Political freedom and the banality singularity
March 28, 2017 § 11 Comments
Folks who live in liberal societies tend to see having a large number of options as a good thing. The basic idea is that government should mind its own business and allow subjects to live and let live: should do as little as possible to ensure that the rights of free and equal individuals are enforced, and beyond that should “permit” individuals to evaluate for themselves which options they think are substantively good.
This is of course an incoherent mess prone to producing mass slaughter and other degeneracy when it crashes into reality: a doctrinal mashup of contradictory nonsense defended by the modern political monoparty with motte-and-bailey equivocation. A liberal sovereign delegitimizes his own authority, and the authority of his peoples’ traditions to protect and enforce what is substantively good, and adopts a philosophy of quantitatively maximizing choice independent of whether those choices are or are not substantively good. In practice this takes all of the things people really care about off the table, since the things people care about most tend to be controversial and often controverted. What remains is the pervasive presence of disgusting and dehumanizing options.
Liberalism has to abolish politics, has to produce a vast homogeneous bureaucratized managed cafeteria of degenerate, trivial, dehumanizing troughs of slop into which atomized autonomous free and equal human animals can put their snouts.
Zippy Catholic 
In a way, discovering Rule 34 would disabuse a substantial amount of people that a bumper crop of choice is inherently a good thing.
“Folks who live in liberal societies tend to see having a large number of options as a good thing…”
I completely agree, as long as we are aware that those “large number of options” are a complete illusion, that in fact more liberalism leads to less choice, less freedom, downright totalitarian authoritarianism really.
I like the entire first paragraph however, because it also fits the views of many more right leaning liberals, libertarians, and the like. Less government, more rights, which can sound good on the surface, but eventually creates the precise same result.
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
Re: insanitybytes22
Do you mean that you agree that liberal societies like lots of options, or that lots of options are a good thing?
Because the latter is not necessarily the case, even when most of the options are good. Falling between two stools and all that.
> …vast homogeneous bureaucratized managed cafeteria of degenerate, trivial…
I think this is a perfect description of public schools, and based on that connection alone, see public schooling as an essentially liberal institution.
“Do you mean that you agree that liberal societies like lots of options, or that lots of options are a good thing?”
I am saying that lots of options is the sales pitch, but when you actually buy the product, you find every aspect of your life invaded. Your “rights” become the right to say, think or act precisely as we tell you to.
The more liberalism, the less choice available to you, although the advertising always suggests the precise opposite.
Or the removal of the big options by giving you two or three minor choices.
You can choose any car you want, but without a car you die.
You can choose any job you want, but without a job you die.
You can choose any religion you want, but cannot let it affect your actions.
And so on. Choice is restricted while “choosing” is emphasized.
The choice dilemma reminds me of something that Simone de Beauvoir and other radical feminists have pushed: outlawing being a stay at home wife/mom. You have every right to choose what you want, so long as it is a liberal-approve choice.
Wait, really? That’s becoming a parody of itself beyond even what I thought possible in a country that elected Trump as a conservative.
What if authority must subsist in a person and it’s absolutely evil to try to make it subsist in an object, even such wonderful objects as laws?
What if love, authority, power, all these are to subsist in persons not things?
[…] as its locus, in a post-Nietzchean world wherein for practical purposes God is dead. Its central subject matter is the very thing the legitimacy of which it incoherently and inconsistently denies: the authority […]