Philosophical Research:MDem/5.2/1999 raditz-vote-biden

A perfectly ordinary conversation about elections

RUST-STATER

Why should someone vote for Joe Biden?

CENTER-LIBERAL

Well, you believe in anti-racism, don't you?

RUST-STATER

I do, but my aunt's brother doesn't. How can I get him to believe in anti-racism so I can get him to vote correctly?

CENTER-LIBERAL

Well, don't you believe in empathy?

RUST-STATER

No, my uncle doesn't really believe in empathy. Why should he believe in empathy?

CENTER-LIBERAL

Well, doesn't he want to be a better person?

RS.

No, he doesn't believe in becoming a better person if other people don't respect him first.

CL.

Well, wouldn't he do better to try to be a better person in order to become respected and become able to have empathy?

RS.

My uncle is basically Raditz.

CL.

Wouldn't Raditz also do better to try to be a better person?

RS.

What.

CL.

If Raditz would like to not not be respected then he wouldn't not do better to try to be a better person.

RS.

No—

CL.

And if he would like to be a better person then he should learn empathy.

RS.

Don't you...!

CL.

And if he wants to learn empathy, he ought to learn how not to be horrible to other planetary nations or subpopulations.

RS.

No, you're not going to—

CL.

And if he believed in non-xenophobia, he would vote for the candidate who believes in non-xenophobia.

RS.

You can't—

CL.

And if that candidate was Joe Biden, he would support Joe Biden.

RS.

What if when I get out into the world my uncle doesn't want to do any of that? And what if there are 90 million of him?

CL.

Then you cast your vote for Joe Biden and literally pray to God that he gets elected.

RS.

I don't believe in a god.

CL.

Then you get out your lucky rabbit's foot. Bonus points if it's blue.

RS.

That's not what I'm saying. Assume we all believed in a god. What if people like me are all praying to the wrong god, and the 90 million Raditzes are the ones who get their prayers answered?

CL.

Then we just put up on a billboard that God has the wrong morality, and rally a bunch of people to dethrone God. Have you, by any chance, ever read Harry Potter?

RS.

And that doesn't qualify as a Communist revolution?

CL.

Of course not.

RS.

Why not?

CL.

Because we take the bad God and replace it with a good God.

RS.

Why would you do that instead of just abolishing God?

CL.

Because democracy isn't about killing kings or kicking kings out, it was always about getting every single individual to perform the correct morality. I'm sure you're aware center-Liberals weren't in favor of dethroning the Russian Tsar? Every modern republic preserves its king or queen.

RS.

Then how do I get my uncle to believe in United States independence?

CL.

Oh that's easy, because compared with monarchy, colonialism is a totally unrelated thing.

RS.

How is colonialism different from Alexander the Great?

CL.

Well, you see, compared with single-continent empires taking over a particular assortment of territories and people-groups, colonialism is entirely in our minds.

RS.

...Okay... But if colonialism is entirely in our minds then how did it kill anyone?

CL.

Oh, no, empires of people kill people and abuse people all the time, but that's not colonialism.

RS.

All right, then what processes caused people to kill each other?

CL.

Colonialism.

RS.

You just told me colonialism was separate from people getting into wars on the United States frontier.

CL.

Well, I misspoke. What I meant was that colonialism was in people's minds and it then caused people to get into frontier wars. But frontier wars are a separate level of things.

RS.

Okay, I can understand that much. But what puts colonialism in people's minds?

CL.

Western prejudice.

RS.

That sounds as if you just told me a synonym for the same thing.

CL.

True, but this one was in Europe.

RS.

So people had Western prejudice in Europe, and it spilled over into the United States and became colonialism.

CL.

Right.

RS.

Is that to say that if people had had a civil rights movement in 1600s Europe specifically against Western prejudice then there wouldn't have been colonialism in the United States?

CL.

Basically.

RS.

Why did it take people centuries and centuries to realize there was Western prejudice?

CL.

