noddy,noddy wrote:being a selfish rotter and living your life all bout 'me me me' is an obvious criticism.
You have reminded me to write something about Rand.
Alex.
noddy,noddy wrote:being a selfish rotter and living your life all bout 'me me me' is an obvious criticism.
good questions Alex.manolo wrote:Nap,NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:Wiegel points out the failing is in "radical personal autonomy" and he is right.
After a century or so of trying to make everyone into cannon fodder/ species fodder/ historical fodder here in the West, the pendulum has swung the other way where the dominant ideologies focus too much on an individual autonomy without a moral or intellectual foundation.
We are relational beings first and foremost who live, learn, love and pass away. This makes us, ultimately, both social and personal at the same time and the makes it hard to square with the individualism fetish just as much as the fodder lovers.
This is near the centre of the issue IMHO.
Is it possible for personal autonomy to be "radical"? Can we have too much of it? The idea of individual/personal autonomy being "without moral or intellectual foundation" is a strange one. What is morality and intellectual life if it is not about deciding moral and intellectual questions for ourselves?
Lots of questions raised.
My own view is that personal autonomy is a condition of freedom. It is a condition of practical freedom and freedom of thought. The latter is the most threatened by all or any form of ideological control. To be practically imprisoned is one thing, but to be imprisoned in thought is something else. The OP refers to such imprisonments in the past and the present.
Alex.
Well said. One's chosen ideology/perspective is probably the most commonly functioning prison or fortress.noddy wrote:
a prison is also a fortress, the detail is always in who has access to the keys.
Peter Thiel's Hyper-Libertarian Cartesianism
by Peter Lawler
Today, our most resolute Cartesians are libertarians. They’re for gay rights, property rights, and against any ideology that treats the individual as part of a whole. They are typically “nonfoundationalists.” That means MY irreducible existence is the bottom line, and there’s no reason why I have to explain why. Recourse to God or nature or country or whatever to defend myself or account for my significance makes me less than myself, and such foundationalism might well get me slaughtered for a cause that’s not my own.
The fabulously wealthy (the PayPal guy) Peter Thiel proclaims in his spirited “The Education of a Libertarian” that "I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual." He stands against everything that works against the perpetuation of the authentic liberty of the “I” called Thiel.
In some ways, the brilliant Thiel might be our instructive Cartesian today, because he has no democratic illusions about the Cartesian “I.” That thoughtful experience of liberation remains rare, precisely because it’s so contrary to our natures. He's a Cartesian who may well have read Descartes.
At Stanford, the French theorist Rene Girard taught him about “mimetic desire.” People usually don’t make choices about what they want from an individual perspective. One’s desires aren’t actually one’s own, but are mediated through and borrowed from other people. People have always rather thoughtlessly lived in herds, and so they’ve lacked genuinely personal or liberated or Cartesian identities. The omnipresent public opinion or fashion is just the ideology of the herd these days.
With that insight in mind, Thiel got hugely rich by exploiting at early point the unprecedented mimetic or herd-forming powers of the social media—Facebook, PayPal, and so forth. The Girardian insight, it seems, is what led Thiel to Leo Strauss, the philosopher whose theme is the extreme difficulty in rational or philosophic liberation of oneself from all-pervasive social/political dogma or the Platonic “cave.” For Strauss and himself, Thiel explains, the central problem involves how to think independently of the “mob.” Properly understood, that’s the libertarian problem—how to escape from political correctness understood in the broadest sense.
According to Strauss, modern, Cartesian enlightenment hasn’t and can’t liberate most people from the herd. Real enlightenment or liberation has always been the rare exception to the human rule. Thiel expresses his agreement with both Strauss and Descartes that human freedom is the highest human good, and that members of the herd lack that authentic experience. That’s why Thiel, like most libertarians and Socrates himself, sees democracy as opposed to liberty. Authentic liberation, Thiel and Socrates also agree, requires the escape for the collectivist impulses of politics in all its forms.
