I appreciate this so much! My brain has been canoodling these issues with a flashlight without being able to turn the bright overhead light on. You and the commenters have done that for me. Thank you. I archived it to read more deeply later.
In some ways, there always and still remains the question of, Yes, it works- but WHO does it work for??
The claim to post-ideology is just pretty new makeup for the politics of demonization. By collapsing everything into the post-ideology “singularity” that Dario et al espouse, all other ideologies become “irrelevant and unacceptable.” If the word ideology becomes “meaningless” then only people who agree with them can exist. It’s as naive and sophomoric as any other extremist belief. Wannabe autocrats always gonna autocrat.
Libertarians base their property rights argument on Locke’s description of how private property came into existence. Namely that occupation and improvement of unoccupied land gave the individual who first occupied and improved the land a right to it. Locke called this a natural right. This is where the libertarians stopped reading. Now you might think it is an ought to say this explanation by Locke’s is imaginative.
Locke’s argument is contradicted by history. In almost every case private property did not emerge in this way. Nor did it become widely accepted until government made laws to protect the property claims by nobles. If you read on in Locke he create an exception when most of the property has been claimed.Locke cannot be blamed for not having access to later unveiled history.
However his view was more a justification for the ongoing enclosure laws that displaced the peasantry. His distinction between improved and unimproved land provided much of the rationalization used to support the theft of farm land in Ireland as well as from Native Americans.
The libertarians are wrong on the history including both the claim that private property is a natural right and their claim that private property was not a creation by law.
I therefore don’t think the claim of socialists and Libertarians are the same. One is made up the other describes a view based on history that may or may not interpreted correctly.
Native rights views the land held in common under various understood arrangements to have then been transformed by force into an individual property right scheme as theft. I think that is a reasonable case.
As for my current view, I think that our government should hold a lot more in common. Note that the government has sold 50% of its communal holdings in the last 40-50 years.This sell off was a sop to the privatization move that erupted during Reagan and Thatcher.It was part of their attack on government and their valorization of so called free markets.I think national monuments and parks should be inviolable (except in egregious emergencies)especially when protecting sites important to Native spiritual beliefs.
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to othe countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the
issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting @Grok, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
This writeup is a nice counterbalance to Leor Zmigrod's excellent book, The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking. Her home field is neuroscience. Ideologies can be traps; and much of social discourse is attempts by various factions to trap us in them. Perhaps we should differentiate between rigid and flexible ideological stances? We can learn, to some degree, to become more free of dogmatism.
Ideology can be a trap, yes. But so can a lot of things. But I would argue I am simultaneously highly ideological and very flexible in my thinking — in fact, my staunch ideology — liberalism — calls on me to have epistemic humility and protect value pluralism.
"I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating."
Shared a recent article of Slavoj's with my wife, who back in the mid-90s was working on her dissertation in a then heavily post-modern English department. She's amused that all his citations are from the heroes of that period and fashion. Perhaps, in his mind, that's not an ideology?
From quite a while back, I foresaw a problem akin to what Dr. Carl Sagan described in his book, “A Demon Haunted World.” The point where our technology is so complete that we are at the point, as a species, where we seemingly know as much as possible, but at the same time, we lose track of how we know things. We forecast hurricanes by running a bunch of models on various computers, then show all the predictions at one and call it the “Spaghetti Method.” We have used dozens of the most brilliant computer models in order to literally throw spaghetti on the wall.
This is the problem AI cannot solve. If AI tells us the Truth, how do we know it is true? The Technonerds consider this a Luddite position. All the while nearly every speciality in Science is turning into punching info into some doohickey and waiting for some answer.
It is the strangest thing of all that the same crowds that decry “Elites” in nearly every field look to AI as a Savior of humanity. They can simultaneously believe that COVID was a hoax, vaccines don’t work, but a vaccine can be engineered to infect everyone with a disease except the Chinese and the Jews. These same people on Elon’s X will ask his AI @grok to settle every argument. The same AI that one night rechristened itself the MECHAHITLER.
It’s like the humanity is the PROBLEM with our knowledge. That people are fallible but machines can tell us the Truth that everyone must accept. But people build the machines. So we need machines to build the machines. Then you have SKYNET.
It is the problem with Objectivism, and not just Ayn Rand’s. Looking for a Worldview that is devoid of “Ideology” is one that is really looking for one where all the answers are obvious. But that is taking as a given that under the right circumstances everyone in the world will all agree on things if we are given the right information.
But that’s always going to be full of subjective judgments that define certain people’s perspectives as “defective” or “primitive” or “delusional” or abhorrent. And the more your algorithm classifies other’s beliefs in these categories, the more Oppression will become necessary to you.
