Whereas something like "because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable, therefore we must provide them with the tools to understand what is reasonable" isn't necessarily fascist.
If you talk to anyone defending the anti-democractic occupation of the nation's capital today, you'll see that their response is typically is pro-fascist in this regard.
Even this morning, they quoted Adolf Hitler at the capital:
https://twitter.com/always_margot/status/1346578062700400647
The grandiose, arrogant, and blind social elites calling out the popular masses to be socially alienated.
Whose social alienation it would be?
Of course such masses will be of service to any any much significant opportunist group.
People will vote even for a devil himself if one promises to get rid them off such elites.
Just like that, 20 years ago, in a country far, far away, the destitute populace decided, in its sane mind, to vote into power not anybody, but an ex-officer from a mafia-like intelligence organisation people worked so hard to remove from power just 10 years prior.
The wealth divide in the U.S. has been steadily increasing, and the solution for the working class (higher education) isn't working like it used to, even making it worse for young people. This has lead to an angry working class who feel justified in blaming their problems on other out-groups, whether that's BLM, democrats, China, Mexicans, tech companies, doctors, lgtbq, etc.
This is what fascism is feeding on in America, and it has to stop.
There, we are on the same page.
A good historical example I brought up few weeks ago somewhere on HN.
A shameful truth from NSDAP days Germans did not come to admit even to this day is why Kristallnacht has happened.
The prime majority of Germans were not antisemites in thirties, and not even in forties. The image of the schizophrenoid—paranoid antisemite was completely uncharacteristic for anybody, but for single digit percentage of fanatics not unlike the current rightist crowd in America.
So, if most Germans did not drink the NSDAP coolaid, why did Kristallnacht happen?
It happened not because of Jewish people being Jewish as such. It happened because of Jewish people being rich (or being deemed so,) and NSDAP effectively promising complete impunity for looting.
I don't think anyone in their right mind would try arguing that most jewish people in Germany at the time were rich, because that was definitely not the case at all.
But now we have all the benefit of the hindsight, and we cannot go back to thirties, and tell that to masses going crazy from destitution, and poverty.
1. Revolutions of 1830: https://www.britannica.com/event/Revolutions-of-1830
2. The Spring of Nations: https://www.britannica.com/event/Revolutions-of-1848
USA now is basically France of early-mid-19th century.
My clumsy prognosis, USA will more or less repeat the route towards the French style liberal state, possibly, with few Napoleons along the way. And if it wouldn't, then it may well end up Weimarized.
Kings, and governments were replaced like worn gloves in 19th century, but the regime in general was always kind of stuck no matter what angry masses did.
Nobility, bourgeois, wealthy burghers, revolutionary hipsters kept changing, while poor, unwashed masses were kept being oppressed, and handing power to the next group of tricksters out of four above again, and again.
Changing the order of the operands does not change the resulting product.
Guillotines were only finally retired when the collective elite class was compelled to genuinely start improving the situation of downtrodden classes for the fear for their own lives, rather than some romantic altruism.
Nobody is even close to implementing a fascist system in America. This is the kind of thing people who don't actually know anything about Fascism say. Trump was not a Fascist or even close to it.
Stop falling into the tired rhetoric of the 20th century. New words are needed to name the problem.
The name for the system that you need to start using is "Totalitarian Liberalism". The leader is less important than the sum total bureaucratic control that slowly and "rationally" usurps freedom, flexibility, and leisure time from society for the benefit of the people who have the most influence over policy.
It is not a populist system that benefits the aristocracy and the working class by aligning corporate and state power in the national interest (fascism) nor a system that purports to benefit the working class by giving them the means of production (communism) - it is a system that works to benefit the existing rich by exploiting and undermining social divides, papering over them with rules and laws that marginalize the entire working class while setting it against itself.
* strident, often exclusionary nationalism - ("America First") check.
* fixation with national decline (real or perceived) and threats to the existence of the national community - ("MAGA") check.
* embrace of paramilitarism - ("stand back and stand by") check.
* led by an authoritarian leader who claims to embody the national will. - check.
* protecting or elevating the rights of the national community above the rights of those seen as alien - ("build a wall", "I don't care, do u?") check.
* removing obstacles to national unity and suppressing those seen as challenging it - (myth of "stolen" votes, "Deep State" narrative) check.
* expanding the size and influence of the national state - (To be fair, this has been the military industrial complex for quite a long time. Nothing unique here) normalized/not unique here
* often, also seeking to expand territory through armed conflict - (Also, already a characteristic of the U.S. forever war to protect its interests globally) normalized/not unique here
Merriam-Webster: Definition of fascism
1. often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge
Don't know where you're getting your definition from.
