In "How to Make Wealth", pg points out that the emergence of the rule of law made the modern economy as we know it possible. It did - social progress has made institutions like democracy and ideas like liberty and rationalism more popular than it has ever been in history.
This used to give me a dangerously false sense of optimism - that the modern society is a stable scientific one, where good intelligent people are in charge, and that the state of affairs are always improving. This notion partly came from the privilege of never having lived in a war-zone. The life of chaos of those who are unfortunate to be in one is even now beyond my understanding.
I think that the idea that humanity is always marching forward to better days is something implicit among people who live in peaceful affluent societies. But if you look at history, the world has always gone through cycles. No matter how much we improve socially, a regression seems almost inevitable. The Roman Empire did fall, and was followed by the Dark Ages.
Even in the most democratic countries of the world, fascism is only just around the corner. There is a large chunk of society who're easily swayed by purely emotional rhetoric based on in-groups and out-groups, and likes to follow leaders who make a show of macho masculinity. The status-quo is pretty fragile. The nerds aren't safe. Those with warrior tendencies always have upper-hand over those with nation-building tendencies, and that reads like a tautology.
>There is a large chunk of society who're easily swayed by purely emotional rhetoric based on in-groups and out-groups
I think this sentence is the biggest indicator of the problem. The Problem being not that there are large parts of society swayed by emotional rhetoric, but that to most people, the emotional swaying happens to others. It's never me who's swayed by emotions, it's always less rational people, and if only those people could get their shit together, like me, we'd be in a much better place.
You're just as swayed by emotion as those non nerds, you're just swayed on different values. Pretending like you're above it gets us nowhere, because it perpetuates an unhelpful me vs everyone else mentality. It's very satisfying to the ego but it just serves to further drive a wedge between you and everyone else.
That's what struck me most about the article, as well. Russell's essay is very flattering, until you realize the we that he terms "the best men of the present day" are probably not the we of Hacker News.
In particular, when Russell writes about "the philosophical radicals ... who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are[, who] dominated politics and ... advanced [the world] rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being," he is very likely writing about people who would definitely be a Hacker News they, given what I know about his politics and given statements like "if at any future time there should be danger of a Labour Government that meant business, [the British Fascists] would win the support of most of the governing classes."
So, if this essay leaves you with a warm and fuzzy feeling about your "wider and truer outlook" and the feeling that you are being oppressed because of your "skepticism and intellectual individualism", well, congratulations! You've discovered the power of emotional rhetoric.
This just strikes me as post modernist / relativist bullshit. You're claiming that the real problem is not a population largely persuaded to vote against it's own interests inside a voting system which fundamentally empowers party insiders at the expense of the population.
No the problem is ALL OF US, we're just as emotional as these manipulated people!!11 Stop worrying about the broken voting system, the owned press and mislead population. Instead worry about your own emotionally driven mind.
It appears like a wise argument against HN hubris but you're really trying to derail people from a clear view of a problem and instead move the debate into introspection.
This is why liberal intelectuals are so paralyzed. Yes of course we're emotional too. And yes we can be swayed. But life is not black and white. The best of us has managed to develop a resistance to this kind of rhetoric by a life of study, debate, examining common rhetorical tricks etc. And it's not just different values that drives us. It's values that has carried us through a century of carnage into a much better life. We need to stop apologising and invoking bullshit relativistic cultural arguments and show some pride in basic values like equality for women, freedom of speech etc. I kind of think that's the central point that Bertrand Russell is making we paralyze each other by focusing on any potential error instead of realising that the things we value is mostly aligned and has been refined over a long time. We can trust most of our values.
Don't you think it's possible that through diligent study of human interaction and how the mind works you could gain a better understanding of how biases are formed and reinforced and stand a chance of recognizing when your own rational decision making is being bypassed? And in fact there is a large group of people (mainly the nerds, as it happens) who are working daily towards exactly that? And haven't they earned at least a little bit of the right to call themselves more rational than the person who has never even thought in these terms for a single moment of their life?
>It's never me who's swayed by emotions, it's always less rational people, and if only those people could get their shit together, like me, we'd be in a much better place.
That is true, though I would amend it to "even if they got their shit together, like me, we would still have a long ways to go in that regard. But it sure would help if everyone knew what confirmation bias was so that politicians and the media couldn't so easily use it to convince people of things that might not be true!"
The question I was pondering in the comment was whether the tragic cycle of progress and destruction is true or not. I'd love to learn otherwise - but data paints a bleak picture. It took just about twenty years after the 'war to end all wars' for the second World War to begin. Even though there isn't a World War at the moment, UN recently published a report stating that the displacement of humans due to war and persecution is at an all time high in recorded history (http://www.unhcr.org/558193896.html). The question so is whether we are we simply doomed to repeat history.
But as you noted, there is a degree of hidden bias in my statement. I will be more careful in such thoughts in the future. However, one cannot think about the world in a completely detached manner without making any sort of personal value judgements. We have to ascribe some degree of validity to people's opinions and decisions, and to where we personally stand in that spectrum. It is just that such judgements should be made after deliberation, and not slip in as a patterned thought as I have erred here.
> I think that the idea that humanity is always marching forward to better days is something implicit among people who live in peaceful affluent societies. But if you look at history, the world has always gone through cycles. No matter how much we improve socially, a regression seems almost inevitable. The Roman Empire did fall, and was followed by the Dark Ages.
The so-called Dark Ages were a period in which Roman-style governance was exported to the individual kingdoms of the former Roman Empire. Rome could only ever maintain political dominance for so long. Stability increased the might of kingdoms, these kingdoms didn't always want to live under the thumb of Rome. Rome kept it up for a good long while, but it couldn't do so forever.
The Middle Ages was when Europe became Europe. It saw the rise of a completely new type of institution, the pan-national Catholic Church, which became a third check against the power of kings. The manorial system grew out of the old Roman villa system and increased the output of farms and industry. This allowed militaries to professionalize and central government to flourish. Instead of one Rome and many vassal states, the vassal states each became their own Rome.
The intense competition between states eventually produced a theory of sovereignty that cut down on warfare tremendously.
The Middle Ages were not some dystopian hell out of which the Renaissance magically sprung up.
I think you are projecting the narriative of Progres (TM) onto the accurate facts you are presenting.
i.e. the Catholic Church did not invent checks and balances. They used to have those in the Old Republic, but those were abandoned after the Roman Civilization reached the appex of its, let's call it cultural vitality. I see the authoritarism of the Caesars as a symptom of Rome having run out of fresh ideas, they "jumped the shark" if you will.
I agree the Middle Ages were not some sort of dystopian hell. There was a Dark age after (or more precisely, around) the time when Rome fell. Those were hungry and dangerous times, and the people that survived were more impoverished (both in the material and the intelectual sense) than their forefathers, but survive they did. The Middle Ages is what resulted when the survivors rebuilt society out of the wreckage.