Now the people who run Facebook must, in fact, be impressed by how easy it is to manipulate the herdish desires or social instincts of most people. And one interpretation of Cartesianism is the liberated “I”—the modern tyrant or entrepreneur—imposing its will not so much on nature in general as on the blind desires of other people. Thiel’s liberation is not the same as that of the Socratic philosopher talked up by Strauss. It’s the very opposite of getting over oneself and learning how to die.
The libertarian ideology of the “I” refusing to be suckered by herd instinct is one that can be shared much more widely than the questionable wisdom of Socrates. So Thiel is more optimistic about enlightenment—or our libertarian drift—than Strauss. He thinks of Facebook both as expression of herd identity and as a possible way of widespread dissident—if not democratic—liberation.
For Thiel, unlike Strauss or Socrates, one precondition for the pursuit of every human good—including the highest good—is being freed from the inevitability of death. So Thiel criticizes the intellectuals and philosophers who “retreated to tending their small gardens” instead of devoting themselves to waging war against “the relentless indifference of the universe” to personal or individual being. The escape from nature to freedom can’t be mere imaginary or virtual or intellectual. It must be real. That's why Thiel’s turns his attention to outer space and “seasteading,” in addition of course to promoting the coming of the Singularity.
Ignoring or failing to come to terms with one’s mortality, according to Socrates, is part of the irrational self-denial of members of the herd. Thiel adds that accepting death in some Socratic fashion is finally part of that irrationality too. Like any Cartesian, Thiel regards himself as going beyond Socrates in a Socratic direction by being deeply skeptical of any sort of rationalization of death. The extinction of the “I” is unacceptable, and a free being can regard death, with optimism, as yet another problem to be solved.
There’s no reason to believe that we’re merely natural beings, and, with the Christians, the Cartesian transhumanists believe that it’s not the necessary destiny of the free person to die. The rational and industrious displays of personal freedom—technology—is the hope we can believe in, and, for Thiel, a key problem of our time that we’ve stopping believing in our technological future enough.
Thiel understands that “the longevity project” is at the core of the modern/Baconian/Cartesian scientific progress to conquer nature. It can’t be abandoned without the needlessly destructive abandonment of the optimism that fuels our hope in what we can do for ourselves in freedom.
So Thiel disagrees with even Steve Jobs’ rather Darwinian observation that each us can welcome death as indispensable for change. That’s not change any “I” can believe in. The argument that my death is good for any kind of evolution or required to fend off the social pathologies of an aging society is too “consequentialist.” I—Thiel—don’t exist for anyone else.
Still, the least we must say that the Cartesian (Straussian) Thiel can be criticizes on empirical grounds for failing to distinguish one herd from another, and so for calling various human social and political forms herds. He can’t accord dignity or real personal significance or identity to anyone serving any whole greater than oneself—from family to country to species.
That criticism goes for anyone who says that the fundamental human alternatives are individualism or collectivism. Both individualism and collectivism unrealistically deny the relational dimensions of personal identity and personal significance, and consciousness itself is redeemed most of all by the experience of joyfully knowing with others a reality (being and beings) outside oneself.
strikes me as borderline stoicOne’s desires aren’t actually one’s own, but are mediated through and borrowed from other people. People have always rather thoughtlessly lived in herds, and so they’ve lacked genuinely personal or liberated or Cartesian identities. The omnipresent public opinion or fashion is just the ideology of the herd these days.
noddy wrote:interesting, in a way.
how would he differ from an aleister crowley, who from my quick reading of the above is a kindred spirit in self driven direction, if not rhetoric.
excellent points - so many would argue the uberman/wotan thing is just the latent lurking paganism thing all over again and thats satan rearing his head.NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:noddy wrote:interesting, in a way.
how would he differ from an aleister crowley, who from my quick reading of the above is a kindred spirit in self driven direction, if not rhetoric.
He would in that sense; but so would a lot of our prominent European figures in the modern era- especially those working through philosophical-humanism.
There is now a very old western tradition of associating Prometheus with Satan, right? [And of course in some circles, the Enlightenment itself.] Thiel is very much apart of that tradition now, even if his motto isn't as blunt as "Do as thou wilt," so much as it's, "Do what thou can." [which make sense that a Silicon Valley/San Francisco guy would come through that sort of matrix.]
