Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

DEMOCRACY, KANT, ROUSSEAU, MARX, ERRORS AND FAMILY

My ambition, like many that of many others, is to find a resolution to the problem of political conflict between and within heterogeneous groups – which seems to be a barrier to our happiness and prosperity.

Since Postmodern thought has become the religion of the state, it’s useful if we study influential works of Rousseau, Kant and Marx.

MARX

Interestingly enough, we find that only Marx dealt with material reality, even if an impossible economy, while Rousseau an impossible morality, and Kant an impossible philosophy.

Marx is most interesting. His logical failures were at least understandable:

(a) the labor theory of value was an error, because it was an impossibility. Value is subjective, and objectively only known at the point of exchange, and must be so. (Locke making the same mistake);

(b) Consequently he failed to understand the problem of prices and incentives in organizing a division of labor. (He was not alone.) And;

(c) He conflated the problem of alienation from work, with the problem of alienation from membership in a group, drawing the emotions from the second to justify the first.

(d) He didn’t grasp that mass production is only valuable in the service of consumer wants (which is where capitalism often fails to satisfy our reason: it satisfies consumer wants, not what is ‘good or necessary’ in the abstract sense.)

These failures were catastrophic, and he built his entire edifice on misplaced emotions, misplaced causes, and impossible means and ends.

Our feelings are reactions to changes in state both of present and future. And the human mind excels at conflation, and is weak at causal discrimination. It is easy for people to make these mistakes, and Marx was not immune to them. While it is true that working on an expensive pair of shoes if you can’t own one can be alienating, the fact that one can eventually afford something other than them is something else entirely. If one can drive a used ford mustang by working on a luxury BMW, when the difference is merely signaling, it seems difficult to say that one has moral right to status signals.

The problem with our feelings is that we don’t live in tribes. Our feelings originated when we could have some idea of our place in the family and the world. We still seek it. All of us. The problem is the only information system we operate by outside of the family is prices and it’s exasperating: prices, unlike family, don’t care about us. So capitalism is alienating, yes. But Marx misplaced the source of alienation. Because it’s not possible to obtain the same feeling of cause and effect in a vast division of knowledge and labor, that it is as a craftsman. Thats’ why so many people practice hobby crafts.

ROUSSEAU

Rousseau actually doesn’t say anything more meaning than “I was cast out by my family and I want a means of survival as an outcast, so that I can experience eternal childhood.” He tries to recreate the obligations of the family for all of society. Which is what we all want – instinctually. The problem is people don’t act that way if they aren’t homogenous in family structure, and mythos. So, under heterogeneity there can be no ‘general will’, as we see from current political polarity.

KANT

Kant tries desperately, to recreate the protestant church by rational rather than mystical means. Not only does he fail, but he tells us that we can never understand reality – the most anti-scientific ideology in history, second only in harm to Zoroaster and Abraham.

PERSON, FAMILY, TRIBE, and PRODUCTION

The data appears to universally demonstrate that extended families who eschew marriage of relations develop both high trust and redistributive morality. It appears that people who do not do this, do not, and experience high corruption.

As diversity of any kind increases (particularly of family structure) morality changes with it, and disparate family models compete with different moral codes. Signaling is used by groups to demonstrate moral affiliation, and trust declines. (just the data. That’s how it is.)

This explains why northern european countries are redistributive: they are highly related, homogenous extended families, with small political structures. So they do not feel ‘alienated’ from their labor under capitalism. Whereas transitional families do. ie: Marx got it wrong. Capitalism isn’t alienating if you’re a tribe. It is if you’re alone.

Despite the fact that the vast number of social cognitive biases we evolved with lie to us about the similarity of our thoughts, and the Dunning Krueger effect prevents us from discovering it. We always believe we are ‘the average person’ or ‘in the top 20%’. But neither is true. And all but a few are competent to make that assessment, and those that are, underrate their competence.

Democracy is a familial process – for use with Kin. It can be used to choose which of the priorities is highest among people with similar interests. But it cannot choose between competing interests without conquest of one group by another. That is purely logical. And that is what the evidence has shown us.

As such alienation CAN ONLY be a product of inclusion or exclusion from the commons of production that we call a family. Where a family has some maximum size before interests are no longer common. A social contract always exists. It is called ‘norms’: manners, ethics and morals. And they vary by family structure. And family structure is determined by the means of production, whether that be informational, industrial, agrarian, or hunter gatherer.

As such I am fairly sure that diversity and scale are contrary to both any social contract, and any desire to prevent alienation. And Kant’s contribution is just another iteration of mysticism.

Smith and Hume were right. And the conservatives were right: democracy across any variation in interests, is just the slow road to dictatorship.

Cheers.

(eh… not a fan of comparative religion. 🙂