I agree that many former Roman institutions were repurposed during those times, but I do not see this as a way of purposeful progress. Rather, those obsolete institutions were salvaged and repurposed by the new Medieval society for its own needs. Superficially they look like a continuation of the same, but they were successful because they had a different cultural sensitivity, they had fresh ideas now, with their own new values and their own expectations of how things should be. And they pushed those in directions that no old Roman philosopher would've been able to imagine.
I think people tend to conflate Middle Ages with "Dark age" because the Middle Ages ended in a relatively mild collapse. The (Christian) Reformation and the Enlightenment allowed much of the cultural treasures of the past age to be preserved, but also caused warfare, famine, dislocation of whole nations, etc. Again, hungry and dangerous times, and again the survivors picked up the pieces and build the world we know today.
Our world looks superficialy like a continuation of the Renaissance, but it is not. The Renaissance is the apex of the cultural vitality of the Middle Ages, and our own World's foundations rest upon many of its repurposed ideas and institutions. But it had ideas and values of our own, and our forefathers took that in directions that no Scholastic monk would have ever imagined.
So, you can see, we are no closer to a future of endless joy, anymore than any other society that inhabited this planet ever did. We are going our own way around the cycle, and clearly we have ran out of fresh ideas ourselves.
I will not pretend to be subtle, our times will be on the down slope and depending on how fast this proceeds we ourselves or our children may end up in one of those dark ages (no uppercase, thank you very much) where hungry and dangerous is the norm. And then others will come and pick up the pieces. I guess what I expect to acomplish in life is to leave behind some cultural artifacts in good working order; and I hope that, one or two centuries from now, some smart guy will pick those up and push them in directions that I'd never be able to imagine.
Complexity and complacency kill. As you say, everything moves in cycles, and while it's easy to say that we "make the same mistakes", the reality is closer to "the same inevitable forces take effect".
Our societies are driven by emotion, and by reactionary forces. Revolution leads to expansion, which leads to consolidation, which leads to narcissism, which leads to complacency, which leads to inner turmoil, which leads to revolution.
I've recently re-read Asimov's Foundation series end-to-end, and his ideas of how an empire rises and falls, while quite clearly based on Rome, hold very true, particularly in today's world.
All we have now will ultimately end in ashes, and assuming we don't end up with an uninhabitable planet, something new, and marginally better, will grow from those ashes - but it will take time, and the setbacks will be enormous.
As long as we have humans making decisions, the same ideas will take root, the same feelings will be in effect, the same dichotomies of "us" and "them" will arise, and the instinct to hoard for winter will never subside.
The only way out is probably strict technocracy run by benevolent AIs - but it's not one that anyone is going to be willing to accept, as by doing so one loses much of what it is to be human.
Ultimately, you have to accept the bad with the good, enjoy what little life you have, and make your goal maximising the happiness of yourself and others - as there's quite literally nothing else to do.
Clearly it's not as simple as "complexity is bad." Ask any engineer: complexity often enables performance and efficiency. A modern V6 is far more complex than a 1960's car engine, but smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more fuel efficient. Complexity is just a fact of life that needs to be managed.
Indeed, the story of our civilization is progress driven by ever-increasing complexity, facilitated by technological innovation. Amazon is far more complex than a local mom-and-pop. It's also far more effective at getting products to people quicker and more cheaply. Going back in history, Great Britain's financial system was vastly more complex than what contemporary countries had, but it enabled the tiny nation to build and control a vast economic empire.
Complication kills, not complexity. Complex systems are made up of simple independent pieces. Those pieces work together naturally often leading to new behaviors. Because they are independent, they can also adapt easily to changes in the environment.
Complication is different. Complicated systems have dependencies that are more tightly bound together. Because of this, they can't adapt as easily to environmental changes. Consequentially, this creates conflict between system and environment that can often be destructive or violent.
Or at least that's my social hypothesis. I based my idea on the Rich Hickey "Simple vs. Easy" talk on software complexity. I think his ideas could be generalized to societies as well.
>The only way out is probably strict technocracy run by benevolent AIs - but it's not one that anyone is going to be willing to accept, as by doing so one loses much of what it is to be human.
This is along the lines of Plato's philosopher kings, who he insisted were the only hope. This is fascist crap. Benevolent Philosopher kings don't exist, and neither do benevolent AIs.
There was, in fact, rule by philosopher kings in Plato's generation, by a gang of thirty who learned from Socrates. Unsurprisingly, they were brutal fascists. An AI regime would be the same.
This is because there is only one way to ensure human needs are met, and it isn't technocratic anything. It is to ask people and empower them to get what they need directly. I.e. democracy, in as direct and total a form as we can manage efficiently.
> The Roman Empire did fall, and was followed by the Dark Ages
Rome didn't "fall", the "Dark Ages" weren't "dark." Those are oversimplifications from historians centuries ago, a point emphasized in most introductory history classes.
I don't know. With the cognitive relativism of our times, we want to make sure each civilisation, and each of its ages, are "equal". They certainly can be equally interesting for studies, but if we take a simple way to measure its effect on the human race by checking out how many books that are still read today have been written during these periods, you'll see that ancient Greece and Rome (and ancient China, and French enligthment) have been periods of great fertility, while for the normally educated man it is hard to find more than 2 or 3 books from the Middle Age that are still read and having influence nowadays.
So, at least following a few similar criteria, the Dark Ages were "dark". And it is not very surprising: when all the intelligensia spend almost all its brain power in obscure religious debates, you get very few results.
Rome disintegrated, and if the sacking of a once glorious capital by the various tribes of Europe isn't a "fall", I'm not sure what is.
The Dark Ages weren't "dark" in the sense that many understand them, but they were a period of fragmented power, small empires, and warring dynasties - much as much of the Roman period was, but the fact that their structure disintegrated is undeniable.
In their case, it all tied back to lines of communication and an increasingly inefficient taxation system, which lead to declining revenues for Rome, rot at the fringes, and eventual atomisation.
Indeed. The only reason to still consider certain parts of the Middle Ages as "dark", particularity the early portion, is the due to the lack of contemporary sources. The Merovingian Kingdoms of the seventh century, for example, are genuinely hard to study because we've lost so much.
The term "dark" should not be used, as it still much too frequently is, as some negative value judgment that covers a thousand year period which encompassed hundreds of different societies and cultures spanning an entire continent.
It is understandable why people think this way, since European history (at least in the United States and Canada) is still largely taught in a way that skims over the Middle Ages: check out how awesome Greece and Rome were, then, well, the Middle Ages when they had these grand churches, but who cares because then came the Renaissance when everything was cool again.
I've taught European Medieval history survey courses at the university level and one of the most difficult challenges was getting this idea of a horrible "dark" age dispelled from the students' minds. This is not to say that everything was somehow great or that all ages are "equal" in "value" (whatever that really means), but you can not begin to study a period of history without facing your own preconceptions of it (and, really, your own society).
Summary is that though Rome didn't fall overnight, there was a massive economic collapse first in the west and then several centuries later in the east (the latter coming on the heals of a devastating outbreak of the plague).
