The UN and all its subsidiaries (which govern all sectors of our societies) must be dismantled. This organization, a veritable scourge for humanity, must disappear from the landscape, if not be completely overhauled.
In French, 'cause I'am not sure of the translation :
L'ONU et toutes ses filiales (qui régentent tous les secteurs de nos sociétés) doit être démantelée. Cet organisme, véritable fléau pour l'humanité, doit disparaître du paysage, sinon être complètement refondu.
The UN and all its subsidiaries (which govern all sectors of our societies) must be dismantled. This organisation, a real scourge for humanity, must disappear from the landscape, if not be completely recast.
I wonder what material difference it would make to a single human being's happiness or life satisfaction if these UN jobs just vaporised overnight.
Also, Progressivism - as an ideology - is a secular religion, isn't it. So of course it needs to replace other faiths as the ultimate guide to redemption from the human condition.
(I'm enjoying these thoughtful pieces very much - thanks! )
Thanks, Mike. I am one of the few people who is not convinced by the idea that progressivism or 'wokeism' is a kind of secular religion. I tend to think of it more as the inevitable consequence of secularism itself. (Although, not to get too Biblical about it, it's been pointed out for thousands of years that once a people stops worshipping God, they start worshipping other things instead - and often actually just worshipping themselves. One doesn't I think have to be a Christian to accept that observation as a kind of anthropological observation!)
The terrible consequences of people coming to worship themselves is entirely the point of the Tower of Babel story. This wisdom was already ancient when the authors of Genesis wrote it down. I find it truly depressing we are doing it again, when we know where it ends and have done for millennia.
"Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world's industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world's politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.
Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor's intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world transforming and world shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the design-science revolution. Despite this historical demonstrable fact, world society as yet persists in looking exclusively to its politicians and their ideologues for world problem solving."
I remain fascinated by your application of Foucault from what would once have been considered 'right of centre' perspectives (now of course, there is only 'what we say is right' and the 'far right'!). So often, however, your discussions raise more issues than they resolve for me! This is one of them.
How did we go, in the space of one or maybe two generations, from a left that understood the conflicts and balances of the rights agreements, to one that simply perverts and twists 'rights thinking' into pretzels in order to push a vacuous ideology that further empowers nation states and supernational powers...? Half a century back, the left was resolutely opposed to these power structures! All this new rhetoric is quite the reversal, and we do not seem to have a diagnosis for how such a gigantic collapse in thinking could occur so rapidly.
On the one hand, I look at Alasdair MacIntyre's critique, which was prescient but still for me slightly misguided in saying that 'rights are akin to unicorns' - because, frankly, it should be unproblematic to recognise that we can make promises, even if we have somehow reached a place whereby holding to promises is somehow too difficult for us. But MacIntyre's critique of the university, which I touched upon in Stranger Worlds earlier this month, seems to me to be part of the explanation of this mystery:
(Thanks for sharing this one, David - I include the link here for any of your readers who missed it.)
Yet, I feel this must be quite a bit less than the whole story. In the shadows, there is something else that neither you, nor I, nor any other philosopher and intellectual seems to have yet been able to identify. And that inability to identify it is, perhaps, a clue to the essential nature of whatever it is we can't quite name...
Try checking out N S Lyons on Substack for an explanation of the change in the left, particularly his essay The China Convergence. My crass summary is: with the inexorable growth of the Administrative State and mega-corporations Labour, the Democrats etc have, despite legacy rhetoric about workers, become the parties of the Professional Managerial Class. The PMC staff the Party-State bureaucracy, both nominally public and private, and are completely aligned with its rationale. The modern left simply reflects the people it represents.
This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't itself explain the growth of the administrative state in the first place and why it should have been Labour on this side of the Atlantic and the Democrats on the other which became the parties of the 'PMC'. We have to go much deeper into the roots of things to answer those questions.
The PMC is the biggest constituency and both parties in the UK and US cleave to it, with some dissidents in both. Hence the uni party phenomena and the deplorable label applied to ‘populists’ who appeal to those outside the PMC.
Reference the growth of the Administrative State, I studied under Martin Daunton at Cambridge as he wrote Just Taxes and Trusting Leviathan about tax and the rise if the modern state in the US and UK. The world wars and the abandonment of the gold standard are critical, fiat money enabling the growth. The Second World War was the inflexion point. Britain beat totalitarian Nazi Germany by becoming equally totalitarian: the state took over everything. The Attlee government repurposed much of the bureaucratic machinery used to run the war economy to set up the welfare state. The war showed what big government and ‘unlimited’ printed money could do. As Enoch Powell pointed out in his book on the NHS, written after being Health Secretary in the MacMillan government, there is no rational limit to how much of other people’s money you will spend on your health. The same applies to the other aspects of the welfare state, where you vote yourself money. Benjamin Franklin cautioned it is the beginning of the end when people realise they can vote themselves money.
