Today I want to make a couple of deeper points concerning a brain fart I posted a couple of days ago:
“Milton Friedman? Hayek? Ayn Rand? Alan Greenspan? Robert Nozick? Sure they were intelligent people. The only problem is what they dedicated their intellect to: sucking the dick of the rich in the hope that they’ll give us our fair share.”
And please bear with my process.
First of all, what we are looking at here is an example of what I’ve been on about as concerns the model offered by Arthur Lupia in Uninformed: Why People Know so Little About Politics and What We Can Do About It. And, once again, it has to do with the dialectic he offered that starts with information which moves into knowledge which moves into competence. Furthermore, it shows why it is far more accurate to talk about competence than it is intellect which is more about one’s capacity to process information into a knowledge base that can suit a given need.
And we see this at work with the examples I offer above. They are clearly intelligent in that they show a high capacity to process knowledge for the sake of a given end. But the only thing they show themselves competent at is offering alibis for those that have an economic advantage. And in the process of doing so, they show themselves competent at succeeding by basically sucking that corporate dick, by acting as true believers. Where they show their selves completely incompetent, however, is in a democratic discourse that generally assumes the goal of reaching a compromise that will work for everyone involved. They basically come into the language game un-armed as it were. And it’s why they have to turn to the cheap and mean spirited tactics that they do. I mean when all else fails, turn to what you’re competent at; right? Which segues to my second point:
I now realize that Deleuze and Guatarri’s opposition to “state philosophy” may have been a little misleading. It makes it seem as if government has been the problem all along when the examples of FreeMarketFundamentalism I offer above are the only voices I hear offering conformist arguments –that is when government is the only realistic check and balance we can hope for against corporate power.
It was never “state philosophy” that was a problem that needed to be addressed –at least not as of the the time of D & G. And they should have known that given their Marxist influence. It was, rather, corporate philosophy.