> There is a large chunk of society who're easily swayed by purely emotional rhetoric based on in-groups and out-groups, and likes to follow leaders who make a show of macho masculinity. The status-quo is pretty fragile. The nerds aren't safe.
Imagine polling this forum to identify their heroes and then poll a non-technical forum. Then contrast the two lists for macho qualities. You can probably do this simply by counting the sports heroes.
Admitting that one is not immune to biological influences is really what matters. In this respect, nerds are more mindful. Also, nerds historically belonged to the out-group. Again with mindfulness, we will hopefully sympathize with the out-group even if our recently elevated social status is permanent.
FYI, this idea of continual progress through history was invented during the Enlightenment, as far as I know. Before that the prevailing idea was more the LotR-style descent-into-less mentality that "great things of the past will never come back again"...
This is what happened in the West. It doesn't always need to be the same cycle of total destruction followed by reconstruction. While we should look to history for guidance, we cannot assume the same things will happen, or even that the same pattern will repeat itself. Short of an accidental nuclear holocaust, it seems rather unlikely that the current economic system will be undone anytime soon.
As a counterpoint to the demise of the Roman Empire, the Chinese Empire not only survived for thousands of years, it assimilated all the different people's living in the Chinese Mainland into one race (the Han). I feel like something similar is likely to happen in the future of the world.
>> emergence of the rule of law made the modern economy as we know it possible
The world has had laws since the beginning of man's time on this planet. What made the last 100-200 years different for the US and for the world has been free market economy, not laws alone.
>> It did - social progress has made institutions like democracy and ideas like liberty and rationalism more popular than it has ever been in history.
Democracy by itself fails. The most successful partial Democracy has been the US which is a Democratic Republic, not a true Democracy or Republic, the strength lies in the constant struggle of both.
>> that the modern society is a stable scientific one
Societal stability has nothing to do with science and everything to do with the choices people make every day and the military that defends a free world.
>> Even in the most democratic countries of the world, fascism is only just around the corner.
[Even in the most democratic countries of the world, Communism is only just around the corner.]
You know, as tautological as that sounds, it does not seem to happen a lot.
Yes, if you wait for long enough, everything fails. If it didn't fail yet, it's just a matter of waiting a few more centuries. But those failures are getting shorter and shorter in duration, while the periods societies are "failing to fail" get longer and longer.
It's a question of scale. Small groups will go through the same stages of civilisation as a much larger group, but more rapidly. There's a "rotten spot" between very small groups and very large groups where things are particularly unstable, which we have stayed largely abreast of through telecommunications, but it doesn't make us immune to those forces, just more easily dented and less easily broken.
This comment sounds like post-modernist pap. Beware -- modernism isn't the ultimate ideology, but post modernism isn't the bee's knees either. (Fyi, that "notion of continuous progress" of yours comes from Hegel.) Your comment comes off as handwavey and I think you've been "swayed" by the emotional rhetoric just as much as the next guy. It's as if you became disillusioned with communism, so you decided to become a libertarian. (No, this isn't an appeal to the balance fallacy. I'm saying reversed stupidity isn't intelligence.)
Also, what's this about cycles? Have you ever seen a population graph? It literally looks like a backwards L. But from your comment, one might expect a sine wave. And if you've been following say... Bill Gates's blog, the third world has significantly and measureably improved in the past 50 years.
Democracy has nothing to do with how well an economy operates, and it has nothing to do with how free individuals are, all it ensures is that a majority has control of who rules them. An economy operates best when individuals are free to pursue their own ideas, because the best ideas - the ones that create lasting value for the world - are spread throughout a population, they aren't concentrated within the mind of a democratically elected leader.
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are
cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
This seems to be the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. Knowing more means having greater awareness that what you know is only a small part of what you could know.
"A hundred years ago the philosophical radicals formed a school of intelligent
men who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are"
If true, I wonder what caused this. Could anyone suggest cultural, social or technological reasons that may have temporarily united the intellectuals of the age?
> Could anyone suggest cultural, social or technological reasons that may have temporarily united the intellectuals of the age?
I think the Internet played a very strong hand with uniting the "unintellectuals" of our age.
As for your actual question the answer lies within that sentence "philosophy." Philosophy has been found[1] to be an excellent way to teach children how to access their intelligence; most importantly regarding critical thought. To blindly follow the stupidity of others you must have first failed to practice critical thought.
> I think the Internet played a very strong hand with uniting the "unintellectuals" of our age.
It seems like the Internet has the opposite effect of uniting people. By allowing people to form ever tighter communities around specific topics, it allows people to feel like they've been united closer with others, but the interests of the groups they form are narrower than pre-Internet social groups. As to whether this affects intellectuals and unintellectuals more, it's hard to say. I could definitely be swayed either way. I've observed communities that fill every square of the (intellectual, unintellectual) x (narrow interest, broad interest) matrix.
Dunning Kruger didn't show that more competent people thought themselves lesser than incompetent, just that they thought they were lesser than they actually were, and incompetents thought themselves better than themselves, not better than those more competent.
i.e. Self reporting showed a shallowing of the competency slope, not a reversal.
The Philosophical Radicals was a philosophically-minded group of English political radicals in the nineteenth century inspired by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Individuals within this group included Francis Place, George Grote (1794–1871), Joseph Parkes, John Arthur Roebuck, Charles Buller, John Stuart Mill, Edward John Trelawny, and William Molesworth.[1]
Amongst other things, members of their group were the publishers of Darwin and ran the progressive journal the Westminster Review.
The problem is that smart people (setting a low bar to include anybody who doesnt have deep-seated prejudice or inviolable beliefs rooted in ancient superstitions) who don't think critically are subject to propaganda. They'll be told that opposing Hitler is simply being intolerant of intolerance, and that makes them no better than the Nazis. If they don't think about it critically, they'll agree, but if they do think about it critically, they'll realize that one side is being intolerant of oppression and violence, while the other is being intolerant of regular people being allowed to peacefully exist. During Hitler's rise, there were many prominent Nazi sympathizers in the US, and this was solved not by a pandemic of critical thinking but by instituting war propaganda in the opposite direction.
This is the same problem that plagued abolitionists in the 19th century, women's suffrage at the turn of the last century, civil rights in the 60s, apartheid in the 80s, and gay rights and refugees today, some of which had to be solved by counter-propaganda by those in power, and some of which had to be solved the hard way by those with little power loudly promoting critical thinking.
> smart people (setting a low bar to include anybody who doesnt have deep-seated prejudice or inviolable beliefs rooted in ancient superstitions)
I think this hits on what I disliked about the quoted Russell passage. He uses "intelligent" as if it is objective and obvious who is included, and that it is those who he broadly agrees with. You're doing something similar by dismissing from your definition of "smart" anyone who is prejudiced or religious. It is clear to me that there are extremely intelligent people who are one or the other or both. What do you achieve by excluding them from your definition of intelligence? It is better to attack prejudice as misguided on its own, rather than as the product of stupidity.
