After a lengthy pause in writing for this Substack, today I’m putting one up. I shared this post with a friend knowledgeable about these issues when I first wrote it. He told me that Colin Wright has written one similar in the Wall Street Journal all the way back in February of 2022. Having written this one, however, and having been pretty happy with it, I thought I would share it on this Substack all the same. Enjoy!
I said that I would also consider this post to stay on-subject.
Sartre says: "that the way we are and how we behave is illegitimately imposed on us by culture and society". He had a certain focus on what didn't work for him. "Existentialism therefore justifies and insists that we do not need to, and should not, accept such impositions. We are free to be ourselves."
Since Sartre was raised in a society, he has no way to know what "free to be ourselves" means without a society. Maybe our "natural behavior" is to cry and kick our feet when we are hungry? My bet would be that there is no way to know or do anything without the societal linguistic norms that we have either accepted or not. Even working against them is the same as working for them, because these norms remain the standard (pro or con) in your life.
Categorization and classification are always, and necessarily, an arbitrary exercise of the human mind. It is happening all the time inside your own head. If it spills over into society, what else would you expect? If categories are imposed on you and society, in order to uphold and maintain the "oppressive nature of your society", when they are gone you will finally understand the jungle. This won't happen, so that these people are completely dependent on those stable people that maintain social relations, while the former use all their ingenuity to destroy what's here.
Queer Theory takes categorization and applies it to gender and even sex. Gender is a human construct. Sex is not. It is how babies are/were made for 100,000 years. Gender IS normalized through society. But both society and even civilization, or the human species for that matter, exists only because some people stay with the old notion of Sex.
Actually what being queer means – is intentionally not adhering to socially expected and constructed norms relating to gender, (please leave sexuality out of it.) When a person becomes an "everybody" which is the same as a nobody, then that person stands for no labels, or nothingness, a very hollow and non-satisfying life ensues. As long as billionaires are playing with you, you can make a little demonstration, but then, to the dustbin.
If you look to the origins, all gender advocates, and including the pedophile politicians and business magnates, they all define life as how to have another sexual orgasm!! Please stay with the sex-dolls, or just keep Whacking-Off.
I can read this post later and comment on it, but first I want to address your dialog with N.S. Lyons. (He doesn't allow comments unless he can get on the dole.)
I liked that innovated format because one of my worries about Substack was that it will be difficult to have a debate just in the comment fields. Congratulations on having overcome that.
We can start with the definition of "collectivist systems" according to Hayek (mid-1940's) it is the “deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal.” This implies a moral or ethical system that places the one goal above all other competing, and thereby subordinate, goals. All societies have some definite goals, and they are relative to other goals, depending on if those major goals are under attack.
For instance, in America the overriding goal is to sanctify unlimited private property by any and all means. Just say "Socialism" and see what happens, or you can hearken back to the McCarthy era.
At one point we are told that the overriding collectivist goal of the Soviet Union was "Communism". That seems like a gross over-simplifications to conform to a certain 1940's narrative. Communism just means there are no billionaires. Shortly after the Soviet civil war there were no billionaires, and communism was a reality. Communism's major flaw was the belief in world revolution. But by the time of Stalin, he said "let's have Socialism in one country". So the "communism" that Hayek refers to, didn't exist, or in name only.
The Soviet Union's overriding collectivist goal was to industrialize their nation, and that they did. In fact, between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the end of the Great Depression in the LATE 1930s, the Soviet Union saw the largest growth in its gross domestic product of any other nation in the world, growing by more than 70 percent between 1929 and 1937/8. the collapse of the U.S. economy exposed the instabilities of other industrialized countries. In contrast, the economic isolation of the Soviet Union and its detachment from the capitalist system meant that it was relatively shielded from these events. The majority of European countries saw their GDP growth fall in the depression's early years. However, none experienced the same level of decline as the United States, which dropped by 28 percent.
Soviet GDP / Capita went from 28%, measured against the Western European GDP / Capita, in 1929 - to 43% in 1938, a substantial gain on the west in just that one decade.
A few more definitions might aid us in moving forward.
Environmentalism, seeks to eliminate the so-called environmental impact that humans have on the natural world irrespective of the impact on humans themselves.
Woke: means aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice). Or those issues that have merely agglomerated themselves to Woke, via common association among the people involved in Progressive political movements.
Identitarianism seeks to retributively redistribute resources from so-called oppressor to so-called oppressed identities. Which may be feasible, if not overdone.
