And the French.

Aye. Depends how you look at it really. The middle class is expanding such that there won't be anyone else soon. But the poverty gap is (I believe, in real terms) widening. If applying to less people.

 

I do think peoples' attitudes are, in general, slowly moving in the right-ish direction. Ish. Nearly. Kinda.

Crap. So much I want to say to this thread, but not sure where to start.

Let's try with this:



Exactly so. Everything you wish to achieve is (largely) irrelevant without at least a tentative path to the goal. It doesn't matter how well-intentioned your propositions, if you cannot say "and to attempt to achieve this goal Z, we must start by doing X, which should lead to Y and, finally, Z" then, it's just like saying 1. steal underpants, 2., 3. profit!

Pragmatism: One accepts the world is the way it is right now, one can recognise it is imperfect and that billions of people could benefit from major changes in the way things work, but that if one wishes to make any real difference, one must find a point of leverage - a fulcrum - get behind it and push. But also be careful what the other end of the lever is pushing, that the effects of one's efforts will not be counter-productive and that one is also pushing against the right object; one which stands a chance of moving with the potential wielded, that one is not swimming against the tide. One might be completely right and in possession of the "full facts" but it will do no good in certain situations. One recognises that until any possible future stage when pan-human education levels have reached a significantly higher average than the present (a second enlightenment perhaps, but vaguely utopian and distant) then thing will tend to get done only as a result of violence or populism - carrot or stick.

This is by no means a definition of pragmatism, but it roughly but I would say one who fulfils those qualities (or at least a good number of them) would be pragmatic and, frustrating as it is (since I'm a born idealist), pragmatism is absolutely and utterly essential in making change happen.

I disagree. We just phrase things differently.

I'm not so big on rationality. There's only so far it can go.

Nontheless, my aim is the removal of conditioning and my tentative path is to do so via culture. Culture does the conditioning so culture can do the unconditioning. We just need a shitlot of the right sort of culture making, that's all.

Case in point: you see the Enlightenment as a good thing. I see it as.. progressive in some ways but hugely retrograde in other, quite damaging ways.



It's my view that that will never happen under the present system, no matter how much lever pushing any number of people do. The current system is set up so as not to allow that to happen so if it's going to happen it will be via routes outside of any system of levers and pullies currently in existence.

Regardless, I think the start of anything has to be understanding, not facts and ideas - they just lead to purposeful uselessness (such as party politics). I'll use the Paris Commune of 1871 as the sort of thing I mean. There was no plan/direction to it, to begin with, it just arose because (there was an opportunity and) people understood their situations. It ended in a strategic mistake but from everything I've read it seems it would've been sustainable.

I don't believe that the major problems that plague our species and planet today can be solved by markets or anything we really see floating to the surface in the current system, but again, pragmatism says "to change the current system, we must show people a better alternative, because most people are sheep and either need to be shown the greener grass to graze on or forced into the pen by the yap of the dog."

In a personal case, I'm (generally) an egalitarian, a pacifist and liberal, so I'm not expecting to be in the mood to carpet bomb whole populations for the next couple of hundred years at least. Using violence to try and "improve" people's lives almost seems like a paradox to me anyway and would undermine any progress that might be made, so that leaves the carrot. This genuinely is the most difficult part of getting any chance rolling - the pitch. You have to sell your idea to the masses and it's really then a question of how much you will bend, distort and break the truth to make the sell. Bugger people about too much and you walk away with nothing or, worse, a violent uprising, where peaceful progress could have flourished.

What is required are bright "young" leaders to begin organising real, new, grass-roots political parties. Parties that are unassuming. Parties that do not say "we are on the left" or "we are on the right", especially when they're not. Parties which instead as "what is the problem" and "what can we do to fix it". Parties who aren't afraid to do a bit of house-cleaning or tell the public, as gracefully as possible of course, that they are wrong, when they need to hear it. People who come from the kind of perspective you seem to hold and to which I would broadly assign myself too - people wanting improvement, but not seeing an opportunity for it, losing any faith they may have had in democracy (faith ought not to be required, for it should be possible to see it in action), surely people full of ideas, but who more often than not, believe their ideas will never be listened to.