This applies to Russell as well; in thinking his opponents are just stupid, he deprives himself of the ability to understand their viewpoint well enough to debate it. The worst way to win an argument is to think the other side is just stupid and you're just smart, so there's nothing to talk about.
"In this gloomy state of affairs, the brightest spot is America. In America democracy still appears well established, and the men in power deal with what is amiss by constructive measures, not by pogroms and wholesale imprisonment."
I dunno. Life would not have been that great for me in 1950s America.
On a large-scale, I agree. On the one hand, I would like to see the US transition to being a regional power, not a global one. Think UK now, versus UK 100 years ago. That said, human nature abhors a power vacuum, and I would rather live under US rule than under Russian, Chinese, or Islamic rule. I know what to do and what not to do under US rule. Also, I can do most things that I want to do without having to deal with common-place gangsterism.
Hm? I feel like this still applies reasonably well to America.
For all of the radical lunacy in our politics, our government's actual actions remain fairly moderate. (Of course maybe that's because political gridlock prevents us from having time to enact radical policy.) And we still are leading the world in all sorts of things, like scientific progress and technological progress.
That's an incredibly prescient piece of writing, to see that clearly what would happen in the next 14 years and to write it down so un-ambiguously and tersely. Who is our present day Bertrand Russell?
It's me, I'm the smartest man on Earth. I'm still waiting for people to catch up. I find it strange to predict the next 14 years when the world is exploding with Africa/Asia literacy and the internet mainstreamization, and the technology. It's like trying to guess the flow of streams, with the waves beating. In 1935, it was a smaller scale of events. It doesn't matter, anyway. The world doesn't need more ideals and high-level thoughts, people function less than they think at that level, and there is progress enough, it needs empathy and respect, and fixing the bottom, for a more cohesive whole. These days I worry about what Africa will be when pacified, since it seems to be the major change, with internet, and they have a different culture, and they got shafted a lot, it seems. Africa is 1.1B people, US+Europe, so with our level of education, it'd be a crazy actor. http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ourworl...
People rave at the impact of major works, but the impact of achieving literacy in one generation, and opening all these infinite doors to half of humanity, this is a major event, and you can predict it just as well as you can predict the path of an engulfing ouragan... I'm in such a poetic and verbose mood. Alright, I give up the title. Another day.
Chris Hedges writes alot about this nowadays. His background as a war reporter for nyt gives him a bit of a radical perspective, but like much of modern social commentary, it makes me depressed reading too much of it.
Joe Bageant (RIP) is really good too, and he can be funny aswell. Hedges is never humorous.
We should add Chomsky to the list, although I can't stand reading his stuff. I'm sure it's good what he writes, but he is just too high-brow for me.
Chomsky is obviously strongly influenced by Russell, he's usually on the mark but takes 25,000 words where Russell takes 500 or so to make the same point and much stronger.
I'd go with Alain De Botton. I like Sam Harris too but a lot of people hate him. He's not a philosopher per se but he's willing to have strong opinions about controversial issues.
Replace Germany with Russia in article and you would be describing the sad state of things in modern Russia, the most brutal and stupid are running the show there now.
Don't forget France. A politician noticed a PS4 console in a terrorist's room and concluded that that's what they used as a super-secret communication channel. Turns out they used good ol' SMS. Already intercepted. They announced that from now on they'll also intercept the PS4 messaging traffic anyway.
Then there's the plan to put ankle bracelets on "known extremists"...
It is not the stupid who run Russia, in fact looking at Syria Putin seems to be the only one with a realistic goal in that war. The Russian interests are their access to the Mediterranean and following from that they want to aid their ally, the Assad regime, both clearly attainable military goals. Contrast that with the western engagement in Syria, ISIS was created in Iraq during the occupation, and now the West tries to put down by bombs what was created by bombs, a strategy that did not work for Israel in the last 50 years. So perhaps Russia is run by the cynical, but certainly not by the stupid.
"civilised world" is kept together by midddle- and working class people. What people need is hope and predictable outcomes from their personal efforts.
The Great Depression of 1929 struck America hard but Weimar Germany much harder. Incremental changes and hard work did not produce improvements. Life was uncertain and critical amount of people felt that life was unfair to them. They were ready to try stupid and unorthodox.
I find it unlikely that radical and stupid ideas alone can rock liberal democracies. They are always present. What is needed is personal uncertainty and fear of the future that resonates with the society.
> "civilised world" is kept together by midddle- and working class people.
Well, sort of. I think first you need technological innovation, and then the middle- and working class fill the labor to maintain that technology, but they for the most part didn't create it. They are users of it. Companies do investments and allocation of capital to produce that technology. Without a central source of capital, it would be hard to get the investments needed to research and produce it. I think technology (in all its forms from basic to advanced) is what enables the motion of society and individuals and the freedoms.
And also civilized society is just as much about daily life and consumption of information and perceived oppression or unfairness as it is pure work. It feels like a lot of modern arguments are about these perceived unfair situations, but on a personal level rather than systematic level. This leads to systematic "macro" chaos but predictable individual "micro" movement in the system (based on emotion and current view of the world). As long as the technology and resources can be maintained, there will be some order in the basics in society, since everyone needs food, shelter, clothing, security and so forth, so I would say, the whole system is what keeps the civilized world going and then some day, something fundamental breaks in some way, due to the accumulated macro momentum of micro scale movement, and then the macro breaks, or something like that.
Edit: also as an addon, these micro movements are decided today, by so called "thought leaders", and so these thought leaders are also responsible for the civilized world in that sense. An idea or representation of something has a huge effect I think.
> In America democracy still appears well established, and the men in power deal with what is amiss by constructive measures, not by pogroms and wholesale imprisonment.
Well all was not perfect even there - just a couple of years later all Japanese were "wholesale imprisoned".
Thanks for sharing. We could spend hours drawing from this essay.
Let's consider this part:
"A hundred years ago the philosophical radicals formed a school of intelligent men who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are; the result was that they dominated politics and that the world advanced rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being."
Another example of this is neo-liberal capitalism: from Hayek [1] and his disciple, Friedman [2], to myriad think tanks, Reagan and Thatcher, SCOTUS (eg Powell [3]), etc. We're still living with the outcome of a generation of intelligent, organized, ambitious people united by a [flawed] ideology.
Your specific objection being? Or do you consider your rhetoric sufficient?
Any comments about the enthusiasts for the currently totally unsustainable welfare states set up in the West along with the massive associated debts to be loaded onto the backs of those as yet unborn?
I don't understand this essay. It seems to be a romanticism of intelligent individuals, but he refers to Nazi Germany as the triumph of the stupid. However, isn't Nazi Germany the product of a small group of highly intelligent individuals?
