So, I basically ended the discussion I referenced in the last article after the dude basically insulted me and said I have no foundational moral principles and that my perspective boils down to "UBI good" (HAHAHA).
Now, to be fair, I didn't really go into massive detail on my actual foundational moral principles and all of those existential questions, because quite frankly, I REALLY didn't want an existential debate with this guy. Those debates take too long, are too complex, and my interest level in this topic wasn't...enough. The original question basically asked "why not have socialized EVERYTHING?" and I answered with my bog standard answer about how not everything works under socialism and some stuff like food production, housing, etc. actually works better with capitalist structures.
And of course, from there, socialists are just gonna make their same old bog standard arguments, and yeah. I really didn't want a debate, but this guy kept insisting on having one, but yeah. But after the dude told me TWICE i dont have foundational moral principles and basically shamed me for not agreeing with him, I was done. F that guy. And you know what? He wasn't that smart.
Which is why I'm writing this article. While I respect that people think existentially about these questions and maybe sometimes get different answers than me, I find a lot in common with ideologues across the spectrum, whether they be libertarians, socialists, georgists, etc. It's that they often think that they stumbled upon the absolute objective moral truth, and that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. And often times, it's a waste of time to debate these people. Because you're not gonna convince them, and they're not gonna convince you. And rather than dig into this stuff super deeply, with the other guy acting like a know it all and just lecturing me, I prefer to just end the debate there. I have no interest in some other dude evangelizing their truth to me. Not when I've heard it, I have informed opinions about it, and it does things for me. I'd be interested in sharing my truth with him, I mean, one of the reasons I write this stuff is to share my knowledge with others, but I try not to be like that pushy religious evangelist who just won't go away.
One other thing that I think separates me from them is that I know that my truth is just one of many possible truths out there. I present my views hoping people see value in it and if I change views fine, but I know that there are other possible views out there. And while I do think a lot of adherents to other views are brainwashed, whereas I do not see my views that way, there IS one major difference between me and them. And that is that my ideology is PRIMARILY my own. I admit, not all of it is, obviously everyone who develops their own perspective stands on the shoulders of giants, but honestly? I AM familiar with worldviews like secular humanism, and I used that largely as a basis to create a new political worldview that is a synthesis of conservative, liberal, and leftist thought in terms of economics. unlike others, who seem fine with taking everyone else's views and just pushing stuff written by old dead guys, I basically decided to make my own custom political ideology. And honestly, around the time I adopted my views, almost NO ONE held these things. I do owe some intellectual debt to thinkers within the basic income movement, like karl widerquist, phillipe van parijs, and even scott santens, BUT, I did make their ideas my own, and combined them with my humanism.
And the end result was that I got something similar to what Andrew Yang ran on like 5-6 years later. Yang is not the original thinker as far as human centered capitalism, although he is the first to really write about it and campaign on it. And you know what? I respect the hell out of him for that, regardless of how I feel about where the guy has gone since.
But honestly? Yeah, I came up with the idea independent of yang for the most part. I've been advocating for these ideas since before I began this blog and you can see these lines of thinking in my early works on it (oh crap, are those more "foundational principles" articles? Gee, it's almost as if I've thought of this stuff before...). And as I just showed, I even explained how most morality is subjective and that we should reject extremism.
Just proving a point there. The fact is, most ideologues think they're qualified to be teachers but in reality they're just students with dunning kruger. They think they came across some super special objective truth and that they have it right and everyone has it wrong, and in reality, they need to go back to school. I probably thought existentially more deeply about these issues than they did. Because they just found someone else's work and copied it and made it the end all be all of their worldview, without putting the work in themselves.
And yeah. That was just a rant I wanted to get off of my chest. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
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