Because prejudices outlaw questioning the existing ontology containing prejudices. Bad ontologies containing prejudices build up, and become their own protective mechanism against questioning them.

RS.

But if prejudices outlaw questioning prejudices, and it's taken people hundreds of years to figure out they had prejudices, how do we know anybody will be able to question prejudices now?

CL.

Because at least a few people already have.

RS.

But haven't you just explained to me that the bulk of history comes out of the actions of the majority of people that haven't?

CL.

Well... I guess that's technically true, but it doesn't have to be that way.

RS.

How do you know that your theory of prejudices doesn't have prejudices baked into it that prevent you from questioning it?

CL.

Because I choose to constantly examine them and question them.

RS.

Fair enough. But, let's get back on topic. If my uncle has prejudices, but his prejudices prevent him from seeing he has prejudices, and I'm the only one that can see his prejudices, then am I not the one doing all the thinking for him? Aren't we beyond the normal mechanisms of morality now, in a weird new space where one person has to have another person's thoughts and make another person's decisions?

CL.

I suppose you could look at it that way.

RS.

What's the point of voting if voting is just one person ordering another person to make the correct decision?

CL.

Oh, no, you weren't looking at it the right way. Voting is the way individual people agree to a code of morality and then become able to enforce it on each other.

RS.

But if voting is just populations ordering each other to make the correct decision, and they each potentially have prejudices that prevent them from seeing their own prejudices, how can either of them have any idea whether enforcing a code of morality is morally right?

CL.

No, no, that's not how morality works. There really is a correct answer to morality even if you're not going to get it from Uncle Raditz.

RS.

But if he can't see that the morally right answer is morally right because of his prejudices, won't he then perceive it as morally wrong?

CL.

I guess that's possible, but again—

RS.

And if he perceives it as morally wrong, won't he do everything to fight back against it because he believes it's morally wrong?

CL.

That's just another form of prejudice.

RS.

Answer my question. Will he or won't he perceive the morally correct answer as morally wrong, and do everything to fight back against it?

CL.

Possibly. But at that point, we don't have to care about his opinion.

RS.

What is your reasoning for being able to pre-judge him and dismiss him with prejudice?

CL.

Simple. He has the wrong answer.

RS.

But if he can't see that he has the wrong answer because of his prejudice, how will you get him to examine his actions and agree to cast the vote you want him to cast and behave the way you want him to behave?

CL.

Education.

RS.

I've heard this one before. You put education everywhere about history and different experiences, and then you hope everyone will see it. And if they see the education, then they might change their minds. But here's my question: what will you do if somebody decides that education is morally wrong?

CL.

Nobody in their right mind would decide that.

RS.

Yes, but we've established that we're talking about my uncle, not somebody in his right mind. Now, you've just guided me through your explanation of how voting works. A population of progressives with the morally correct answer is justified to enforce policies because they held a vote. The result of the vote is justified because people with the wrong answer can be dismissed on grounds of having the wrong answer. Telling people to vote for a particular candidate is justified because anybody in their right mind would want to have the right answer. And we get people into their right mind by way of education. But what are our grounds for justifying education?

CL.

We have to justify... education? I don't quite follow you.

RS.

You put a book in front of somebody. You tell them this is the correct answer. Maybe you add some qualifier like "currently" or "as far as we know". Then once you've handed them that book, you can more or less order them to vote a certain way or else, and if the vote goes through the right way, you can order them to obey the law or else. If they don't vote the way you want them to vote, and don't read the book the way you want them to read it, you can dismiss their existence entirely. How can somebody discern whether this series of events is morally right or morally wrong?

CL.

By reading a book on ethics.

RS.

That's not what the question is. I want to know what's in the ethics book.

CL.

I still don't follow. How can there be a moral valence to education?

RS.