Haunting and frighteningly timely short essay. This particular part jumped out (not least because the first sentence is highlighted):
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
Around the same time (1930), Sigmund Freud articulated the concept of "the narcissism of small differences" in his book Civilization and its Discontents, a concept that is endlessly useful in understanding how otherwise like-minded people tend to tear themselves apart. A related concept in software development is "bikeshedding".
However in "bikeshedding", like-minded people tearing themselves apart over small things is a byproduct of the underlying problem: they're procrastinating the bigger issue.
Maybe that's the point. I feel sometimes like the world today is so complex, that it's hard to be sure of any politics whether it will work, or produce more misery than good. So, perhaps on a subconscious level, it's easier to bicker about details and never actually do anything.
Moral high ground is the privilege of those that don't do anything...
It's a classic, but I do think there's more to it than stupidity versus intelligence. It's also about conviction versus cowardice.
In my experience bullying and persecution are very often more about fear and insecurity. If you're persecuting and blaming someone else, you're not being persecuted and blamed yourself. It's a way to deflect hostility and responsibility away from yourself and on to other people. It seems to me most of the people Russel was writing about may not even have been going along with the mainstream because they genuinely thought Jews, Communists etc were a real threat, but because if everyone is having a go at them they're not having a go at me. If I join in then I become one of the team and can buy safety and security for myself that way. In the uncertain and dangerous times Germany had been through, any route to personal security and safety must have looked very attractive.
How is this relevant today? Clearly Putin is using this sort of response to great effect by using conflict and rivalry with foreigners to deflect criticism away from his abysmal record at actually achieving anything of value for the Russian people. Even having a Russian jet shot down by Turkey plays to his advantage in that respect.
For us the question is, how to treat Muslim minorities in the West, and what to do about the Syrian refugee crisis. The refugees didn't create this crisis and are the primary victims. The vast majority of Muslims in the west are against ISIS and deplore it's tactics. But blaming 'The Muslims' for all of this and using excuses such as that terrorists will infiltrate the west disguised as refugees are blinkered and cowardly. What are we going to do? Drive millions of refugees back into the Mediterranean sea?
It's going to take determination and perseverance to do the right thing. Take as many refugees as we can. Build bridges with Muslim communities in the West. Confront IS and it's backers militarily and economically. There will be further attacks. Integrating so many refugees is going to be expensive, hard work and there are going to be negative consequences and mistakes made. It's not going o go smoothly. But we still have to do it not because we are 'Intelligent' but because we have courage.
Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, individual Germans have done more to further civilisation than the individuals of any other country; during the latter half of this period, Germans, collectively, have been equally effective in degrading civilisation.
Russell here is making the same mistake as most people today. It wasn't the "Germans collectively", it was the German government, tolerated by a mostly ignorant population with a few "hawks" to show support for the government action.
Contrary to the top post here right now, this is the same thing happening in the US right now. The government bombs another country every 1-2 years and people let it happen. We're still in appeasement times but the state already gradually disrespects individual liberties and soon America will become a collective much like the one described in the article.
Well, I must disagree and say it was the "Germans collectively", at least in a large part (37% of them voted for Hitler in his last real election), but in their defense, it was the Treaty of Versailles, imposed upon the nation at the end of WWI, that basically forced them into this position.
Remember, Hitler and the National Socialist's were voted into party thru democratic means, although to be sure, democracy was never really a part of the German zeitgeist back then.
All the major players knew the ToV was going to lead to another war, and it sowed the seed for the rise of some sort of militaristic, Fascist government.
Well, with Obama (who was elected by the American people) attacking at least two souvereign countries (Lybia, Syria) will you hold the American population responsible?
More generally, if I vote today for X and tomorrow X turns out to be a murderer, will you hold it against me because I can only vote every 5 years?
I think it would be too easy to say that it was only the German government responsible for what happened. Below is a key quote:
What has happened? What has happened is quite simple. Those elements of the population which are both brutal and stupid (and these two qualities usually go together) have combined against the rest.
And another quote from Hannah Arendt:
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
The problem might be that the "mob" is getting stronger for various reasons and there is an active elite that is eager to exploit them for their own gain.
"The government bombs another country every 1-2 years"
This is dumbing down history. The world would as we know it would not exist without all the US army involvement around the world in the last 100 years: notably WWI,WWII, the cold war, & many more.Some less glorious, indeed. But it's not "bombing every 1-2 years" but a mixture of defending freedom, sometimes financial interests, mistakes and more. But overall, there would not be a "free world" without the US power and the will to use it
If only US military involvement was only in WW1 & 2. The US was one of the good guys then, sure. Most of the other conflicts US army has taken part sound like a powertrip from an arrogant white man. Indian wars and the resulting genocide, Vietnam war where the french wanted the US to spank their unruly colony into submission... I'm sorry to say, the parties who like to smear US have quite enough fact based material.
That said, I'm not claiming US is evil but it's not a force of good either.
Yeats's The Second Coming, written in 1919 and following the cataclysm of the First World War, conveyed the same horrific and accurate vision of the future:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I believe there is, but for me the skepticism comes from my belief that there are a lot of 'well-read' people today thanks to the internet, Google and Wikipedia, although not many critical readers and thinkers. The best illustration of this for me is in the movie "Good Will Hunting", where the main character overhears a cocky college student, and puts him in his place [1]. That scene epitomizes a large portion of talk I hear about me, but with no real substance, or a Will Hunting to put them in their intellectual place. I think we don't teach basic critical thinking any more except in special classes or programs when it should be part of every class - common sense.
there's a kinda funny part in the Daodejing (or, Tao Te Ching, by the old Giles-Wade latinization of Chinese):
(3) Not to value and employ men of superior ability is the way to keep the people from rivalry among themselves; not to prize articles which are difficult to procure is the way to keep them from becoming thieves; not to show them what is likely to excite their desires is the way to keep their minds from disorder.
Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones.
He constantly (tries to) keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act (on it). When there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal.
---
I think our elites most of the time do a good job at the "empty their minds" bit. Spread a lot of confusion, FUD, and nobody dares to do anything. They are failing on the "fill their bellies" front, that's something to work on.
I find the passage kinda funny, since eastern philosophies are very popular nowadays mostly because of a hippie outlook on what they say. This part is in a way very cold and calculated. Daoism is pretty level-headed, my favorite of all eastern schools, along with some elements of Zen.
I think it's not stupidity (nor the Dunning Kruger Effect) that leads mankind astray; it's groupthink, in any shape or form. When you blind yourself to whether you and your allies do more harm than good, in service of some abstract ideal or philosophy, you fail.
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Göring, and the other leaders of the National Socialist party were horribly brutal, but they were not stupid. They were some of the brightest in the most well-educated country in the world. The same goes with French influenced Marxists such as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Bertrand Russell is right on many points, but he's terribly wrong to think the enemies of civilization are stupid. Read Machiavelli.
> The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
It was Hume and Kant who injected skepticism back into Western thought and are responsible for empowering the stupid, including the Nazis. If you know the cause of your plight then you can fix the effect.