I think you and Juvenal are right about the loss of religious constraints unbinding the exercise of Power. Fiat money is what enables it.
I have great sympathy with your explanation here, Dan (your Attlee government point has relevant parallels across the pond too). However, like David I feel like there are pieces missing.
In the case of the Democrats, shifts in the sources of funding help complete the picture - yet even then, the ideological alignment between Labour and the Blue Team in the US is uncanny, because Labour did not undergo the same changes in funding at all, and have no reason on paper to align with Blue Team ideology other than, perhaps, the changes at the Guardian having effects downstream on both sides of the Atlantic (could this one newspaper really have that much influence, though...?). I can also trace a lot of the shifts here to changes in the academic discourse, so a partial explanation exists here too - yet it all feels precisely that: partial.
I'm open to the possibility that under the metaphorical ground is just a tangled root network of influences that is not entirely open to adequate explanation (or at least, that because it is so multivariate does not satisfy as an explanation). I remain agnostic to the idea that a complete answer can be provided. Yet I still keep digging holes, and seeing what I can find.
PS: I think you may have inadvertently helped me complete the Iris Murdoch Stranger Worlds for the end of October that had been giving me trouble. Many thanks!
Very well written and thought out, David. Odd the way this individualism notion is playing out. It seems to have come apart from the notion of self reliance. I also wonder if it's worth picking apart "Power" perhaps to get at something more constructive. In any event, the root of the trouble is properly laid at the feet of our education system.
Yes - this is all in de Jouvenel. The point is that individualism ends up in reliance on the state, because when you have a truly individualistic society in which social bonds have broken down, people necessarily have to look to the state to give them what they want and need. This is why the state is actually incentivised to 'individualise and totalise', as Foucault put it. Individualisation and totalisation are two sides of the same coin.
Sure. But this an example of inversion at extremity. One loses individualism when one surrenders self reliance. I'm sensing some semantic slippage here, as though part of the trouble lies in the language of the critique. The reason I bring this up is to potentially find a way through.
The UN and all its subsidiaries (which govern all sectors of our societies) must be dismantled. This organization, a veritable scourge for humanity, must disappear from the landscape, if not be completely overhauled.
In French, 'cause I'am not sure of the translation :
L'ONU et toutes ses filiales (qui régentent tous les secteurs de nos sociétés) doit être démantelée. Cet organisme, véritable fléau pour l'humanité, doit disparaître du paysage, sinon être complètement refondu.
The UN and all its subsidiaries (which govern all sectors of our societies) must be dismantled. This organisation, a real scourge for humanity, must disappear from the landscape, if not be completely recast.
I wonder what material difference it would make to a single human being's happiness or life satisfaction if these UN jobs just vaporised overnight.
Also, Progressivism - as an ideology - is a secular religion, isn't it. So of course it needs to replace other faiths as the ultimate guide to redemption from the human condition.
(I'm enjoying these thoughtful pieces very much - thanks! )
Thanks, Mike. I am one of the few people who is not convinced by the idea that progressivism or 'wokeism' is a kind of secular religion. I tend to think of it more as the inevitable consequence of secularism itself. (Although, not to get too Biblical about it, it's been pointed out for thousands of years that once a people stops worshipping God, they start worshipping other things instead - and often actually just worshipping themselves. One doesn't I think have to be a Christian to accept that observation as a kind of anthropological observation!)
The terrible consequences of people coming to worship themselves is entirely the point of the Tower of Babel story. This wisdom was already ancient when the authors of Genesis wrote it down. I find it truly depressing we are doing it again, when we know where it ends and have done for millennia.
"Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world's industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world's politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.
Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor's intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world transforming and world shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the design-science revolution. Despite this historical demonstrable fact, world society as yet persists in looking exclusively to its politicians and their ideologues for world problem solving."
Buckminster Fuller
I remain fascinated by your application of Foucault from what would once have been considered 'right of centre' perspectives (now of course, there is only 'what we say is right' and the 'far right'!). So often, however, your discussions raise more issues than they resolve for me! This is one of them.
How did we go, in the space of one or maybe two generations, from a left that understood the conflicts and balances of the rights agreements, to one that simply perverts and twists 'rights thinking' into pretzels in order to push a vacuous ideology that further empowers nation states and supernational powers...? Half a century back, the left was resolutely opposed to these power structures! All this new rhetoric is quite the reversal, and we do not seem to have a diagnosis for how such a gigantic collapse in thinking could occur so rapidly.