Let's take a hypothetical scenario: Stalin hands Trotsky a book on the proper operation of Stalin's government. Trotsky reads the book. He does not like the way Stalin's government operates. He circulates a negative review of the book. Stalin's government finds out, and starts dismissing people from positions for spreading these negative book reviews. Stalin says to the Trotskyites that they would support what the book says if they only understood it. If only they had proper education, they would all cast their votes for the policies in Stalin's writing. None of them would leave a meeting without the greater bulk of their answers matching Stalin's answers. Stalin's answers really are the correct answers. But there are still a lot of people who don't understand the correct answers who are not happy that Stalin gets to tell everybody what the correct answers are, and dismiss their existence as long as he has the correct answers. Do you see how the political context of a correct answer can make a big difference in whether people choose to go along with other people and accept it?

CL.

I see what you're saying now. But liberal democracy is really different from Stalinist regimes.

RS.

In what way?

CL.

In liberal democracy, there are at least two forms of anti-racism, so you never have to vote for the one you don't want.

RS.

As far as I can tell that is a purely counterfactual statement.

CL.

Well, there should be two forms of anti-racism! There definitely will be if we win.

RS.

But there aren't.

CL.

There will be eventually if enough people believe there should be.

RS.

But that hasn't happened for the last one and a half centuries.

CL.

Stop thinking so negatively. One and a half centuries is a short time. We'll keep going for another century, and then when our progressive party wins we'll divide in two and then you'll never have to vote for a party you don't want to vote for. None of us are in favor of a rigid Stalinist establishment.

RS.

And yet there's been one party for 150 years.

CL.

So? What's it to you?

RS.

I'd prefer if things didn't continue with half the country locked in racism for the next two centuries.

CL.

Okay, so we agree on something. Why not contribute to spreading education?

RS.

There's nothing wrong with education, but it isn't actually having any effect on the way people vote.

CL.

How do you know that?

RS.

Before I answer that, how do you know that it is?

CL.

I've seen anecdotal evidence from two people that said it did.

RS.

Do you think those two are a representative sample of the other 90 million?

CL.

I don't know why they wouldn't be. Don't we all have the same shared humanity?

RS.

No.

CL.

How do you know that?

RS.

My uncle told me that education was a conspiracy, and I know I don't perceive the world the way he does.

CL.

How do you know that separates you from having the same humanity?

RS.

Because I don't think that education is a malicious conspiracy to overwrite people's ethnicities and religions and I don't think that Latinos are a criminal mafia plotting to forcefully steal the United States.

CL.

Those are just prejudices. They don't mean you don't have the same humanity.

RS.

What do the two of us have in common if one of us wants to shoot Mexicans and one doesn't?

CL.

You were both born and you're both going to die.

RS.

That also applies to my dog. Are you trying to say she could definitely be persuaded to vote for Joe Biden?

CL.

I don't know. Maybe there are rational capabilities of animals we don't know about.

RS.

So if dogs could read books, we might have the right to beat them.

CL.

I didn't mean it that way. Why is that the first interpretation you'd jump to?

RS.

No, think about it. If there was a book that said it was okay to beat dogs, and a large number of people believed it was a correct book, and whenever anybody said "I don't think it's a good idea to beat dogs" people handed them this book, and then people held a vote on it, that would be the law, and any time anybody said that thing shouldn't be legal somebody would hand them the book and say that if they were educated in the facts people believed to be correct they would vote for this to be the law too.

CL.

But that's based on whether people believe it to be a correct book, not whether it is a correct book.

RS.

Do you think most people can tell the difference between those things?

CL.

I don't know. I would hope so.

RS.

How does anyone know if a book is correct?

CL.

They could ask an expert in the field.

RS.

But is an expert really any different from a book? How do they know the expert isn't wrong?

CL.

They look at the consensus of other experts.

RS.

But wouldn't you need the knowledge of an expert to know if experts had successfully come to a consensus? Many people falsely believe physicists have come to a consensus around theories like MOND, and it always takes another physicist to clear up that there isn't a consensus yet. Nobody gets hurt when people believe the wrong physics model, but people can definitely listen to an expert and pick the wrong one.

CL.

Hmm. I guess this is getting back to how we know what's true.