But that's exactly Trumps presidency? Or at least what he was attempting.
What you're missing is that fascism doesn't align ALL of the groups, just a fraction of each, and blames failures on the ones that aren't in that alignment
> And for those who want to nitpick what she said, let me just stop you right there—Hitler was right on literally nothing.
This is most likely fake news. Hitler was one of the first world leaders against smoking. So he was right on at least one thing.
* Rockets * Propaganda films
The US still uses his advancements today
People are seriously afraid of things like Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology being taught in our schools. It's indoctrinating kids and parent's don't have a choice about it being taught to their kids.
She is literally quoting Hitler to show what the LEFT is doing in schools and how it's WRONG. This reaction is taken entirely out of context.
Ideally, yes, everyone could understand every concept from the ground up and be able to engage in reasonable discourse about anything.
At this point, the complexity of the world precludes the majority of people from doing that, which is why we have specialization.
Practically speaking, people rely on authoritative sources to gain information about something so they can form opinions and make decisions. Those authorities do define what's reasonable based on different attributes, and in doing so exert control, but that doesn't make what they're doing fascist. It's done because the amount of complexity present in the world requires it.
You can help people reach reasoned conclusions without telling them what conclusions to reach.
In theory, &/or to some degree.
It's also worth noting that "reasoned conclusions" are not necessarily what is True. Rather than desiring that humanity strives for Rationality, wouldn't it make more sense to aim higher? To instead desire that humanity pursues Truth? This way, we can improve all people: the members of our outgroups and our ingroups.
Perhaps it has been found but not distributed, or accepted. If we found it, would we even know? Would we be willing to acknowledge it, and practice it?
> But it seems to me that the best way to find the truth (with a small T) is by rationality; the alternative is irrationality which seems unlikely to be effective.
This seems like a bit of a false dichotomy to me.
Reality is rarely exactly as it seems.
> My hope is that, by collaborating using the tools of reason combined with our own personal Truths, humanity could do our best by everyone involved.
Perhaps, assuming (at least) we have no major flaws in our premises, or our systems (democracy theatre). I do share your hope though.
> I don’t know for certain that it will work, but it seems like the best way we’ve got.
It may be the best we've got now, but have we put any serious effort into finding alternatives? The horse and buggy was the best we had until someone invented the car; NASA was the best we had until Elon Musk started SpaceX, and so forth and so on.
As we sow, so shall we reap.
> by what alternate means do you propose we find and determine how to correct them
A reasonable thing to do would be to perhaps ask people what their problem is. Funny thing is though, it seems like this reasonable idea hasn't occurred to any "reasonable" people, as far as I know anyways.
A more ambitious approach would be to perform a comprehensive and careful examination of the other styles of thinking & belief systems that are out there. When you read threads like this one, do you get a strong sense that a large percentage of the people in here have actually done that? I don't, perhaps because I've actually done just that, at least do a large degree. I know that 75%+ of the people in here are running largely on heuristics, likely combined with some first hand experience (perhaps with a side order of confirmation bias), and likely plenty of consumption of "proper, trustworthy journalism", written by people who are also running on heuristics.
Very few people have a very good knowledge of how the mind works, and almost no one seems to have excellent knowledge, including things like edge case behaviors. Another thing you may notice in culture war threads like this one is the lack of curiosity/uncertainty/humility - but you may not notice it unless you are consciously looking for it. That's another thing about the mind: it's not so great at seeing things that aren't there, or knowing things that it doesn't know. I believe that this is a partial cause for the perceptions of omniscience that are always on full display in threads like this. Ironically, omniscience is a fairly reasonable perception for a neural network like the subconscious mind - after all, how do you reason about data that is not in your model?
Such things can be learned, but why would one go to the effort of learning something new if you already know everything worth knowing? That would be unreasonable.
As for the general utility of using reason as an approach to our problems - HN is surely an above average intelligence forum. The conversation that's going on in this thread (and the many others like it that occur on a regular basis), is this what "reason" looks like? And if people on HN can't even manage it, how reasonable is it to expect joe sixpack to pull it off?
And so I shall take my downvotes, and we will repeat this same process tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and eventually we will all reach our expiration date and our children can continue this process, and then pass it down to their offspring - The eternal circle of life. Well, eternal, provided another nation who doesn't suffer from this cultural affliction doesn't rise to power and ruin our party that is. That would be a real bummer.
