Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/4.4r/3190 no-omori
1-06
it's a fake problem invented by philosophers. it's not a real-world dilemma.
whenever it's presented in fiction it's a total strawman of how reality works, it's like, sure if it were possible to go live in an anime girl simulation maybe there would be a moral significance to that, but when it's not possible it doesn't even matter. it's angels dancing on the head of a pin. by even discussing this possibility we are ignoring how the real-world counterparts to the problem actually look and function [*ms]
very often when people retreat from reality in real life it is because _they are barred_ by morality, norms, or other hard rules from carrying out the solutions to their problems one of the most obvious cases is Marxism. if people are retreating into some not-immediately-relevant theoretical discussion, debating about what should have been done in the 1930s or whatnot instead of talking about today, they are retreating from reality because it is _prohibited_ to try to effect Marxism in reality and construct what they believe are the solutions to their problems we retreat from reality precisely because Existentialism is afraid of "totalization" and people forcing their mental models of reality onto other people, even though this is not always bad and in certain cases is absolutely necessary to get people to come to the same understandings of material reality material reality is tyrannical. and yet we get caught up in this weird "hyper-democracy" where we want the very definition of what is real and not real to respect every single individual's opinions when it simply cannot
what really changed my mind about this, funny enough, is _Dragon Ball_. this is one of the few works of fiction that actually doesn't mangle the problem and actually ends up presenting it in a somewhat realistic way. say we take the point of view of Vegeta. he has a lot of terrible opinions and understandings. is it bad for him to retreat from reality? or should he try to face reality and solve his problems, when it is clear to everyone else that his proposed solutions are terrible? it's arguable that Vegeta retreating from reality is best for everyone, because if only the people with good models of reality like Goku and his close allies face reality, the problems will get solved. nobody needs Vegeta. Vegeta is just an obstacle for everyone, regardless of whether he might decide to help or decide to participate purely for his own reasons. at the same time this harsh reality brings pain. the reality that some people are unfit to face reality and solve their problems conflicts with people's inner experience that their problems are bringing them suffering. they would like to do something. their Lived Experience tells them the right thing is to do something. but as soon as they interact with other individuals or groups they will clash into other people's morality or frameworks that tell them not to participate and to suppress themselves unless they can neatly assimilate into an _approved_ framework or moral code. don't be Vegeta. don't be Shadow. be Sonic. be Goku. don't be yourself for the sake of being yourself. be the self that is considered Right by everybody else.
1-08
because the opposite side of the coin is that you spontaneously refuse life or you spontaneously refuse death if the first one is true, then all we need to fix the world is to send everyone to therapy, because every case of avoiding life is simply a case of delayed suicide if the second one is true, which it probably is, then we're all in much more trouble because getting up in the morning and existing is quite non-trivial and you need much more than a good attitude to pull it off.
who actually needs to not-refuse-life or refuse-death the most? poor neighborhoods full of smoking, drugs, heart disease, limited businesses, and gangs. are they like this because individuals retreat into themselves, and in effect, need to get off their asses? or are they like this because it's non-trivial to go spontaneously rebuild social institutions especially when you have no control over anybody else and whether they will frequent the businesses, build the right businesses, or any business will stay open instead of everything falling apart again and everybody sinking into their houses to go do drugs again?
"Existentialists reconstruct poor neighborhoods without any injection of capital and purely through the motions of local individuals building new businesses" challenge no Menshevism, no charities, Final Destination Lenin can solve that one. can you?