RS.

Exactly. How does anybody know anything is a true fact if they don't already trust the person who said it?

CL.

They could go verify it for themselves.

RS.

That isn't true of very many things. My uncle can't send out a second space telescope to check space telescope images, or go to the Galapagos for a month just to observe speciation. He doesn't even have the equipment to check what's in vaccines.

CL.

I suppose that's true.

RS.

Every time he tries to go verify something it's going to come down to talking to another group of experts.

CL.

And some of the experts read dog-beating books, according to you.

RS.

Not in the real world, but from his point of view there's always a chance. So it's really a matter of managing uncertain threats.

CL.

All this would be so much easier if people had people they felt safe around who were actually willing to seek out new information. I wonder if it wouldn't help to go looking for a progressive church?

RS.

No, there is a particular boundary around demographic reactionaries which is different from the boundary around demographic Christians. A progressive church forms around the kind of people who would be progressive in the first place, and then it's Christian. Take one step into a progressive church and my uncle is going to insist they aren't the real Christians.

CL.

Just like Hermione isn't one of the real wizards, or Goku isn't a real Saiyan.

RS.

Exactly. It's a matter of what demographics get to order around what demographics.

CL.

Well this is going to make me revisit the way I look at Harry Potter.

RS.

It's all about Draco, not about Voldemort.

CL.

...How do we get people out of their prejudices.

RS.

I don't know if people exactly have prejudices.

CL.

There have to be some prejudices. What do you call it when a person has no information but stereotypes?

RS.

A lack of information.

CL.

Surely some cases of people being misinformed must be worse than a lack of information.

RS.

If that was really true, then how would it be possible to educate them?

CL.

I hadn't thought about it that way.

RS.

I tried to explain this to you earlier. Either people won't learn new information because there's more going on than a lack of information, or they will learn new information and they aren't actually prejudiced.

CL.

I think people can learn some information and still be prejudiced. Otherwise, how would so many people be capable of misusing science?

RS.

Why do you think people have prejudices?

CL.

Maybe it's so they can keep things simple. Things are harder if they have to learn new information.

RS.

That sounds mostly good except that I have seen some conspiracy theories get ridiculously complicated.

CL.

Like what?

RS.

For one, it would be a lot more difficult to understand how and why the government engineered a special microchip tracking program than to understand the real science behind vaccines. What would the government gain from these microchips that's more useful than driver's licenses or credit card numbers? If the microchips are monitoring every step people take, wouldn't that be way too much data to practically sort through? What patterns would there be in the data? Is it being sold? If it is being sold, then wouldn't it be directly between the pharmaceutical corporations and other corporations without involving the government? Why is it that most of these people who are so afraid of microchips are fundamentally okay with corporations? If the government is so bad at everything, wouldn't abolishing most of the government mean that versus the government corporations would be much more effective at tracking us all by themselves? The private sector is terribly effective, and what that really means is that every conspiracy theory against the government only gives corporations the power to build more and more effective trackers to ensure they don't lose their customers. Many conspiracy theorists seem to believe in morality only at the moment "corrupt" people are running specific corporations, but if you can't make anyone believe in morality when it comes to anti-racism education, how does anyone have any authority to tell anyone to believe in morality when it comes to running a business? Is it really just a matter of seeing people as automatically doing the correct form of functioning without being told or being defective? If the government really wanted to put a microchip in vaccines, it would probably be specifically to track disease exposure and nothing else, but the government built an elaborate online system for people to send back information about the vaccines through a web form, which included a lot of information the tracking chips wouldn't have provided. Nothing about it makes any sense.

CL.

I don't think it's worth it to take a detailed look into conspiracy theories.

RS.

How will we understand these people's thought process if we don't?

CL.

I've always felt like we don't really have to. I can see why you would think that's wrong.

RS.

It baffles me that this country now has rooms and rooms full of theory books all about prejudices and then you say you don't care about understanding how people think.

CL.

I can sense that you're about to accuse me of throwing dog-beating books at people or explaining to Trotsky why he should be in prison.