PS: Sorry for being a dick. It's in my nature.
It sounds like we’re actually in violent agreement; I also think that we should be seeking each others’ perspectives. We’ve approached this conversation from different angles; the tack I’ve taken is to assume that is a given and consider ways to encourage it to happen productively. Of course people are not “just(!) unreasonable”; but even if the things they feel strongly about cannot themselves be reconciled by reason, it is still a useful tool to effect action based on those beliefs. I (and, it seems, you) seek tools to help reconcile differing beliefs and ensure that shared goals—whatever they may be—might have the most effective plan of action.
With that said, a few comments on particulars:
> When you read threads like this one, do you get a strong sense that a large percentage of the people in here have actually ... perform a comprehensive and careful examination of the other styles of thinking & belief systems that are out there?
Not really, no, but I also didn’t get the impression that you had done that, either, so there you go. I haven’t, either, very much; it’s an incredibly large field, so I rely heavily on encountering them by happenstance (though I do try to increase the chances of that occurring), which brings me to my next point:
> 75%+ of the people in here are running largely on heuristics
Running on heuristics is all we can do; the world is too large and complex for anything else. The best we can do is tune them carefully and be prepared to change them (using, of course, more heuristics; as you noted in your first paragraph this is heavily influenced by existing priors).
> Another thing you may notice in culture war threads like this one is the lack of curiosity/uncertainty/humility...
Any online thread is likely to be skewed towards a lack of visible curiosity; that is frequently satisfied by merely reading, whereas the most prolific way to produce content is by debate.
> if people on HN can't even manage it, how reasonable [! —ed.] is it to expect joe sixpack to pull it off?
Under present circumstances, perhaps not. But I’d still like to keep nudging things in that direction, and maybe someday we’ll get there.
Perhaps it's due to a difference in our thinking styles. You said:
>> But it seems to me that the best way to find the truth (with a small T) is by rationality; the alternative is irrationality which seems unlikely to be effective. My hope is that, by collaborating using the tools of reason combined with our own personal Truths, humanity could do our best by everyone involved. I don’t know for certain that it will work, but it seems like the best way we’ve got.
To "do our best by everyone involved", does that not involve society and the people that live within it, who act according to the virtual reality that is contained within their minds?
Now, maybe you weren't "making that point" (or in other words, thinking of it from that perspective), but this kind of gets into the distinction between Reality and Truth. (For more on that, see the 3rd video I linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662949)
> When I hear “the tools to understand what is reasonable” and write of “finding the truth” and “collaborating using the tools of reason” I think of things like statistics courses and advancing the theory of systemantics. Reading your reply, it’s hard for me to tell exactly what you’ve heard, but it sounds like you may have instead understood this as my desiring to impose my beliefs of truth on others, which is not what I meant at all.
Oh no, I'm not saying that it is your (conscious) intent to "impose my beliefs of truth on others" (but I would speculate that this could manifest unintentionally, via simple democracy). My point is that you seem to hold the axiom that "things like statistics courses and advancing the theory of systemantics" are the only modalities of thinking that we have at our disposal.
As for things like Systemantics, I am a huge proponent of this sort of thinking. But you may (or may not) notice a near complete lack of this sort of thinking (that we live within a complex, semi-indeterminate system) in threads like this.
> It sounds like we’re actually in violent agreement; I also think that we should be seeking each others’ perspectives.
Yes, I would very much like for HN to adopt this culture. Alas, it seems more than people here can muster, which is one of my prime complaints. I have also suggested an experimental solution to resolve this inability in the comment I linked above. Alas, @dang seems uninterested in trying to improve things, despite his (I presume) perception that he wants HN forums to be a force for good in the world. The mind has massive capabilities for imagination, but it seems there are certain places that this imagination will not go: into itself, or one's tribe.
> but even if the things they feel strongly about cannot themselves be reconciled by reason, it is still a useful tool to effect action based on those beliefs.
True. My point is, consider the possibility that you are hitting a kind of hard limit of this approach. I believe that this is where humanity now finds itself - we are metaphorically building ever taller towers of technological capability based on our capacity for reason (science, engineering, etc), but we find ourselves unable to manage the societal consequences of the system we've built ourselves to live in. Perhaps it is indeed possible to solve this increasingly risky situation with reason - but what if it isn't? What if your intuition (which is what it is) is wrong? Disproving hypotheses is a fundamental part of the scientific process, and yet look how eager we are to skip over that part when dealing with indeterminate domains.