We are told that Racialism is Tribalist. Surely racism was ongoing way after the consolidation of the tribes. We need another definition of racism. We are also told that "Trans" is a craze?
While I agree that anti-racism and environmentalism are both collective movements, if Woke is merely attentive to social justice, (which social justice)? Attentiveness is not a collective, whereas the individual issues might be; (racism and the environment). Trans is not a collective, or a mini-collective. It has no power in itself and is not an important "voting block". Trans is something that is manipulated by a third party. Who is that third party and what are its aims? Outwardly it is your congressman. But why is that?
Really that is where the analysis must lie. If it is about identitarians, then some force wants to further fragment society. IMO, Identitarianism does not compete with the Environmentalist streams. They are of completely different weights, and it only depends on what force is behind them.
Then we get to the statement; (you said), "I am against collectivism in any form". For instance I just bought a used car this morning, and I spent the morning in the government office devoted to changing vehicle titles. Wow, it is an enormous enterprise, huge office and a drive-through shop where they check your car's safety, 100's of employees. Upstairs is driver's licenses, even bigger. Maybe 500 titles are changed daily. What would we do without that office? Just hand over a wad of bills, take the keys, and drive off? If so, all of my cars would have been stolen in the first month.
When describing Trans, N.S. Lyons says,"trans-ideology’s central demand is that, for the sake of justice, the world must conform to MY will, rather than the will to the world. In this, transgenderism is the ultimate expression of a centering of the individual will to power – and, arguably, of “identitarianism” in a larger sense: of making one’s inner “identity” the cornerstone of reality."
Modern individualism believes that life starts with the individual, after which comes groups and society, but Durkheim and Mauss believe that this is a limited WESTERN VIEW and that many societies elsewhere in the world do not think this way at all. First, there are totems, and symbols of the group that define the group as a whole, and only after the group is defined is the individual acknowledged. Individual consciousness comes from group consciousness, which means that group consciousness is the prerequisite for individual consciousness and not its result.
Then it is said that Trans will dominate Woke. Maybe so, but only if anti-racists abandon the term. Racially suppressed people number a billion, Trans couldn't even be a million. As soon as the billionaires abandon Trans, it will collapse. (As they did with the Kurds, and are now doing with Ukraine). That is not to say Trans people will disappear. But they won't be "in your face". For instance, I have traveled throughout South East Asia. There they have what they call "Lady-Boys". They are terrifically creative in building their identity. They have national beauty pageants instead of street marches. They are often in the entertainment business, although you meet them in regular jobs too. They don't compete in women's sports (except maybe in "Pole-Dancing"). I think most people like them, are even proud of them, like a national image.
It was said, "Racialism is ultimately a cynical grift, an attempt to redistribute resources, power, and status"; This statement I did not understand where it is coming from. Racism is about the lack of prosperity, which can also be caused by inequality. There may be prosperity, but the majority goes to the ONE PERCENT. If people complain, they are answered, "Look over there"; "Those brown skins are taking your jobs."
I would like to propose that racism isn't the same "world-phenomenon" that it is in the West. Yes, both Rome and China called all others Barbarians. But in Europe, Racism was/is an important justification for colonialism. However if we go back to the Asian heritage; like the Mongol domination, a huge continent with 10's of millions of people was dominated by 800,000 people. (I don't say 800,000 warriors, that was their total population.) How did they do that? They didn't have any ethnic cleansing, but let people live and let live. They were a kind of a central police force or mercenary army that prevented too much conflict. It was worth paying them to keep the peace. They were the mercenary army that allowed Moscow to dominate the Kievan princes.
Russia inherited its ethnic tolerance from them, and in a modern country of a 100 ethnic groups, I believe you'll find little racism in Russia. (Of course, they suppress separatism.) China may now be similar, Lyons wrote a large article on China, what did he discover?
Woke is reactive. I don't think it grows because people need to join something? It is prosthetic surgeons who invented Trans along with the pharmaceutical's drug cocktails, and as I say, some large force is manipulating it.
The difference between Classical Liberalism and libertarianism? You said "Classical Liberalism is a less extreme form of libertarianism that is also characterized by a Christian moral underpinning. This Christian moral underpinning is often dismissed or ignored but remains at its center through axioms such as natural rights. I think you can have individuals and individual rights and freedoms while at the same time being harnessed and guided by a Christian morality."
