Coffee House The end of liberalism

[Macaquerie]

That is to say, the OP is not an idiot, but a purposefully deceptive poster.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

In any event, given that conservatives these days are quick to drop any adherence to free markets and individual liberties in favor of reactionary identity politics, I would say that the distinction between the different flavors of "liberal" are gradually being eroded.

[Felya]

In any event, given that conservatives these days are quick to drop any adherence to free markets and individual liberties in favor of reactionary identity politics, I would say that the distinction between the different flavors of "liberal" are gradually being eroded.

The idea of liberals being distinct in identity politics, was always a lie. Regan invented the welfare queen...

[Theodarzna]

Theodarzna, I am from Croatia, we used to be part of Yugoslavia, a socialist country. Like the elite in many other socialist countries, ours were obsessed with the idea of inevitable nuclear holocaust between the imperialistic capitalistic West and the socialist countries of the world. They were devising plans how to restart complete political dominance over the population that survived nuclear exchange since the days of Stalin. Since then, the technology has progressed to heights undreamed of, and with it, the infrastructure and methodology required to reignite the political dominance of the modern aristocracy.

That 1% is far more intelligent and cunning then you give them credit for, and they would include people of various professions who would provide their knowledge how to keep the lights on or the buildings warm in exchange for safe place during the collapse of civilization. The military would be given safe place for them and their families, and they would keep order with a iron fist. That is how societies were run for thousands of years. A king>his military>workers.

I maintain that in theory they have a plan, somewhat like a plan to survive an alien invasion or the impact of a comet. Intelligence isn't everything, and in a state of nature the brilliance of programing is not a particularly adaptive trait. The issue is mainly a question of how much personale vanishes. I'd say 90% is fatal. I look at what became of the Native Americans after the collapse of 9 in 10 of their population. How quickly urban centers vanished, agriculture collapsed and societies became little more than hunter gatherer tribes and bands.

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Conservatives in America are liberal themselves.

The most critical fact of the book referenced in the OP is that Conservatives are a type of Liberal, just as Progressives are. Both promise to secure greater liberty and freedom but by different means.

Progressive promise to expand the state and legal instruments that grant people autonomy and freedom from the obligations and peculiarities of culture, community and other humans.

Conservatives promise to deregulate and grant ever greater access to a global marketplace of goods and services, believing that through limitless access to those things we will be free and liberated.

What the OP's book does is question both of these currents in America and merely suggest both are two heads of a chimera that is itself a contradiction.

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God damn I wish this discussion would pick if it's talking about to left-wing cunts known as liberals or those capitalist pigs known as liberals.

It's kinda an important distinction ya know?

I think it has been made clear since the beginning that it is about both. If not, it is now explained.

[Sunseeker]

I think it has been made clear since the beginning that it is about both. If not, it is now explained.

Oh, it's you again.

Hoping for that "if I repeat something often enough it will become true" thing to actually work this time?

[Theodarzna]

Oh, it's you again.

Hoping for that "if I repeat something often enough it will become true" thing to actually work this time?

Let me catch you up to speed:

The most critical fact of the book referenced in the OP is that Conservatives are a type of Liberal, just as Progressives are. Both promise to secure greater liberty and freedom but by different means.

Progressive promise to expand the state and legal instruments that grant people autonomy and freedom from the obligations and peculiarities of culture, community and other humans.

Conservatives promise to deregulate and grant ever greater access to a global marketplace of goods and services, believing that through limitless access to those things we will be free and liberated.

What the OP's book does is question both of these currents in America and merely suggest both are two heads of a chimaera that is itself a contradiction.

Hope that helps.

[Sunseeker]

Let me catch you up to speed:


Hope that helps.

Yes, I'm aware that the author argues a lot of garbage in order to pretend that everyone he disagrees with falls under the same label, a label he can then construct a straw man out of and knock down to make himself look impressive.

For those of you just tuning in to this sort of rhetorical mumbo-jumbo this can seem impressive. In fact it can even appear quite convincing.