There is a lot of good, and good criticism, in his ideas.
I've also had teachers, non-Randians/non-libertarians at that, who would make fine arguments for why we should believe in what we're calling the "radical" individualists much more heartily than the moderates or any sort of collectivists. To them, the last two centuries in western history have been rather reactionary and conservative and we've gotten far afield from upending the old superstitions and really liberating man in his promethan struggle.
Instead, we've allowed artists like Mary Shelley and philosophers like Hegel scare us away from taking a hold of ourselves (and our species) as we should. So guys like Thiel and the trans-humanists, however far off the reservation they may be (or representative of just one type of radical individualist), are a clarion call to get back into fighting shape here and stop getting distracted by our own shadows.
noddy wrote:excellent points - so many would argue the uberman/wotan thing is just the latent lurking paganism thing all over again and thats satan rearing his head.NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:noddy wrote:interesting, in a way.
how would he differ from an aleister crowley, who from my quick reading of the above is a kindred spirit in self driven direction, if not rhetoric.
He would in that sense; but so would a lot of our prominent European figures in the modern era- especially those working through philosophical-humanism.
There is now a very old western tradition of associating Prometheus with Satan, right? [And of course in some circles, the Enlightenment itself.] Thiel is very much apart of that tradition now, even if his motto isn't as blunt as "Do as thou wilt," so much as it's, "Do what thou can." [which make sense that a Silicon Valley/San Francisco guy would come through that sort of matrix.]
There is a lot of good, and good criticism, in his ideas.
I've also had teachers, non-Randians/non-libertarians at that, who would make fine arguments for why we should believe in what we're calling the "radical" individualists much more heartily than the moderates or any sort of collectivists. To them, the last two centuries in western history have been rather reactionary and conservative and we've gotten far afield from upending the old superstitions and really liberating man in his promethan struggle.
Instead, we've allowed artists like Mary Shelley and philosophers like Hegel scare us away from taking a hold of ourselves (and our species) as we should. So guys like Thiel and the trans-humanists, however far off the reservation they may be (or representative of just one type of radical individualist), are a clarion call to get back into fighting shape here and stop getting distracted by our own shadows.
we seem to really struggle with giving the space inbetween rand and marx a voice, or vision, except perhaps during the peak of protestant high culture, fragile and temporary as it was.
i suspect the biggest problem is the self glorifying gnostic thing that travels with it, the dismissal of the others who cant keep up as sub human, yet this reaction itself is the bucket of crabs problem that holds back so many.
oh dear, back to spenglerverse 101, the neverending argument again.
i can even bring in a forced tolkein reference to tie this top of the head dribble together - gandalf was odin crossed with jesus, protestant high culture perfected, the odin uberman that could keep his depression at bay with his love of the community.
I would find the label of "intelligence-amplified dream ape" most flattering.
only if you describe your patterns of usage for smart drugs and show your commitment to your post human, potential maximised, self.Simple Minded wrote:I would find the label of "intelligence-amplified dream ape" most flattering.
if the flowers have enough nectar to make mead they may prove useful.Simple Minded wrote:Do you prefer flowers or chocolates?
Yep, right back into the spenglerverse.noddy wrote:excellent points - so many would argue the uberman/wotan thing is just the latent lurking paganism thing all over again and thats satan rearing his head.
we seem to really struggle with giving the space inbetween rand and marx a voice, or vision, except perhaps during the peak of protestant high culture, fragile and temporary as it was.
i suspect the biggest problem is the self glorifying gnostic thing that travels with it, the dismissal of the others who cant keep up as sub human, yet this reaction itself is the bucket of crabs problem that holds back so many.
oh dear, back to spenglerverse 101, the neverending argument again.
i can even bring in a forced tolkein reference to tie this top of the head dribble together - gandalf was odin crossed with jesus, protestant high culture perfected, the odin uberman that could keep his depression at bay with his love of the community.
SM,Simple Minded wrote:
The obvious answer on the political front would be I don't have to pay taxes, or I don't have to obey the law. But if Fred wants to live in the woods, or even on the street, with no income, and he is not trespassing, then no harm, no foul. Leave him be.