On the one hand, I look at Alasdair MacIntyre's critique, which was prescient but still for me slightly misguided in saying that 'rights are akin to unicorns' - because, frankly, it should be unproblematic to recognise that we can make promises, even if we have somehow reached a place whereby holding to promises is somehow too difficult for us. But MacIntyre's critique of the university, which I touched upon in Stranger Worlds earlier this month, seems to me to be part of the explanation of this mystery:
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/after-universities
(Thanks for sharing this one, David - I include the link here for any of your readers who missed it.)
Yet, I feel this must be quite a bit less than the whole story. In the shadows, there is something else that neither you, nor I, nor any other philosopher and intellectual seems to have yet been able to identify. And that inability to identify it is, perhaps, a clue to the essential nature of whatever it is we can't quite name...
Try checking out N S Lyons on Substack for an explanation of the change in the left, particularly his essay The China Convergence. My crass summary is: with the inexorable growth of the Administrative State and mega-corporations Labour, the Democrats etc have, despite legacy rhetoric about workers, become the parties of the Professional Managerial Class. The PMC staff the Party-State bureaucracy, both nominally public and private, and are completely aligned with its rationale. The modern left simply reflects the people it represents.
This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't itself explain the growth of the administrative state in the first place and why it should have been Labour on this side of the Atlantic and the Democrats on the other which became the parties of the 'PMC'. We have to go much deeper into the roots of things to answer those questions.
The PMC is the biggest constituency and both parties in the UK and US cleave to it, with some dissidents in both. Hence the uni party phenomena and the deplorable label applied to ‘populists’ who appeal to those outside the PMC.
Reference the growth of the Administrative State, I studied under Martin Daunton at Cambridge as he wrote Just Taxes and Trusting Leviathan about tax and the rise if the modern state in the US and UK. The world wars and the abandonment of the gold standard are critical, fiat money enabling the growth. The Second World War was the inflexion point. Britain beat totalitarian Nazi Germany by becoming equally totalitarian: the state took over everything. The Attlee government repurposed much of the bureaucratic machinery used to run the war economy to set up the welfare state. The war showed what big government and ‘unlimited’ printed money could do. As Enoch Powell pointed out in his book on the NHS, written after being Health Secretary in the MacMillan government, there is no rational limit to how much of other people’s money you will spend on your health. The same applies to the other aspects of the welfare state, where you vote yourself money. Benjamin Franklin cautioned it is the beginning of the end when people realise they can vote themselves money.
I think you and Juvenal are right about the loss of religious constraints unbinding the exercise of Power. Fiat money is what enables it.
I have great sympathy with your explanation here, Dan (your Attlee government point has relevant parallels across the pond too). However, like David I feel like there are pieces missing.
In the case of the Democrats, shifts in the sources of funding help complete the picture - yet even then, the ideological alignment between Labour and the Blue Team in the US is uncanny, because Labour did not undergo the same changes in funding at all, and have no reason on paper to align with Blue Team ideology other than, perhaps, the changes at the Guardian having effects downstream on both sides of the Atlantic (could this one newspaper really have that much influence, though...?). I can also trace a lot of the shifts here to changes in the academic discourse, so a partial explanation exists here too - yet it all feels precisely that: partial.
I'm open to the possibility that under the metaphorical ground is just a tangled root network of influences that is not entirely open to adequate explanation (or at least, that because it is so multivariate does not satisfy as an explanation). I remain agnostic to the idea that a complete answer can be provided. Yet I still keep digging holes, and seeing what I can find.
Thanks for sharing your part of the picture!
PS: I think you may have inadvertently helped me complete the Iris Murdoch Stranger Worlds for the end of October that had been giving me trouble. Many thanks!
Very well written and thought out, David. Odd the way this individualism notion is playing out. It seems to have come apart from the notion of self reliance. I also wonder if it's worth picking apart "Power" perhaps to get at something more constructive. In any event, the root of the trouble is properly laid at the feet of our education system.
Yes - this is all in de Jouvenel. The point is that individualism ends up in reliance on the state, because when you have a truly individualistic society in which social bonds have broken down, people necessarily have to look to the state to give them what they want and need. This is why the state is actually incentivised to 'individualise and totalise', as Foucault put it. Individualisation and totalisation are two sides of the same coin.
Sure. But this an example of inversion at extremity. One loses individualism when one surrenders self reliance. I'm sensing some semantic slippage here, as though part of the trouble lies in the language of the critique. The reason I bring this up is to potentially find a way through.