What you are failed quite horribly at is not listening to people, myself among them, who know better due to our training and experience with these subjects and our familiarity with this kind of writing. But you always miss that because you're not here to have a conversation with people, you just want to talk at them.

Which is why we repeat this little dance in every one of your threads.

[Theodarzna]

Yes, I'm aware that the author argues a lot of garbage in order to pretend that everyone he disagrees with falls under the same label, a label he can then construct a straw man out of and knock down to make himself look impressive.

For those of you just tuning in to this sort of rhetorical mumbo-jumbo this can seem impressive. In fact it can even appear quite convincing.

What you are failed quite horribly at is not listening to people, myself among them, who know better due to our training and experience with these subjects and our familiarity with this kind of writing. But you always miss that because you're not here to have a conversation with people, you just want to talk at them.

Which is why we repeat this little dance in every one of your threads.

Considering your purpose in this thread is animus purely towards me, a person posting on a WoW message board, Yeah I haven't taken your posts all that seriously, much as you haven't done with mine. Seems kinda fair don'cha know?

[Frontenac]

I maintain that in theory they have a plan, somewhat like a plan to survive an alien invasion or the impact of a comet. Intelligence isn't everything, and in a state of nature the brilliance of programing is not a particularly adaptive trait. The issue is mainly a question of how much personale vanishes. I'd say 90% is fatal. I look at what became of the Native Americans after the collapse of 9 in 10 of their population. How quickly urban centers vanished, agriculture collapsed and societies became little more than hunter gatherer tribes and bands.

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The most critical fact of the book referenced in the OP is that Conservatives are a type of Liberal, just as Progressives are. Both promise to secure greater liberty and freedom but by different means.

Progressive promise to expand the state and legal instruments that grant people autonomy and freedom from the obligations and peculiarities of culture, community and other humans.

Conservatives promise to deregulate and grant ever greater access to a global marketplace of goods and services, believing that through limitless access to those things we will be free and liberated.

What the OP's book does is question both of these currents in America and merely suggest both are two heads of a chimera that is itself a contradiction.

That is more or less what I understood. Any ideology possesses in itself the seed of its destruction, because no ideology can encompass de complexity that is human life and reality. There comes a time when an ideology arrives at the limit of its logic and when it becomes foolish.

[Sunseeker]

Considering your purpose in this thread is animus purely towards me, a person posting on a WoW message board, Yeah I haven't taken your posts all that seriously, much as you haven't done with mine. Seems kinda fair don'cha know?

Oh absolutely.

But you haven't taken anyone else who disagrees with you or the material you post seriously either. THAT is the problem.

[Theodarzna]

That is more or less what I understood. Any ideology possesses in itself the seed of its destruction, because no ideology can encompass de complexity that is human life and reality. There comes a time when an ideology arrives at the limit of its logic and when it becomes foolish.

I'd say we are well past that threshold. The greater freedoms we win, the bigger and more involved the State becomes, the more intrusive, controlling and omnipresent it is has grown far beyond what even the most self aggrandizing Kings of old could dream of. And the liberty of the market has only not produced omnipresent, immortal corprate persons whom easily could come to control every facet of out lives and create a permenant aristocracy.

Thus the term revolution becomes literally true. A 360-degree rotation back to one's original position.

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Oh absolutely.

But you haven't taken anyone else who disagrees with you or the material you post seriously either. THAT is the problem.

I engaged until it became obvious what was going on. People who come to deal in petty insults and animus towards me specifically are not worth responding to. Maybe having something worth talking about. Heck, even others outside your little clique have acknowledged you guys and gals have a freakish level of obsession with my posts.

I'll note for the record that I was respectful of Aurinaux far longer than Aurinaux was of me.

[Felya]

That is more or less what I understood. Any ideology possesses in itself the seed of its destruction, because no ideology can encompass de complexity that is human life and reality. There comes a time when an ideology arrives at the limit of its logic and when it becomes foolish.

