EPTAnd I'm no fan of ayn rand, I'm hardcore yo, like, amoralist hardcore. Oooo
The Lie of Capitalism and Globalization - Page 15
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Yurebis
United States1452 Posts
And I'm no fan of ayn rand, I'm hardcore yo, like, amoralist hardcore. Oooo | ||
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Rothbardian
United States497 Posts
On January 29 2010 14:53 lOvOlUNiMEDiA wrote: BTW, you may have read this (but probably after The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult" paper) but it is an interesting examination of Rothbard's early views on Rand: It is the second letter. The first is from Mises. Thank you. I will read this. It still doesn't change the fact she called me monstrous and disgusting. | ||
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Rothbardian
United States497 Posts
On January 29 2010 14:55 Yurebis wrote: I know I was just kidding. And I'm no fan of ayn rand, I'm hardcore yo, like, amoralist hardcore. Oooo lol | ||
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lOvOlUNiMEDiA
United States643 Posts
On January 29 2010 14:57 Rothbardian wrote: Thank you. I will read this. It still doesn't change the fact she called me monstrous and disgusting. Right. What she thought was disgusting was, basically, the way (she perceived) libertarians trying to ground their moral views. The Objectivist view is that deontological arguments all fail because, ultimately, they are arbitrary. I won't bother defending the views here -- I simply don't want to spend the time it would take to do it. If you are really curious you can read a professional Objectivist's criticism of Kantian versions of morality in this book: VIABLE VALUES | ||
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lOvOlUNiMEDiA
United States643 Posts
On January 29 2010 14:55 chrisSquire wrote: some of you may enjoy this work one-dimensional man by Herbert Marcuse + Show Spoiler [Table of Contents] + Introduction: The Paralysis of Criticism: Society Without Opposition Part I: One-Dimensional Society 1. The New Forms of Control 2. The Closing of the Political Universe 3. The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation 4. The Closing of the Universe of Discourse Part II: One-Dimensional Thought 5. Negative Thinking: The Defeated Logic of Protest 6. From Negative to Positive Thinking: Technological Rationality and the Logic of Domination 7. The Triumph of Positive Thinking: One-Dimensional Philosophy Part III: The Chance of the Alternatives 8. The Historical Commitment of Philosophy 9. The Catastrophe of Liberation 10. Conclusion Marcuse wasn’t a known figure until he took up the flag and figurehead of the student-revolt in the 60s. The student-revolt was, by admission of the rebels and by commentators on both sides of the political spectrum, the eruption of the “new-left” onto the American cultural and political stage. What is the “new-left” movement and why would it select Marcuse as its leading spokesman? While the student-rebels rallied behind traditional ‘leftist’ causes, an article from the Saturday Evening Post (May, 1965) captures the essential quality of the new-left when it quotes a leader of the student movement as follows, “We began by rejecting the old sectarian left and its ancient quarrels, and with contempt for American society, which we saw as depraved.” A Newsweek article from the same year reads, “These students don’t read Marx, they read Camus…If they are rebels they are rebels without an ideology, and without long- range revolutionary programs. They rally over issues, not philosophies, and seem unable to formulate or sustain a systematized political theory of society, either from the left or right.” The primary focus of the students groups – and the new-left in general – is focusing on action instead of ideas (theory). According to the new-left, the change demanded on any particular issue does not have to be integrated with an overall theory. This view is nicely captured by a CBS documentary (June, 1965) when it interviews a student activist leader who said, “We learned that there are no absolute rules, we make the rules for ourselves.” Absolute rules would be theories or systems. If a theory or system would inhibit what a particular student felt to be right then to hell with the theory! The new-left finds systematized ideas (Marxism, classical-liberalism, religion) stifling. That is why an advocate of the new-left said (quoted in the SEP article above) “We don’t spend endless hours debating the nature of Soviet Russia or whether Yugoslavia is a degenerate workers’ state.” To guide your actions by a –system- of thought means that some actions are ruled off limits or at least viewed as very bad. Eschewing the policy of grounding a view in an overall system, the new-left argued for the radical atomism of each moment and each policy. But a moment of reflection will reveal that this view cannot be consistently advocated and it was especially unwise for it to be advocated by the new-left in their particular context. Let me explain both of these statements. First, this view cannot be consistently advocated because it is self-refuting. It is tantamount to arguing that argument should be rejected – a contradiction. Let me elaborate on this for a moment. An argument is a discourse where separate parties give reasons for their views. The reasons are used to justify the assertion being defended. So, for example, I could defend free- speech because it is morally wrong to bar someone from speaking their mind. The assertion is that free speech should be defended and the reason is that it is morally wrong to forbid it. (This process can, of course, get very complicated). But the entire framework of