I would venture to say Liberalism and Libertarianism are the same thing. Once upon a time, there were kings and nobles. No king ruled single-handedly. Then, there was the justifiable urge to limit arbitrary powers, and limit their government. Now there are politicians and nobles, but the nobles are called oligarchs. Oligarchs choose the politicians that serve them best, and exchange them when they don't. The oligarchs also write the laws, through their lobbies. The best metaphor for this system is the Wizard of OZ, the only true power which is resting in the oligarchs. The "Government" is the thin curtain hiding the Wizard. Libertarians want to rip that curtain down. It won't change a thing, but will make it way worse. The Wizard will still be working the levers of power, but now he will be laughing at you. LIBERTARIANISM IS OBSOLETE in this age.
To think that you can pedal backwards and find a liberty bound with Christian morals is hocus-pocus thinking. First of all, what Christianity says and what Christianity does couldn't be more opposite. When we look at the culture of antiquity, truly admirable statues and paintings of the Renaissance, we lose sight of many things. In particular, the fact that all the cultural content of the Renaissance was created by the work of several dozen talented artists and humanists fascinated by antiquity, at a time when manslaughter was a daily occurrence for Western Europeans, and it took on massive proportions. But neither Raphael's Sistine Madonna nor Michelangelo's David will tell historians anything about the atrocities of the Borgia papal family or the violence perpetrated by the Sforza dukes. Therefore, for a person interested in what really happened, it is preferable not to confuse works of culture with the system of behavior of the ethos that created that culture.
Just look at European wars for a 1,000 years, Christians massacring Christians on into the 50's and 100's of millions. (Millions of Muslims too with the crusades.) One was even called the 100 year war. Can you imagine; your grandfather and your grandson fought in the same forever war. That was your Christian culture's only stereo-type of behavior for a century. (Did they ever get out of it?) Just now we are finding the true moral status of Europe and the West, and their quest for domination is still alive. "Woke" is very small-potatoes in contrast.
For a while, I thought, ‘Okay, so some people want pronouns to reflect inner gender instead of biological reality… Maybe that’s fine since language evolves over time. What’s the harm, right?’ Then the internet gave me the answer: a news story that the ancient Roman emperor, Elagabalus, is being reclassified as a woman. The harm is the erosion of historical accuracy based on presentism and scant evidence.
Those who prioritize their feelings over logic need to master their emotions before they destroy all truth and knowledge.
I said that I would also consider this post to stay on-subject.
Sartre says: "that the way we are and how we behave is illegitimately imposed on us by culture and society". He had a certain focus on what didn't work for him. "Existentialism therefore justifies and insists that we do not need to, and should not, accept such impositions. We are free to be ourselves."
Since Sartre was raised in a society, he has no way to know what "free to be ourselves" means without a society. Maybe our "natural behavior" is to cry and kick our feet when we are hungry? My bet would be that there is no way to know or do anything without the societal linguistic norms that we have either accepted or not. Even working against them is the same as working for them, because these norms remain the standard (pro or con) in your life.
Categorization and classification are always, and necessarily, an arbitrary exercise of the human mind. It is happening all the time inside your own head. If it spills over into society, what else would you expect? If categories are imposed on you and society, in order to uphold and maintain the "oppressive nature of your society", when they are gone you will finally understand the jungle. This won't happen, so that these people are completely dependent on those stable people that maintain social relations, while the former use all their ingenuity to destroy what's here.
Queer Theory takes categorization and applies it to gender and even sex. Gender is a human construct. Sex is not. It is how babies are/were made for 100,000 years. Gender IS normalized through society. But both society and even civilization, or the human species for that matter, exists only because some people stay with the old notion of Sex.
Actually what being queer means – is intentionally not adhering to socially expected and constructed norms relating to gender, (please leave sexuality out of it.) When a person becomes an "everybody" which is the same as a nobody, then that person stands for no labels, or nothingness, a very hollow and non-satisfying life ensues. As long as billionaires are playing with you, you can make a little demonstration, but then, to the dustbin.
If you look to the origins, all gender advocates, and including the pedophile politicians and business magnates, they all define life as how to have another sexual orgasm!! Please stay with the sex-dolls, or just keep Whacking-Off.
.
First half
I can read this post later and comment on it, but first I want to address your dialog with N.S. Lyons. (He doesn't allow comments unless he can get on the dole.)
I liked that innovated format because one of my worries about Substack was that it will be difficult to have a debate just in the comment fields. Congratulations on having overcome that.
