PROMETHEAN ANTAGONIST

Me:

In reference to political extremism, as someone with a blue color background, I’ve often found myself in heated debate with someone from a pampered background with a very intellectual elitist worldview, typically sympathetic to totalitarian ideologies. To me, there seems to be a similar mechanism at play between garden variety conspiracy theories and belief in imposed utopian systems - often Marxist.

Chat GPT:

I think you’re identifying a genuinely interesting common mechanism, although I’d make one distinction: conspiracy thinking and utopian political ideology aren’t the same phenomenon, but they can be psychologically related.

The resemblance becomes particularly clear when you look at what happens to a person’s picture of causality.

The common structure

A conspiracy theory often says:

The world appears chaotic and irrational because a hidden group is secretly directing events.

A utopian ideology can say:

The world appears chaotic and unjust because society has been badly organized by a particular class or system; if we reorganize it according to the correct principles, the underlying problems can be eliminated.

Both provide something reality itself usually refuses to provide:

a comprehensible world with identifiable causes and a path toward resolution.

And Marxism, particularly in its more revolutionary forms, can become extraordinarily powerful in this respect. There really are exploitation, class interests, economic inequality and concentrations of power. Marx identified genuine phenomena. The leap occurs when those observations become a total explanatory system into which virtually every historical event can be fitted.

There’s an especially interesting reversal involving elites

Your observation about the pampered intellectual versus the blue-collar person is worth examining without making it a universal rule.

Someone who has lived relatively comfortably within an intellectual or academic environment can develop an enormous confidence in the ability of human reason to redesign society.

Someone whose experience is more directly connected to physical work, business, family obligations, machinery, construction, agriculture, etc., may have encountered something different:

reality has a way of resisting elegant theories.

You can’t negotiate with a broken transmission.

You can’t solve a crop failure by redefining the economic relations between farmer and consumer.

You can’t make human beings cease being selfish, jealous, ambitious, tribal or status-conscious merely by changing the ownership structure.

That’s one reason I think the old distinction between “theory” and “practice” is so important. The intellectual can imagine society as a system of variables.

The person who has spent his life dealing with concrete reality tends to know that the variables have a nasty habit of becoming people.

And people don’t behave according to the model.

This produces a fascinating psychological temptation

Suppose your utopian program produces an unexpected consequence.

There are two possible reactions:

“Perhaps our theory was wrong.”

Or:

“The theory is correct; someone must be obstructing it.”

The second reaction is extraordinarily dangerous.

Now you need to identify the obstruction.

Capitalists.

Counterrevolutionaries.

Reactionaries.

Foreign agents.

Saboteurs.

“Class enemies.”

And suddenly the theory has acquired the same self-sealing quality we discussed with conspiracy theories.

Failure becomes evidence that the conspiracy against the theory is even greater than previously imagined.

That’s one reason revolutionary movements can become increasingly authoritarian while sincerely believing they are defending human liberation.

And there is another parallel I find particularly fascinating

Both systems can divide humanity into two groups:

Those who understand.

and

Those who don’t.

The conspiracy theorist thinks:

“You haven’t seen the evidence yet.”

The revolutionary intellectual thinks:

“You haven’t developed the necessary class consciousness.”

In both cases, disagreement can therefore be interpreted not as evidence against the proposition but as evidence of the other person’s ignorance, indoctrination or corruption.

That’s an extraordinarily powerful intellectual trap.

And it can produce a strange phenomenon:

the person who believes himself to be fighting authoritarianism can become authoritarian toward anyone who doesn’t accept his conception of reality.

Hayek saw something related to this

Friedrich Hayek made an argument that I think is particularly relevant to what you’re describing.

Human society contains vastly more information than any individual—or even a government—can possess. Much of that information exists locally, implicitly and spontaneously: people’s preferences, circumstances, skills, knowledge of particular places, changing prices, relationships, customs, etc.

A centralized intellectual system necessarily throws enormous amounts of that information away.

Hayek’s criticism wasn’t simply “socialists are bad.” It was essentially:

How could a small group of people possibly possess enough knowledge to consciously construct the extraordinarily complicated order that emerges from millions of individual decisions? That is a profound challenge to utopian thinking generally.

Which brings us back to your original reptilian example

There’s an almost amusing symmetry.

The conspiracy theorist says:

“There is a hidden order behind apparent chaos.”

The utopian says:

“There is a rational order that we can impose upon apparent chaos.”

The first imagines an invisible hand behind everything.

The second imagines that human hands can organize everything.

Both can underestimate something rather humbling:

reality is vastly more complicated than the explanatory system we have constructed for it.

And perhaps that is the deepest commonality between conspiracy thinking and ideological utopianism—not stupidity, but the human discomfort with uncertainty and complexity.

The genuinely difficult intellectual position is to say:

“I may understand some of what’s happening, but I don’t understand all of it—and neither does anyone else.”

That isn’t nearly as emotionally satisfying as having discovered the master key to history. But it may be considerably closer to wisdom.

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 12:58 PM 0 comments

It’s almost funny watching different media reactions to the recent election in Germany. Everything about the debate is virtually identical to what we’ve been hearing in the U.S. for years now.

Most media mouthpieces write off half the political spectrum through accusations of “extremism.” …”Far right,” "ultra right," "extreme right.” I heard one media source frame the elections as a triumph of the [Will?] Right “not seen since 1945” — sure.

For years both Europe and America have been held captive by a basically leftist elite that imposes their will on all aspects of society. When there’s any pushback, the usual nonsensical accusations of “racism” and “extremism” are hurled at people who want nothing more than stability, reasonable prosperity, safety, and the cultural standards that have been passed down to them by generations. There is no reason for the land of Beethoven, Goethe, and Dürer to eradicate itself for the intrusion of Mohammad.

The leftist industrial complex seems to assume that entrenched leftist belief in the established order is the standard of good and conservatism of any stripe is some evil abberation from the good.

If real extremism emerges over coming years, it will largely be the result of the nonsense that has been directed at decent citizens who merely hold an “extreme” desire to be left alone in their pursuit of happiness.

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 11:57 AM 0 comments

and the perpetual dishonesty of the omnipotent state.

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 9:55 PM 0 comments

being the good."

-- Ayn Rand

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 12:29 PM 0 comments

The Democrat party has no concern for American citizens and will allow and even facillitate suffering to reach their ultimate goal of uncontested power. once they're fully in charge, the the real horrors begin as they impose their will upon all aspects of life. The essence of communism never changes.

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 12:20 PM 0 comments

Off the deep end.

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 1:16 PM 0 comments

THIS SIMPLE.

# posted by Promethean Antagonist @ 1:10 PM 0 comments