There are so many of them/us/whatever out there that they hold the real power in western democracies right now and their power will only increase as successive generations feel more alienated from the people who lead them.

The important thing is to try and establish this kind of movement before it is forced upon us. Revolution and all that might be a bit of a lark, in theory, but in practice it's generally best avoided and again, pragmatically, I think the present situation doesn't call for revolution, but swift and directed evolution. The power is there for the grabbing, the issue is how to show people that they can Take The Power Back in a way they understand.

As long as there is humanity, there will be conditioning, to a lesser or greater extent, when it's a big problem it's when it's done systematically on a state- or planet-wide basis. Being condition to certain aspects of existence may not be a bad thing, but it's important, if possible, to realise that we are so conditioned, so as to be able to avoid automatically making certain decisions when it would be foolish.

Certain parts of it are, but overall, the policy of the rich exploit the poor is not necessarily unsustainable, it depends on how well the rich are able to continue to covertly or overtly manipulate the other "players". To be fair, I'm sure with the meteoric rise of China and India, not to mention other other areas that, not many decades ago were seen as "3rd World" (hell, still are by some, but that's another story) the rich will find (are finding) it increasingly difficult to maintain their stranglehold. Again, this mostly concerns me because no faction will be (is) keen to co-operate if it means potentially accepting compromises that their citizens might view as concessions or acceptance of equality (let alone inferiority!). If that is the case, then the only eventual outcome, due at some point during this century and, more likely than not the nearer end, is terrible wars, on a scale to make Iraq look like a walk in the park.

Certainly a possibility, definitely not an inevitability.

I'm pretty sure I can almost agree, but I think that's exaggeration, really.

Right-ish direction? Care to clarify, I could almost equally believe you meant to the right of the political spectrum or the "correct" way.

Get yourself on the ballot, fool, it's the only way to SAVE YOUR CUNTRY!

What's "rational" then?

 

Being rational involves using a system of thinking/language which is based on or inextricably tanged with our conditioning. So our conditioning gets perpetuated by us behaving as what we think of as rational. Unless we make a rational decision to do something completely irrational (and that won't happen because we'll keep electing rational people who supposedly represent the average person but who don't really represent anybody) looks like some sort of apocalypse is the only way it's going to happen.

 

Innit.

I don't think it's exaggeration. I'm only talking about locally, in first-world countries. It's not a reality, people aren't actually becoming middle class, but they believe they are, and that's what matters. It's a cultural/ideological shift rather than an economic one (the 'new' middle classes don't have any meaningful stake in the means of production, they're just indoctrinated so as to believe they have an ideological stake).



'Correct' (as in 'better'). Again, in the first world. I just mean the result of stuff like feminism slowly seeping into the collective understanding of things, combined with (although I realise this partly stems from that < ) a semi-acceptance, culturally, of absolute relativism (not that I agree with it).

In more concrete terms: women are better paid and are more likely to be in powerful positions than 20 years ago, people are less likely to be overtly racist, positive discrimination is fairly widely practised etc.. Not that I think much has changed below the surface, but it's movement at least.



I disagree. I believe people act correctly when they're free from being shown grass and the yaps of dogs. I'd rather attack that which is making them behave incorrectly than try to show them how to behave (because I can't tell them, for the same reason that I wouldn't be able to speak fluent french after reading a french dictionary).



I'm not a pacifist. Or rather, ideally I am but I surrender to pragmatism here. I'm quite happy for violence to be used in order to clear the way for progress. Partly in response to the naturalised (and thus somewhat invisible) violence embedded in the current systems (from our military exploits to our treatment of the second and third worlds to the existence of a judicial system and police force to the prevalence of misogyny and commodification etc. in our cultural forms). I firmly believe that pacifism cannot win against an ideology prepared to use violence. But aside from all that I can accept some short term moral-wrong in order to put things right.