Yes, there is. Math is objective and the epiphany people like Theo rely on is detailed here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

The problem? Math is politically and culturally ambivalent. You cannot derive the fear mongering and tribalism that Theo leans on, from math. Even if you want to lean on religion, that respect is already covered as well, through math:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître

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But you haven't taken anyone else who disagrees with you or the material you post seriously either. THAT is the problem.

The whole point of that perspective is that you know better, regardless of what anyone tells you. It’s a self centered and self important ideology. The reason it works as subversion, because to admit you are wrong, you admit that you don’t know everything. That’s what the idea of there being no truth is based on... you determine what is truth, which is rediculously self centered and devoid of real review.

[Frontenac]

Yes, there is. Math is objective and the epiphany people like Theo rely on is detailed here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

The problem? Math is politically and culturally ambivalent. You cannot derive the fear mongering and tribalism that Theo leans on, from math. Even if you want to lean on religion, that respect is already covered as well, through math:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître

Mathematics are not an ideology.

[Sunseeker]

Maybe having something worth talking about.

Fine. You get one. Buckle up.

Lets start from the top(I will be addressing this in chunks, because a line-by-line analysis would make this post 10 miles long):

In recent days we’ve seen inspiring demands for liberty from the oppressed citizens of Iran. Our situation in the West today seems the opposite: too much ill-used liberty combined with a soft authoritarianism that we have largely welcomed. We buy what we want, throw away what we no longer desire, and allow the debt to accumulate. We enjoy Caligulaesque sexual liberty but no longer marry nor have children. We eat until we are obese, legalise drugs that take the edge off, consume a degraded popular culture that leaves us stupefied, and alter our brainscapes through unceasing consumption of online ephemera. Amid these seemingly unlimited personal choices, we can see the growth of an encompassing state and transnational institutions that make innumerable decisions in politics and economics over which average citizens exercise no control. If this is the form of ‘liberty’ that protesters in Iran aspire to achieve, then any liberation is likely to prove Pyrrhic.

In a world longing for liberty, advanced western liberalism seems to have reached a dead-end. Having promised liberation from any constraint that is not chosen by the consent of the individual, we have created nations of individualists who are now responsible to no-one in particular, but simultaneously subjects of an all-encompassing state and international order. That liberalism has succeeded. It has also visibly failed. Western liberal democracies are in a state of internal crisis: by every measure, they are wealthy, powerful, and unchallenged by any ideological contender. But an internal rot has spread as its citizens feel at once powerless amid their autonomy. Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded.

Alright, so these first tow paragraphs are largely introductory. Deneen is introducing us to his theory and explaining what the percieved problem is, and what has caused it. However, his initial argument has started off flawed. His initial assumption is summed up with "Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded." and the flaw with his premise is demonstrated by the second part of his claim. To note: it is typically dangerous to make a two-part claim, because now you're stuck trying to prove two things, instead of only having to prove one. It is secondly dangerous from an argumentation standpoint to pin your primary claim "Liberalism has failed..." on the second claim. Compare say claiming something like "The DNC was rigged against Bernie." this is probably comparable to claiming that "liberalism has succeeded" but it lacks the secondary claim of say "Which caused Hillary to lose the election."

Anyway, back to the problem that firstly: liberalism has succeeded.

This is where you get a good deal of my disagree with Deneen because he's talking about several different kinds of liberalism (more than that really). "Economic liberalism" both in terms of classical liberalism and neo-liberalism AND he's connecting to social liberalism or what are more commonly known as American Liberalism. This poses a problem because it makes his argument (which he is attempting to make as general as possible) very specific to the situation in the United States. Each of these kinds of liberalism may share such generic common threads as "liberty" but that really isn't enough to make much of a claim on well, anything. A lot of political ideologies share common threads, in the same sense that a lot of religions share common threads (such as the "Golden Rule"). Because he is connecting so many different and distinct ideologies on such a single tenuous thread, it makes it difficult to prove his claim: 'liberalism has succeeded'. Each of these ideologies presents different "win scenarios", and some of them are highly contradictory. Ayn Rand is very classical economic liberalism. Modern American Liberals are very much NOT. Modern American Conservatives are very neo-liberal, which in many ways is contradictory to classical liberalism. And Modern American Conservatives are also very much NOT the social liberals that American Liberals are.

