Why should I care? Or why punks are correct and old wise philosophers are wrong

To summarize: the author struggles with the question why they should care (mostly about society and social contracts). The author references Plato's Republic, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and one of Wolff's blog postings and quotes the bible on stuff. To me there is no clear line of argument visible. I presume the author thinks they are some kind of a Christian punk. Fine by me.

The author seems to be blissfully unaware of existentialism, French or otherwise, which could have either saved the author 12 years of anguish (OTOH, a very existentialist thing to have) or made the article more interesting. Maybe both. This way I'd say, needs work.

The article says this: “Taking an active stance on political issues is just a small part of the obligations we acquire as humans, citizens, parents, employees, residents of some apartment block, and so on. And our free time… They might as well outlaw it.”

This sounds like the core complaint in the article and it leaves me utterly perplexed. Most people live their entire lives, without ever having what i would call an active stance on any political issue. Even the very few who are politicaly active (go to protests, organise) do it only occasionally. Most of their time they are doing other things (working, eating, sleeping, hanging out with friends, reading, whatever). And then there are very few who do activism or politics professionally and full time. This is not the norm but the exception.

So then why does the author think that they are obliged by society to take an “active stance on political issues”? Where is this notion comming from?

Maybe they have parents or a friend group who are politically very active and they live in a distorted bubble where they are made to feel not worthy if they don’t care that much? Or maybe their personal definition of “active stance on political issue” has a very low bar?

Violence is not mentioned even once. Maybe because it is and always was _the_ ground to compel all people to enter a social contract. Decentralization and deregulation of violence was attempted many times and ended up with survivors agreeing to centralize it again. And maybe that was what Kant had in mind and then immediately missed it too, instead he argued by property. And yes, private property elevated to moral imperative...has its drawbacks.

— “Why punks are correct and old wise philosophers are wrong” is a trap in the same way “have you stopped beating your wife?” is. Assuming that punks and philosophers (inevitably painted as old and wise men) are a disjoint set is a newbie blunder or attempt at clickbait by putting together two words that would seem vaguely at odds to a philosophically unsophisticated mind.

Of course, philosophers can be punk (Nietzsche, Marx); punks can absolutely be old and/or wise; all philosophers were young at some point, some of them (Hume, Plato) wrote famous works before they were “old and wise”; a system of thought can be considered philosophy, and varieties of punk at their best are systems of thought; and, very much like philosophy, there is no “punk” as a single homogenous system of thought.

— “If I am free, why do I have to defend my actions against a specific body of people and doctrines?” You don’t, in the sense of some specific body of people. You do, in the sense that you do not exist in vacuum: self-awareness automatically requires the other that the self can be set apart from. What you call your “oppressors” are both 1) parts of the same whole that you are part of and 2) bring yourself as an entity into being in the first place. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be oppressed and shouldn’t work to address that; but it does mean that yes, being a human automatically means having to exist among other humans and act in ways that are not only concerning yourself. I’d be a bit normative and say you probably shouldn’t see everyone else as “oppressing” you just because you have to consider how your actions affect them.

Loved this, thanks for sharing!

God's not dead.

Somewhat related thought ... whenever you hear the phrase "be nice" it means don't rock the boat or simpler go away and let me keep or keep doing what I or we want. The people in power use this to tell others to f off essentially. But it's wrapped in niceness construct.

The author quotes Plato only to make a point that Plato explicitly dismisses, and completely ignores the rest of The Republic, which is a sophisticated thought experiment devised to counter the unsatisfactory ending of the first book and Thrasymachus's position.

This is really not how you should deal with other authors. It would be much better to make the point he wants to make without false witnesses and name dropping.

I'd have to re-read TFA a few times to be sure, but it seems that the author echos something that I have felt for some time: humans don't scale.

There is no "categorical imperative" on the plane of existence for the same reason the Tower of Babel collapsed. Once we get above the 23 chromosome pairs defining the standard human, little is enduring.

To govern and coordinate people at scale requires stripping individuality and binding them through, e.g. a UCMJ[1]. That is, some sort of military-ish authoritarian system.

For a glance at history, authoritarianism is both attractive, and transient.

So history seems more a chemical reaction of a variable set of "people-molecules" in an environmental "solution", building up and tearing down structures as we collectively fumble along.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Code_of_Military_Jus...

If that font is meant to be better readable by dyslexics, it has the opposite effect on me. Like comic sans would have, too.

Closed.