelter, education. If we have these things and wish to be selfish but see others that do not have them, we should put aside our growth and help them. As an added benefit, I believe if we live with this altruistic awareness well enough for long enough, our selfishness will subconsciously be influenced by a desire to help others. And in a more immediate sense, we should always help those To me, altruism is an awareness. I think the biggest problem with selfishness is that in many ways, it forces you to be blind to the needs of others. This is why developing an awareness of the people and the world around you is critical. I think it is the only way you can be selfish and have a good heart.
I believe this awareness is what provides us the balance we need to live selfishly. Because if a person has, let us say, a requisite level of awareness that says they would never, under any circumstances, let another person's basic needs not be met if they had the power to immediately prevent it (food, water, shelter), then when they are selfish is not determined by how they feel, but by the circumstances surrounding them.
There is a wrinkle in that the best person to help out with altruism is a person who is selfish, but who also has an altruistic awareness. It is least good to be altruistic towards one that is not selfish, for they give away more of their strength than is prudent. They do not see that if they would be a bit more selfish, they would be able to help people on a grander scale than they are currently able. I do not know exactly what to do with this information, but it is something to be aware of.
If we look at the costs, I think we see the cost of being too altruistic is that you stunt your personal growth, while the cost of being too selfish is that you stunt the capacity for personal growth in those around you.
I do not believe asking the question "what kind of person do I want to be" is useful. I feel it is too egocentric to be of prescriptive use, and instead should be replaced by the question "what kind of people do I want the people around me to be?" I want the people around me to be happy, which to an extent requires them to be selfish. But I also want the people around me to be sensitive to the pains, needs, hungers, and desires of those around them. Not just that, I want them to act upon this sensitivity. I want people to be receptive to these things so that if someone does need help -- even in the most basic of ways -- their human compassion will guide them to set aside their momentary needs in order to help that person. I see how this sort of altruism can go too far, and I say that it should extend to family and friends (friends, of course, being elective).
I want this for my family and friends -- for them to live fulfilling lives (which comes by being selfish), but also to be aware of and willing to act upon the pains, needs, hungers, and desires of others.
I suppose I am saying that it is best to be selfish to maintain one's strength, but selfishness without an awareness of one's surroundings is evil, for it is from this awareness that one's altruism flows. To live well, I believe one can only be selfish in proportion to the awareness of the needs of those in their immediate surroundings.
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On July 13 2015 22:40 bookwyrm wrote:
Yeah we deeply, deeply disagree. I dont think you are practical at all, I think you are living in a fantasy world
Are you really giving me the tech billionaire hagiography line? So silly
basically I think you are intellectually complicit with a bad system that keeps getting worse and worse and making peiple more and more dependent, in the service of an imperial project, papered over by a bunch of feel good liberal claptrap
Basically your position is equivalent to the liberal finance doctrine under which the solution to a bubble is to blow an even bigger bubble so when it inevitably fails ita catastrophically bad as opposed to just really bad
You can call me complicit while you work for them and use their money to buy their products. I'm aware of that but I don't bother with the self loathing and the utopian ideas that are never put in practice. You're no better than me, because you do nothing while I try to stir a failing idea a little bit in the right direction while you whine and cry because your wild ideals are nothing more than a dream.
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What have you been following me around watching me do this nothing? The assumptions people make about the lives of others around here are insufferable
Theres nothing worse than a smug liberal
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You live in a bad system, you participate in it. I made no assumption, you don't live on the moon. It says United States right next to your name. And you're not magical, so my assumptions are not unfair. Do you live in the woods with the internet or something? I think you're a hypocrite and you won't tell me how you're not complicit. You call me complicit for waking up in the morning and doing the best I can do in a flawed system, what do you do? Are you bringing down the system you consider to be so flawed it's pointless to do anything in it? And to add to the hypocrisy, you were the one making assumptions just before.
There is nothing worst than a smug, deluded idealist. (I lie, there is plenty worse, you're kind of endearing).
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LOL actually yes, right now I literally live in woods and use 4g for internet when I can pick it up. Its hardly revolutionary but it is a literal description of my current living arrangment
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Also im not an idealist I am a quite dogmatic matetialist. Im also a political realist in that I accept the inevitability of political violence. So I dont know in what way I am an idealist. You may be confused if you are not accustomed to talking to people who have principles
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On July 14 2015 00:05 bookwyrm wrote:
LOL actually yes, right now I literally live in woods and use 4g for internet when I can pick it up. Its hardly revolutionary but it is a literal description of my current living arrangment
Looks like you're using practical measures to mesh your ideals with a conjuncture you disagree with. You're still tied to the networks of the massive multinational corporations to access the web, perhaps you make money, or perhaps you make your own food which is great, yet you're not really succeeding in changing anything, you're just doing your thing.
