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Category: Politics

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    Freedom paradox: subjective/objective

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    1–2 minutes

    Unsurprisingly, our freedom does not arise from the physical world: the objective realm limits us and is arguably antagonistic to our freedom. However, we phenomenally experience the world with subjective perception (limited, personal interpretation).

    Oddly, freedom resides inside the subjective realm as a fantasy construct, yet it transcends the individual as an abstract notion. It is both in you and beyond you.

    This inside/outside dynamic allows an abstract notion to be mapped onto the objective world through a subjective lens. As such, we can perceive our freedom and agency in action, even if our reading is delusional. To counterbalance our bias, we can share the expansion or constriction of our liberty with others.

    Consider that your level of freedom is based on shifting alignment, reframing your subjective stance: deciding contentment punctures the idealistic conceit of victimization or frustrated agency. Yet, it simultaneously allows others dominance if your actions do not deny authority over you.

    The contradiction of having and fighting for freedom is not only self-imposed but externally mediated, reverting the “subjective framework” back into a substantial, shared reality. And yet, it remains nonobjective, non-noumenal, completely accessible, and ultimately denied.

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    Technocrats Reshaping Sovereignty

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    1–2 minutes

    We are witnessing a shift in political power. Sovereignty is moving away from traditional democratic systems and into the hands of a new elite, what might be called a "Humanitarian Party." This entity consists of "technical experts" and "moral authorities" from corporations, universities, media, and NGOs, who use their influence to reshape governance. (aka the "managerial elite.")

    Their legitimacy is based on the idea that they protect vulnerable groups—racial and sexual minorities, the immunocompromised, and others—whom they elevate as mascots of social programs driven by compassion. While these programs claim moral high ground, they centralize power in the hands of technocrats and bureaucrats, eroding common sense and traditional practices.

    As a result, the majority’s voice is increasingly sidelined in favor of the expert-driven rule, which expands managerial control and concentrates authority in a sprawling parastatal network.

    Like any infestation that becomes destructively parasitic, this transformation risks undermining democratic accountability while advancing a biased vision of moral superiority, which disguises self-serving motivation, all confounded with technical and linguistic arcana.

    from Matthew Crawford
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    Your democratic role: participant to witness

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    1–2 minutes

    As democracy wanes into managerial technocracy, with some celebrity cameos and oligarchic influence, we are offered the gift of becoming witnesses instead of full participants. We are not in "Survivor;" we are watching "The Bachelor."
    We are necessary as the voting audience, but we no longer need to involve ourselves in the messy moralizing, risky responsibility, or carry the burden of concern. Sit back, enjoy, or wring your hands, but please don’t disturb the show.

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    Political hygiene

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    1–2 minutes

    When a movement (such as the woke left or far-right) feels it cannot change the wider world (dethrone or enthrone Trump), it turns on those it can control: the people in its party or tribe.

    Inside the group, they increase the need for "ideological purity" to weed out interlopers and enforce/institute a hardcore of radicalized ideas, which demand alignment or at least lip-service obedience to remain in the party. (Since we have not made progress, we must go harder: you are either with or against us.)

    Examples of pejorative othering are terming: cuckservatives as in-party shaming on the conservative right or naming them a moderate or an ally to stack the progressive left hierarchically.

    Any criticality is erased, bad ideas flourish, and extremism distances what should be united.

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    Overemphasizing Human Rights

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    1–2 minutes

    Post-Cold War overemphasis on human rights has skewed discourse, sidelining issues like ecology, climate change, income inequality, and nuclear proliferation.

    Human rights have become sacrosanct, yet they are oddly always under threat. This allows broad arguments concerning the species’ survival to slide into the more punchy, impossible, short-term trumpeting of moral indignation instead of retaining focus on realpolitik issues.

    While the rationality needed for long-term survival has its pitfalls (such as quantifying the value of life), the emphasis on human rights has drifted into emotional protectionism.

    This is a significant danger: when human rights are conflated with subjective emotions, the threat is to dismiss rights, as is often done with emotions.

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    the right to equal stupidity

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    1–2 minutes

    We tend to consider intelligence as the primary solution: the government and politicians have more information and, therefore, should make wiser decisions. Yet, we find our elected leaders obscuring evidence, colluding and manipulating messaging, repeatedly (obviously) fucking up, and blaming others.

    For the survival of our democracy, we are supposed to be intelligent enough, wise enough, and parental enough to see through it: we are required to vote better, be better, to alter the bureaucratic state.

    The fault is placed back onto the citizens to do better.

    But we have every right to be as stupid and misguided as those in charge. They are surrounded by an edifice of checks, balances, advisors, and responsibility oaths, while we work two jobs and consume politics over beers.

    We are praised as smart when we are manipulable, and told we are dumb (wrong-headed) when we don’t accept the lies.

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    Representative Democracy: The monarch

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    1–2 minutes

    A second argument against representative democracy is the bureaucratic management that blocks change and disperses accountability. Meanwhile, the benefit of a monarch is that they should care deeply and be attentive lest their head be removed.

    While power can operate behind the monarch, having a singular figurehead allows for a lightning rod and scapegoat; people crave a visible leader and target, not invisible functionaries. However, the risk of notoriety (becoming the figurehead) is rewarded with perceived power converted to real power: the monarch can tyrannically dismiss the puppeteers. This should force a tremulous alliance of mutual use and disdain.

    The positive and negative aspects are long-term stability and a deft reliance on appearances to simulate balance and care, something democracy attempted to circumvent and yet has increasingly embodied.

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    Intellectual Integrity: The outcome is predictable

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    1–2 minutes

    Being educated can lead to illogic because wanting something—such as to be virtuous, moral, and right—allows your education to become a rationalizing faculty. Ideally, academics or scholars would draw from a breadth of resources, allowing knowledge to shape their worldview. As an authority, they would be capable of framing or debating multiple arguments from multiple positions. (authority instead of zealotry)

    However, the counterintuitive dynamic persists where, for the sake of inclusive status, research and authority often mold information to fit personal ideologies. The outcome is predictable before the research begins, resulting in increasingly abstruse and moralistic arguments that fail to create the necessary paradigm shifts.

    In this case, academics are not science, though they wish to hold the authority science once held. Even facts are politically reinterpreted, which begs the question of the possibility of apolitical human discovery as an anomaly, if not an impossibility.

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    rebellion as belief

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    A liberal paradox: cherishing rebelliousness signifies a break from tradition, yet ironically cultivates instability through its commitment to disruption.

    Embracing the underdog role (freedom from oppression) is as patriotic as embodying the victorious "winner" role (an American archetype.)

    For us, fighting against the odds transcends typical political affiliations, emphasizing a personal (subjective) quest for success that resonates with national values (transcendent).

    This interplay between destabilization and idealism is a conundrum: embracing persistent turmoil as a form of national idealism (undermining authority as it establishes itself) may be the very trait that sustains America’s humanity despite its perpetual, domineering striving.

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    slippery slope of trust

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    1–2 minutes

    As a society, we handed over more and more authority to science because its agenda was approaching truth in an investigative manner by acknowledging failures and correcting them.
    Over time we placed trust in scientists and doctors, not the discipline, and increasingly handed authority to technocratic expertise: specific knowledge in hard disciplines was earned trust.
    Accordingly, politicians and the state, who seek trust and social persuasion, co-opt technocratic puppets. They utilize credentials to push agendas proven to be blindly harmful.
    The suborning of science’s trust creates a didactic return to the felt experience, the perceptive phenomenal embodied subjective, as more trustworthy, though that too has been proven unreliable.
    Consequently, our state of confusion is valid: we can not trust science, leaders, or ourselves.
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