RS.

No, I'm just confused on what the definition of a prejudice is.

CL.

Prejudices are the things you don't think, not the things you do think.

RS.

But if prejudices are the things we don't think, then doesn't everybody have them? Everybody has things they don't consciously think about.

CL.

Potentially.

RS.

So if I never thought about chrysanthemums until today and then I picked up a book on chrysanthemums and I found out I had wrongly thought that sunflowers were a type of chrysanthemum, does that mean I had a prejudice about sunflowers?

CL.

Hmm. I think that's a far cry from the study of how prejudices build harmful societies, but technically? Probably.

RS.

If prejudices are the things we don't think, then how is there any meaningful difference between prejudices and general-sense wrong facts?

CL.

Well, with prejudices you don't want to change them.

RS.

But I never had any strong feelings about the definition of chrysanthemums or sunflowers in my example, and you said that was a prejudice.

CL.

Okay, let's try this again: prejudices are things we don't think that sometimes make us not want to change them.

RS.

What's the difference that makes us want to change them or not?

CL.

The content of the prejudices. We've been through this.

RS.

But how can prejudices pick up such elaborate content if we aren't thinking them? Like, imagine you're trying to write an encyclopedia. You have to think about all that. And prejudices can have a lot of content in them too. How does all of that get there if nobody is thinking it?

CL.

That would be because prejudices are a feedback loop. People have prejudices as they build physical systems, and then the physical systems reinforce the prejudices.

RS.

Are you perfectly sure the physical systems aren't manufacturing the prejudices the whole time?

CL.

What do you mean?

RS.

Say an insular group of wizards associates together away from Muggles. This is the physical system. No information is coming into it. Can't that be the thing that's generating the prejudices?

CL.

But they had to have had prejudices to wilfully form an isolated group like that.

RS.

Yes, but prejudices are the thing we don't have.

CL.

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

RS.

How do we know that prejudices are a thing at all and not simply the stark absence of a thing?

CL.

Because like you said, prejudices accumulate content.

RS.

But none of that content is something anyone thinks or chooses. None of it is people actually doing anything. It's all people doing nothing, or refusing to do anything.

CL.

If prejudices were the lack of a thing, I'm not sure why that would be a problem.

RS.

It's a problem in that you can't tell people to not do an absence of a thing that they already don't do.

CL.

Is there something in particular that that means?

RS.

It means that whenever you want to tell people to not do a non-thing you then have to get them to stop not doing the non-thing by telling them to do a thing.

CL.

What exactly was I telling people to not not do and then telling them to do?

RS.

Education.

CL.

So education is a thing you stop not doing.

RS.

Yes. But it can also be done different ways. If Stalin designs a school and Trotsky designs a school, they won't necessarily do things the same way. They won't do the same thing even though they stop not doing the same non-thing.

CL.

Ah, so when you go from there not being things to there being things, the things are different.

RS.

Yes. That's almost the point of things.

CL.

And if Stalin creates a party and Trotsky creates a party, there are two things. If we assume that could exist, you start out with two things.

RS.

Yes.

CL.

But the Democratic Party has always just been one thing.

RS.

Yes.

CL.

People don't want to be part of the one thing just because there are two things. They leave the one thing thanks to there being another separate one thing.

RS.

Yes.

CL.

So you're telling me that the United States was one thing and the Soviet Union was one thing and because there weren't two central Marxist party-nations in the Soviet Union, Trotsky then had to leave the one thing there was to join the other one thing.

RS.

You're getting it.

CL.

And in that regard the Democratic Party actually is like the Soviet Union. When a country is only one thing and you don't fit into that one thing, you have to defect from an entire country just to move over to another one thing. If we take the Democratic Party to be our actual country, the Maga movement is really people defecting from our entire country and trying to conquer it.

RS.

Well, that's only half of the picture, but so far so good.

CL.

What's the other half?

RS.

The one you dismissed with prejudice.

CL.