So I disagree with that stuff about paradoxes. There's no paradox. Sticky situation, yes, but just a choice and I would happily choose to destroy that which is currently doing violence with the intention that after that occurs, no violence is done. Destroy that with an interest in ongoing violence. I see that as akin to self defence - to me, defending onseself with force is morally wrong, but I would always choose to do it because my intention is to end the violence.



China's quite definitively second world, and that's important. India, arguably solidly third world but altered by its relationship with the British Empire. I don't think either are typically third world. Those labels are a bit meaningless anyway since the old of the cold war - or at least need some re-alignment. India's handling itself quite well at the moment - for once a country is actually thinking about its' long term future and particularly its farmers. They're still making what money they are by doing the menial tasks of the first world, though. China is a special case and one so complex it's not going to make a good example of anything, really.

When I talk about the third world I really mean countries like (in terms of standard of living etc.) most central African countries.

I don't see the economic struggle as important in the same way you do. I don't see it as desirable for second and third world countries to 'get where we are' because they can't get to where we are economically without getting to where we are culturally and ideologically (one of the things which makes China so complex - there seems to be a belief in the western media that China desires this). All these countries are fighting an uphill battle against out trade regulations etc.. Like you imply, 'they''ll never get anything from 'us' unless it's to our advantage. ButI'm working on the assumption that they really don't want to get to where we are - /we/ just see it that way due to historicisation - they must want what we have because what we have tis the pinnacle of development thusfar. Arrogant, blind and hopefully wrong.

I've meandered all over the place and have no real point - just responding to stuff you've brought up.

When I say 'rational' like that I'm just kinda talking about how the 'rational' has been privileged since the Enlightenment. The way science/scientific thinking has come to be synonymous (culturally) with 'truth'. i.e. scientific truths are taken to be absolute truths rather than the conventional truths they really are, and that something which does not express itself rationally is not expressing anything at all.

 

Like, clearly, music, religion, art (though it's undergone a sort of pseudo-rationalisation) and things like that clearly mean something beyond what we can explain rationally. They hold meaning which cannot be rationalised but they are seen as being (in this context) meaningless (not valueless, just that they cannot ... lead to progress (I've not said that well)).

 

(science is work, meaning, truth while 'art' (broadly) is play, entertainment, distraction)

 

So yeah, just there's been a cultural shift toward the rational and away from anything that cannot be explained in rational language, and that's a shame because there are meanings which rationality cannot express - so we're currently (to whatever extent) incapable of expressing them/exploring the possibilities they lead to.

 

And yeah, I agree that rational language and conditioning are intrinsically linked. And that non-rational languages, being less rigid/digital offer us (better/easier) ways of thinking outside our conditioning., just due to the nature of the language - they're so indexical that you're kinda making up/defining your terms as you go along. 'course, they tend to be semantically inxact so you have to go to rational language to nail it down but I believe the thoughts/ideas will necessarily originate in the non-rational.

 

So we just need a counter-enlightenment.

<quote>women are better paid and are more likely to be in powerful positions than 20 years ago,</quote>

 

Although in some ways that's true, there's still a long way to go before anything approaching gennder equality is reached.

 

The gender pay gap in the finance sector, for instance, is 43%.

I did follow that with "Not that I think much has changed below the surface, but it's movement at least.".

I agree it's not gone anywhere near far enough. And I don't really think it really represents much actual cultural change, it's mainly just paying lip service to political correctness (knowing what you should do but not why).

Just saying there has been some movement in the right direction in recent times.

I know, I just like chucking in that statistic because it's fucking disgusting.

 

It's not very insightful anyway, as the main reason the gap is so big is nothing to do with gender. It still stands that the majority of top city finance positions (the huge salaries that skew the stats) are still given out to some bloke you were mates with at Eaton or whetever - gender isn't really a factor.

 

I reckon that if the rest of the populace (be that working or middle class) directed their efforts at challenging those systems it would have a much bigger impact on 'equality' shit.

W3rd to that.