I really got thinking about this seriously the other day while in a car that was driving on the highway. I looked up and noticed one of those highway signs the city puts up as PSA to say some kind of socially positive message. It said something like “Please drive safely, you matter!”
I suddenly felt a weird emotion, like the government or my society around me actually cared. Almost like the sign was something from a parent, lovingly telling us please be careful you are special to us, we love you. I knew it was just some silly PSA government message and not anything personal, yet the simplicity and directness of the message almost felt personal.
Then I got to wondering: is this how liberals feel? Maybe liberals/left-wing people feel this was all the time. That the state/government/society around them really cares about them personally, like a loving parent, is looking out for their best interests and is there to help when they need it.
If that is true then I can finally understand why libs/left-wing people simp for the state. Why they are happy obedience worshippers and never question authority so long as its coming from their own side of the political ideological aisle. They might really feel part of a big happy loving family, in which they are safe and protected and cared about.
To be honest, it felt good. I had the thought at the time, " I know this is bullshit, but I wish it were true." Yes, I wish society/my government/leaders really did love us like that, genuine caring for the people and what is best in their lives. Of course I know that isn’t the case, but it is a nice lie. It feels nice to believe.
To all you liberals / leftists / democrats out there, can you answer this question? Is this close to how you feel about the government/society in general? Is it a warm fuzzy sort of feeling when you think about it, like you are really cared for and protected and valued? Or is that way off base?
as usual, no idea what a liberal actually thinks about…
let us look at various societies… Ancient Rome for example,
part of the reason, a very strong reason why Rome was
more successful than its competitors … was its government…
every successful society that ever existed, had a strong
government behind it… or try this, name a successful
state or society that didn’t have a strong government?
what we would consider a successful state or society, has
a strong government… no exceptions…
it has nothing to do with feeling warm or fuzzy, the fact is
that our lives without government would be Hobbes
‘‘State of Nature’’ which was a state of lawlessness and
chaos…‘‘of war of every man against every other man’’
Existence in this ‘‘state of nature’’ is as Hobbes puts it,
‘‘Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’’
government is what makes a society/state work…
and the more a government takes care of its citizens,
the more successful that government is…
Rome lasted as long as it did, because of the
grain shipments that the Roman state gave its citizens…
One can and has, defined that as ''Bread and circuses""
but the fact is without that grain, Rome would have collapsed
centuries before it did…and every single empire afterwards,
did in one fashion or another, did take care of its citizens…
but every single great empire thereafter was a strong empire
because of its government…just as the American empire
depended on its very strong government… take away the
government and America would collapse in a year or perhaps
less… those on the right who fight for private enterprise to win,
is also cheering on America becoming a ‘‘State of nature’’…
think of your life without the government… how would you
have been educated? or does health care work without
the government? Roads and sewage plants and air travel,
all work without the government? very badly or not at all…
We live our lives in peace and comfort and with liberty
because of the presence of the government keeping the peace,
and keeping us free and with liberty… and that has
nothing to do with any psychological warm and fuzzy
feelings… my life is good because I live in a country
with a strong government…
and look at countries that are third rate countries…
and the commonality of them is a very weak or non-existent
govenment… Mexico is a failing state and why? Because
its government is weaker than the forces against them…
the gangs of Mexico are stronger than the government
and that is bringing down the quality of life in Mexico…
and think of other countries that are hellholes…
and I can guarantee that they lack a strong central
government… let us think about Somalia for example,
or Haiti… no central government and the country has
collapsed…and that is what happens without a strong
central government… and that is what would happen to
every single country in the world if their central
government were to collapse…
Reduce the American government to being small enough to
drown in a bathtub and that would plunge America into
a failed state terrain… does that sound like fun or a happy
scene to anyone at all? so, before calling for the reduction
or elimination of the government, one should realize that
what you are calling for is the end of a stable and safe
society/state… you are calling for the of America…
as IQ45 has done… and will do…
So, looks like your answer is Yes. You really do love the government and think it loves you back. Awww, how cute.
But to answer your questions,
“how would you have been educated?”