...Okay. The Maga movement is defecting from the Democratic-Party States and trying to conquer it, but the Maga movement at the same time seems to believe that the Democratic Party is defecting from the Republican-Party States, and I guess that the Democratic Party is trying to conquer them. The Democratic-Party States says that it can enforce morality on the Republican-Party States if it only wins the vote, but the Republican-Party States also says exactly the same thing down to the concepts of morality and education.

RS.

You're finally getting it.

CL.

It's like we're repeating the Civil War all over again. It's like after one and a half centuries the Civil War never ended.

RS.

Now, why do you think that is?

CL.

I mean, it's because the Maga movement is prejudiced.

RS.

We are not doing this again.

CL.

What problem do you have with prejudice? Is it that I'm only looking at my own side?

RS.

No, think back to the discussion we had on one thing and two things.

CL.

...One thing and two things. If there are two things they each act like one thing, and Trotsky has to go to the other one thing if there aren't more one things, but there are only two one things.

RS.

No, not that. Think back to the part about Stalin and Trotsky building schools.

CL.

...Schools. If Stalin and Trotsky build schools. Two things each acting as one thing. Oh. So you're saying that if the Democratic-Party States builds a school and the Republican-Party States builds a school they're each going to be different schools, each acting as one thing. Each of the schools will do things completely differently, but they'll each crank out their own education explaining why the school had to be built that way. When really, the education isn't necessarily giving the real reasons. Yet at the same time it still has to try to convince everyone to build the same kind of school by cranking out education.

RS.

Yes, it's like you took Harry Potter but an entire school was Gryffindor and an entire school was Slytherin.

CL.

Okay, now I really can't tell whether you're making fun of me.

RS.

I just think it's a good analogy.

CL.

Okay then. So we have two different schools. Gryffindor builds his school and whenever all the wizards go there it tells everyone to build more Gryffindors. Slytherin builds his school and whenever the wizards go there the school tells them to build more Slytherins. If anyone goes to a Hufflepuff school it tells them to build more Hufflepuffs. If anyone goes to a Ravenclaw, you get more Ravenclaws.

RS.

Exactly.

CL.

But then whenever any of the Slytherin kids graduate, they're going to go tell the Gryffindor graduates to build more Slytherins. And the Gryffindors don't want to build more Slytherins. The Gryffindor graduates think the Slytherins should build more Gryffindors. So you need a justification for why the Slytherins should build Gryffindors or the Gryffindors should build Slytherins. But you can't get that by going to school because none of the schools ever explains any of the other schools, and each school always tells you to build something different.

RS.

You are finally beginning to understand.

CL.

I wonder if the problem with this is simply the entire societal system of formal education.

RS.

Wait, no. No no no.

CL.

When you think about it, schools are an awfully rigid thing. They don't have room to build education tailored to everybody's individual talents and inner experience.

RS.

No. You are not going to get anywhere with this line of reasoning.

CL.

Why not? I know at least two people who have gone to non-traditional schools and both of them liked it better.

RS.

You are not actually thinking this through. Please think for a moment about all the possibilities.

CL.

What possibilities?

RS.

The possibility that my uncle opens his own non-traditional school environment to teach everyone that anti-racist education is a criminal conspiracy by evil mob bosses and that all the progressive non-traditional schools need to be closed.

CL.

Hmm. That is a problem.

RS.

The moment all the reactionaries come together and vote to outlaw progressive schools, all the progressive non-traditional schools are gone.

CL.

And at the same time, all our reactionary voters are coming out of reactionary schools and this process that keeps rebuilding reactionary schools that tell people to build more reactionary schools. The Slytherins are building Slytherins are building Slytherins are building Slytherins.

RS.

The Slytherin ouroboros.

CL.

So if we want to stop building Slytherins we need... Slytherins in Gryffindor and Gryffindors in Slytherin? It's as if we need to mix up all these schools almost for the sake of it.

RS.

If anybody ever wanted to be inside a reactionary school for more than a minute, that would be a great idea.