1-06
but, is this process of suppressing Lived Experience truly bad? not necessarily. it is almost inevitable for such a thing to happen if anyone wishes to live in a world containing morality or ethics. the real problem simply lies in the way Existentialists explain how the process works. if Existentialists were honest about the fact that all Lived Experiences are not comparable and in order to protect any Lived Experiences some Lived Experiences must be declared invalid, then they would present a coherent theory of reality which would be much harder to argue with. having such an "honest" theory would, of course, expose contradictions in capitalism and primitive Existentialism. Existentialists would be forced to admit to the existence of such processes as minority groups in the United States clawing their way out from under majorities in order to essentially seize an existing position of superiority over other nationalities, thinking that experience with Black people's oppression entitles United States people to tell the whole country of Korea what to do, or experience with Muslim and Arab oppression entitles United States people to tell the whole country of China what to do. democracy does not meaningfully exist when "democracy" actually consists of a specific code of morality rising to the top of each country and linking into a single large cross-border group which dominates the other groups of both countries. whatever this thing is to be called, it is an entire historical process involving the formation of demographics, much the way warring states periods and national liberation movements are historical processes. the morality-population is a new entity transcending "culture", nationality, historical heritage, national laws, national sovereignty, and all the structures of democratic republics. the more people it has and the more money it has, the more power it has to swallow or crush all the separate entities that spawned it. in some ways the small scales of population formation starting at individuals and social connections never truly get tuned out because they can always threaten to bubble up through arbitrary boundaries and create new nations.
the problem was never Stalin. the problem was never that one theorist took over the Soviet Union and started trying to force the whole world onto the same ideology. that would happen either way. that could happen "anarchically" starting from a million separate people. the problem is that nobody has ever figured out how to properly republicanize a Social-Philosophical System. Social-Philosophical Systems in a free-floating soup always try to dominate or eliminate each other. if Stalin exists, this may actually be a step in the right direction, because historically once a population is unified under a single leader assemblies specifically for the new population can be created and the single leader can be overthrown. conceptually speaking, Stalin can be defeated if the country is ready to organize itself along the lines of different materially-accurate theories that are not in conflict, such as plural Marxisms, and somehow creates a body of representation for every plural Marxism with only limited acknowledgement of Liberalism and Existentialism — every separate ideology is conceptually equivalent to a house of parliament, and Trotskyist delegates agree to work together with Stalin followers, Gramscians, and Deng Xiaoping followers to carry out what is actually the best plan. this also suggests a solution to conflict between countries: every country specifically sends delegates from _each plural Marxism_ or _each plural Left faction_ and in order to make a decision affecting the world almost all Left factions have to agree. it certainly would not be easy to create either of these systems. to even have a plural conference in one country requires every single ideology to produce great theorists on a huge scale no workers' state has actually achieved, as well as for all of those theorists to strive to understand reality to the point they would be able to explain and apply each other's theories and not get into arguments. the task may sound impossible. but whether something sounds impossible doesn't dictate whether it is worth doing. a world that recognizes the inherent plurality of ideologies yet simultaneously manages to only keep the best and most accurate group of ideologies is _a world where plurality becomes possible_, instead of a world where plurality is an illusion used to continue justifying homogenization and the destruction of Difference. the alternative is to throw out all existing knowledge about ethics and the rights of demographic identities and begin mechanically calculating what a natural transition to ideological empires and a natural installment of an ideological-imperial government looks like. perhaps it is the case we cannot steer history, but if that is the case, theorists across the world really ought to throw out words like "colonialism" and "socially-conditioned biases", which all inherently require the concept of historical materialism and the intentional repetition of past historical processes to become sensical. perhaps it is the case there really is just one morality and it really is just "obvious" or "common sense" that everyone subscribe to it, rather than the construction of a single morality everybody agrees to being dreadfully complicated. but if so, we had better forget about the prospect of steering imperialism or domination away from oppressed groups; the great majority of people do not hold the steering wheel, and never did. perhaps the world's true morality _is_ to be discovered by the sheer stochastic assembly of the world's biggest and strongest group of people breaking down the world's borders, Freely Deciding to be as moral as they can, and spreading around moral theory that rather than providing a material explanation of their victory merely justifies and glorifies the conquest they achieved through sheer power. that would be the way things have been done since thousands and thousands of years ago, so why would we be disappointed?
we should be, because morality has always claimed to be something more than the justification of imperialism and conquest, even if it never actually has.
[*d] I definitely don't hate Deltarune because it at least has a really interesting subtext, in juxtaposing religious concepts like _Chronicles of Narnia_'s wardrobe / "the opium of the masses" with the ordinary secular concept of Escapism. one rail of the story talks about how Escapism is fun but technically bad, and the other rail talks about how religion is morally wrong because nobody should have god-like power over a whole world and even if there were a god people believing in religion would take their agency away. a rather Existentialist argument against gods, but not necessarily a bad one.