Something I've noticed among various factions, both on the left, and on the right, is that they often try to portray their views as some sort of objective reality that cannot be disputed and must be accepted. Often times, these views are very subjective and based on ideological narratives, and as "reality based" as they are, things are that way often times because "reality" is engineered that way. In this article, I will look at various examples of this behavior at work.
"If you don't vote for Hillary Clinton, you will get Donald Trump, that is reality"
This is a common example I've seen of "reality based" rhetoric recently. In this example, the democratic party gives people a choice, either you vote for Hillary, or else. And while yes, after the primary was decided, this was the choice, since only one of them had a viable chance of winning, let's not ignore the intentions of the people wielding this rhetoric. The people who use this rhetoric had the intention of electing Hillary Clinton from the start. As we know, the primary process was not fair, media coverage was not equal between all candidates, and the nomination of Clinton was very likely engineered by powerful forces within the democratic party and its affiliates. So, after that's all said and done, then these guys come along and tell you that "hey, you might not like Clinton, but you have to vote for her, if you don't, you'll let Trump win." Quite frankly, I took this as a bit of extortion, as if their whole strategy was to ensure we couldn't get what we want and then try to strong arm us into taking the less evil option over Trump. Honestly, I didn't fall for this, and I basically thought along the lines of "no, you engineered this 'choice', this 'reality' as you call it, I refuse to play along as your little pawns. This is extortion, and I don't negotiate with terrorists." And this is how it goes with many people using "reality" based rhetoric. More often than not, in my experience, people using this kind of rhetoric are trying to get people to adopt a certain point of view, and trying to get you to behave in certain kinds of ways, and by playing along, you're their willing pawn so to speak.
I've gotten in pretty heated arguments with friends about this. I still have friends who insist that the democratic party wasn't extorting us into supporting Clinton, but that she is there to save us from Trump or something along those lines, and I generally don't buy it. They're telling me that I'm the one extorting them, only being willing to give them my vote if I get exactly what I want, when from my perspective, I'm basically giving them a counter offer to their perceived extortion. There is some room for debate here, don't get me wrong, but from my perspective, the democrats engineered this outcome, they made this "reality" and tried to force it on voters, and tried to get us to play along with their game. As unhappy as I actually am about Trump winning, I can honestly say at least we dodged the bullet of allowing a party that relies on extorting people like that from a win. Rejecting these peoples' "reality" and basically refusing to play along was the right move, because it takes away the reward tied to this behavior, and, hopefully, the incentive to do it in the future. By rejecting their "reality", we get to replace it with our own going forward, and that might become a more dominant narrative in history. Remember, history is written by winners, and there are competing narratives to decide what goes in the history books, and by rejecting one narrative, we have the opportunity to replace it with another. And that's what these ideas of "reality" really are most of the time, one's own narrative, which is often no better or worse than other narratives (although occasionally are, I'll get to this later in the article).
The ideology of the center
I don't plan on spending this whole article going after the democrats, I actually do plan to attack the right too, but I want to criticize the centrist dems one more time before moving on. One thing that steams me about the center, and I originally planned on writing an article just dedicated to this, but it is better fit into this larger article, is the fact that the "center" often tries to portray itself above the ideological fray, and above partisanship and politics. Every other point of view is ideologically driven, while theirs is simply "reality" based. We saw this a lot, once again, with Clinton's ideas. We see it a lot with economics. We're often told free trade is good for us because economists say so, despite the fact that many high paying union jobs are replaced with low pay service jobs in this "new economy" in the process. And as I discussed in another article, economics is in part ideologically driven to support things like maximum growth and unemployment, and often times its conclusions are simplistic and based on models that may not accurately represent what actually happens. In a lot of ways, the downsides of policies are downplayed and the positives are emphasized, which is, in essence, an ideology. It's a narrative.
But honestly, it's not just trade either. It's everything related to the mainstream dems. Their policies were called more "reality based" than Sanders by virtue of being more incremental and thus easier to implement. Ideas pushed by the Sanders camp were seen as "pie in the sky" and "unrealistic", and while even I will admit problems with them, the fact is, the center is actually taking a side and pushing a narrative and trying to portray it as a fact. The rest of the world has these systems, why can't we? Why is it when the richest country on earth tries to implement these plans suddenly they can't work? Because this is a narrative. The democrats have an ideology too. And while their "reality based" approach might work well against the ignorant base of the republican party that denies basic scientific and economic facts about the world in pushing their narratives, it doesn't work well against other narratives, such as the Sanders camp.
