So I'm very a-priori skeptical about this whole cluster of beliefs. A lot of it is for reasons that aren't entirely fair, but they're also important enough that I'll just talk about them anyway.
The basic problem is that a belief like "democracy is actually good, but the systemic issues corrupt it, and what we need to do is fight as much of the systemic problems as possible to get more of the underlying good" is incredibly emotionally compelling. This goes far beyond ordinary confirmation bias; it's a belief that you can structure your entire world view around. You can use it as a reason to justify your political leanings, a a simple story to make sense of just about any political story or development, and as a framework to view the entire political battle in a positive light. It's about as powerful as an idea as it gets.
My views about consciousness also come into play here because I strongly believe that a lot of what people do is controlled by their aesthetics, where an aesthetic is something like "the way the brain constructs valence out of certain input patterns". This could mean that a certain kind of visual art or music feels nice to engage with, but it can absolutely also refer to abstract or ideological ideas. And imo it has a disgustingly large influence in people's world view because man almost no one actively defends concepts that feel unpleasant to them. Find me a single communist who, when they hear the word "communism", has an ick reaction of the kind that many people have today. And anyone who has an aesthetic that's broadly anti-cynical -- anything that wants to believe in the intrinsic worth and non-stupidity of people -- is at high "risk" for extending that toward democracy because the two concepts are so closely related.
So what's the probability that this incredibly emotionally compelling view also happens to be true? Well, it's exactly as likely to be true as if it weren't compelling. It's the poker analog of "what's the probability that this maniac who plays every hand has aces?" and the answer is "exactly 1/221" because being incredibly aggressive doesn't make it any less likely to get a monster hand. P(idea is true) itself is unchanged. However, what does change is P(people have view | view is actually false) (the analog here is P(person is ultra aggressive | they don't have aces)) -- and in extension P(people have view | view is correct), which is the value that matters to me, changes as well.
So with that said, it's certainly
possible that pure democracy is good and the problem are just the systemic issues, but from me PoV, I have to discount people arguing for it heavily because I'm pretty sure a lot of people would argue for this even if it were false. That's why I call all-ins from maniacs with weak top pairs, and well sometimes they have the nuts and I lose everything. As I said, this is a very unfair argument since it's psycho-analyzing people rather than engaging with the actual substance, but the emotional component is so powerful here that it's kind of silly not to bring it up. So yeah, I'm just very very skeptical about this whole view, especially if the arguments themselves also don't strike me as convincing
Not that many people in the US are actually happy to be voting for Trump, they do it because they don't feel like they have better options, which is not that hard to happen when they only have one other option and most of the other option's voters also agree that they aren't happy to be voting for him, they just do it because they don't feel like they have better options. The fact that most Americans are in agreement that there aren't really any good options to vote for shows 1) that the average American does actually have reasonable takes on politics 2) that the American democracy is fundamentally extremely imperfect.
I mean in some sense that's true, there would be a hypothetical better option. But Trump is currently running against Nikki Haley, who is a pretty hardline Republican, has quite a likeable personality (at least to me), is strong, and actually pretty sane for the most part. She seems like a really good candidate to me, and she's polling at around 17.8% in the national primary. So overall, this analysis just seems much more false than true to me. Trump isn't just the only option; people actually genuinely want this guy over more regular republicans, even if they're pretty good regular republicans. I'd have bought it a little more 8 years ago where the Republican field was mostly filled with morons except for Kasich, who's a very sane guy (probably more than Haley) but didn't have a lot of charisma. But with Haley right there and now the sole surviving choice, I completely don't buy this.
It's all connected in my mind, the lack of democracy and the support for the far-right.
The far-right benefits because it can put itself in a perceived opposition to a system that does not serve the interests of the average citizen. The system does not serve their interests because people in critical positions are reliant on the support of corporations. Corporate power stems from the undemocratic control that wealthy people have over the economy. If corporations were worker-controlled, we could significantly remove their influence over politics, and when they do lobby, it would be on behalf of the workers rather than their rich shareholders.
At the same time, a corporatized media landscape pushes the interests of the media owners, which align more with the far-right than the left. Here again worker democracy in journalism would allow them to set an agenda that is more closely aligned with the interests of the people.
The problems in the US and in Germany are systemic.
Similar reaction here. I mean this is incredibly difficult to respond to because it basically incorporates the entire left-leaning world view, which I know you can do a really good job arguing for. But man. It really seems to me like my own story of "people just aren't very smart and easily influenced to believe dumb shit" is simpler and explains the situation equally well.
Both of these ring very true to my lived experience. Since about half of US voters in any given election have no reasonable choices they just don't bother voting, while others vote for the least bad option.
If this were true, I would expect turnout to be much higher in primaries than in the general election, which is the opposite of what we see, and for it to be higher if the candidates in the general are reasonable, which I think is also the opposite of what we see. If the problem is that both Trump and Biden are bad choices, then -- from the PoV of a republican -- you should vote for Haley! The primary is on-going, this would be exactly the time where we should see high turnout. Haley seems to me like everything this hypothetical reasonable Republican who is just held down by the system would want.
The story is more plausible on the Democratic side, but then again, 4 years ago we had a primary there, and they chose Biden... while one of the people running against him was imo the most sane and rational person I've ever seen in politics by a mile. (People will disagree with me, but do you really think there was no good option there?) The "least bad option" thing just doesn't resonate if they chose the bad option before that, and if turnout while choosing that option was lower than when only the bad options were left.
Author
Topic: The Necro Wars (Read 466408 times)