Socialists and Scientific Authoritarianism

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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Authoritarianism is rooted in the father-child relationship, and innately exposes personal relationships of individuals, whether intentional or not.

In this Modern-Post-Modern Western world, I agree with Lorikeet on one main thing. Western society/culture does NOT advocate for, and it even censors the idea, of child surpassing the father, which is the case of more Conservative/Traditional cultures. Western Civilization/USA is more about detachment, removing and destroying family connections, where the child stays forever prepubescent or infantile. This is a political and cultural attitude.

For evidence and proof of this, do a simple exercise. Watch popular movies, media, and television shows from the 1970s to now, compare & contrast their messages of morality. Show how they have gotten better or worse, more or less relevant than before. Why are the Marvel movies so popular, why the fixation on superheroes? Why is politics and news media obsessed with Trump? Consider the last several Presidents, how many had sons? How many had daughters? Is it a coincidence that Liberal Presidents have daughters and Conservative Presidents have sons?

Lots of legitimate questions and answers, yet nobody has dug into the philosophy around here. Why not?

42

It seems to me to be far more of a Master-Slave relationship. A parent implies a degree of concern for the well being of the child. I am not seeing that. What I am seeing is commands being dictated, profits being extorted, and punishments for not obeying. If that is a parent, I sure would hate to be in that gene pool.

Such as? :-k

43

The Father-Child relationship is not akin to the Master-Slave dialectic, this is actually a big problem.

Many people conflate the two, and that “Authoritarianism automatically means Fascism/Tyranny”. It doesn’t. Again, some fathers are good fathers, other fathers are bad fathers, some are absent and not present at all. So how the personal relationship is abstracted to Politics, or in this case Scientific Authoritarianism, doesn’t necessarily mesh together or agree. This is why many people are threatened by Trump, like the liberal-left, and others are not, like the conservative-right. The threat is a resemblance of how a father has dominion over a family.

If a father is abusive, then this taints the perception, and then that perception will be abstracted politically.

That’s the larger point.

To say that “All Authoritarianism is Fascist and Totalitarianism” is the equivalent to claiming “All fathers are bad fathers”.

Scientific Authority is quite simple. If Scientists can reliably and consistently reproduce Experiments and Results, then that constitutes “Scientific Authority”. There is less ‘morality’ in Science than there would be in, say, Religious Authority. A different type of system, and means of gaining and maintaining status of Authority.

“Who is the Authority” on what?

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And why?

45

The natural rites of ascent were between a flesh and blood father figure and his sons.

1- At first the boy worships his father as a god like figure. His father can do no wrong, the child hangs from his every word.
2-Then, around adolescence, the child begins to see the father’s flaws, his humanity…his imperfections.
He rebels, becomes disillusioned, disappointed in a father he idolized.
3- Then the boy goes into the world can realized there is no perfect man, no perfect woman, no perfect anything…he now begins to appreciate his father flaws and all…as but a representation of his heritage his identity.

This does not occur in modern systems.
first because ideas are defined 'out of existence", i.e., made into supernatural, vague, perfect entities, clouded in mysticism and validate by obscurantism.
The boy cannot finish the process towards maturity, and is stuck in idol worship or in rebelliousness, never being able to surpass what is perfect and absolute and faceless…unreal.

Such boys usually lack a tangible experience with a real man, a real fahter…so they idolize the concept of father. The missing father becomes scarified, deified…conceptualized as this perfect being
Some remain submissive children to authority, others progress to a state of perpetual adolescence, continuously rebelling against authority because no earthly authority can ever live up to the ideal; no real tangible authority figure is ever worthy of respect because none can match the imagined one.

If Nietzsche were alive these men-children who worship him would quickly lose interest in him…it is in death where the dead attain perfection, like Jesus did to be resurrected as purified sanctified ideal.
Such minds are easily manipulated by charlatans who offer them a surreal, a supernatural, paternal figure…but such magical spells quickly dissolve in the light…like vermin scurry into the corners when the lights are turned on, and shadows dissipate and retreat when the sun rises…
Shadows are required for superstitions to survive. Some, like the guy in Plato’s cave, refuse to leave the shadow world…the shadows are comforting…concealing…
In the dark all merge and synthesize, everything becomes larger more terrifying…more awe inspiring…boundaries fade and you cannot clearly distinguish nor discriminate, you cannot differentiate.
In the dark all is one and the same, allowing the mind to turn inwards to its dreams, to its fantasies, to its inner light, such as it is.

The dynamic is a bit different with women…but that’s a topic for another day.

46

For me, there are two authorities, the individual, and the people.
I tend to emphasize individualism a bit more than populism, but they ought to share power.
There is no autocratic, or oligarchic authority, whether it’s minorities on the left hand, or corporations, technocrats or theocrats on the right.
Elected leaders should be given a bit of leeway to exercise their own judgment independently of the people, but fundamentally or mostly, they should carry out what the people elected them to do, or they’re bad leaders.
I don’t look at society the way I look at a family.
Humans aren’t eusocial, like the eusocial insects, our societies are much more contrived and genetically heterogeneous than theirs.
If you give one or a handful of men power, in all likelihood they will put their interests way ahead of the people, whose interests they may not even understand, let alone care much, if at all about.
The individual, and the people have to took out for themselves, they can’t expect anyone else to.

47

Traditional societies, based on ethnicity, are homogenous …the Spartan respected his leaders because he shared genes and memes - bloodlines and a culture.
His leader was a representation of himself.
Modern systems are increasingly heterogeneous…like the US. No common ethnicity, no common racial or cultural foundation …all based on an idea, i.e., liberty, salvation.
This is alienating…just as a worker in alienated from the product of his labour, in Marxist theory.
The individual feels no pride in a shared goal, a common past…all he is given is a product to consume and to participate in producing. So, he seeks pride elsewhere…in fantasy, in delusion, in nullification… a slave having lost all sources of pride feels proud of his enslavement, in his servitude, in his submission.

