Talkin’ about a Revolution

> and cannot cope with things going back to normal.

I would argue that we worked our way to the post cold-war golden age, and then destroyed it with greed, which led to financial pain, which led to political nonsense, which led to the rubbish we are in right now.

So the period we are in right now is not the "back to normal" phase, but an actual decrease of human evolution. Not dissimilar to things that happened in the past, for example with the collapse of the roman empire.

> People do not change all that much morally

This is debatable. In fact, the US culture war is absolutely about what American "morality" should be. It's what a lot of the Project 2025 Manifesto is about:

"The document spans a wide range of policy areas, but when it comes to culture, family, and morality, it emphasizes a return to traditional values, a rollback of progressive social policies, and an assertive use of federal power to reshape American culture"

There's a reason it's called a Culture War and not a Culture Mild Disagreement.

I talked to a history professor recently and asked him how he viewed the whole situation.

He leaned back, thought for a bit and answered:

It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives.

It’s the next 30 years I’m worried about.

PS: ofc, I have no clue if he’s right or not. But I thought it’s an interesting take to share.

The world gets both better and worse.

It doesn't have to get worse. Conversely, it doesn't have to get better, either, but at this point, we've got a lot of history that shows us what has and hasn't worked. I think the measure of how people are doing worth focusing on is how much of their potential they've fulfilled. I'm not really interested in how generally well off someone is today compared to someone in some random point in history because there are too many outliers on both ends of that one.

> cannot cope with things going back to normal.

Interesting take on "normal" by Canadian physician Gabor Maté.

https://drgabormate.com/book/the-myth-of-normal/

>and cannot cope with things going back to normal.

how do we define "normal" for society?

I think that sort of analysis ignores the things that we gave up to get our golden age; such that a return to normal would actually mean ending up worse than we were before in many ways. We accepted Capitalism's race to the bottom in exchange for the benefits of consumerism. Now we are being asked to give up consumerism but there's no indication that we will also go back to a time before everything was cheaply made plastic crap.

Well, WWIII or some other form of nuclear strikes may change that perception.

I agree its dangerous to be overly positive and naive, we humans are still just a notch above beasts, are easy to manipulate (always via negative emotions like greed, envy, inferiority complex and so on), but things can absolutely go to utter shit, we have more capabilities than ever to spread it across globe. Not just nuclear - drone warfare is absolutely maddening. Imagine 10 millions of them, each with their target, each going with absolute precision and on its own - thats what current armies aim for and within a decade they will get it.

What is (and always was) is that very few holds most of the decision power. Get one mental unstable vicious person there and it falls down like house of cards. Our current high tech civilization is pretty fragile to disruption. Sure, we can always revert to stone age, some would even be glad, but I strongly prefer not to.

I'd argue we evolved to think rationally in order to specifically advance our instinctive drives, rather than the "Triume brain" view of the neocortex and lizard brain fighting for dominance. Immediate and extreme danger enforces a realistic and calculating view of reality, when otherwise people tend to avoid thinking about or dealing with a danger.

Courage is the ability to choose an alternative besides first choice of fear. But it isn't necessarily rational either, more likely a different instinctive motivation winning out. A completely emotionless person, meanwhile, would probably be completely nonfunctional.

As I see it, Optimism is usually unrational but drives change and Fear kills optimism.

Trust is not purely rational its emotional. Fear kills trust, making you more rational in the sense that you assume other players are rationally adversarial.

I'm in the same camp, and I go step further and avoid places where fear is the main tune.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

"Moreover, when this non-conceptual, substantial knowledge professes to have sunk the idiosyncrasy of the self in essential being, and to philoso­phize in a true and holy manner, it hides the truth from itself: by spurning measure and definition, instead of being devoted to God, it merely gives free rein both to the contingency of the content within it, and to its own caprice. Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of the divine substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self­ consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams."

-- Hegel

“May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays of Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer! He's one of the guys in the quotes of the big time jerks article!

https://medium.com/luminasticity/quotes-of-the-big-time-jerk...

I won't call it a grand theory but I like this solution to the puzzle.

https://gaby.wordpress.com/2025/03/20/wilde-democracy/

> The average philosopher has zero incentive for constructing grand theories

I mean, considering Hegel's grand theory indirectly lead to the deaths of tens of millions in the 20th century, maybe that's not a bad thing?

The problem is not limited to philosophy. All of academia is broken this way. Sadly, we think the only alternative is "industry", an equally broken set of incentives. That limits fronts of human progress to two types. We either get committee-driven institutional science leveraging huge resources, supercomputers, particle accelerators - blighted by cutthroat competition, opaque "publishing" and fraud - or radical populist individuals and small unaffiliated groups of thinkers able to operate without material resources. The Goldilocks zone of quiet, contemplative science, of whimsical, "high-risk" enquiry reminiscent of the Enlightenment, is gone in the 21st century.

Ideally, it sucks the most ass of all.

I have no idea how many of those giants Hegel actually influenced. The list covers so many famous intellectuals that I suppose the only 20th Century writer worth reading is Dale Carnegie; he's the only guy left!

Interested to know why you think Foucault or Lacan are ‘deviants’, do you mean that in the nazi sense, or something else?

That seems a bit unfair to pin it on Hegel. Most of the damage could have been avoided if people like Mao were champions of liberal values - however the fact that he was in a position of power at all was because he came from a rather backwards society that didn't champion liberal values. It is a shame the Chinese Republicans didn't manage to take, but to say there was a lot going on in China at any given moment would be an understatement.

At any point in the chain of events people could move towards liberalism and market economies, then become more prosperous. We've even got case studies where that was tried - the USSR - and a lot went wrong but it still went much better than most of the other experiments out of the 1900s. China too, eventually, where we can't really say what the end result is going to be but it has been an amazing journey so far.

The issue wasn't with these thinkers, it looks a lot more like any deviation from liberalism is a terrible mistake and it is really only a competition for who can be most liberal on the important issues (which, unfortunately, are only revealed with a little hindsight).

> Most thinkers and ideologues that represent what is rotten in modern society have to thank Hegel.

You just need to jump through a few more hoops to get to the self-consciousness and then you'll see, it all makes sense in hindsight

(like the preface to the phenomenology, this comment will only make sense once you've read the whole damn thing)

Whenever I see such random list, I know that the person hasn't read any of these authors.

on whom do you put the crimes of capital?

Fully concur

The fact that people still hang on to the outdated epistemology of the dialectic is absurd given the domination of empiricism in real world

Always interesting how the Anglo world never really got into Hegel, I guess it's their lack of real philosophical spirit that explains it. They never really got passed Hume's empiricist reflexes.