Posted by
m0t0r1zed on Saturday, June 21, 2008 9:42:49 PM
(i'm too lazy - cut 'n paste)
The problem.
The problem I have with political ideologies are their arbitrariness (and this is why they screw up the world). They assign one or more value(s) greater importance than others. For communists/socialists it tends to be equality. For libertarians – liberty. For antiquarians – antiquity. For vegetarians – vegetability.
But is there a rational basis for assigning these abstract ideals a greater value than others? Is it grounded in reality? In the way the world really works? Why should it be the central underpinning of policies that affect billions of lives? Why not just pull any arbitrary value out of a bag and make that the central pillar of some new chic political mumbo jumbo garbage hullabaloo brouhahahahahah? Brouhahahahahah. Brouhahahahahah! Haha!
The problem is … people base their political philosophy subjectively – more on how they wish the world to be, rather than looking at the world objectively. They make pseudo-attempts at a rational explanation, but it's just hokum hocus pocus.
So stop doing this you dumb people. Dummy dummy dumb dumb poopoo heads.
Zero.
Hmm. Let's start from zero. Nothing has any value at all. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. Equality. Social justice. All that stuff. Whatever. Everything = nothing.
So, what is it that seems to drive us? Let's think biology. Pain. Pleasure.
Pain is associated with death. Pleasure with reproduction and life. Both serve a simple purpose – survival.
Okay. That's lame. How do you construct a political philosophy out of that? Nothing has value but survival??? Unfortunately, that is the hard truth. Things exist to exist to exist to exist to exist to ... The further your political philosophy deviates from this, the more dissonance will be created between your idealistic policies and their realistic outcomes (oooh oooh stick something in here about cognitive dissonance and stuff so I can do like Homer Simpson I am so smart s m r t!).
You can build a utopian castle on top of clouds and dreams in storybooks and fairytales, but if you do so in reality, you get big heavy blocks of stone falling on your head (you know, all of these parenthetical asides are annoying me – oh, wait. I'm the one writing this? Whats is I doings?).
A one and a two.
So, now we have at least something to work with that is rooted firmly in reality and not on some arbitrary, abstract principle. But is it possible to construct a rational way to create political principles from this? Well, from the one political philosophy class I took a while back I remember those utilitarian guys. The maximization of happiness people. Bentham and Mill? [Mill was like a supergenius (with like a eleventy bazillion [IQ]) {who would like say to me, like (STFU n00bzor!!!!)}] Okay, so that's kinda close to the whole pain and pleasure and survival deal we've been babbling about.
But I remember they screwed up in two major ways. Mistake one – ultimately it is not happiness, but survival that is what drives existence what. What!?! If it is a choice between increased happiness and increased survival, survival wins (I suppose that's why humans are so good at living and being miserable about it at the same time). Mistake two – the whole "higher pleasures" nonsense is a messed up attempt at justifying why we all aren't engaging in orgiastic debauchery if the whole thing was about tickling our pleasure centers. Why do we defer pleasure and value things such as hard work and self-sacrifice and place value upon doodads like artistic expression, intellectual discourse, the sciences, and such gobbledygook? So I think it was Mill who came up with the whole "higher pleasures" concept and stuff about sad Socrates being better than a happy pig (ergo a sad panda is better than a happy monkey). But anyway, I think this whole "higher pleasures" stuff is probably magical fairyland thinking. However, at the time, there wasn't a framework that could accommodate all of these different data points.
And a three.
But there is a way to explain it. If you apply a multi-level selectionist view to politics, you can create a political philosophy grounded solidly on realistic principles. Higher pleasures are explained simply as things that can improve group stability ("happiness") versus individual stability ("happiness"). Higher pleasures tend to be things that improve or benefit the common good / society in general / nobody in particular / everyone but me.
MU and the fall of Atlantis.
So, if you tweak the theory of utilitarianism by combining it with multi-level selectionist theory from biology, then you get MU – Multi-level utilitarianism. (See, I make a stinky political philosophy in my pants). Then again, "mu" means nothing. So, I suppose we're back to zero.
But we're not, damn it! Jeez, what would be the point of all this! By acknowledging that there is a competition of interests between many levels of state – starting from the individual – then you can start to understand and see what is going on. Equal rights, intellectual freedom, higher pleasures, and all of that other stuff start to make sense. It is just a matter of tracking down the level at which the selection pressure is coming. Autocratic governments, devoid of such values, can still form a viable, stable system – again, it is not happiness but stability that is key – although it would suck to live in one as a peon, I suppose.
This is just mostly babbling bubbling off the top of my head. There's some stuff that I wrote down that is even more useless – in which I was pretending to sound somewhat sane. Anyways, I woulds likes to finally endeth this by speakething in the words of the greats philosophers, blah blah blah blah blah. Wha wuh wtf?