Honestly, I'd also consider myself centrist and reality based in some ways. My ideas push for a hybrid type economy somewhere between capitalism and socialism. And I do believe they are founded in facts, so I do believe they're legitimate. But at the same time, notice how different they are from the democrats' ideas? I'm not even attacking the legitimacy of the democrats' ideas. They are valid...from a certain narrative, but so are mine. Just because some narratives are more factual than others, and not all of them are admittedly equal, doesn't mean that there aren't competing narratives that are just as valid as one another. There is a role for ideology to guide views, and as long as these ideas are based on science and other academic disciplines I'm okay with them on a factual level regardless of the ideology. But there is also a role for ideology, and I don't believe there is a such thing as being above ideology on the spectrum. Even among those with hybrid ideologies like myself and the democrats, some people emphasize different ideologies more than others. Democrats tend to be a bit more capitalist in their approaches, and I am a bit more socialistic, despite both of us having hybrid ideologies. And even if both of our views are "reality" based, they can also be opposed on subjective, value based grounds as well, as long as those are also based some sort of factual, scientific basis.
6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person
So, every once in a while, I'll see someone, normally an edgy right winger trying to "educate" the left, post the above article, which is a long tirade about how the world doesn't care about you, only what you can do for it, how you are your job, and generally spouts all kinds of extreme pro capitalist, rugged individualistic sentiments. Except it isn't clear that it is, in essence, pushing a sort of ideology. It tries to push its narratives as factual, using words like "truths" and making appeals to the "real world" to push its claims. Moreover, the goal of the article appears to be telling those sissy liberals, hippies, socialists, etc., that they are WRONG about the world, and trying to convert them to their ideological perspective. They're trying to make the reader CONFORM to a certain narrative, rejecting other narratives in the process. They are "right", and you are "wrong." Now shut the **** up and be a good little wage slave, will you? Its underlying values remind me a lot of that SWEAT pledge I discussed about a month ago. That you're entitled to nothing, the world only cares what you can do for it, blah blah blah.
I don't deny there is a component of our society that is like this, but in a lot of ways, it's ENGINEERED to be like this. I don't deny that humans are, to some degree, self interested, but our society also extols the values of self interest, claiming that a society in which everyone is constantly trying to screw each other over in a struggle to attain more wealth is the best way society can be organized and that other ways don't work. While they are right to an extent, much of what I blog about is also about compensating for the problems with this. And there are problems with this the author of the article totally ignores. It ignores how it forces everyone to work harder and harder for less while those at the top just continue to amass more and more wealth. It ignores the fact that we can reach some happy compromise between having a system governed by self interest, and having counterweights to compensate for the downsides of this. I mean, I don't deny it either, I'm selfish to a degree too. But let me explain the left to a selfish person. Capitalist society is like a prisoner's dilemma. You can either cooperate with others to reach mutually beneficial arrangements, or you can try to screw each other over, with some people coming ahead, and others getting nothing at all. I'd argue the most beneficial arrangement involves cooperation. While some people might do worse under the arrangement, many many others do much better, and as a result, we'll see everyone better off on the whole/average. People will have higher standards of living, and they will be more secure. Unions and other collective action are in the rational self interest of the working class. Regulations are in their self interest. Safety nets like universal healthcare and basic income are in their self interest. Having a democratic work place in which people are part owners and help make decisions for the work place are in their self interest. These ideas are actually in the rational self interest of AT LEAST 50% of the population in my opinion. The people opposed to these ideas are the ones who benefit from the current arrangement, and often they try to engineer outcomes to their own benefit, trying to convince people they would be worse off if they don't support such ideas, or even trying to get people to "take one for the team" in support of an abstract ideology....