So when he says "liberalism has succeeded" whose liberalism is he talking about, exactly? It can't be all of them, at least not 100% of each of their ideologies. So I'll be generous for a moment, and say "well, maybe he's talking about liberty in general." It's certainly possible to read it that way, but if we were to read it that way the problem would be that it is demonstratably false. Even in the mighty West many individual liberties, even ones Deneen explicitly mentions in his opening statements ('Caligulaesque sexual liberty' and 'legalise drugs that take the edge off') are patently not true. Across the USA for example many forms of sex (even positions!) are illegal. With the exception of marijuana in a handful of states, the overwhelming majority of drugs (above alcohol and cigarettes and perscrption drugs) are still demonstratably illegal. Many elements are still actively working to restrict the rights of women, minorities and in this context, businesses. Neo-liberals want to free businesses. American Liberals want to free people. Often at the cost of the other. So again whose liberalism has succeded?

In summation, the problem with is second premise is that some of his supporting facts are demonstratably false.

Now, back to his first premise. And remember, you asked for this.

His first claim that 'liberalism has failed' is partially predicated on his second claim, and we've already demonstrated that his second claim is faulty. Faults I could liberally write an essay on. But lets at least say that it is partially true. In some ways it is, we are more free now (at least in a cosmic sense) than we were before the concepts of liberalism emerged and started being applied to society and government. The 'failure of liberalism' here is somewhat vague, which is a problem (for the reader, not Deneen) because in order to demonstrate if a claim is true, false, accurate or inaccurate it needs to be specific. However, he best gets at what liberalism has failed at right here: "Having promised liberation from any constraint that is not chosen by the consent of the individual..."

The problem is: liberalism never promised this. Here we are once again conflating multiple ideologies that all share a common root "liberty". Perhaps the closest to this promise is Modern American Liberalism, who promise social and personal freedom. The freedom to choose who you love, who you fuck, what drugs you take and so on and so forth. But this is somewhat unfair to classical economic liberalism and neo-liberalism, as neither of these systems promise any of those things. Economic liberalism promises you only what is right there in the name "economic liberty". And some of its strongest thinkers assume a rather restricted social system (take Locke's reliance on how he defines a "rational actor"). These are explicitly economic theories, how society functions is usually treated as a given, or as a side-effect of the economic process. Compare to other socio-political-economic philosophers: Hobbes promises social and economic liberty via the reduction of freedom. Marx promises social freedom by the restriction of economic freedom. These ideologies cover all the bases "government, society and economy". Classical liberalism tends to assume a functional society underlies the market economy it advocates. Neo-liberalism tends to treat society as a predictable outcome of the implementation of neo-liberal economic policies.

So his primary claim "liberalism has failed" is problematic again because he can't seem to decide what kind of liberalism has failed.

How can we understand this paradox? The answer lies at the root of liberal philosophy, an ideology that sought to remake the world in its image. Liberal philosophy begins with the belief that humans are by nature free and independent.

Now, I know I said I wouldn't go line by line, but this needs to be addressed for a moment. Lockean liberal philosophy does not assume this, explicitly so. It assumes that rational actors believe in and fear God. It then goes on to completely ignore what it calls 'non-rational actors' ie: everyone who doesn't believe in God. This is common in a lot of classical liberalism, the "assumed society" I mentioned above that underpins the market systems classical liberalism advocates. Also, it is somewhat disingenuous to bring up that liberal ideology wanting to remake the world because really the vast majority of socio-political-economic theories advocate world-wide implementation.