We can start with the definition of "collectivist systems" according to Hayek (mid-1940's) it is the “deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal.” This implies a moral or ethical system that places the one goal above all other competing, and thereby subordinate, goals. All societies have some definite goals, and they are relative to other goals, depending on if those major goals are under attack.
For instance, in America the overriding goal is to sanctify unlimited private property by any and all means. Just say "Socialism" and see what happens, or you can hearken back to the McCarthy era.
At one point we are told that the overriding collectivist goal of the Soviet Union was "Communism". That seems like a gross over-simplifications to conform to a certain 1940's narrative. Communism just means there are no billionaires. Shortly after the Soviet civil war there were no billionaires, and communism was a reality. Communism's major flaw was the belief in world revolution. But by the time of Stalin, he said "let's have Socialism in one country". So the "communism" that Hayek refers to, didn't exist, or in name only.
The Soviet Union's overriding collectivist goal was to industrialize their nation, and that they did. In fact, between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the end of the Great Depression in the LATE 1930s, the Soviet Union saw the largest growth in its gross domestic product of any other nation in the world, growing by more than 70 percent between 1929 and 1937/8. the collapse of the U.S. economy exposed the instabilities of other industrialized countries. In contrast, the economic isolation of the Soviet Union and its detachment from the capitalist system meant that it was relatively shielded from these events. The majority of European countries saw their GDP growth fall in the depression's early years. However, none experienced the same level of decline as the United States, which dropped by 28 percent.
Soviet GDP / Capita went from 28%, measured against the Western European GDP / Capita, in 1929 - to 43% in 1938, a substantial gain on the west in just that one decade.
A few more definitions might aid us in moving forward.
Environmentalism, seeks to eliminate the so-called environmental impact that humans have on the natural world irrespective of the impact on humans themselves.
Woke: means aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice). Or those issues that have merely agglomerated themselves to Woke, via common association among the people involved in Progressive political movements.
Identitarianism seeks to retributively redistribute resources from so-called oppressor to so-called oppressed identities. Which may be feasible, if not overdone.
We are told that Racialism is Tribalist. Surely racism was ongoing way after the consolidation of the tribes. We need another definition of racism. We are also told that "Trans" is a craze?
While I agree that anti-racism and environmentalism are both collective movements, if Woke is merely attentive to social justice, (which social justice)? Attentiveness is not a collective, whereas the individual issues might be; (racism and the environment). Trans is not a collective, or a mini-collective. It has no power in itself and is not an important "voting block". Trans is something that is manipulated by a third party. Who is that third party and what are its aims? Outwardly it is your congressman. But why is that?
Really that is where the analysis must lie. If it is about identitarians, then some force wants to further fragment society. IMO, Identitarianism does not compete with the Environmentalist streams. They are of completely different weights, and it only depends on what force is behind them.
Then we get to the statement; (you said), "I am against collectivism in any form". For instance I just bought a used car this morning, and I spent the morning in the government office devoted to changing vehicle titles. Wow, it is an enormous enterprise, huge office and a drive-through shop where they check your car's safety, 100's of employees. Upstairs is driver's licenses, even bigger. Maybe 500 titles are changed daily. What would we do without that office? Just hand over a wad of bills, take the keys, and drive off? If so, all of my cars would have been stolen in the first month.
When describing Trans, N.S. Lyons says,"trans-ideology’s central demand is that, for the sake of justice, the world must conform to MY will, rather than the will to the world. In this, transgenderism is the ultimate expression of a centering of the individual will to power – and, arguably, of “identitarianism” in a larger sense: of making one’s inner “identity” the cornerstone of reality."
Modern individualism believes that life starts with the individual, after which comes groups and society, but Durkheim and Mauss believe that this is a limited WESTERN VIEW and that many societies elsewhere in the world do not think this way at all. First, there are totems, and symbols of the group that define the group as a whole, and only after the group is defined is the individual acknowledged. Individual consciousness comes from group consciousness, which means that group consciousness is the prerequisite for individual consciousness and not its result.
Then it is said that Trans will dominate Woke. Maybe so, but only if anti-racists abandon the term. Racially suppressed people number a billion, Trans couldn't even be a million. As soon as the billionaires abandon Trans, it will collapse. (As they did with the Kurds, and are now doing with Ukraine). That is not to say Trans people will disappear. But they won't be "in your face". For instance, I have traveled throughout South East Asia. There they have what they call "Lady-Boys". They are terrifically creative in building their identity. They have national beauty pageants instead of street marches. They are often in the entertainment business, although you meet them in regular jobs too. They don't compete in women's sports (except maybe in "Pole-Dancing"). I think most people like them, are even proud of them, like a national image.