Very true Alex, but not for the person who chooses to view themselves as oppressed by those same taxes and laws.manolo wrote:SM,Simple Minded wrote:
The obvious answer on the political front would be I don't have to pay taxes, or I don't have to obey the law. But if Fred wants to live in the woods, or even on the street, with no income, and he is not trespassing, then no harm, no foul. Leave him be.
You won't be surprised to hear that paying taxes and obeying the law brings us freedom.
I can get in my car and drive anywhere in the UK (or indeed the EU) by virtue of my road tax and driving licence. This is a freedom that would have been beyond the dreams of my woad spattered bonded forbears.
Alex.
check yer telepathic inbox.noddy wrote:
only if you describe your patterns of usage for smart drugs and show your commitment to your post human, potential maximised, self.
timeless advice, but "we" can never agree on which guru to follow....NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:
Instead, we've allowed artists like Mary Shelley and philosophers like Hegel scare us away from taking a hold of ourselves (and our species) as we should. So guys like Thiel and the trans-humanists, however far off the reservation they may be (or representative of just one type of radical individualist), are a clarion call to get back into fighting shape here and stop getting distracted by our own shadows.
SM,Simple Minded wrote:
Very true Alex, but not for the person who chooses to view themselves as oppressed by those same taxes and laws.
Within an hour of watching a young lady with drop-dead gorgeous supermodel looks, and wearing a Harvard sweatshirt (probably at least a third generation American), speaking very articulately at an OWS rally about oppression and lack of jobs in the US, I was in line at a convenient store behind 5 Mexican looking dudes who wore dirty clothes and spoke very broken Spanglish who were each getting money orders for over $1800.
I suspect it would have been as difficult to convince the Harvard girl that she was free, as it would have been to convince the Mexican dudes that they were oppressed.
Damn those mental filters!!!
alex,manolo wrote:SM,Simple Minded wrote:
....Damn those mental filters!!!
We talk at cross purposes, but very pleasantly I might add.
I have found few, if any, right wing Americans who could allow that there is freedom within a system. It is like the word 'system' is such a dog whistle that communication ends right there.......
Alex.
Alex,manolo wrote:
SM,
We talk at cross purposes, but very pleasantly I might add.
I have found few, if any, right wing Americans who could allow that there is freedom within a system. It is like the word 'system' is such a dog whistle that communication ends right there.
Alex.
Simple Minded wrote:
"Free" is a fun concept to imagine, but it does not exist. "Free" roads, college, housing, medicine, and food are all ideal.
Alex,manolo wrote:Simple Minded wrote:
"Free" is a fun concept to imagine, but it does not exist. "Free" roads, college, housing, medicine, and food are all ideal.
SM,
We are dancing around the issues again. One way that I define the right wing mindset is your sentence above.
Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch; someone pays. But, for the impoverished senior who cannot afford to travel a free bus pass is not ideal, it is hard and harsh fact. The senior presents a bus pass and the driver does not ask for money. Do ideologies matter to that senior at that point in time? I think not. What matters is getting on the bus. It is the same with college, housing, medicine and food. These things are substantive and have been bitterly fought for against right wingers who resent such calls on their wallets.
As a senior I receive free bus travel, free healthcare, subsidised dental, cheap car insurance, free winter fuel, free eye tests, discounted restaurant meals. It is a good life. Am I going to get all ethical and ideological about this bounty? There is an old countryman's saying - Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Alex.
Parodite,Parodite wrote:SM, I agree. The misery of others is just our own perception. They ought to pay taxes for the space they occupy in my brain triggering all these false emotions and projections! When now I see a poor beggar in the streets, or even a sick patient who is after abusing other people like doctors to steal their time.. I just laugh at them right in the face. And when they try label me as "selfish" I even just laugh louder!
There is a new-age school of thought (not sure if it still has much followers) that says that everything that happens to you is of your own choice. When you get sick, you want it. When you get a car accident, you want it. That all happiness and unhappiness is self-chosen. Now there we have some real rugged individualism. I think I'll become a "Heal thyself first!" fundamentalist, like you.