Liberal theory posits that this imaginary condition helps to reveal human nature prior to the conventions of human society, it establishes the aspirational norm for humans in society, and it becomes the main aim and of government and society to establish the conditions for the realisation of such liberated creatures. A vast and encroaching political and social architecture is required to establish the conditions for such liberated people, freeing them from bonds of family, community, church, culture, and nation.

Sorry, I'll at least try to take this in chunks and not lines. The first part of this section is quite possibly true. Though it's not unique to liberal theory any more than it is any other theory. You would replace "liberal theory" with "marxist theory" or "christian theory" or any number of other things and you'd still be accurate. This is again a problem for the reader and the quality of this as an insightful piece of political thought. It's way way too general. If it doesn't say anything that is unique to liberalism, then it doesn't really say anything at all does it?

The second part is conjecture. Another "claim" added to the growing list of claims Deneen is making. If this were a college-level politics course there'd be so much red ink on this paper it would look Biblical. As part of good political writing you want to be making few claims and supporting them with vast evidence. So far Deneen has been particularly good at making claims, but not particularly good at supporting them.

The state and market together are deployed to replace actual bonds with depersonalised mechanisms that leave people at once free yet increasingly powerless. Family life is displaced by calls to individual authenticity backstopped by a welfare state that will take care of you, cradle to grave. Schooling that reinforces the formation of character is replaced with an education in non-judgmentalism, deracination and ‘critical thinking’ without content. Cultures must be liquefied in the name of diversity. Religious belief is weakened by appeals to individual conscience and toleration: ancient calls to self-discipline and self-limitation redescribed as ‘hatred’ and ‘bigotry’. Local markets are displaced in preference to a single, world-straddling market. Borders are effectively erased in the name of openness. Liberal humanity achieves perfect freedom, yet experiences this condition as bondage to forces that can no longer be governed, and which have no regard for individual dignity and self-determination.

The rest of this is really all over the place, which is not surprising given Deneen's initial claims. When you conflate so many contradictory and competing ideologies together based on a single tenuous aspiation to "more liberty" without context to the types of liberty they each advocate and their preferred methods of implementation it becomes difficult to create a coherent message. Worse than that, there is a number of buzz words and sound bytes in use here, which is generally not good in politicial writing when you are not specifically quoting something someone said.
Lets look at some of the things he says here:
His first line is a bit odd, because this isn't anything any form of liberalism actually promote. It's closer to Marxist theory. While it wouldn't surprise me for Deneen to at this point lump Marxism in with Lockean capitalism it does any argument hes trying to make an insane disservice because it completely misses context (as mentioned just a couple lines above) in an effort to as I said in my multiple posts in your thread before: paint everything that's wrong with the world as being tracable back to "liberalism". Which he claims have left people with the "101 flavors of ice-cream" problem. Choice lock is a very real thing and while it may be an outcome of the system we have it isn't an outcome promoted by liberalism, by any liberalism. If we were to boil all the flavors of liberalism down into "what is the one thing these systems all want you to have" we could certainly conclude that "choice" is one of them. But that's a little meaningless, what these systems all want you to have are "real choices". As opposed to "false choices". People feel powerless when they are faced with "false choices", of which our society presents them with in vast numbers. Do I get a 9-5 and put food on my table, or starve? That's not a choice. There are a million variations of this question in our society and all versions of liberalism would find them abhorrent. Lockean market economics wants you to have real choices between which store you shop at, it ideally advocates that each choice will offer you something unique. Neo-liberal market economics isn't concerned if each choice is unqiue, but still advocates that each choice will have some fundamental value that the other does not, maybe one offers you lower prices for cheaper goods, while another offers you obscure products at prices based on nice demand. Modern American Liberalism wants the choice of if you get an abortion to mean something, when the choice is "Do I put food on my table, or risk losing my job and having another mouth to feed." there's no choice at all.

The feeling of powerlessness in the West is not due to "choice lock", it's due to an overabundance of false choice. An overabundance of false choices is not indicitave of "too much choice" but in fact too little.