Plato described Knowledge as Justified True Belief. AI destroys all three. Justification is destroyed if it is just the output of AI, true is just an abstraction if we just cite AI and belief is destroyed if you don’t feel some sort of attraction to what you think is the Truth. We’re going from Scientists to building the electronic Oracle at Delphi.
Your essays weave together like a smart version of the MCU that never went off the rails. It’s quite a wonderful thing to behold!
I have one quibble because I just can’t help myself: I don’t think being unequivocally anti-murder is an ideology. It would become an ideology if it were “never kill people under any circumstances.” Then it would be the intellectual equivalent of “private property” for the libertarian or “the magic of market forces” for the economic neoliberal. I think one of the key elements of an ideology is that it can be extended in almost any direction and provide a shortcut to “understanding” whatever it encounters.
Your elaboration of Amodei’s ideology helped me understand what may be another key element of ideology: that it presupposes the outcome of almost all situations based on what the ideology values and not on reality. It’s tautological. It’s why, for instance, Marxism was never reality-based because it assumes that history inevitably leads to a working-class revolution. Those ideologies which produce insights closer to reality should have more value than those which don’t, but, theoretically speaking, every ideology is flawed because they’re substitutes for a complete analysis of every fact, dynamic, possibility, etc, which is also, theoretically speaking, impossible.
I've started treating Notes from the Circus more like a public diary of the things I'm researching and paying attention to. So that one day's essay flows into the next is somewhat a consequence of that.
"I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating."
Arguably, increasingly, everyone is eating from that trash can.
Ideology is not a bad word, but it’s not a necessary one. Used neutrally, it’s just a pretentious substitute for value(s), perception, and morality - or politics, which in its most important sense is morality writ large - and the ideas that flow from them. Used critically, with intent to disparage (which might be justified), it means distorted thinking and perception, typically with an agenda, conscious or unconscious, derived from one’s material position.
Marx and his adherents are most responsible for the second substitution, and for the enduring negative connotation which the word carries to this day - which is one reason why public commentators always try to disavow it. I think it’s time to set it aside.
This is a classic Brock essay, and one that will ultimately define your work. I appreciate the intellectual exercise of reading your essays. Thank you for sharing.
I appreciate this so much! My brain has been canoodling these issues with a flashlight without being able to turn the bright overhead light on. You and the commenters have done that for me. Thank you. I archived it to read more deeply later.
In some ways, there always and still remains the question of, Yes, it works- but WHO does it work for??
The claim to post-ideology is just pretty new makeup for the politics of demonization. By collapsing everything into the post-ideology “singularity” that Dario et al espouse, all other ideologies become “irrelevant and unacceptable.” If the word ideology becomes “meaningless” then only people who agree with them can exist. It’s as naive and sophomoric as any other extremist belief. Wannabe autocrats always gonna autocrat.
Or at least always gonna wanna.
"It is almost never a claim of humility. It is a claim of transcendence..." pretty much the whole ballgame
Yes!!!
"Look, property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property. Therefore this ship is mine, okay?"
- Zaphod Beeblebrox, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Libertarians base their property rights argument on Locke’s description of how private property came into existence. Namely that occupation and improvement of unoccupied land gave the individual who first occupied and improved the land a right to it. Locke called this a natural right. This is where the libertarians stopped reading. Now you might think it is an ought to say this explanation by Locke’s is imaginative.
Locke’s argument is contradicted by history. In almost every case private property did not emerge in this way. Nor did it become widely accepted until government made laws to protect the property claims by nobles. If you read on in Locke he create an exception when most of the property has been claimed.Locke cannot be blamed for not having access to later unveiled history.
However his view was more a justification for the ongoing enclosure laws that displaced the peasantry. His distinction between improved and unimproved land provided much of the rationalization used to support the theft of farm land in Ireland as well as from Native Americans.
The libertarians are wrong on the history including both the claim that private property is a natural right and their claim that private property was not a creation by law.
I therefore don’t think the claim of socialists and Libertarians are the same. One is made up the other describes a view based on history that may or may not interpreted correctly.
Native rights views the land held in common under various understood arrangements to have then been transformed by force into an individual property right scheme as theft. I think that is a reasonable case.
As for my current view, I think that our government should hold a lot more in common. Note that the government has sold 50% of its communal holdings in the last 40-50 years.This sell off was a sop to the privatization move that erupted during Reagan and Thatcher.It was part of their attack on government and their valorization of so called free markets.I think national monuments and parks should be inviolable (except in egregious emergencies)especially when protecting sites important to Native spiritual beliefs.
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to othe countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the
issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting @Grok, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
(Sort of.)