I don’t need the government to educate me. State-education is a massive failure and just a way of indoctrinating children and breaking their will so they will become reliable consoomers and workers in the future. And American education is well known to be a huge failure anyway, American kids lag way behind kids in other countries.
Communities and families can educate themselves. 95% of the stuff you learn in state schools is completely meaningless and irrelevant to anything if not outright wrong information or just plain propaganda. “Now look little Timmy, there are more than just two genders, ok? And men can have babies too.” Yeah, no thanks. I’ll take my chances the way we used to do education: a local schoolhouse where kids in the area went to be educated by a single teacher on actually important subjects like English language, real history, basic mathematics, social norms and responsibilities, morality, and financial knowledge. A single local teacher would know how to teach all that to a group of students living not too far away, you don’t need a government and trillions of taxpayer dollars to do any of that.
“how does health care work without the government?”
Um, how does it work WITH the government? You don’t need a government to provide healthcare, you realize doctors and medicine have existed outside the domain of the state right? For most of the history of America, doctors were independent professionals who would usually come to your home and give you personalized care. Their profession involved learning from each other, meeting with other doctors to compare notes, reading research papers, and learning based on their real-world experience and knowledge. Why does the government need to be involved in any of that? It doesn’t. The only possible role for the government would be to have basic laws against medical malpractice and harming people, which already exist, and then possibly to fund certain medical research. Beyond that, no need for it at all. But your sort of government healthcare today is just a bloated dysfunctional system where seeing a doctor for 5 minutes costs $900 and having the nurse take your temperature costs another $450 and if you don’t pay out your ass every month for health insurance well then you’re really fucked, but even with health insurance you’re still paying out the ass anyway unless you’re poor in which case you get all your medical care subsidized for free and you can go WEEEEE yipeee!! to the emergency room any time you want on a free ambulance ride and ring up thousands of dollars of charges for the taxpayer to shoulder for you.
Yeah, no. Government getting involved in healthcare was one of the worst possible moves. It’s not necessary and it only inflates the system with unnecessary bureaucracy and subsidies that cause prices to go through the roof, wait times to explode and quality of care to plummet.
“Roads and sewage plants and air travel, all work without the government?”
Sure you can have local governments or state governments funding road construction. Nothing wrong with that. Basic infrastructure is part of the reasonable mandate of government to help pay for. But you think the government itself is building the roads? No, private companies are doing that. Paid for by private individuals via their tax contributions. But somehow you think “the government” is the one making the roads, lol.
Sewage treatment is equally possible without government involvement, you just need to find a way for people to pay for it. Setup a sewage treatment system and anyone who wants to plug into it for their toilets, send them a bill. Oh wait, that is exactly how it already works. No government needed.
As for air travel, you think the government invented airplanes? Lol. Airplanes and airplane companies were invented by citizens, not the government, and citizens ran these companies and flew these planes and continue to do so today. The government just decided to step in and force everyone to take off their shoes and shit just to get into the terminal, because of some muh terrorism fears. Not even necessary, airports can manage their own security just fine if you let them.
…hm, so far you haven’t provided any examples of where the government is actually doing anything useful or is necessary for any of the things you mentioned. Odd. But you love the government not because of these rationalist excuses you are making, just your mere justifications after the fact, but rather because you feel an emotional connection and love for the idea of government. You really think it cares about you and you are happy to give it your emotional allegiance in order to maintain that positive feeling and worldview. I mean, yeah I get it. Like I said in my OP here, I experienced that feeling for a brief moment and it was really nice.
“we live our lives in peace and comfort and with liberty
because of the presence of the government keeping the peace”
The proper role of government is to provide basic protection from external and internal threats, otherwise to leave the people alone. That is liberty and security. The government can maintain a standing army for national defense, and local city governments can maintain civilian police forces for internal protection. That is all fine and good. You seem to be confusing me with some kind of weird anarcho-capitalist, which I am certainly not.