God that was a lot to address a single line. Sadly, we are far from done.

The next section here is a strange mix of buzz words and sound bytes. But can be summed up with this: Deneen is once again making more claims about what liberalism must implement in order to fuction. The problem is: no form of liberalism actually calls for ANY of this (except again, maybe Marxism). Deneen's essay is reading more and more like an essay against Marxist Communism, but considering how wide of a brush Deneen is painting with, it doesn't really surprise me. Please note for the record: I repeatedly addressed this already much more succinctly by calling Deneen out for tearing down the straw man that his argument is. Deneen CANNOT claim to argue with any sort of intellectual honesty that liberalism has simultaneously failed and succeeded by attacking Marxism.

Not yet thirty years after the supposed ‘end of history’, the western liberal nations are in internal disarray. Liberalism is being rejected in the name of liberty. Whether the ‘inevitability’ of the dissolution of national sovereignty, the globalisation of the economy, the extension of the sexual revolution to the choosing of one’s gender, the dissolution of cultural norms and religious roots as a precondition of individual liberty – we are witnessing an uprising among average citizens outside the corridors of power that rejects the mantle of inevitability, asserting instead the prospects of various forms of self-government. In England, the nation that created modern liberalism – born of the thought first of Thomas Hobbes, then John Locke and John Stuart Mill – the apparent unhindered path to the dissolution of national sovereignty and a globalised politics and economics was rejected by approximately half the nation. In the first nation to embrace the liberal experiment, the nomination and then improbable election of Donald J. Trump similarly shattered the view that history had a ‘side’ and its outcome was inevitable.

I'll be honest here, I'm really not sure what Deneen is actually saying here. Half of this is clearly more claims, but again, it reads all over the place. As much as it pains me, I can't give you an analysis of something that is so incoherent as this. I guess at best it serves as an introduction to his next paragraph.

Defenders of the liberal regime are today the reactionaries: defenders of a dying regime, fighting with every weapon in their rhetorical and increasingly physical arsenal. What was once admired as ‘democracy’ is now ‘populism’, ‘nationalism’, or, of course, ‘fascism’. The longstanding liberal mistrust of democracy has re-appeared, with some thinkers – like John Stuart Mill long ago – calling outright for the limitation on democratic decisions that elicits decisions that the ‘epistocrats’ disapprove. The enforcement of speech and thought codes in the schools, on college campuses, at workplaces, and in the public square seek to function in the role of the censors of old, maintaining an order that increasingly relies on sheer force and threat of bankruptcy or imprisonment to achieve obeisance.

This is a nice story Deneen has written here, but honestly, that's all it is. There's no meat here. I can't tell you if anything he says here is wrong or right, because it's fiction. This is likely an outcome of conflating so many ideologies. Deneen doesn't know what he's actually talking about anymore, so he's just talking. Which makes this a terrible piece of political literature.

But if inspired by an admirable rejection of liberal illiberalism, ought those who aspire to genuine human freedom place their hope in the populist uprisings occurring in Britain, America, and elsewhere across Europe? Having disassembled the cultural norms that once might have governed and directed such uprisings, its denizens are drawn too often to uncultured iconoclasts, leaders who assert strength without concomitant calls to self-governance. The kinds of elites that might once have offered a moderating and elevating voice to the popular yearning for self-determination are scant in evidence, with the schools and universities today having produced a different leadership class that regards such yearnings with horror and disdain. We have a liberal elite without a populace, and a populace without a moderating elite. Whether a post-liberal world yet-to-be born will be one we celebrate or lament rests on the implausible possibility of a better people calling for better leaders, or better leaders shaping a more refined populace. We have not reached the end of history. We are approaching the end of liberalism.

Again, this is nice story but that's all it is. There are more claims here, again, something Deneen seems particularly proficient in accumulating. But the point of making a claim in political literature (of the scholarly sort) is to refute or support it. There's a reason it's called "political science". If what he is writing about is true, it should be demonstratable, if what he is writing about is false, it should also be demonstratable. The problem is that his premise and claims are so wide and vague there's nothing really here to prove or disprove.