48

Okay, I’m just ever and always exploring the extent to which someone’s moral and political convictions are recognized to be existential fabrications rooted subjectively in dasein…or are instead thought to be derived from one or another objectivist font: God, political ideology, Reason, Kantian deontology, assessments of Nature etc.

After all, to the extent that someone is an objectivist, they might have an argument that allows me to yank myself up out of this:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

My point is that whatever one thinks is right or wrong in regard to “Socialists and Scientific Authoritarianism” here and now, a new experience, a new relationship or access to new information, knowledge and ideas, could very well manage to change their minds.

On the other hand, the more rabid objectivists among us, liberal or conservative, left wing or right wing, are pretty much convinced only the manner in which they argue about, well, everything, reflects the actual Truth about it.

This part in other words: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296

49

As I’m an agnostic, I don’t derive my values or politics from God.
I don’t derive them from philosophical abstractions like Kantianism or Platonism either.
Nonetheless, my values and politics aren’t wholly subjective, nor wholly objective.

I derive them from what I believe is my mostly rational (altho some may argue irrational), and intuitive understanding of the world, how it was, is and could be, as well as my feelings, my preferences for what ought to be.
Hindsight is relatively 20/20, foresight gives you a list of possibilities, plausibilities and probabilities.
My reason, and intuition tell me which courses of action are possible, and the likely consequences of them, that’s the more-or less objective part, my feelings tell me which consequences I prefer, that’s the subjective part.
I take the course of action whose consequences I prefer.
If I take x action in x situation, get the consequences I was expecting, and like the consequences, I’m more likely to take that or similar actions in the same or similar situations in the future.
Conversely, if I take x action in x situation, don’t get the consequences I was expecting, and don’t like the consequences, I’m less likely to take that or similar actions in the same or similar situations in the future.

Overtime, I am able to figure out which actions are most likely to get me the best results, the ones I like.
I may recommend others, who’re similar to me and in similar situations, take similar actions, and these recommendations to myself, and others become my values.
I also learn from others, which actions will likely yield the best results.
Sometimes I learn from others negatively, that guy did that and he got bad results.

50

They may as well be right about everything. I don’t think that’s the problem.

51

The problem is the kind of influence they exert. They don’t want you to understand anything (since it would take too long) as much as they want you to act in a specific way. (Clockwork orange style.) The goal being to bypass your brain rather than to correct it. If they succeed, they create an internal dissonance – a conflict between what you really think is true and what you can’t help but feel obliged to believe is true. And noone wants that for themselves EVEN IF what they really believe is false and what they are forced to believe is true.

52

This led me to some good mulling. It first reminded me of an encounter here with an intelligent poster who had recently found a spiritual guide. In this case a, yes, dead person. We got into discussions, some about this person, sometimes about other issues and suddenly even in those not related topics I would be facing a quote by the dead man. If I ever criticized anything the dead man had said, I was deemed to not understand, or have a ‘thing’ about the dead man. IOW I had it out for him. I could acknowledge some things I agreed with, but I was critical of others. I never noticed this person ever concede that anything could possibly be wrong with what the dead man said. However I had a thing if I was critical. There were also, of course, value issues involved, and it could never simply be that I had different values. No, I was biased, he - the dead guy - was right and I was showing some kind of rebellious activity. It was completely binary. Accept all or you have a bias.

And this from someone who could be pretty nuanced and not binary on other issues.

IRL, rather than here in discussions, I am a leader in a couple of different areas. I get uncomfortable when it seems like people just introject ideas from me. It’s great if they are inspired, great if they try out something I suggest (or in some situations do what I say since part of my role is to make decisions). But it’s creative work - I’m not an emergency room doctor leading a medical team through triage or something. And I think when I sense introjection I get the sense that later on I will get stabbed in the back. Put someone on a pedestal, then later, when disappointed, knock that guy off the pedestal. The other leadership role is professional with very clearly defined role differences and there I don’t worry so much about introjection. Further there’s no overlapping of private and public roles.

So…given that you are a leader on KT, how do (or do you?) undermine introjection, illusory respect, becoming the projection screen for the perfect daddy and then failing or ‘failing’ and getting grief, endlessly. Or more troubling people who do not move forward. Your ‘polish’ disciple is rather easy to deal with. The gauntlet is thrown, it’s dominoes from there. But people who do not openly try to take daddy down, but are stuck, or just projecting and introjecting, parroting and hoping for gold stars. What do you do about them?

53

do tell

btw i agree with the rest of that post
in sum, jungian father archetype and hero archetype

54

That’s a different take on it.
You want to be free, even to be irrational, or selfish.
I agree to some extent, we need some leeway to be irrational, and selfish.
Not sure to what degree I agree.

55

Or the freedom to choose between selfishness and selflessness or rationality and irrationality.

56

I think freedom has intrinsic value.
All too often we focus on its extrinsic merits rather than on its intrinsic ones.

57

Or the freedom to decide for ourselves what truth and justice are.

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The freedom to choose is a big part of what it means to be human.
The scientific elite want to bypass/circumvent that.
They’d rather have automatons than men.

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The old, religious elite at least wanted you to have freedom of choice, altho they’d punish you for making what they considered to be the wrong choices.
The new, transhumanist elite want to remove your capacity to choose altogether.
Yea, they want a clockwork orange.

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Altering our RNA/DNA with the nanotech in these vaxxines may be the first step on a long, dark road towards transhumanism, where they can redesign humanity, remove the parts they don’t like, like critical thinking and freewill.