It was said, "Racialism is ultimately a cynical grift, an attempt to redistribute resources, power, and status"; This statement I did not understand where it is coming from. Racism is about the lack of prosperity, which can also be caused by inequality. There may be prosperity, but the majority goes to the ONE PERCENT. If people complain, they are answered, "Look over there"; "Those brown skins are taking your jobs."
I would like to propose that racism isn't the same "world-phenomenon" that it is in the West. Yes, both Rome and China called all others Barbarians. But in Europe, Racism was/is an important justification for colonialism. However if we go back to the Asian heritage; like the Mongol domination, a huge continent with 10's of millions of people was dominated by 800,000 people. (I don't say 800,000 warriors, that was their total population.) How did they do that? They didn't have any ethnic cleansing, but let people live and let live. They were a kind of a central police force or mercenary army that prevented too much conflict. It was worth paying them to keep the peace. They were the mercenary army that allowed Moscow to dominate the Kievan princes.
Russia inherited its ethnic tolerance from them, and in a modern country of a 100 ethnic groups, I believe you'll find little racism in Russia. (Of course, they suppress separatism.) China may now be similar, Lyons wrote a large article on China, what did he discover?
Woke is reactive. I don't think it grows because people need to join something? It is prosthetic surgeons who invented Trans along with the pharmaceutical's drug cocktails, and as I say, some large force is manipulating it.
_______________
Second half:
The difference between Classical Liberalism and libertarianism? You said "Classical Liberalism is a less extreme form of libertarianism that is also characterized by a Christian moral underpinning. This Christian moral underpinning is often dismissed or ignored but remains at its center through axioms such as natural rights. I think you can have individuals and individual rights and freedoms while at the same time being harnessed and guided by a Christian morality."
I would venture to say Liberalism and Libertarianism are the same thing. Once upon a time, there were kings and nobles. No king ruled single-handedly. Then, there was the justifiable urge to limit arbitrary powers, and limit their government. Now there are politicians and nobles, but the nobles are called oligarchs. Oligarchs choose the politicians that serve them best, and exchange them when they don't. The oligarchs also write the laws, through their lobbies. The best metaphor for this system is the Wizard of OZ, the only true power which is resting in the oligarchs. The "Government" is the thin curtain hiding the Wizard. Libertarians want to rip that curtain down. It won't change a thing, but will make it way worse. The Wizard will still be working the levers of power, but now he will be laughing at you. LIBERTARIANISM IS OBSOLETE in this age.
To think that you can pedal backwards and find a liberty bound with Christian morals is hocus-pocus thinking. First of all, what Christianity says and what Christianity does couldn't be more opposite. When we look at the culture of antiquity, truly admirable statues and paintings of the Renaissance, we lose sight of many things. In particular, the fact that all the cultural content of the Renaissance was created by the work of several dozen talented artists and humanists fascinated by antiquity, at a time when manslaughter was a daily occurrence for Western Europeans, and it took on massive proportions. But neither Raphael's Sistine Madonna nor Michelangelo's David will tell historians anything about the atrocities of the Borgia papal family or the violence perpetrated by the Sforza dukes. Therefore, for a person interested in what really happened, it is preferable not to confuse works of culture with the system of behavior of the ethos that created that culture.
Just look at European wars for a 1,000 years, Christians massacring Christians on into the 50's and 100's of millions. (Millions of Muslims too with the crusades.) One was even called the 100 year war. Can you imagine; your grandfather and your grandson fought in the same forever war. That was your Christian culture's only stereo-type of behavior for a century. (Did they ever get out of it?) Just now we are finding the true moral status of Europe and the West, and their quest for domination is still alive. "Woke" is very small-potatoes in contrast.
.
For a while, I thought, ‘Okay, so some people want pronouns to reflect inner gender instead of biological reality… Maybe that’s fine since language evolves over time. What’s the harm, right?’ Then the internet gave me the answer: a news story that the ancient Roman emperor, Elagabalus, is being reclassified as a woman. The harm is the erosion of historical accuracy based on presentism and scant evidence.
Those who prioritize their feelings over logic need to master their emotions before they destroy all truth and knowledge.