argument, the concept of giving supporting justification to a view in order to defend it, is a system based on a theory and it is theories that the new-left is claiming should be discarded. So, for example, if we were in an argument and you give reasoned statements for your view what is to keep me from clapping my hands, doing a dance and claiming I have won the argument? Well, you will say that I have not presented reasoned claims for my view. But then I will claim that I don’t believe in your theory of argument – in fact I don’t believe in theories at all but in concrete action and, in this case, the concrete action I thought best was to clap and dance. Thus, the dialogue is over. Moving to the second reason, it would have been positively suicidal for the new-left to advocate it. If argument is appealing to a theory and theories are discarded, then argument is discarded. How, then, will disputes be settled? If they cannot be solved by dialogue there are two options. First, that the parties will go their separate ways. But the new-left was not interested in going its own way. They explicitly wanted to make changes in the system. Thus, the second method: force (the Weather Underground Organization was the most well known violent new-left group). But, obviously, a rag-tag group of students couldn’t advocate force as a means of achieving their views. They were not a match for the local police much less the national-guard or army. Thus, while on the surface the new-left may advocate an anti-ideology (theories//systems are bad) and violence, they needed the aid of an ideology to make their point. They got their aid from Herbert Marcuse. While Marcuse said that he did not like the fanfare the new-left was showering him with he did speak out on behalf of the movement many times. It makes sense that the students would look to him for intellectual support. Marcuse was a prime target because his earlier works, such as “Eros and Civilization” (1955), fit the students libertine disposition but also because in 1964 Marcuse published “One Dimensional Man” which explicitly stated that the students will have an important place in revolutionizing civilization.. But, I think more importantly, Marcuse’s fundamental view is that it is the place of a group of enlightened individuals (presumably him, his followers and the student-rebels) to tell the rest of civilization how to act. But Marcuse’s notion of what it is to be ‘enlightened’ is, as I hope to show, bizarre. Marcuse’s intellectual training became apparent when he completed his dissertation on Hegel in 1931. Thus, to understand the backdrop of Marcuse’s views I want to give a brief summary of Hegel’s views. Hegel is one of the most famous philosophers ever. His view was that the world, as well as the mind, is governed by, what he called, dialectical law. According to dialectical law, an original state of affairs develops through the confrontation between contradictions. For Hegel, the fundamental “contradiction” is rooted in self-consciousness. Self-consciousness longs for absolute freedom. Self-consciousness desires its wishes to have mental power over reality. It wants imagination to rule. However, it finds itself confronted by an indifferent universe. Self-consciousness must be content, then, with being able to shape reality through thoughtful action. The original state of affairs is self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is consciousness of a reality that does not yield to wishes or imagination. However, the mind is not impotent. Although it cannot transform the state of affairs simply by thinking, it can transform the state of affairs by thoughtfully acting. Thus, a new state of affairs is brought about: a state where thoughtful action synthesizes pure self-consciousness and pure indifferent reality. So far so good. But the true key to dialectical thinking is to recognize that this is not a final step. Instead, it is only one stage. In each successive stage of the dialectic, self-consciousness is forced to develop by confronting that which is foreign to it. In the case above, thoughtful action recognizes that it only has a finite amount of time to act before death. But, as in the first example, this is not an end to the developmental process. Instead, this provides another moment for the dialectical law to exert its force. Thoughtful action does not have to resign to death. Instead, it can synthesize death into itself resulting in a new, deeper and richer position --- for example, the desire to redouble one’s efforts and not waste time or the desire to create something that will persist through history. The above is a brief summary of Hegel’s account of dialectical law. The critical point to keep in mind is the fact that a mere documentation of the ‘facts’ – what I illustrated above as ‘indifferent reality’ is never the whole truth. The whole truth must take into account the teleological character of self-consciousness. It must keep in mind that self- consciousness inherently strives to overcome those things that act as obstacles. It is this aspect of Hegel’s thought that Marcuse makes much of. In “One Dimensional Man”, Marcuse bemoans the fact that Science dominates contemporary industrial civilization. Marcuse is bothered by the fact that society seems to be more concerned with what there is than with what there should be. A One-Dimensional-Man is man that has given up, or at least largely ignored, the critical aspect of his nature – the aspect that allows him to recognize not just what is but what ought to be. Scientific activity, whether it is physics or economics, concerns itself with facts and the theories based on those facts. The average man is dominated by the ‘empirical’ world view and a