[recurnal]

I feel I'm fairly hard to pin down ideologically. Many of my political sentiments are actually antipolitical in quite a degree. I don't believe that there is an ideal way of organizing or managing a society. However, I harbor many reservations about various political philosophies; maybe the negative can shed some light on the positive.

For one, I'm highly critical of liberal-individualism, mostly for the way in which it fails to sustain any sort of substantial individuality. Through the agency of media, people are dissolved into a single indefinite Person, namely, the Individual. So much is 'let into' a liberal-individual society that little can be adequately sustained on the 'outside'. Thus, people are forced to harbor themselves against public judgement and against the lies of a commonly shared exterior. The division between realms 'inner' and 'outer' becomes ever more prominent, leading to a dissociation of thought and action. No longer can anyone live what he thinks or think what he lives. One has to choose between a life of action and a life of contemplation, each at the total expense of the other. Heidegger has strongly influenced me in this regard.

Marxism too I find disconcerting, along with any other philosophy which suggests that an 'end of history' is feasible or has already been reached. I don't believe we can ever construct a society in which all actions are accompanied by the guarantee of pure reason because I don't believe in any such thing as pure reason or rational morality. Reason culminates in nothingness and in unreason; a 'rarefied' reason would get caught up on the suggestion that its presence in the world isn't welcome, if that makes any sense. Precisely to the extent that a society is composed of humans it will be unreasonable, unless we somehow manage to change our essential composition, namely, our inessentiality. I wouldn't want to be alive for that, though.

On a similar note, I don't agree with any ideology purporting to derive from 'human nature' or some such, because human nature is a myth. Our very nature is our conditionality, our naturelessness. There are certainly patterns of behavior which bridge eons and human societies, but none among them is constitutive. There is no 'kernel' inside of us, the loss of which admits of nothing but death.

I hope that that was informative enough for some general positive statement about my political philosophy to be made.

[layman]

You have listed things you dont like which isnt really enough.

Just be a liberal. It means you are on the winning side

[mikema63]

Yeah, you really need to make a positive statement about what you do want to see happen for anyone to put a label on you.

[recurnal]

Yeah, you really need to make a positive statement about what you do want to see happen for anyone to put a label on you.

You have listed things you dont like which isnt really enough.

Hmm. Barring any sort of immediate labeling, is there an ideology that comes to mind with which I would be at least compatible? I've ruled out a lot in my original post; maybe the list of potential ideologies would be fairly narrow.

(Politically I really don't have very many positive things to say; a definite set of labels might get me working on that, though.)

[The Immortal Goon]

How do you feel about Edmund Burke?

[recurnal]

Going on what I could gleam from the internet, so-so. I agree with some of his more philosophical views but disagree with the political inferences that he draws from them. I haven't read anything by him, though, so I can't be entirely sure.

[The Immortal Goon]

Well, then I'm going to echo what the others have said. If you could change society, take a positive step, what would you do?

[ComradeTim]

If you find Marxism too structured and dogmatic, there is always Libertarian Socialism. We take an organic approach to human relations and don't waste time theorizing as the end result is usually wrong. We seek to channel society to its most rational,natural and stable form (which probably won't be purely or even mostly, rational or stable).

[recurnal]

Well, then I'm going to echo what the others have said. If you could change society, take a positive step, what would you do?

That is a tough question. Let's see (much of this is tentative; I haven't any solidly formed views on the subject of positive change).

With regard to foreign policy I'd adopt a relatively dormant position. I wouldn't impose the values of my nation on any other nation except under certain extenuating circumstances.

With regard to immigration my views are mixed. If I were being asked this question long before I was born I'd have thought that cultural separatism was the right way to go, but now there is no hope for a unified culture. Closing off the borders right now would be totally counterproductive, so I can't help but support multiculturalism.

Our system of education is lost beyond recovery; it has been completely subsumed under the demands of the marketplace. Ideally I would divide education into two programs, one dealing with the education of the masses and the other with the education of those showing great potential in the arts.

I do not support free markets because they mangle our identities, but I know of no better alternative.

I see no practical way of making my wishes into a reality. Much of my ideology, if it can even be called as such, deals with the individual and his ways of coping with the present-day state of affairs given that the latter is not bound to ameliorate itself any time soon.

[The Immortal Goon]

How do you feel about the following statements (ideologically, I would urge you not to google them so you can remain unbiased as these are not indicative of the individuals entire ideology, and it's not Hitler)

The General:

Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for every individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on their own initiative and must be under their own direction and control. Yet most people do not have to exert this initiative, direction and control as single individuals. It is usually enough to act as a member of a SMALL group. Thus if half a dozen people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be served. But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no room for autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power process will not be served. The same is true when decisions are made on a collective basis if the group making the collective decision is so large that the role of each individual is insignificant.

It is true that some individuals seem to have little need for autonomy. Either their drive for power is weak or they satisfy it by identifying themselves with some powerful organization to which they belong. And then there are unthinking, animal types who seem to be satisfied with a purely physical sense of power (the good combat soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing fighting skills that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors).

But for most people it is through the power process—having a goal, making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining the goal—that self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not have adequate opportunity to go through the power process the consequences are (depending on the individual and on the way the power process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc.

Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know the people who make them. (“We live in a world in which relatively few people—maybe 500 or 1,000—make the important decisions”—Philip B. Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995.) Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more [than] a very limited extent. The individual’s search for security is therefore frustrated, which leads to a sense of powerlessness.

It may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure than modern man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy; hence modern man suffers from less, not more than the amount of insecurity that is normal for human beings. But psychological security does not closely correspond with physical security. What makes us FEEL secure is not so much objective security as a sense of confidence in our ability to take care of ourselves. Primitive man, threatened by a fierce animal or by hunger, can fight in self-defense or travel in search of food. He has no certainty of success in these efforts, but he is by no means helpless against the things that threaten him. The modern individual on the other hand is threatened by many things against which he is helpless: nuclear accidents, carcinogens in food, environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes, invasion of his privacy by large organizations, nationwide social or economic phenomena that may disrupt his way of life.

It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no one’s fault, unless it is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon. But threats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They are not the results of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.

Thus primitive man for the most part has his security in his own hands (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) whereas the security of modern man is in the hands of persons or organizations that are too remote or too large for him to be able personally to influence them.

About the Left:

Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.

Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.

Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.

The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior. [1] But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself.

About the Right:

The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.

The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.

Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.” Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems, the mass communications media, the modern health care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects people at other locations far way. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the greenhouse effect affects the whole world.

Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.

[Heisenberg]

Well played, TIG.

To be honest, recurnal, it sounds to me like you don't have a coherently formed ideological position - you're what Cartertonian calls a "political agnostic". That's perfectly fine - people tend to focus too much on labels.

[recurnal]

How do you feel about the following statements (ideologically, I would urge you not to google them so you can remain unbiased as these are not indicative of the individuals entire ideology, and it's not Hitler)

With the first statement I don't disagree. Bureaucracy can indeed feed into a sense of alienation. Our decisions, in a sense, have been taken away from us.

I remember reading the second statement before. I believe it's from Kaczynski. That being said, I agree somewhat, although culture is relative and the foundations of our knowledge are dubious, no matter the psychological motives that would cause me to adopt that position. This still isn't to say that things aren't accomplishable through reason or that self-sufficiency is impossible. But somebody can be a rightist and somebody else a leftist, each for the same reason; when we start using psychology or other forms of ad hominem as a way of depreciating ideologies, we start to make some pretty severe generalizations. I'd say that Kaczynski's is a partial explanation for the behavior of some leftists but not for all of them.

I agree with the third statement as well. Local autonomy is incompatible with the demands of big business, and the only social direction prescribed for society by an increasingly fluid marketplace is the left.



EDIT: Oh. They're all Kaczynski. Never mind. I totally disagree with all three statements.

[Heisenberg]

Hang on: just because they were written by Ted Kaczsynski, it doesn't mean you have to disagree with them. "Play the ball, not the man", and all that. If there is one Kaczynski quote that's stuck with me, it's this one:

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression had been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of SOME conditions that exist in today's society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

[recurnal]

Hang on: just because they were written by Ted Kaczsynski, it doesn't mean you have to disagree with them.

That was more of a joke. I still agree.