Pants-of-dog wrote:This Hofstadter guy is wrong.
He seems to be confusing two different meanings of equality. Equality has many different meanings. Here he is using it to mean both “socioeconomic equality and equality of opportunity” and “two things being the same”. This confusion leads to stupid ideas like “egalitarian societies and varied levels of intelligence cannot coexist”.
@Julian658 makes this mistake all the time.
If this were the case, democracy would be incompatible with professional athletes, or the fact that some kids are more popular than others. The fact that people exhibit varying levels of ability is not inherently anti-democratic.
I don't speculate his position to be one that in a democratic society, intellectual elites don't or can't exist but that they expiernece a tension in themselves when they hold to democratic principles. The idea being that intellectuals tend to be persons quite distinct from the general masses because they are an intellectual elite and in being as such, they experience themselves as those with greater understanding which can be at odds with the sense that the mass of people know what is best for them i.e. an implicit paternalism.
Have you not seen someone express disdain for how great amount of people vote or their politics as they hold minority opinions? The sense that I understand things best and people who disagree simply don't understand and are stupid. Isn't there often an arrogance when one feels themselves to understand things others apparently don't or seem to believe something entirely different.
I think it lends itself to a tendency to think democracy doesn't lead to the best political decisions and at times a rejection of the democratic majority vote decision-making process wholesale instead of critiquing the failure to live up to its concept.
There is no observer playing by different rules. We are all subject to these tendencies of human nature and so we are all predictable. Including the agents who manipulate others.
And we see this in even the most mundane examples, where intelligent and aware people still buy Harlequin romances or Fast and Furious DVDs even though they know these products are simply profit centered escapism.
But I do not think that people who are naturally skilled in manipulating others will necessarily use these gifts in anti-democratic ways. While many will go to work for the elite, many will come from marginalised communities or classes, and use these gifts to support egalitarianism. Stacey Abrams is a good current example.
I may look at the rest later.
I am unsure how predictable people really are as they're not held by causal necessity as objects are, although they do hold a level of predictability by probability in narrow estimations.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfWhat Marx describes when he addresses the way in which economic laws play a role in determining the actions of human beings, are tendencies of members of various social groups to act in circumstances shaped through those laws, and not iron-clad predictions for particular individuals. Howard Sherman, in his 1981 paper, “Marx and Determinism,” puts this point very nicely when he writes:
Marx pointed out that one can find regularities of human behavior, that on the average we do behave in certain predictable ways. This behavior also changes in systematic ways, with predictable trends, in association with changes in our technological and social environments. At a simpler level, the regularities of human behavior are obvious in the fairly constant annual numbers of suicides and divorces (although these also show systematic trends). If humans did not, generally, behave in fairly predictable ways, not only social scientists but also insurance companies would have gone out of business long ago. Any particular individual may make any particular choice, but if we know the social composition of a group, we can predict, in general, what it will do. Thus, on the average, most large owners of stock will vote in favor of preferential tax rates for capital gains; most farmers will favor laws that they believe to be in the interest of farmers109.
As a rule, a capitalist will tend to maximize his profit irrespective of the social repercussions. A bourgeois intellectual will tend to develop theoretical justifications for the continuation of capitalism, often in spite of the glaring social contradictions.
But despite these tendencies, social science doesn't show itself with law like predictability and it is even harder to predict the individual case.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fdc2/446bb0d1d660df15c3eea2698e3681163945.pdfOne could go on multiplying examples of the predictive ineptitude of economists, and with demography the situation has been even worse, but this would be grossly unfair; for economists and demographers have at least gone on record with their predictions in systematic fashion. But most sociologists and political scientists keep no systematic records of their predictions and those futurologists who scatter predictions lavishly around rarely, if ever, advert to their predictive failures afterward. Indeed in the notorious article by Karl Deutsch, John Platt and Dieter Senghors (Science, March 1971) where sixty-two alleged major social science achievements are listed it is impressive that in not a single case is the predictive power of the theories listed assessed in statistical terms -a wise precaution, given the authors' point of view.
That's because there is an unpredictability about humans and their actions otherwise we would be forever the some and without radical change.
But there are those who are in positions of greater autonomy than others that can do much to help change the conditions of others in a way that is enhancing to their subjectivity and help them increase their independence via solidarity. And with this in mind, those who do wish to influence others must do so by subjecting themselves to the goals and needs of others to build them up rather than manipulate them as objects.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e4d1/da3a8252c6f0ca60809d440acfe4bc5560a3.pdfFar from allowing Lukács to slip back towards a form of dualism, it opened a space within which he was able to conceptualise socialist political intervention within the class struggle in a non-emotivist but yet activist way by means of the generalisations about class interests that could be made on the basis of the history of workers’ struggles. For instance, to say that workers have an objective interest in challenging racism even in the absence of an anti-racist movement does not imply imposing the idea of anti-racism onto the working class. Rather, it functions as a generalisation about objective interests made on the basis of previous moments of struggle. This way of thinking about politics opens the door to an interventionist conception of political leadership that escapes the emotivist substitutionism of self-appointed vanguards without liquidating the left into a (retreating) movement.73
This requires developing certain virtues to be one able to really be willing to engage in solidarity.
https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/02/13/kierkegaard-on-the-art-of-helping-others-to-understand/?fbclid=IwAR0uXR1MiNK0DEpt5Lnvm9r2elp36Mcn59eoUyWNJDi86KtOy3BXyz_39mMIf One Is Truly to Succeed in Leading a Person to a Specific Place, One Must First and Foremost Take Care to Find Him Where He is and Begin There.This is the secret in the entire art of helping.
Anyone who cannot do this is himself under a delusion if he thinks he is able to help someone else. In order truly to help someone else, I must understand more than he–but certainly first and foremost understand what he understands.
If I do not do that, then my greater understanding does not help him at all. If I nevertheless want to assert my greater understanding, then it is because I am vain or proud, then basically instead of benefiting him I really want to be admired by him.
But all true helping begins with a humbling. The helper must first humble himself under the person he wants to help and thereby understand that to help is not to dominate but to serve, that to help is a not to be the most dominating but the most patient, that to help is a willingness for the time being to put up with being in the wrong and not understanding what the other understands.
I think this is the way to ethically change someone, which entails opening ones self up to being changed by the other person in support of them. It puts you on their level rather than imagines ones self above them, to meet someone as a friend.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics