Aesthetic Materialism

  Dominating cultures tend to freely appropriate ideas and traditions of the cultures that they dominate.  They just add the gods of the people they have conquered to their already-existing pantheon - even when the mythologies clash and are logically incompatible, dominating cultures shrug.  Thus, for instance, Genghis Khan's descendants were happy to adopt the cultures they dominated.  The Yuan Dynasty took on Chinese customs and beliefs, Berke Khan became a Muslim, and so on - without hesitation.  Often they believed great swirling mixtures of Tengrism, Buddhism, astrology, Christianity, and anything else they came across, all at once, without feeling any cognitive dissonance.  There is always something sweetly naive about conquerors. Dominated cultures, on the other hand, seethe with resentment and hatred.  They remember every infraction and count every penny they've been cheated.  Not only hatred towards those who have dominated them - not eve...

To my mind, the best decision making process would probably have elements of meritocracy, sortition, democracy, subsidiarity, and stability.  Exactly how much of each and how they can be balanced is an open question.  But for the sake of argument, here's one way of incorporating all of them. Society is divided into many small portions, (each containing, perhaps, 15,000 people) each of which has some fairly large degree of relative autonomy, capable of deciding on a wide swath of policies for itself.  (We can call each of these a mini-society.) Within each mini-society, there is a process for decision-making.  This process can, itself, be changed - the Constitution of each mini-society can be amended by the mini-society itself to change the process.  But the default process, as it were, would be as follows: Step 0: The mini-society has laws, in official law books, beginning with that mini-society's constitution.  They also have at least 2 (though probably ma...

  I don't think that conservatives are evil.  Thinking of conservatives as "the bad guys" is totally wrongheaded and ineffective as a strategy, because it misses the point. I think that conservatism is something that happens to most people - probably to everyone, to one degree or another, especially as people get older, although different people become conservative in different ways.  As they age, people become more and more stuck in their ways.  It becomes more and more difficult to change your mind.  "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," as the saying goes.  People become more and more convinced that they are right, more dogmatic, more authoritarian, less and less open to new ideas.   In much the same way that, if you don't exercise, you will become out of shape, and if you don't exercise your mind, with reading, sudoku, crosswords, or something, your mind will gradually deteriorate as you get older - similarly, most people gradually become c...

  Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1, Part 13 "Alright, stop right there!" says the kid, after you have battled some more Girgashite zombies and worms, levelling up again in the process. "Now, close your eyes!  All of you!  I see you peeking, Gestas.  Keep them closed.  Now spin around 10 times!  That's right!  Keep spinning!  Okay, now keep them closed, and hold our hands.  We'll lead you... over this way... good, keep coming, walk this way, okay, good, okay, great.  Now sit down, keep your eyes closed, and now count down from 100!  I'll be right back!" You open your eyes to reveal another dugong - even bigger than the one you fought before.  The kids are nowhere to be found.  This time, though, you're ready, and considerably stronger than you were the first time you had to fight a dugong.  You and Gestas finish him off with little difficulty, and at the end you have a super-sized dugong tusk for a new we...

As Karl Marx said, "I am not a Marxist."  Marxism is, simultaneously, the greatest obstacle to any real proletarian movement to overturn the existing order, and the means by which we can overcome this obstacle. I'd even go so far as to say that Marxism is, in its way, a greater obstacle than the bourgeoisie itself (which it serves).  This seems counter-intuitive, and it is - even to me! - because Marxist movements are so small and almost powerless that it seems like they wouldn't make any difference.  Yet, again and again, every time a real proletarian movement arises to overturn the existing order, the Marxists suddenly appear and immediately defeat the real movement, either by destroying it completely, dismissing it as somehow impure or not "true," absorbing it, redirecting it, distracting it, confusing it, dividing it, or some combination of the above.  By neutralizing every potential movement for change, the Marxists always end up serving and reinforcing...

Marx was the greatest theologian of the 19th century, because he was the most subtle, the most nuanced, and he had the best sense of humor.  (Or perhaps Marx was the second greatest theologian of the 19th century, second only to Hegel - but it's very close, and I'm not sure who ultimately wins.  Nietzsche might be third, but it's a distant third.) Wittgenstein famously said, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence."  His comrades initially thought that this made him a logical positivist or even an eliminative materialist.  In reality, Wittgenstein was something more like a mystic, who was deeply invested in poetry.  He identified morality with aesthetics, but not to denigrate either - he thought both were deeply important, but that the truths of morality and aesthetics could not be stated clearly but could only be "shown".  This, to me, is evocative of mystics like Meister Eckhart, for whom God was above all human qualities, incl...