CL.

...Right. But we could certainly do it the other way.

RS.

Doesn't that ultimately just amount to stealing individual people from reactionary schools? If you keep taking them one at a time and putting them in progressive schools, there won't be anything left.

CL.

True. But as you already pointed out, who actually wants to go to a reactionary school?

RS.

Parents.

CL.

Parents?

RS.

For some reason reactionary parents really want their children in reactionary schools.

CL.

Oh. Right.

RS.

Here's the problem. No individual is actually an individual. Every time a child goes to school, that child is part of that child's parent. Every time a reactionary parent goes to a progressive social event, that parent is part of a reactionary social circle. Every time a reactionary legislator goes to a conference with progressive legislators, that legislator is still part of reactionary communities. Whenever these people go to a mixed meeting of people they have to put in real effort to become something greater than themselves, or else they will all just fall back into two separate things each trying to claim the greater thing. No. Oh no. I shouldn't say that, or you're going to jump on it. All right, when different groups of people—

CL.

But can't we just put in that extra effort to be something greater?

RS.

...You said it. You actually said it.

CL.

No, I can see what you're trying to say. We want to think that liberalism just works, but actually society is just a bunch of separate groups of people acting as separate one things and building separate kinds of schools. And when they come together and vote, that amounts to nothing more than Gryffindor and Slytherin having a shouting match with no real way to actually know what kind of school to build because we only have books and schools to tell us to how to create the same kinds of books and schools over and over again. So what we need to do is every single group of people actually make an effort to make group meetings functional.

RS.

You are missing the point yet again. What if every single person that goes to the group meeting is my uncle?

CL.

So basically, what if everyone on the Slytherin side is Raditz.

RS.

I wasn't going to mix my metaphors like that, but yes.

CL.

Well if everyone on the Slytherin side is Raditz, then Goku just needs to collect the seven Horcruxes and summon the dragon in order to stop Voldemort from having it, so he won't be able to build any more galactic empires.

RS.

...Seven. God I never noticed that. Why did there have to be seven of them? Why did this metaphor have to be possible.

CL.

We could make it even better by adding Chaos Emeralds.

RS.

Okay, but if Harry is going to get the seven Chaos Emeralds in order to stop Voldemort from summoning the dragon, he's first going to have to figure out how to outwit Shadow.

CL.

No, but, more seriously, I get it. We want to think that liberalism and voting are simple, but it's actually a matter of these whole separate cycles of generating education that then contains the instructions to tell everybody to build the same education, and every time we try to send people into the other groups of people generating other kinds of education we get times when the groups don't mix, and then everyone goes back home and we don't successfully stop the cycle. The cycle goes around and around again a few more times and before you know it the Slytherin side is sending out Raditz while the Gryffindor side is sending out Goku. Goku can't control what Raditz thinks or believes. Not really. And if Raditz has no communication with other groups of people, he might believe that Goku trying to control him is morally wrong while him trying to reign in other groups of people trying to control him is morally right. If that wasn't the correct answer he'd never know because that's not what it says in his local education. And if anybody else shows up to tell him his education is wrong and their education is right, he can't actually know that this isn't simply being used to control him, because that's more or less the thing he would do.

RS.

So we really are on the same page now.

CL.

However...

RS.

Oh no.

CL.

Isn't it inherently right to consider the perspective of another person's lived experience even if they might be using it to control you?

RS.

You can't be serious.

CL.

I believe the most important thing is considering other people's perspectives. It's almost invariable that we have to ignore other people's perspectives in order to do bad things, but at the same time we almost always have to listen to other people's perspectives in order to do good things. Edmund Husserl said so. You can't understand reality without characterizing all its phenomena as people see them. That's why listening to other people's perspectives is the best way to get rid of all your prejudices.

RS.

Okay, all of that is mostly agreeable, but we need to take a step back to what you said the moment right before that.

CL.

What, that you need to listen to other people's perspectives even if they might be using them to justify throwing a dog-beating book at you and tossing you in prison?