> Not really, no, but I also didn’t get the impression that you had done that, either
And then there is: What is True.
> so there you go.
You and me both, and the society we live in. And where are we going? I don't know, but the neighbourhood outside the window I'm looking out of is starting to get a little scary, by my standards anyways. Maybe I just have to work on my thrill seeking skills. Although, I don't get the sense from others in this thread that they're seeking thrills, so do they see something different outside their windows? Or is something else going on?
> it’s an incredibly large field, so I rely heavily on encountering them by happenstance
As do most people, and I can appreciate why: it is indeed a very large field, and it seems to take years just to get even a rough lay of the landscape. But what I can't appreciate is that "reasonable, informed" people (like my brethren here on HN, or so they tell me) seem to have no curiosity when such ideas arise. What they do have though, is downvotes. But to be clear: I don't appreciate it, but I do understand it. I propose that once one has traversed the right parts of these lands, you can begin to notice the very same, simple patterns always and everywhere (hence my suggestion in my other comment).
> Running on heuristics is all we can do; the world is too large and complex for anything else. The best we can do is tune them carefully and be prepared to change them (using, of course, more heuristics; as you noted in your first paragraph this is heavily influenced by existing priors).
These beliefs are derived from a heuristic (resting upon axioms and premises). Why not apply the very tool you are recommending: (first principles based) reasoning? Once again, is this not at least suggestive of a fundamantal shortcoming in that approach? On one hand, you surely know (in one state of mind [1] that is) that your knowledge is limited, and yet you speak as if it isn't (another one of the common patterns I refer to above).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory
> Any online thread is likely to be skewed towards a lack of visible curiosity
If this was /r/politics, I wouldn't complain. But this lack of curiosity combined with the abundance of self-congratulatory claims of intelligence in these threads is a bit off-putting to me - and I am a great lover of irony!
> whereas the most prolific way to produce content is by debate.
I dream of a day that we can manage a debate here on HN, on culture war topics, with the same mental discipline we demonstrate when debating determinate domains, like programming, hardware, etc. Heck, I'd even be happy if someone could agree that the noticeable degradation in quality of discourse on topics like this, combined with the gravity of the topics (ie: climate change), might be substantial enough to at least consider trying to do something about.
> But I’d still like to keep nudging things in that direction, and maybe someday we’ll get there.
That is what I have been trying to do for quite some time now: nudge people into a higher state of consciousness - to get them to at least realize what is going on in threads like this. But it seems to be an unpopular idea.
I would like to say though: despite the harshness of my tone and words, this has been the best conversation I've had on HN in a very long time, so thank you for that.
'The News' - which is mostly credible, is mostly not a form of state propaganda.
'The News' in the US, is a 'reasonable' form of credible information.
'Facebook' is generally not a good source of truthful information. It's a very open and free place to communicate, which is wonderful, but it's just not a good truthiness signal.
Enough with this idea that anything but 'everyone on a soapbox' is somehow fascist. Every community has sources that are more legitimately authoritative than others.
'The problem with the press' are their own internal narratives and biases, not any external influence.
The press are generally free to report on what they see, and they do that. It's their opinion that gets in the way.
And ironically, if there are bits they're afraid to report it's definitely not political, it's corporate, for fear of losing advertising revenue.
There is just the same as “control them” and in practice is how fascism works. The DDR didn’t rely primarily on stasi breaking kneecaps to enforce order.
Social media has given everyone a soap box, a megaphone and a repeater and the ability to piggyback on other people's shouting directly into people's ears and eyes. Do you think this is a good thing? No one is vetting anyone seriously, no one is being consistently judged on their honesty, accuracy, track record or motives.
It's not entirely about being dumb, more and more it's turning out to be about how much time people are able to commit to understanding what they're reading. This is why people are known as experts in the first place. Do you really think everyone is capable enough to handle the highly nuanced planning and decision making necessary for governing millions of people on the balance of thousands of existing laws and regulations?
Sometimes you can't boil information down into something that everyone can understand in a short enough amount of time which would be what is necessary for each person to play a role in democracy. Just like we pay someone to fix our plumbing we should be paying our politicians to figure this stuff out for us.
We don't have the time or attention span. It's impossible.
No it's not. This is declaring a problem -- which I think is a very real problem -- but not suggesting a solution. I don't believe anyone is suggesting fascism is the solution to this problem -- except for you.