It would be interesting if people reading this would say here which country they associated Germany to. I suppose almost all the countries will be on the list.
So an interesting question would be which country you associated the US in the essay to?
Opportunist here, riding on the popularity of this post. See my recent post which is partly along the lines of thoughts expressed by Bertrand Russel:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611416
Summary - readers who think that vast majority of individuals are 'stupid' - please contact me. One of the failings of 'sane' intelligent people is that we do not band together.
aka the raging cretinisation of the world or overfitting, from data science jargon; second time in a row I'm forced to write this here on HN, I'm probably overfitted too. :(
>>> By murder, by torture, by imprisonment, by the terrorism of armed forces, they have subjected the intelligent and humane parts of the nation and seized power with the view of furthering the glory of the Fatherland.
As opposed to all those links you posted that do belong here?
Really, if you don't like it that much and you believe it does not belong here you can flag it. But the best way to make HN into what you feel it should be is to post good links and to visit the new page to upvote the things that you feel do belong here.
We get these comments pretty regularly. Perhaps something could be done to avoid them - like the "Add Comment" page having some basic guidelines. A reminder of etiquette, the things that get downvoted, how to properly object (ie flag)?
It's a worthy sentiment but it's also a useless comment in that people who don't want to read the story should [and will largely have] just step over it whilst those who think it should appear here will read and so will naturally downvote such an objection.
In a sense, one can see how the Nazis' commitment to a brutal racial hierarchy undermined their ability to win WW2 (i.e. Jewish physicists left the country). On the other hand, is this being put forth as a serious theory of historical change? Wouldn't it be better to look at objective conditions (e.g. austerity conditions imposed after WW1, rampant anti-semitism) rather than whether or not the Nazis were 'stupid'? As nasty as they were, I doubt that Hitler, Goering, Himmler, etc. would appear as stupid today. Also, wouldn't the decades long commitment to eugenics on the part of many of Russell's friends, including forced sterilization, suggest that the intelligent should be full of doubt?
Really? This is an old text saying that nazis were stupid and americans were not. I don't think that this qualifies as "[something] that good hackers would find interesting". It must have been posted here as a way to warn people to "not be stupid" or something?
By murder, by torture, by imprisonment, by the terrorism of armed forces, they have subjected the intelligent and humane parts of the nation and seized power with the view of furthering the glory of the Fatherland.
^ The terrorism of armed forces part is particularly important. We tend to think that terrorism is something crazy non-state actors do in religious or delusional fervor, but it is really just the use of violence to achieve certain political ends. This is precisely what the American army started doing around the world after World War II. If you include psychological manipulation with it as well, as recently evidence by the disclosure that the DOD was paying NFL to propagandize during games, we get a very concerning picture of the role of the US military in today's world and in the US itself.
In this gloomy state of affairs, the brightest spot is America. In America democracy still appears well established, and the men in power deal with what is amiss by constructive measures, not by pogroms and wholesale imprisonment.
^ How dated that sounds. Wonder what Russell would say about the America of today, with the oligarchy entrenching itself to replace a democracy, a wide-scale militarization of the police, a pogrom against Muslims in some southern states, the wholesale imprisonment of African Americans, and the popularity of near-fascist leaders like Donald Trump.
littletimmy, how about citing sources for these extraordinary claims ("a pogrom against Muslims in some southern states")? I can't believe it wouldn't be widely known in the current "politically correct" environment.
Even if you are now aware that "pogrom" wasn't the right word to describe something "against Muslims" that is worrying you, please do write what that is.
$6.8 million in the context of the US defence budget doesn't seem that big a deal to me - that's a rounding error in terms of the Pentagon recruitment budget (which appears to be in the range of low tens of billions).
NB I'm not trying to be pro-military - just noting that armed forces everywhere need to recruit and they will have to spend money to get their message out there and a football game seems as good a place as any. I've seen military sponsorship of school level rugby games here in the UK.
>it is really just the use of violence to achieve certain political ends.
That's not terrorism, that's just war. All wars use violence to achieve political ends. Terrorism is the use of the fear of unpredictable attacks against a civilian population to prompt a high-impact political response, like war or revolution. Not all violence is terrorism.
It's also somewhat idealistic. After all, it was only in 1920 (13 years before the essay was written) that in the US women got the right to vote. And even today in some states felons are not allowed to vote.
Edit: And of course people under 18 also don't have the right to vote.
In "How to Make Wealth", pg points out that the emergence of the rule of law made the modern economy as we know it possible. It did - social progress has made institutions like democracy and ideas like liberty and rationalism more popular than it has ever been in history.
This used to give me a dangerously false sense of optimism - that the modern society is a stable scientific one, where good intelligent people are in charge, and that the state of affairs are always improving. This notion partly came from the privilege of never having lived in a war-zone. The life of chaos of those who are unfortunate to be in one is even now beyond my understanding.
I think that the idea that humanity is always marching forward to better days is something implicit among people who live in peaceful affluent societies. But if you look at history, the world has always gone through cycles. No matter how much we improve socially, a regression seems almost inevitable. The Roman Empire did fall, and was followed by the Dark Ages.
Even in the most democratic countries of the world, fascism is only just around the corner. There is a large chunk of society who're easily swayed by purely emotional rhetoric based on in-groups and out-groups, and likes to follow leaders who make a show of macho masculinity. The status-quo is pretty fragile. The nerds aren't safe. Those with warrior tendencies always have upper-hand over those with nation-building tendencies, and that reads like a tautology.
>There is a large chunk of society who're easily swayed by purely emotional rhetoric based on in-groups and out-groups
I think this sentence is the biggest indicator of the problem. The Problem being not that there are large parts of society swayed by emotional rhetoric, but that to most people, the emotional swaying happens to others. It's never me who's swayed by emotions, it's always less rational people, and if only those people could get their shit together, like me, we'd be in a much better place.
You're just as swayed by emotion as those non nerds, you're just swayed on different values. Pretending like you're above it gets us nowhere, because it perpetuates an unhelpful me vs everyone else mentality. It's very satisfying to the ego but it just serves to further drive a wedge between you and everyone else.
That's what struck me most about the article, as well. Russell's essay is very flattering, until you realize the we that he terms "the best men of the present day" are probably not the we of Hacker News.
In particular, when Russell writes about "the philosophical radicals ... who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are[, who] dominated politics and ... advanced [the world] rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being," he is very likely writing about people who would definitely be a Hacker News they, given what I know about his politics and given statements like "if at any future time there should be danger of a Labour Government that meant business, [the British Fascists] would win the support of most of the governing classes."
So, if this essay leaves you with a warm and fuzzy feeling about your "wider and truer outlook" and the feeling that you are being oppressed because of your "skepticism and intellectual individualism", well, congratulations! You've discovered the power of emotional rhetoric.
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This just strikes me as post modernist / relativist bullshit. You're claiming that the real problem is not a population largely persuaded to vote against it's own interests inside a voting system which fundamentally empowers party insiders at the expense of the population.