RS.

That. I have a problem with that.

CL.

I can't see what's so unreasonable about it.

RS.

If everyone is obligated to listen to every perspective regardless of the surrounding political context, then how can anyone even tell the difference between an oppressive perspective and one that isn't oppressive?

CL.

Well, that's easy. Non-oppressive perspectives result in good outcomes once you accept them, and oppressive ones don't. Think of Goku. He might be trying to control people, but when they accept his perspective nothing bad happens, so it's just fine. Same with Harry Potter. Even if he might be willing to kill people to defend Hogwarts, it doesn't mean he's out to oppress people.

RS.

What if you listen to someone's perspective, you accept it, and then it doesn't oppress you but it does oppress somebody else?

CL.

There's no situation where that's actually going to happen.

RS.

Are you really sure about that?

CL.

Pretty sure.

RS.

What does colonialism look like?

CL.

Colonialism looks like a bunch of people clustered together who don't consider other people's perspectives, causing outside groups of people to become characterized as The Other. This then causes populations of people to put each other into slavery or kill each other.

RS.

Do people ever end up allowing themselves to be characterized as The Other because they accept a dominant population's perspectives?

CL.

Y—... Wait. Oh god.

RS.

Do you now finally understand what I've been trying to tell you this whole time?

CL.

To be honest, not quite. But my mind is spinning. Everything is a mess now.

RS.

It's okay. It will get better with time.

CL.

How does one even create a meaningful Harry Potter metaphor for this?

RS.

There's a specific way Hogwarts School goes together, and it will always be a bunch of separate self-perpetuating schools unless we figure out the actual way to stably arrange those building blocks.

CL.

Yeah, let's go with that.

RS.

I find Stalin and Trotsky to be an easier metaphor to work with because they're each associated with ways of building entire countries. And, well, neither of them is Voldemort.

CL.

Have I been interpreting Dragon Ball wrong?

RS.

Don't feel bad about it. Most people have.

CL.

If Dragon Ball is actually about the concept of Saiyans and earth people living in harmony, and Harry Potter is actually about the concept of the four houses coming to understand each other... well then what's up with the Dragon Balls, Horcruxes, and Chaos Emeralds?

RS.

Confusion about what power is.

CL.

Really?

RS.

People seek power because they don't know how to live in harmony. But they don't know how to live in harmony because all the specific things they want are actually mutually exclusive and different. A Dragon Ball is the concept of two people having different wishes that can't be carried out at the exact same time. Similarly, if Saiyans want to expand their population in one way, however violently, and earth people want to build their population another way, those two different ways to combine populations and land areas are in conflict. The same thing is true at any number of smaller scales. People don't figure out how to fit things together, and then they end up fighting.

CL.

Harry has a much bigger task ahead of him than we ever realized. Voldemort is hardly much more than 10% of the picture.

RS.

Indeed he does... indeed he does.

Footnotes

[*] This is a B-side chapter, but I'm still figuring out what chapter with what number is the A-side.

Metadata

1. MDem 4.3/ "layers" (scrap) 1:(-)1:(-)1

item type

Z1 Basic Item (wiki feature; C (pronounced C)) 1:(-)1:(-)1

[P] (pronounced [P]) alias (en) [string]

v5.2 chapters/ A perfectly ordinary conversation about elections

MDem 5.2/1003B (pronounced 1003B) raditz-vote-biden

v5-2_1003B_raditz-vote-biden

v5-2_1999B_raditz-vote-biden

case of [Item]

bop scrap

Bibliographic information

date

25-3-05

with context

created

title

A perfectly ordinary conversation about elections

format

APA

author name string

R. Bergfalk

R. Bergfalk "R.D." @reversedragon3

Links

• v5.2 revisions/ what is progress, and what is The Left? [unreleased]
• v4.4-5.1 scraps/ are any US postcolonial theories actually postcolonial? [unreleased]
• MDem SSR/ Ontology Item
• v5.2 revisions/ plaintext source file