resulting fascination with what there is (i.e., consumer goods) instead of what there should be. For Marcuse this is not a good mode of being for a human. What is, then? The proper mode of being a human is to adopt is nothing but Hegel’s view of self- consciousness. This view, again, is one that avoids the problem of a short-sighted fixation on what there is (science) that is typical of a one-dimensional-man. Instead, it emphasizes the importance on what ought to be. This focusing on the ought is often called the ‘critical’ attitude. Marcuse’s emphasis on the ‘critical’ aspect of the human being meant that his concern was by default ‘revolutionary’. This does not mean that any particular method of revolution was mandated by his philosophic base but only that what is was always viewed in relationship with what ought to be and thus the status-quo was subject to an un-ending criticism. What, in particular, did he criticize? Almost everything. Marcuse implicated empiricism, science, capitalism, democracy and even things such as free-speech in his criticism. In a simple – so simple it is close to trivial – sense we can see his point: Science is not ethics. Science will tell you how to build a nuclear bomb but it will not tell you what to do with it. Science can give you Auschwitz. Etc. The solution to this is, indeed, to link science with a program of ethics. But this is trivial. When the Americans dropped the bomb there was, of course, an ethical standard associated with the decision to do so. Likewise, Hitler and the Nazi’s had a very explicit and precise ethical program that fueled their war and their holocaust. All examples in history will demonstrate that Marcuse’s claim that science operates outside of ethics is absurd. The One-Dimensional-Man is simply a myth. His point may be, however, not that science is operating without ethics but that it is operating without the ‘right’ ethics. Thus, the question immediately arises: What does Marcuse claim the ‘right’ ethical system is and how does he demonstrate that it is, in fact, the right system? Marcuse’s basic claim is that the right ethical system is the system that is based on the essence of man. In this case, the essence of man means the realization of reason (with reason ‘properly understood’). What this ‘realization of reason’is is not very clear and in One- Dimensional-Man it never makes itself more transparent. In his book “Reason and Revolution” he claims that the realization of reason can’t be concretely imagined because it is always changing with the historical process. In another of his books, “Eros and Civilization” he claims that the realization of reason is a civilization where sensualist//libidinous behavior permeates all things to bestow the benefits of pleasure on all aspects of life. In his essay, “Repressive Tolerance” he states that the realization of reason is making sure that those whose version of the “realization of reason” is not ‘actually’ the realization must be subject to violence and repression. But still, in not one case is there a clear articulation of what his abstract standard means. Faced with this difficulty, Marcuse pulls out the standby of all tongue-tied philosophers: intuition. There are a few who, as a result of “…methodic intellectual meditation” will know by “intuition” the correct ethical system (One Dimenstional Man p126). Or, “The question, who is qualified to make all these distinctions, definitions, identifications for the society as a whole, has now one logical answer, namely, everyone 'in the maturity of his faculties' (read: everyone who has the right intuitions) as a human being…” (Repressive Tolerance). This emphasis on intuition, in the words of a famous Marxist-Scholar is: “Marcuse combines contempt for science and technology with the belief that we must strive for higher values because all the problems of material welfare have been solved and commodities exist in plenty…In this respect Marcuse is typical of the mentality of those who have never had to trouble themselves to obtain food, clothing, housing, electricity, and so on, as all these necessities of life were available ready-made. This accounts for the popularity of his philosophy among those who have never had anything to do with material and economic production. Students from comfortable middle-class backgrounds have in common with the proletariat that the technique and organization of production are beyond their mental horizon: consumer goods, whether plentiful or in short supply, are simply there for the taking. Contempt for technique and organization goes hand in hand with a distaste for all forms of learning that are subject to regular rules of operation or that require vigorous effort, intellectual discipline, and a humble attitude towards facts and the rules of logic. It is much easier to shirk the laborious task and to utter slogans about global revolution transcending our present civilization and uniting knowledge and feeling…Marcuse’s…program is…to destroy democratic institutions and tolerance in the name of a totalitarian myth, subjecting science and technology to a nebulous ‘essential’ intuition which is the exclusive property of philosophers hostile to empiricism and positivism.” While I have tried to give you a picture of the kinds of ideas Marcuse advocates, this short summary really can’t portray it. Suffice it to say that quotes such as “It should be noted that Marcuse’s demands go much further than Soviet totalitarian Communism has ever done…” are not uncommon or, in my view, unfounded. | ||
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L
Canada4732 Posts
A "monopoly" in the Free-Market can only happen for a fleeting and temporary period of time Oh boy. Lets see how you twist your pretzel to defend this one. | ||
