mould

THEORY: Potential Entrant into the Market of Ideas - Enter or not?

When I first began this blog, Rachel said that she saw in it the germ of some sort of magnum opus. I often indulge myself in fantasies, and while I’d be the last person to say that I could produce anything of use at all, much less something that one might affix that bombastic title to, I have thought quite frequently about what I would really like to produce some day – something I can see myself dedicating a lifetime of academic pursuit to.

When I was somewhat younger I once dreamt of saving the world, somehow. I have been scorned very frequently by certain personalities for such hyperbolic ambitions, but I’ve always nurtured a nugget of that possibility somewhere in my puerile mind. Increasingly I realised that saving the world as some kind of hero from fantasy novels was no longer possible, for the following reasons:

1) In those periods where fantasy novels are usually set, there is a high level of integration amongst kingdoms but without the corresponding economic (and therefore technological) growth that one might expect. Magic, the equivalent, should, by some economic or Marxist theory, generate some similar effects but it is often tagged onto a feudal system without thought as to possible ramifications especially if we assume utility-maximisers. Anyway, the point is that you can only save the ‘world’ when such a unitary system exists, at least to some extent. But to do so you need that kind of magical power. Technology?

2) Since industrialisation the world has undergone a far less glamorous form of unification. I say unglamorous because technology has basically proven to be a leveller of power. Glamour stems from the superman, the individual, the outstanding fellow. Technology has erased the possibility of that kind of glamour. (And that’s why magic is the stuff of fantasy, because it accords huge power to individuals (somewhat arbitrarily) so they can go be glamorous heroes). No one can use individual power to save the world today.

But some weapons continue to exist, tools that are somewhat magical in the sense that they are not physically bound the same way physical power (duh) is. First, institutions – individuals can exert power via institutions, and that usually means through people (through the mechanism of trust). For example, one can use a nation state’s power to, say, spread democracy throughout the world. Second (and I distinguish this from institutions because institutions hold preferences constant), there are ideas, which change preferences by affecting what and how people think.

Ideas are a dime a dozen today. Every mother-son has something interesting to say. But this does not undermine their importance. I refer to an earlier post (but I’ll state it again here because I feel I can express it better now): the world as we know it is deterministically chaotic. Information volume and velocity tend to very high. This does not mean we cannot predict anything, it just means we can’t predict anything reliably. And at the same time, humans, at some primordial level, are humchee. Usually we’re afraid of stuff; we may generalise to say we’re Always and Very unsure if we can get what we want (e.g. to continue living, to get a girlfriend etc.). So we need something to convince us all is not lost – the world is not an arbitrary place where you can die because a comet drops on you or something, and you can achieve your preferences if you work towards them in a certain, systematic way. Both the cloaking of the arbitrary world and the method of achieving preferences require order – the organisation of information into a stable framework within which we think and act, in other words, live. This is where ideas come in. The most powerful ideas are those that can alter this framework, usually by capturing the new system of ‘real’ factors more accurately. Best example – move from Newtonian to Einsteinian world. Or, decline of divinity and empowerment of humans. That kinda thing.

So here we have a basic divergence between ‘real’ and ‘nominal’ knowledge. Real knowledge refers to hard empirical facts – what we really know about the universe: gravity/relativity; economies of scale; that natural disasters do have physical causes etc. Obviously, none of this is conclusive, but usually they’re pretty significant in forming the bedrock of human knowledge. Normative knowledge is the ‘ideas’ concept – a way of sorting all of the real knowledge out. So we have existentialism, Marxism, liberalism and so on. The thing is, for a given set of real knowledge, there is, while not infinite, more than one way of organisation. This is especially the case with the social sciences, where the chains of correlation and causation become crazily complex, especially because they’re uncertain in the first place. (Check out the alliteration!!!) And when we add to this the idea of path dependency, we see that there are very very very significant advantages for first-movers. I won’t go into the advantages – msn me or something – but this is where the main part begins.

Basically liberalism had the first-mover advantage. I admit there are some universal traits to liberal thought but I totally deny that an even vaguely thick form of liberalism can be applied to all. A variety of reasons including communitarian arguments exist to support this. The key point though is that I believe in developing a new, alternative organisational method at least with respect to political theory. This will probably be Chinese or oriental in origin. So I don’t deny, yeah, pride (only partially racial) plays a part in the inspiration for this. I’m sick and tired of other people telling me that I’m full of shit and a slave and a drone with none of the love of freedom that is intrinsic to all mankind and that there’s something wrong with that anyway. The racial bit may be because I know oriental philosophy has a substantial base to work on, and also because I do have pride in aspects of it anyway. So I really hope that one day I can formulate an alternative to Western liberalism that serves as a viable political theory as well.

So here is perhaps the exciting part, the agenda.

1a) The basis of human life at personal and aggregate (humanity) levels – it’s still utility at the personal level (I may add the stuff about pain and struggle from earlier) but at the aggregate level there’s knowledge-seeking. There’s some very very vaguely nihilistic stuff too.

1b) From here we move to the second-order stuff we should prize in life and in our minds. Freedom is one, possibly an important one, but definitely not the most important one. Experience, and by proxy, continued life, is another. Victory may be another. Utility in the sense of physical and mental pleasure too.

1c) Some different components of utility, including community and freedom. Actually maybe victory should be here. Anyway, this is different from 1b because 1b is what we should prize even if we don’t like it.

2a) Here I’ll probably take a detour and talk about the concept of liberty and how the negative and positive forms are really the same but for the feeling of human domination. Links can also be made between determinism and that weird but cute possibility-space model I came up with.

2b) Having reduced liberalism to its core of institutional equality, I think I can bring in my OWL article (which sadly I’m sure won’t be published). The important thing is to undermine the importance of equality, replacing it by hierarchy. The basic idea is to undermine the universality of liberalism.

3) Right. Here I have to suggest the alternate theory based on some measure of hierarchy. Obviously I’ve got to bring in justice of some sort. I was thinking about benevolence and mercy, but that’s really quite disgusting – better to have some respect for the community as a whole (no need for an overriding rule of law). The thing is, there’s hierarchy everywhere, but where politics is concerned it’s more important, because of the monopoly on legit violence. So that’s going to be the key issue I think: how I can solve the risk of the poor outcome of tyranny.

And I think that’s it for now. It doesn’t look very convincing, sheesh. Well in my mind it looked like it stood a really strong chance. We’ll have to see how it goes. Anyway, people will say you’re a cock you know that, if you do something stupid like that and it really succeeds aren’t we gonna have another Communist failure? With deaths and misery etc.? That’s definitely true, and may be answered in part by 1a. Western liberal democracy has worked well so far – it’s good in terms of violence, it’s good in terms of progress, so since it ain’t broke, maybe it’s better not to touch the trend of political thought.

I feel that we have to try. I said this earlier too. A lot of things cannot be understood or grasped in their entirety till they’re put into practice and we have the chance to see their consequences fully acted out. So it must be implemented for the effects to come about. And I do believe that if we introduce some competition into the current dominant system, the results in the long run will be beneficial. Different modes of thought can give rise to entirely new branches of knowledge. For example a lot of power literature has been inspired by Marxist theory. A good part is, this new theory won’t pretend to be universal, and so even if there are negative effects they won’t be ideologically-driven to spread all over the world. A lot of good that will do to the Chinese who are suffering under the yoke of oppression if it happens…

Right. I totally lost steam. Maybe next time I’ll talk a little about why systems excite me so much and I’ll post this quite silly piece I wrote for Tanah Ayer. And I need to do the RPG dungeons too. And maybe review Wu Jian Dao. Yay!