No the problem is ALL OF US, we're just as emotional as these manipulated people!!11 Stop worrying about the broken voting system, the owned press and mislead population. Instead worry about your own emotionally driven mind.
It appears like a wise argument against HN hubris but you're really trying to derail people from a clear view of a problem and instead move the debate into introspection.
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This is why liberal intelectuals are so paralyzed. Yes of course we're emotional too. And yes we can be swayed. But life is not black and white. The best of us has managed to develop a resistance to this kind of rhetoric by a life of study, debate, examining common rhetorical tricks etc. And it's not just different values that drives us. It's values that has carried us through a century of carnage into a much better life. We need to stop apologising and invoking bullshit relativistic cultural arguments and show some pride in basic values like equality for women, freedom of speech etc. I kind of think that's the central point that Bertrand Russell is making we paralyze each other by focusing on any potential error instead of realising that the things we value is mostly aligned and has been refined over a long time. We can trust most of our values.
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Don't you think it's possible that through diligent study of human interaction and how the mind works you could gain a better understanding of how biases are formed and reinforced and stand a chance of recognizing when your own rational decision making is being bypassed? And in fact there is a large group of people (mainly the nerds, as it happens) who are working daily towards exactly that? And haven't they earned at least a little bit of the right to call themselves more rational than the person who has never even thought in these terms for a single moment of their life?
>It's never me who's swayed by emotions, it's always less rational people, and if only those people could get their shit together, like me, we'd be in a much better place.
That is true, though I would amend it to "even if they got their shit together, like me, we would still have a long ways to go in that regard. But it sure would help if everyone knew what confirmation bias was so that politicians and the media couldn't so easily use it to convince people of things that might not be true!"
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The question I was pondering in the comment was whether the tragic cycle of progress and destruction is true or not. I'd love to learn otherwise - but data paints a bleak picture. It took just about twenty years after the 'war to end all wars' for the second World War to begin. Even though there isn't a World War at the moment, UN recently published a report stating that the displacement of humans due to war and persecution is at an all time high in recorded history (http://www.unhcr.org/558193896.html). The question so is whether we are we simply doomed to repeat history.
But as you noted, there is a degree of hidden bias in my statement. I will be more careful in such thoughts in the future. However, one cannot think about the world in a completely detached manner without making any sort of personal value judgements. We have to ascribe some degree of validity to people's opinions and decisions, and to where we personally stand in that spectrum. It is just that such judgements should be made after deliberation, and not slip in as a patterned thought as I have erred here.
We should indeed recognize that we are all prone to the effect, but here you have replaced one sweeping generalization with another.
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I think this post is the biggest indicator of the problem, as set out by Russell.
> The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
> I think that the idea that humanity is always marching forward to better days is something implicit among people who live in peaceful affluent societies. But if you look at history, the world has always gone through cycles. No matter how much we improve socially, a regression seems almost inevitable. The Roman Empire did fall, and was followed by the Dark Ages.
The so-called Dark Ages were a period in which Roman-style governance was exported to the individual kingdoms of the former Roman Empire. Rome could only ever maintain political dominance for so long. Stability increased the might of kingdoms, these kingdoms didn't always want to live under the thumb of Rome. Rome kept it up for a good long while, but it couldn't do so forever.
The Middle Ages was when Europe became Europe. It saw the rise of a completely new type of institution, the pan-national Catholic Church, which became a third check against the power of kings. The manorial system grew out of the old Roman villa system and increased the output of farms and industry. This allowed militaries to professionalize and central government to flourish. Instead of one Rome and many vassal states, the vassal states each became their own Rome.
The intense competition between states eventually produced a theory of sovereignty that cut down on warfare tremendously.
The Middle Ages were not some dystopian hell out of which the Renaissance magically sprung up.
I think you are projecting the narriative of Progres (TM) onto the accurate facts you are presenting.
i.e. the Catholic Church did not invent checks and balances. They used to have those in the Old Republic, but those were abandoned after the Roman Civilization reached the appex of its, let's call it cultural vitality. I see the authoritarism of the Caesars as a symptom of Rome having run out of fresh ideas, they "jumped the shark" if you will.
I agree the Middle Ages were not some sort of dystopian hell. There was a Dark age after (or more precisely, around) the time when Rome fell. Those were hungry and dangerous times, and the people that survived were more impoverished (both in the material and the intelectual sense) than their forefathers, but survive they did. The Middle Ages is what resulted when the survivors rebuilt society out of the wreckage.
I agree that many former Roman institutions were repurposed during those times, but I do not see this as a way of purposeful progress. Rather, those obsolete institutions were salvaged and repurposed by the new Medieval society for its own needs. Superficially they look like a continuation of the same, but they were successful because they had a different cultural sensitivity, they had fresh ideas now, with their own new values and their own expectations of how things should be. And they pushed those in directions that no old Roman philosopher would've been able to imagine.
I think people tend to conflate Middle Ages with "Dark age" because the Middle Ages ended in a relatively mild collapse. The (Christian) Reformation and the Enlightenment allowed much of the cultural treasures of the past age to be preserved, but also caused warfare, famine, dislocation of whole nations, etc. Again, hungry and dangerous times, and again the survivors picked up the pieces and build the world we know today.
Our world looks superficialy like a continuation of the Renaissance, but it is not. The Renaissance is the apex of the cultural vitality of the Middle Ages, and our own World's foundations rest upon many of its repurposed ideas and institutions. But it had ideas and values of our own, and our forefathers took that in directions that no Scholastic monk would have ever imagined.
So, you can see, we are no closer to a future of endless joy, anymore than any other society that inhabited this planet ever did. We are going our own way around the cycle, and clearly we have ran out of fresh ideas ourselves.
I will not pretend to be subtle, our times will be on the down slope and depending on how fast this proceeds we ourselves or our children may end up in one of those dark ages (no uppercase, thank you very much) where hungry and dangerous is the norm. And then others will come and pick up the pieces. I guess what I expect to acomplish in life is to leave behind some cultural artifacts in good working order; and I hope that, one or two centuries from now, some smart guy will pick those up and push them in directions that I'd never be able to imagine.
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Complexity and complacency kill. As you say, everything moves in cycles, and while it's easy to say that we "make the same mistakes", the reality is closer to "the same inevitable forces take effect".
Our societies are driven by emotion, and by reactionary forces. Revolution leads to expansion, which leads to consolidation, which leads to narcissism, which leads to complacency, which leads to inner turmoil, which leads to revolution.
I've recently re-read Asimov's Foundation series end-to-end, and his ideas of how an empire rises and falls, while quite clearly based on Rome, hold very true, particularly in today's world.
All we have now will ultimately end in ashes, and assuming we don't end up with an uninhabitable planet, something new, and marginally better, will grow from those ashes - but it will take time, and the setbacks will be enormous.
As long as we have humans making decisions, the same ideas will take root, the same feelings will be in effect, the same dichotomies of "us" and "them" will arise, and the instinct to hoard for winter will never subside.