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ItchReliever
2489 Posts
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Rothbardian
United States497 Posts
PETER OWNS! | ||
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lOvOlUNiMEDiA
United States643 Posts
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Yurebis
United States1452 Posts
On January 29 2010 15:24 ItchReliever wrote: globalization is not good for everyone/ the weak will die and the strong will consume/ it's a game we've been playing/ pretending to even out the field/ but everybody knows only one belly gets filled/ but it's more complicated than that/ because the weak don't have a choice/ what can one do when they come knockin' with their guns/ there's only one way out and it's to get guns yourself. I wonder how did the world get to a 6 billion population, if globalization is such a zero-sum game as you say... | ||
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lOvOlUNiMEDiA
United States643 Posts
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tomatriedes
New Zealand5356 Posts
1) Would you want all parks and national parks privatized? If so, would there be anything to stop billionaires and corporations buying them up and preventing their access by the public forever? Would you consider this a good thing? What about public libraries, should they all be privatized too? What if they are bought by private companies, who start charging for books? Would you consider that a good thing? 2) What about air and sea pollution? The argument usually is that private land ownership can prevent pollution, because you can't pollute other people's land, but what's to stop Ajax Chemicals from spewing as much filth as they want into the air and the sea if there is no government regulation? 3) If privatization and deregulation is so beneficial why was Naomi Klein (in the 'Shock Doctrine' ) able to find so many (well-researched) examples, in a variety of countries, where such programs resulted in impoverishment for the majority of the population and only benefited small business elites? Why was it necessary for many of the countries who pushed such programs to kidnap and torture trade unionists and others who opposed such measures and why were the measures often introduced in very undemocratic ways (ie in Chile after a military coup)? 4) Apparently privatization is always supposed to make things more efficient, right? If that's the case, how come when the NZ government sold off it's railway system (Tranzrail) to an Australian company they ran it into the ground, reinvesting none of their profit back into the infrastructure but instead just taking the profits overseas? How come the NZ government was eventually forced to buy back the railway system because it was being run in such a shoddy way? How do the free market purists account for this? 5) For many years NZ's banks were all private-owned, there were several banks, so according to free market theory, they should have been competing to give the consumer the best deal, right? How come instead of that they uniformly charged similar high fees? How come it was only when the NZ government created a government-owned bank to compete with the private-owned banks and began winning customers from them with lower fees that they reluctantly began lowering their fees? If all government enterprises are so inefficient how is it that the NZ government-owned bank is able to charge lower fees than the other banks but still turn a profit? Isn't it possible that in some cases when several big corporations control almost 100% of the market, rather than competing with each other on prices and service, they will actually find it more profitable to collude on keeping prices high and the consumer will lose out? | ||
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Yurebis
United States1452 Posts
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Froleson
Iceland18 Posts
On January 29 2010 13:05 Rothbardian wrote: Austrian Economics is Praxeological. We do not derive our theories from statistics, but from logic and reason. And this is one of Austrian Economics great failings. It´s closed logical system where everything fits, very much like Marxism. And, like Marxism, it has very little to do with reality. F.ex. there´s no empirical evidence that free-markets do work. Every single industrialised nation has more or less followed the same pattern, heavy state intervension to protect local industries from global competition, be it the US, Europe, Japan, S-Korea, et.c. According to Austrian School state intervention decreases productivity, lessens GDP et.c., but how do you then explain the fact that the Scandinavian countries, where there´s enjoy almost as much GDP as the US? Can it be that there are other factors than the raw "homo economicus"-ones that affect economic prosperity, say trust and democratic empowerment; social capital, or universal health-care? Can it be that a big democratic state that actually cares for it´s citizens will actually on the whole boost the GDP? And not that GDP should be the main focus, it´s an ambigious concept that should take second place to happiness and self-empowerment in society. Now, I havent read all your posts(it´s a long thread) so if you´ve touched upon these issues I appoligise. Consider this little rant more of a criticism on lazze-faire capitalism and Austrian School economics. In my mind, economics is positivistic 19th and 20th century bs; believing that you can quantify human behaviour down to a exact science. The Austrian School and lazze-fair capitalism took this false preachingsand turned itinto a religion. | ||
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Yurebis
