Aesthetic Materialism

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...

  Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1, Part 12 Your eyes open.  You see flies and a small, glowing bug buzzing around.  ...up on the wall, the glimmer of something! You are a girl in a cage.  There's a somewhat older boy with a shaved head, kneeling in a cage next to yours.   "Hey!" you whisper to him, but he sits there, impassively, staring forward. "Hey!" say, still whispering but more loudly and insistently.  You're just staring at the smooth back of his head, in gradually rising frustration. "I can hear you perfectly well," he intones, speaking clearly in a normal tone of voice. The room rocks to the side, and you tumble backwards.  The boy seems poised, utterly unperturbed.  As you regain your balance, up on a nail, sticking into the wall, you see it: a golden key, surrounded by the flies. As the entire room lurches at a nauseating slant, the golden key sways out from the wall, as if stretching towards you, invitingly. Yo...

  In "The Eclipse of Reason," Max Horkheimer writes: "Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument." First I would have to believe that reason ever had autonomy - or to even know what autonomous reason would mean - before I could accept the premise that it has "given up" this autonomy. Horkheimer is smuggling a kind of idealism (quasi-Kantian) into his presuppositions. Reason has never been autonomous. As Hume said, reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions. Or, better yet, the material conditions of a society, in the final analysis, determine the ideological superstructure, including that society's reason. At best we might say that our goal is to create - for the first time - an autonomous reason. But that is well outside of the goal of Marxism. As Marx put it, reason has always existed, but not in rational form. The role of the critic is, through dialectic, to discover the rational kernel within the irrational - and ...

Whenever I speak to a Marxist, I feel like a Religious Studies researcher, or an anthropologist of religion, speaking to a Christian.   For me, not only is Marxism a religion - it's the religion.  It's the religion by which all other religions are measured.  Something is a religion if and only if, and to the extent that, it resembles Marxism.  (And that's not a bad thing.  I love religion .  And I also love communists .)  Marxism is the most sophisticated religion, the most subtle and nuanced - after all, Marx was the greatest theologian of the 19th century . I see an unbroken line of tradition from the earliest Hebrew prophets - Amos, for instance - to contemporary communist movements.  From the beginning of this civilizational progression, Marxism was always in a process of becoming, of entelechy.  It always existed as potential; in Marx it reaches its entelechy or fulfillment - or at least until something else supersedes Marxism....

There's something fundamentally unserious about politicians.  When I think of the most important people of the 20th century: Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, John von Neumann, Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett , etc., none of them are politicians.  I just don't think politicians matter that much.  I don't think they've ever accomplished anything particularly noteworthy - and that goes for both positive and negative accomplishments, although they certainly seem much more capable of negative accomplishments - wars, genocides, atrocities, etc. - than positive ones.  The art of being a politician seems to belong to the realm of entertainment and public relations.  (Zappa had that famous phrase, of which there are a few versions: "Politics is the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex," or the one he explicitly advocated but did not claim to originate, "Politics is the entertainment wing of industry.")  To me, this...

The art of thinking dialectically means: not disappearing up your own asshole. It means not only seeing things from your own perspective.  Trying to stay in dialogue with people who don't see things the same way you do. You have to use language that someone who isn't playing the same game as you are could understand. People who find themselves arguing with someone (especially online) and thinking (or saying) "This idiot has no idea what he's talking about," and thus conclude that the argument is pointless, are missing the point.  Let's assume it's true.  You don't realize how precious that is - to meet someone who has no idea what you're talking about.  Now you're in contact with a truly outside perspective.  A rare opportunity.  Now dialectics can begin.  Unless you can say what you mean to someone who isn't in your culture and doesn't use your language, you yourself don't understand it at all.

    Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 11 As you walk through the woods, there's a side road that splits off from the road you're on.  Next to it is a sign: "PRIVATE ROAD".   Sam points down that way.  "Up there.  That's where the prophet lives.  But this is where I stop.  I'm not going anywhere near there.  He's a bad man.  All the kids are scared of him." Gestas pipes up.  "Kid's got a point, Dismas. What are we even doing here?  This isn't any of our business." "If we have a chance to save Jesus, we have to take it." "I'm sorry," says Sam. "That's okay," you reply.  "Thanks for your help."  You and Gestas carry Jesus up the path.  Pretty soon you come to another sign: "NO VISITORS" Right in front of the sign is a great big bear!  It seems young.  It's munching happily on some berries.  The two of you try to sneak past it without bothering it, but ...

  Human beings evolved from other hominins and spread throughout the Earth.  For most of the time that they've been here, they've been nomadic.  But for most of that time, their ability to travel - and thus their strategy - has been profoundly limited by one crucial necessity: the need for fresh, salt-free water to survive.  Moreover, they'll avoid stagnant water, which is more likely to cause disease.  Thus, for untold millennia before the development of plumbing, they had to stay within fairly quick walking distance of rivers - typically, the small tributaries that lead into larger rivers, which will often be the freshest and most potable. Thus, in almost every part of the globe, long before the development of agriculture and the concept of land as property, humans both competed and cooperated for the purpose of safe access to rivers.  Rivers provide not only drinking water but also food sources such as fish, opportunities for bathing and the disposal of ...

I have, in the past, identified as an anarchist.  Really, none of my opinions or positions on any major issues have changed since then.  But I think the label "anarchist" is misleading and unhelpful for a lot of people and so I usually avoid using this label (see my essay on the "Eminem strategy").  But for exactly the same reasons, I think it's mostly unhelpful to use terms like "communist" or "socialist".  If I need to sum up my political opinions, I can do so in a three word phrase: Own Your Job .  I've asserted before that I believe in worker ownership of the means of production.  But this is a bunch of jargon.  What does it mean?  What is the "means of production"?  Most people picture buildings, machines, and raw materials.  And that's true, in a way.  When Marx writes about the "sublation" (Aufheben) of private property, he distinguishes private property from personal property.  In a just social order, peopl...