That said please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, you're right that I don't know very much about you. You're not bringing solutions here, you're criticizing mine while bringing up no actual alternatives. It's very easy to go live in the woods and tell yourself you're changing the world. In the end it seems to me like you're a failing idealist. Much rather have a successful realist who's actually making modest positive changes than an idealist who's denying reality and is quietly asking for radical changes that aren't coming about. You say you should be willing to make violent changes. Where are these violent changes? Tethering 4g? Buying solar panels maybe? Wow!
So I dont know in what way I am an idealist. You may be confused if you are not accustomed to talking to people who have principles
Well I may be wrong about you being an idealist, to be fair I know nothing of your ideals, but you strike me as someone who's principles are a bit whacky which is why you won't explicitly tell me about them. In your next post I'm unlikely to see what you think outside of the fact that you think I'm wrong. How do we fix world hunger? Let all those people die, you seem to think, because sending food is stupid, and do (something else?). Who knows what, though. But violence is necessary because the current way of things is bad.
And yet we don't know what you want, we don't know what you do. Only that you're losing, whatever it is, because it's not happening.
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I dont remember the part where I said I was opposed to infrastructure
Its kind of hard to have a discussion when the other person gets to tell you what you think and refute it both at once
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The first step to fixing anything is to acknowledge the reality of the problem. Which you refuse to do because you refuse to acknowledge the way in which aid in fact creates the problem it purports to solve. You attempt to solve a problem by refusing to analyze it which is just intellectually lazy. You confuse pragmatism with blind conformity in the face of real, difficult problems.
ive never claimed to have a magic solution to anything
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On July 14 2015 00:17 bookwyrm wrote:
I dont remember the part where I said I was opposed to infrastructure
Its kind of hard to have a discussion when the other person gets to tell you what you think and refute it both at once
I didn't use the word infrastructure, and like I said in my previous post, nothing about what you think, just loose posts about what you might possibly not be against. Nothing about what you think. And then you criticize me for "telling you what you think and refuting it". You've made your position ironclad, and you continue to not shedding any light. Two lines per post, no content, a whole lot of whining. Might fool some...
The first step to fixing anything is to acknowledge the reality of the problem. Which you refuse to do because you refuse to acknowledge the way in which aid in fact creates the problem it purports to solve. You attempt to solve a problem by refusing to analyze it which is just intellectually lazy. You confuse pragmatism with blind conformity in the face of real, difficult problems.
ive never claimed to have a magic solution to anything
You've never so much as brought up a figment of a better solution. You've also never explained how or even came close to demonstrating that sending food is bad (which I agreed, something which you forgot). You've never shown that the alternative, not sending food, is better - you just see that it's part of the problem and your solution a priori seems to be to remove it (not that I would know, since you say nothing, you just stay toward the safe outskirts of the issue to avoid getting wet and actually taking position, which is hard). You see that my solutions are flawed and you seem to therefore deny them outright. My position is more malleable than yours. Granted, you wouldn't take risks in telling me anything. It's easier to leave me hanging and to then say I'm wrong. Sigh.
I've made concessions you see. I understand that sending food is a deeply flawed solution to an infinitely more complex problem. Except that's how the world works. Flawed solutions, and we can try to come up with less flawed solutions, some of which ought to be temporary but due to a lack of political will and to a poor understanding of these problems, we're left with shit that's better than nothing. Tell me, what do you want? Stop with the two liners and the hazy bullshit, tell me who you are if you can summon up some weird form of courage you don't seem to have.
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Arent you critizing me for using wireless networks or something? Like i have a choice between ecoprimitivism or milquetoast liberalism?
I dont know how respond to the accusation that i wont tell you what i think as i clearly am. Fairly stridently. International food aid is a sinister tool of neoimperialism masquerading as altruism. Which is the topic of the thread.
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"International food aid is a sinister tool of neoimperialism masquerading as altruism. Which is the topic of the thread." is the best I'll get out of you. Like I said, you'll fuck around the outskirts of the problem. I agree with that quote, by the way, entirely. Now show me a better way. Something that can be improved now. Tell me something about you that's not just the rejection of something else.
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No! Thats YOUR methodological premise.
ill give you a proposal for modest progressivist policy changes when you give me a ruthless critique of everything existing
Show me you are capable of real critical thought (ie outline a real problem for no easy feel good answer) and I will show that I can think 'pragmatically'
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EPT