United States1452 Posts
Edit: I could explain a little bit I guess, before I go to sleep. Value is subjective. Man acts on his evaluations. GDP and other aggregate measures of economy do not account as to what is happening to each men. You cannot aggregate happiness after all, as you said. Austrian economics does not argue empirically that government intervention hurts the economy, it argues through a bottom-up deductive logic from praxeological axioms. Whether the empirical data confirms or not the theories of austrian economics is irrelevant as no induction is part of the main pillars thereof. Certainly it's a bonus that they've been right predicting numerous governmental fuck-ups, but they take no pride in that (or at least they shouldn't...) The reason why, or one of the main reasons at least, government intervention in the market is "bad", or goes against voluntary trade, in a few words, is because government cannot calculate what the consumers want, and what the sellers can supply. Only consumers and sellers can settle their negotiations to the full extent of their "wants" and "haves". Once government starts meddling in that, forcing them to do this or that, the trade deviates from its original path, and no assertions after-the-fact can be made whether such trade was good or not, since neither the seller's nor the buyer's evaluations were able to be fully used. Only the central planner's values of how he thinks it should be are realized. | ||
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The Storyteller
Singapore2486 Posts
Some of them, like the issue of dumping and monopolies having unfair advantage, are already recognised by pragmatic governments which have anti trust laws and anti dumping laws in place. I don't think there's a whole lot of argument there. Others are superficially correct, but ignore the other side of the argument. For instance, this whole argument that a good company will become a monopoly and then have inefficiencies. That is a fact. But what he doesn't say is that when the inefficiencies get bad enough, other (smaller!) companies find an opening to compete. Some industries are seen as harder to compete in than others because of the high barrier to entry (railroads, telecoms etc.). However, technology is helping that case. For instance, India's fixed line telecommunications market is pretty much monopolised by a state run enterprise. That monopoly leads to inefficiency, as OP pointed out. However, India's mobile phone market is one of the cheapest and fastest growing in the world, because small private companies saw a way to exploit the inefficiencies of the fixed line monopoly. It was made possible through technological developments, which in a way are also spurred by inefficiencies in the capitalist economy. Another example of a simplistic argument is that American workers have to compete with low paid Chinese workers, while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Americans are very happy to buy cheap made in China products. Nobody's forcing them to do it. They do it because they like it. I don't think banning Chinese imports would make a lot of Americans very happy. I could just as well say, what's the use of having a job when you can't afford to buy anything? Besides, you're pretty much saying, "these guy want to work in comfortable conditions, want short working hours and want a lot of money. And I don't want you to employ that other guy who's willing to bend over backwards to make you happy" Forget about the average American, Goldman Sachs wouldn't employ someone who said that! Heck, you wouldn't even get married to someone who said, "I'm fat because I don't want to work out, I'm poor because I don't want to work and I want you to support me. Don't go for that other girl who's rich and'll give you a blow job every other day."! OP also ignores the fact that America has benefitted greatly from globalisation in the export department. It's exported its entertainment, its manpower, its technology, its weapons, its aeroplanes and a whole bunch of other stuff that require highly skilled American labour that other countries just can't compete with. However, the fact that the whole world buys certain products from America provides more employment for American workers. And these are blue collar workers, mind you, working to put together Boeings. There are many more simplistic arguments, I won't go through all of them because I don't have time. However, for a more balanced view I would suggest the OP read "Economics - Making Sense of the Modern Economy", edited by Simon Cox and published under the Economist label. For an easier read I would suggest "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford. Ultimately, nobody denies that pure capitalism does not work. As many have pointed out, you can have state intervention to curb the worst excesses and still have a well functioning state. You need, for example, the state to set aside money for things that benefit the entire population, but which most are too short sighted to support (roads, telephone networks). You also need the state to set aside money to pay for things that don't generate income per se, but which are necessary for a state to function (police force, army, education). However, the reasons for pure capitalism not working are not many of those OP lists, and his vague notion that "we need change" is no solution either. | ||
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The Storyteller
Singapore2486 Posts
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dmgdnooc
Australia33 Posts