Yet you think liberty and peace comes from the government? That’s insane. Governments are the biggest cause of the loss of liberty and peace around the world. Government power is an excuse for people to do very evil things to each other. And in terms of liberty, liberty is a state of being FREE from impositions and power being used against you. What do you think the nature of government is, other than imposition and using power against people? Government is literally a legalized use of force. Think about taxes, if you don’t pay them the government is going to come for you in person and use physical force against you. And somehow you think that is liberty? Naw. It’s a bully taking advantage of having more physical force compared to you.
Government does some good things and we need it for certain basic functions in society, as was established in the US Constitution for example. Although even that went way too far, we don’t need half of that stuff. Government, because of its nature of being a legalized-institutionalized system of force to use against the people at its own discretion, must be strongly limited in what it is allowed to do and there must be equally strong safeguards to keep it within those limits. Otherwise you simply end up with one form of tyranny or another.
I like the solved riddle of Plato’s Republic, & Kant’s self=other cosmopoly (kingdom of ends). We hate government (or any other kind of influence) because either it does not pivot self=other, or we don’t. It is our job to deal with that tension according to self=other…until coal turns into diamonds.
Thanks for the feedback about that. I don’t want to generalize. Maybe no one really feels that way. I was just pretty surprised when the feeling hit me, as I explained above. It seems to me that if a person felt that way even moderately often it could justify the kind of government-simping and obedience worship that characterizes the neoliberals these days.
Then let me be clear: it means people who consider themselves progressive/on the left of the aisle politically, who vote democrat and may even call themselves leftists, who even THINK of themselves as leftists in the traditional sense but in reality are mass consoomers who do and think whatever the big corporations and big government tells them to do, so long as it comes prepackaged with happy pro-left images and a feeling of “all of us in this together against the big bad Right Wing!”
When politics becomes a product you consoome through your TV and smart phone and facebook feed and X and tiktokinstawhatever, when you read billionaire corporations’ media like the NYT or WSJ and think it makes you anything but a slave to those same billionaire corporations, when you actually trust the federal government because someone “on the left” happens to have been elected… when you think elections actually matter as if all the politicians are not already bought out by globalist multi-billion dollar corporate interests of the top 1% of the top 1% and the military industrial complex and Big Tech…
then, you’ll know youre a neoliberal.
It’s more about consumption, laziness, not thinking for yourself / conforming to the herd mainstream way of thinking and virtue signaling your uber-conformity as in “oh look at me look at me I got my FIFTH BOOSTER Im such a good boy!” on your socials.
Like for example, you think of yourself as on the political left, but somehow support the idea of thermonuclear war against Russia. Yeah. Only a Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, Children’s News Network, NPR-consooming neolib could support that.
“neoliberal” actually kinda means something more right-oriented than you might intuitively think. A neoliberal is closer to a conservative or liberatarian than to the left.
Or we can dig up some Hardt & Negri for some real political analysis on the neoliberal world order and its armies of unthinking NPC drones who think they are “saving the planet” or “preserving democracy” or “stopping the spread” or whatever catchy propaganda slogan of the day happens to be on the little screen in their hands.
Then feel free to define what you think neoliberal means, other than just associating it with something you don’t like. Because I gave an actual definition.
And yes, neoconservatives are pretty similar. But none of those people have much in common with authentic leftism or authentic conservatism. They are all co-opted by the super rich and powerful “elites” through their love of money and their naive trust in institutions, bureaucratic system and huge corporations that really don’t give one shit about them either alive or dead, except that dead you can’t spend money on their products. But if they can make more money from you being dead then they’re quite happy to do that instead.
"Public space has been privatized to such an extent that it
no longer makes sense to understand social organization in terms
of a dialectic between private and public spaces, between inside
and outside. The place of modern liberal politics has disappeared,
and thus from this perspective our postmodern and imperial society
is characterized by a deficit of the political. In effect, the place of
politics has been de-actualized.