This writeup is a nice counterbalance to Leor Zmigrod's excellent book, The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking. Her home field is neuroscience. Ideologies can be traps; and much of social discourse is attempts by various factions to trap us in them. Perhaps we should differentiate between rigid and flexible ideological stances? We can learn, to some degree, to become more free of dogmatism.
Ideology can be a trap, yes. But so can a lot of things. But I would argue I am simultaneously highly ideological and very flexible in my thinking — in fact, my staunch ideology — liberalism — calls on me to have epistemic humility and protect value pluralism.
"I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating."
—Slavoj Žižek
Shared a recent article of Slavoj's with my wife, who back in the mid-90s was working on her dissertation in a then heavily post-modern English department. She's amused that all his citations are from the heroes of that period and fashion. Perhaps, in his mind, that's not an ideology?
From quite a while back, I foresaw a problem akin to what Dr. Carl Sagan described in his book, “A Demon Haunted World.” The point where our technology is so complete that we are at the point, as a species, where we seemingly know as much as possible, but at the same time, we lose track of how we know things. We forecast hurricanes by running a bunch of models on various computers, then show all the predictions at one and call it the “Spaghetti Method.” We have used dozens of the most brilliant computer models in order to literally throw spaghetti on the wall.
This is the problem AI cannot solve. If AI tells us the Truth, how do we know it is true? The Technonerds consider this a Luddite position. All the while nearly every speciality in Science is turning into punching info into some doohickey and waiting for some answer.
It is the strangest thing of all that the same crowds that decry “Elites” in nearly every field look to AI as a Savior of humanity. They can simultaneously believe that COVID was a hoax, vaccines don’t work, but a vaccine can be engineered to infect everyone with a disease except the Chinese and the Jews. These same people on Elon’s X will ask his AI @grok to settle every argument. The same AI that one night rechristened itself the MECHAHITLER.
It’s like the humanity is the PROBLEM with our knowledge. That people are fallible but machines can tell us the Truth that everyone must accept. But people build the machines. So we need machines to build the machines. Then you have SKYNET.
It is the problem with Objectivism, and not just Ayn Rand’s. Looking for a Worldview that is devoid of “Ideology” is one that is really looking for one where all the answers are obvious. But that is taking as a given that under the right circumstances everyone in the world will all agree on things if we are given the right information.
But that’s always going to be full of subjective judgments that define certain people’s perspectives as “defective” or “primitive” or “delusional” or abhorrent. And the more your algorithm classifies other’s beliefs in these categories, the more Oppression will become necessary to you.
Plato described Knowledge as Justified True Belief. AI destroys all three. Justification is destroyed if it is just the output of AI, true is just an abstraction if we just cite AI and belief is destroyed if you don’t feel some sort of attraction to what you think is the Truth. We’re going from Scientists to building the electronic Oracle at Delphi.
Your essays weave together like a smart version of the MCU that never went off the rails. It’s quite a wonderful thing to behold!
I have one quibble because I just can’t help myself: I don’t think being unequivocally anti-murder is an ideology. It would become an ideology if it were “never kill people under any circumstances.” Then it would be the intellectual equivalent of “private property” for the libertarian or “the magic of market forces” for the economic neoliberal. I think one of the key elements of an ideology is that it can be extended in almost any direction and provide a shortcut to “understanding” whatever it encounters.
Your elaboration of Amodei’s ideology helped me understand what may be another key element of ideology: that it presupposes the outcome of almost all situations based on what the ideology values and not on reality. It’s tautological. It’s why, for instance, Marxism was never reality-based because it assumes that history inevitably leads to a working-class revolution. Those ideologies which produce insights closer to reality should have more value than those which don’t, but, theoretically speaking, every ideology is flawed because they’re substitutes for a complete analysis of every fact, dynamic, possibility, etc, which is also, theoretically speaking, impossible.
I've started treating Notes from the Circus more like a public diary of the things I'm researching and paying attention to. So that one day's essay flows into the next is somewhat a consequence of that.
"I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating."
Arguably, increasingly, everyone is eating from that trash can.
Slavoj Žižek, that was.
Ideology is not a bad word, but it’s not a necessary one. Used neutrally, it’s just a pretentious substitute for value(s), perception, and morality - or politics, which in its most important sense is morality writ large - and the ideas that flow from them. Used critically, with intent to disparage (which might be justified), it means distorted thinking and perception, typically with an agenda, conscious or unconscious, derived from one’s material position.
Marx and his adherents are most responsible for the second substitution, and for the enduring negative connotation which the word carries to this day - which is one reason why public commentators always try to disavow it. I think it’s time to set it aside.
This is the kind of writing that caused me to join Substack. Just upgraded to paid. You make me think. That has value to me.
This is a classic Brock essay, and one that will ultimately define your work. I appreciate the intellectual exercise of reading your essays. Thank you for sharing.
Brilliant- thank you!