But now that you've provided this unreasonable response, it's now much more difficult to discuss it. You've unintentionally provided an example of the very thing we're talking about.
In a conversation that is supposedly about how people are being mislead by media we're 2 seconds away of Godwin's law again. It's exhausting.
An idiot who shares something untrue that he ought to have known was false is materially different from someone who fabricates something and ultimately directly and by proxy misinforms 10 million people.
The choice isn't between tyranny or absolute freedom. It's about our actions shaping the bones of society. The current framework isn't mere ground truth we must accept we can reshape it if we desire and perhaps we should.
You can’t just squeeze the screw tighter on this.
The idea of “I know better than you, therefore I control what you see and say or else” is the absolute height of arrogance.
First of all, plenty of the people currently spreading lies on the internet are doing so under their own names and have built some celebrity and a career out of it, so I don't know why you think that anonymity contributes to the problem in any real way.
But more importantly, how exactly do you propose to "punish people" who spread lies? With what form of punishment? Is this a formal system of punishment, or some informal system?
If formal: Under what jurisdiction? How does your proposed system determine the truth, and if it can determine the truth how does it determine which lies are malicious enough to be deserving of punishment?
If informal: How does it differ from what we have today, in the form of people arguing with each other and occasionally trying to get each other banned from social media or otherwise made unpublishable or unemployable?
I'm not saying that reading a news article is equivalent to PTSD but it's a spectrum and we all sort of need to accept that different people have different abilities and tolerances when it comes to being exposed to extremism and propaganda - heck we'd all probably pride ourselves here as being able to see through the BS of most advertising but we also need to acknowledge that advertising is effective on a lot of folks.
1. As a society in general, I hope you'll allow.
Too dumb, no. But definitely too gullible - and the is made worse by the profit that is to be made manipulating such people.
The same way that there are large pockets of disease outbreak in rich areas of the country because moms with accounting degrees think they're smart enough to be immunologists because they have an internet connection.
We're literally watching democracy die in real time and its directly due to social media and internet disinformation, on top of the already existing radio/tv disinformation.
US life expectancy may have plateaued, but doesn't appear to be in decline, and it's still above even Cuba, which has perhaps the highest amount of social spending on healthcare as portion of GDP.
Meanwhile, Venezuela and Mexico are in clear declines.
With regards to which extremes of the political spectrum have the highest body counts, I would say the far-left Marxist states are the clear winners, with somewhere in the region of 42 to 160 million killed.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...
Here is a copy of the chart with some additional countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...
Australia is even higher than Sweeden, yet both the UK and Australia are currently governed by conservative parties.
I'm an Australian myself, and in favor of socialized medicine, I just get annoyed by characterization of left vs right as a good vs evil scenario, as our polarized political discussion so often likes to do.
The answer is instead to support human rights and freedoms, and fight back against attempts to take away our freedoms no matter who is trying to take them away.
EDIT: I removed a line that was superfluous to my point and was drawing attention away from my actual point.
The USA is both a representative democracy and a republic - the same as most other democracies on this planet.
Republic just means that the government is a public affair - there is no monarch. It's the opposite of a monarchy.
I removed the "We are not a democracy." line in my previous comment to refocus it on what I was really trying to say.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-01...
"most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" ... and therefore let's help them to understand.
This leads to people being blindsided by things like Trump or Brexit. Its important to register that we tend towards a slanted world view.
I have imperfectly adopted a principle in discourse: that if I have to resort to patronizing explanations to understand, I'm not working hard enough to understand.
It is the responsibility of, well, everyone, but especially those in power—journalists, politicians, pundits—to act in some semblance of good faith. To try to inform their audience. To not say things they know to be false.
The people storming the capital right now have been told by (1) the president of the united states, (2) the news channels they watch, and very possibly (3) their religious leaders, that Donald Trump would have won the election if not for a conspiracy to rig voting machines and throw away millions of ballots. So of course, in that case, the right thing to do is storm the capital and protect democracy!
The basic problem is that too many public figures have decided to reject their most basic responsibility to society. And I just don't know what to do about that.
> I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.
Nonetheless it seems objectively true to me. This may just be my biased perspective being substantially smarter than average, but I'm continually surprised by how gullible, uneducated, and uninformed the average person is. In the USA especially - stop skimping on your education system there!
I'm also surprised pleasantly by what humans in the aggregate accomplish, so it's not all doom and gloom.
I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.
Democracy is built on trusting the populace to self govern. Saying that the populace is too dumb or uninformed to be trusted to self govern is inherently anti-democratic.