I can suss out Deneen's angle on all of this pretty easily.

This is poor writing, political or otherwise, and especially scholarly. Deneen regularly interchanges what he believes liberalism (any kind of it) calls for, with what our current system is implementing, with what he thinks it intended to implement and sums it all up with his opinion on how all this is going to turn out. Deneen muddies up multiple divergent economic, political and social theories, each with often VASTLY different goals, expected outcomes and methods of implementations; all strung together along a tenuous thread of a call for "liberty" within all of them. This is like saying your clothes can't keep you warm because they are all strung out on the laundry line, while ignoring that some of them are long-underwear and others are tube-tops. It is a rather unironic twist that he is "missing the trees for the forest". And the lack of context and specificity absolutely KILLS his argument.

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The whole point of that perspective is that you know better, regardless of what anyone tells you. It’s a self centered and self important ideology. The reason it works as subversion, because to admit you are wrong, you admit that you don’t know everything. That’s what the idea of there being no truth is based on... you determine what is truth, which is rediculously self centered and devoid of real review.

Which, upon in-depth review is likely why Theo was drawn to this piece in particular.

[Mormolyce]

In America, even conservatives believe in the rule of law

I wonder where they are then, and who's supporting the Republican Party in their stead.

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That is more or less what I understood. Any ideology possesses in itself the seed of its destruction, because no ideology can encompass de complexity that is human life and reality. There comes a time when an ideology arrives at the limit of its logic and when it becomes foolish.

And that's when said ideology progresses and evolves into the next thing. It doesn't go back to being an old ideology that already failed.

Which if you think about it, is the fundamental reason why the right wing has been on a 300 year losing streak.

[Deleted]

That is more or less what I understood. Any ideology possesses in itself the seed of its destruction, because no ideology can encompass de complexity that is human life and reality. There comes a time when an ideology arrives at the limit of its logic and when it becomes foolish.

It is pretty much the inevitable conclusion to any ideology, it can not encompass the totality of innumerable variations that challenge it.


@Theodarzna

Loving your Yncarne avatar.

[Theodarzna]

It is pretty much the inevitable conclusion to any ideology, it can not encompass the totality of innumerable variations that challenge it.


@Theodarzna

Loving your Yncarne avatar.

Hype for the new lore and finally got around to reading through it. Guilliman is back and I'm loving the new Eldar faction.

[Muzjhath]

Hype for the new lore and finally got around to reading through it. Guilliman is back and I'm loving the new Eldar faction.

Theo, will you comment on and discuss the issue with Sunseeker as you said you with? After he rasied some good points over in this post here (#279 in this thread).
As he absolutely had great things to talk about. A thing you said would make you engage.

[Elegiac]

Theo, will you comment on and discuss the issue with Sunseeker as you said you with? After he rasied some good points over in this post here (#279 in this thread).
As he absolutely had great things to talk about. A thing you said would make you engage.

Don't engage it, mate.

[Theodarzna]

Theo, will you comment on and discuss the issue with Sunseeker as you said you with? After he rasied some good points over in this post here (#279 in this thread).
As he absolutely had great things to talk about. A thing you said would make you engage.

I'll consider removing the ignore feature on Sunseeker again.

[fengosa]

Don't engage it, mate.

I think there are some valid criticisms of the article which is clearly flawed. I'll take such reluctance to discuss those as a concession to the arguments brought forward.

My critique of the article is more straight forward. Arguing that an ideology is bad because it is flawed is a fallacy. As a practical matter the happiest and richest nations have embraced liberalism and it is needed for healthy democracies to exist. Furthermore, the author doesn't provide a viable alternative to liberalism, which as previously mentioned he poorly defines.

Arguably family, friends and community are important and being tethered to something bigger than yourself is essential to strong mental health and well being. I don't believe that is mutually exclusive of individualism.