In this regard, Guy Debord’s analysis of the society of the
spectacle, more than thirty years after its composition, seems ever
more apt and urgent. 9 In imperial society the spectacle is a virtual
place, or more accurately, a non-place of politics. The spectacle is
at once unified and diffuse in such a way that it is impossible to
distinguish any inside from outside—the natural from the social,
the private from the public. The liberal notion of the public, the
place outside where we act in the presence of others, has been both
universalized (because we are always now under the gaze of others,
monitored by safety cameras) and sublimated or de-actualized in
the virtual spaces of the spectacle. The end of the outside is the
end of liberal politics."
I don’t know why you jump to mind-reading. I actually like a lot about libertarianism. Don’t try to read my mind please.
Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as “eliminating price controls, deregulatingcapital markets, lowering trade barriers” and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.[10] It is also commonly associated with the economic policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States.[29] Some scholars note it has a number of distinct usages in different spheres:[54]
Zizek has pointed this out too: the political Left is dead, it has been dead a while now.
What about the political right? They are basically dead too, following around their orange man because he says mean things on twitter and promises reforms that never came.
Everything is globalized now. But let’s analyze the pros and cons of either ‘side’ today.
The so-called left still has residual good values, including things like equality, tolerance, safety. But these are so enmeshed with madnesses like reverse racism, state power-love and DEI woke extremism that it’s not all that useful anymore. The so-called right still has residual good values too, like tradition and family and limited government. Too bad they are also selling their souls for a paycheck and a few dank memes.
But the new right, the alt right as it’s called, as reactionary and unthinking as it is, is basically a reassertion of other values including radical individualism (‘don’t fuck with me bro’ attitude) and liberty in the classical sense, as in seriously limited government and getting away from these fucking institutions and all their brainwashing nonsense. So that’s part of the relevance and value of all those dank memes: breaking the psychological programming to red pill the masses. Funny enough, its the alt right (so called) that are the last ones standing who really distrust and dislike big government and big corporations.
And yeah, you get some real racism with that. Well, cope then I guess. Because humans been a bit racist since forever and continue to still be a bit racist even today in 99% of the places on earth.
…why do you call me a mind reader? I can’t remember ever trying to read your mind. Is that some kind of new tactic I missed?
So your definition of neoliberalism is basically nothing but the actual definition of neoconservatism, minus the warmongering and simping up to the military industrial complex. But way to trust Wikipedia bro I wasn’t sure if you didn’t have your own thoughts on the matter but now it’s clear.
As I just said above, neoliberalism and neoconservatism are very similar. They are identical in all the ways that really matter, basically they are two directions of system-worship, statism-worship, blind obedience to the powers that be and to the top 1% of the top 1% who really control everything that appears on the screens and in the airwaves all around you. And if you can’t realize that then you’re still stuck in the false left-right paradigm and false dialectic of the modern world.
And don’t get me started on “third way” new fascism stuff. Yes that is part of the “far right of the alt right” and it’s really fucking disgusting. That is the kind of shit we can all get behind hating.
Yeah, language only works when multiple people understand words the same way. If you have your own definition of every word, language just doesn’t work at all. We have to mean at least loosely close to the same things with the words we say to stand any chance of communicating with each other.
Let’s try to put this in the simplest terms possible for the modern politically-interested person to grasp:
Most people today in the west follow and believe whatever the big media corporations, big tech, and the government tells them. They believe the CDC, the FDA, NYT, CNN, all the big three letter groups. They also believe in the military industrial complex, wars, and they are at heart hedonistic consoomers who mostly only care about their next dopamine hit and their 401K plans. They implicitly trust the largest richest organizations and largest richest corporations on earth, whether government or private. So, out of that group of people, those who think of themselves as “on the political left” are the neoliberals. Those who think of themselves as “on the political right” are the neocons. But at the end of the day all of them keep voting for the same system just as all of them keep consooming mass media and eating McDonalds while they Netflix and chill.
I’m telling you man, there’s very little difference. Just ideological abstractions and some controlled emotional triggers over certain issues. Intellectually, and deeper down, everyone (well almost everyone) today is a mass-consuming narcissist blindlty absorbing whatever particular flavor of global-capitalist hyper-rich corporate-statist propaganda happens to fit his personality.
I wasn’t sure if you didn’t have your own thoughts on the matter but now it’s clear.