I have several comments to make on this large and thought provoking post. The theory of free market economics, where supply and demand seek an equilibrium at the best price point, is a fine theory. The problem is that there are no free markets in which to test the theory, all are subjected to manipulation by regulators, large players and insider traders. That markets will tend towards monopolies or oligopolies is well recognised by economists and governments have sought to prevent or encourage this at various times. Although often undesirable, monopolies are not necessarily destructive. Steel production in Australia is monopilised by one super large player under government encouragement. If there were many small steel producers they would not be able to survive in Australia's limited market for steel - leaving Australia without a steel industry and subject to foreign price rorting. The current system of pricing goods does not input the environmental or social costs of production. These costs are borne by the rest of the world and not the purchasers of any particular commodity. I think that focussing on the price of goods is a good indication of efficiency, the problem is that all the costs of production are not included in the price. That a corporate entity is permitted to partake of the political conversation of a democracy is, in my opinion, a scandal. A democracy is government by the people (the demos) with one vote that has one value, and entities without voting rights are no part of that demos. Lets call it a plutocracy and use the correct descriptive for a system of government where the moneyed class (stock holders) get a vote at the ballot box and another in a back room in Washington (or Canberra, London, Paris etc). Back rooms are by their nature hidden from the public eye and the proceedings that take place there are not subject to scrutiny by the demos. Seutonius mentions an incident from the life of the Emperor Vespasian. An engineer presented to the Emperor the plans for a labour-saving device that would revolutionise heavy transport, greatly reducing costs. Vespasian is said to have paid the engineer hansomely for his invention but refused to impliment the new technology saying "you must allow me to feed my poor commons". That is, the Emperor preferred to maintain people in jobs rather than have them unemployed and the cost savings were forgone. This Roman morality could be profitably applied in the West's current unemployment dilemma. Ok, enough, thanks for the prod. | ||
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SWPIGWANG
Canada482 Posts
Are you telling me that you'd return to a protectionist, non-trading world because AMERICANS don't get paid absurd amount of money for blue collar work anymore? (eg. car production) The world is a big place, and you'd rather wipe out the economic growth of China and India, which had its income more than double in the past two decades? You'd rather leave them unemployed subsistence farmers that can't afford anything better than a hand built hut? I guess they don't matter because they aren't 1st world persons and thus of no concern. (are the yellow man even human?) Now you could take a leaf out of some radical left's play book and say that yes, they'd be better off being subsistence farmers over the dirty and hard work in a sweatshop. However, the workers inside obviously disagree and have shown their disagreement with direct action. Arguments that automatically define Americans as more worthy of high wages that is not earned by merit compare to the rest of the world is not one I or any reasonable person can support. If you want to make more money, simply be better and produce more and better shit. Blaming other people for working harder while demanding less is just plain simply absurd. How can such racist and nationalist views be moral? -------------------- I'm not going to talk about monopolies and such since it is a recognized and worked upon problem. The whole thing about investment is based on appeal to emotions too, since companies do invest in new technology and products despite how much the top of their management gets paid sometimes. | ||
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Archerofaiur
United States4101 Posts
I liked how so much of his rhetoric is belief based instead of evidence based. Actually that brings me to the part of this I find the most interesting. Id like to expand on the part he made in the middle about borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. What he and infact most in the political realm miss is that all of politics is transfering priority from one value to another. You want small government, fine. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of that system. You want large government, fine. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of that system. There is very little universally best answer. So what does this all come down to? How do you decide what to do? Values. That explains why so much of these debates has the charectoristics of religious or philosophical arguements. You have two sides living in different worlds. If I am on mars and you are on venus how can we possibly agree what color the planet is. Now given that our realities are value based in both observation and conclusion how should politics be approached? First by excercising radical respect and focusing on understanding the othersides values and where your values could possibly overlap with them. And second by using evidence based dialog with the understanding that interpretation is colored by preexisting values. TLDR: What we see today in the political sphere is a reflection of the course religous ideology took in the earlier chapters of human history. You begin at different places and that cannot be changed. But that does not mean coexistance is not possible. | ||
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