Which is another thing. Not everyone is often as self interested as portrayed. A person who sacrifices his life for people in war is not that interested in his own benefit. He's interested in a greater cause. Individuals who support religions are often told to act in ways counter to their self interests, and that this is "good". And even some "small government" conservative types I've talked to, when I tell them of the greater benefits they would achieve from my ideas, consider them immoral and "theft" from the rich. So it seems people aren't as self interested as we're told. Sometimes they do sacrifice their interests for a "greater good" as they see it, an ideology, a narrative. I just have a much different one. As such, while one can debate the content of this guy's arguments all day, the fact is, they are based on an ideology, a narrative, of how humanity works. And quite frankly, I have a much different approach. It's totally up to you which you accept, his, mine, or something different altogether, but don't be fooled by this guy's use of the word "truth" or "reality" or any other similar buzz words. Those are a bunch of crap, and what the far left would consider "pure ideology."
Atheism, "relationships with reality", and the limits of relativism
Despite all of this, I do not wish to advocate for some sort of "factual relativism" that implies all facts are ideological and there is no absolute truth at all. There often is. And the one example I'd like to bring up is atheism. Atheists get a bad rap a lot of the time from the religious, and even some holier than thou atheists who think they're somehow superior for "respecting" religion. Despite there being a lot of latitude for a lot of "reality" based things being more relative, sometimes there are narratives that conform more with facts than others.
In response to Christianity being a "personal relationship with Jesus", atheists like to call atheism a "personal relationship with reality." And in a lot of ways, it is. Atheists who use this phrase often try to use things like science, and logic, and reason, to support their views, while characterizing the religious as having views based on nothing verifiable. As an ex-Christian, I will conform this perception of religion. All in all, after analyzing my former religion, and covering just about every angle I can think of, I have to say, there's no valid reason to accept Christianity, except out of blind faith. On a factual level, it just appears untrue, and the amount of mental legwork needed to justify it in accordance with the facts just seems to be a blatant violation of occam's razor. By the time you can come up with narratives that explain away all of the contradictions and philosophical problems religion causes in my opinion, the much simpler explanation is just that there isn't a god, at least none active in our universe, and that the religion is false.
If you have evidence based reasons to disagree with this, then fine, all the power to you, I'm not really attempting to persuade anyone out of their religion in this article at least (I used to blog about atheism and debunking religion but it gets so boring after a while, tbqh, and most good arguments can be found on sites like RationalWiki and Iron Chariots anyway, not to mention many many youtubers and other websites that have debunked this stuff over the years). However, I am going to use this as an example to explain how not all views are on equal ground. Some views are, quite frankly, much easier to defend than others. And some seem to conform more with objective facts than others. The real debate regarding relativism comes with things like emphasizing certain facts over others, or valuing certain things over others, assuming both sides do their research and have evidence based perspectives. This is why I said, for example, the democrats can be complacent in knocking around conservatives with their "reality based" narratives, because when you are forced to choose between the democrats who use facts and republicans who ignore them, of course the democrats are far more reality based. But that doesn't mean that their ideology is the only reality based narrative out there or that their ideas are objective truth. Having a reality based narrative is a prerequisite for the real debates we SHOULD be having. We should all have reality based narratives and THEN we decide what is the best way to organized society. The fact that only one party in our country has a reality based narrative is problematic as it gives them a relative monopoly on facts and gives them a license to act as arrogant and entitled to votes as the democrats acted this election. But no one has a single idea of truth which is correct, and that others are wrong. There are competing narratives, some of which are good, some of which aren't. It's up to us to decide what's truth, rather than just taking someone's word for it.
Conclusion
When someone tries to portray their views as a sort of "reality" or "truth", be skeptical, very skeptical. More often than not, they are trying to force a certain ideological narrative on you. Question everything. Question capitalists, questions socialists. Question atheists, question religious people. Question republicans, question democrats. Question this blog. Question the mainstream media. Question and criticize EVERYTHING. If you haven't reached the point that you had an existential crisis or questioned things to the point of entertaining ideas like freaking solipsism at some point in your life, you need to question more. I'm serious about that, too. You should really strip your sense of reality down to the bare minimum, where you legitimately question the universe we live in as being "real", and then completely rebuild it up from there, as if it's a blank slate or canvas for you to paint your own narratives on. Don't just accept peoples' narratives as reality. Don't allow people to herd you into a certain perspective, or into making certain choices or adopting certain values. These are up to you to grapple with yourself. Make your own decisions, make your own reality, based on science, evidence, logic, and what you find to be valuable. Don't let people do it for you. Don't be a follower, be an independent thinker. More often than not, reality is not as straightforward as it seems and not as straightforward as people pushing certain narratives want it to appear.
No comments:
Post a Comment