The only way out is probably strict technocracy run by benevolent AIs - but it's not one that anyone is going to be willing to accept, as by doing so one loses much of what it is to be human.
Ultimately, you have to accept the bad with the good, enjoy what little life you have, and make your goal maximising the happiness of yourself and others - as there's quite literally nothing else to do.
> Complexity and complacency kill.
Clearly it's not as simple as "complexity is bad." Ask any engineer: complexity often enables performance and efficiency. A modern V6 is far more complex than a 1960's car engine, but smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more fuel efficient. Complexity is just a fact of life that needs to be managed.
Indeed, the story of our civilization is progress driven by ever-increasing complexity, facilitated by technological innovation. Amazon is far more complex than a local mom-and-pop. It's also far more effective at getting products to people quicker and more cheaply. Going back in history, Great Britain's financial system was vastly more complex than what contemporary countries had, but it enabled the tiny nation to build and control a vast economic empire.
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Complication kills, not complexity. Complex systems are made up of simple independent pieces. Those pieces work together naturally often leading to new behaviors. Because they are independent, they can also adapt easily to changes in the environment.
Complication is different. Complicated systems have dependencies that are more tightly bound together. Because of this, they can't adapt as easily to environmental changes. Consequentially, this creates conflict between system and environment that can often be destructive or violent.
Or at least that's my social hypothesis. I based my idea on the Rich Hickey "Simple vs. Easy" talk on software complexity. I think his ideas could be generalized to societies as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0
>The only way out is probably strict technocracy run by benevolent AIs - but it's not one that anyone is going to be willing to accept, as by doing so one loses much of what it is to be human.
This is along the lines of Plato's philosopher kings, who he insisted were the only hope. This is fascist crap. Benevolent Philosopher kings don't exist, and neither do benevolent AIs.
There was, in fact, rule by philosopher kings in Plato's generation, by a gang of thirty who learned from Socrates. Unsurprisingly, they were brutal fascists. An AI regime would be the same.
This is because there is only one way to ensure human needs are met, and it isn't technocratic anything. It is to ask people and empower them to get what they need directly. I.e. democracy, in as direct and total a form as we can manage efficiently.
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> The Roman Empire did fall, and was followed by the Dark Ages
Rome didn't "fall", the "Dark Ages" weren't "dark." Those are oversimplifications from historians centuries ago, a point emphasized in most introductory history classes.
> the "Dark Ages" weren't "dark."
I don't know. With the cognitive relativism of our times, we want to make sure each civilisation, and each of its ages, are "equal". They certainly can be equally interesting for studies, but if we take a simple way to measure its effect on the human race by checking out how many books that are still read today have been written during these periods, you'll see that ancient Greece and Rome (and ancient China, and French enligthment) have been periods of great fertility, while for the normally educated man it is hard to find more than 2 or 3 books from the Middle Age that are still read and having influence nowadays.
So, at least following a few similar criteria, the Dark Ages were "dark". And it is not very surprising: when all the intelligensia spend almost all its brain power in obscure religious debates, you get very few results.
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Rome disintegrated, and if the sacking of a once glorious capital by the various tribes of Europe isn't a "fall", I'm not sure what is.
The Dark Ages weren't "dark" in the sense that many understand them, but they were a period of fragmented power, small empires, and warring dynasties - much as much of the Roman period was, but the fact that their structure disintegrated is undeniable.
In their case, it all tied back to lines of communication and an increasingly inefficient taxation system, which lead to declining revenues for Rome, rot at the fringes, and eventual atomisation.
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Indeed. The only reason to still consider certain parts of the Middle Ages as "dark", particularity the early portion, is the due to the lack of contemporary sources. The Merovingian Kingdoms of the seventh century, for example, are genuinely hard to study because we've lost so much.
The term "dark" should not be used, as it still much too frequently is, as some negative value judgment that covers a thousand year period which encompassed hundreds of different societies and cultures spanning an entire continent.
It is understandable why people think this way, since European history (at least in the United States and Canada) is still largely taught in a way that skims over the Middle Ages: check out how awesome Greece and Rome were, then, well, the Middle Ages when they had these grand churches, but who cares because then came the Renaissance when everything was cool again.
I've taught European Medieval history survey courses at the university level and one of the most difficult challenges was getting this idea of a horrible "dark" age dispelled from the students' minds. This is not to say that everything was somehow great or that all ages are "equal" in "value" (whatever that really means), but you can not begin to study a period of history without facing your own preconceptions of it (and, really, your own society).
There's been a lot of recent interest in this topic. For example: http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Rome-And-Civilization/dp/0192...
Summary is that though Rome didn't fall overnight, there was a massive economic collapse first in the west and then several centuries later in the east (the latter coming on the heals of a devastating outbreak of the plague).
> There is a large chunk of society who're easily swayed by purely emotional rhetoric based on in-groups and out-groups, and likes to follow leaders who make a show of macho masculinity. The status-quo is pretty fragile. The nerds aren't safe.
What makes you think nerds are any different?
Great question. They aren't.
Imagine polling this forum to identify their heroes and then poll a non-technical forum. Then contrast the two lists for macho qualities. You can probably do this simply by counting the sports heroes.
Admitting that one is not immune to biological influences is really what matters. In this respect, nerds are more mindful. Also, nerds historically belonged to the out-group. Again with mindfulness, we will hopefully sympathize with the out-group even if our recently elevated social status is permanent.
FYI, this idea of continual progress through history was invented during the Enlightenment, as far as I know. Before that the prevailing idea was more the LotR-style descent-into-less mentality that "great things of the past will never come back again"...
This is what happened in the West. It doesn't always need to be the same cycle of total destruction followed by reconstruction. While we should look to history for guidance, we cannot assume the same things will happen, or even that the same pattern will repeat itself. Short of an accidental nuclear holocaust, it seems rather unlikely that the current economic system will be undone anytime soon.
As a counterpoint to the demise of the Roman Empire, the Chinese Empire not only survived for thousands of years, it assimilated all the different people's living in the Chinese Mainland into one race (the Han). I feel like something similar is likely to happen in the future of the world.
>> emergence of the rule of law made the modern economy as we know it possible
The world has had laws since the beginning of man's time on this planet. What made the last 100-200 years different for the US and for the world has been free market economy, not laws alone.
>> It did - social progress has made institutions like democracy and ideas like liberty and rationalism more popular than it has ever been in history.
Democracy by itself fails. The most successful partial Democracy has been the US which is a Democratic Republic, not a true Democracy or Republic, the strength lies in the constant struggle of both.
>> that the modern society is a stable scientific one
Societal stability has nothing to do with science and everything to do with the choices people make every day and the military that defends a free world.
>> Even in the most democratic countries of the world, fascism is only just around the corner.
[Even in the most democratic countries of the world, Communism is only just around the corner.]
You know, as tautological as that sounds, it does not seem to happen a lot.
Yes, if you wait for long enough, everything fails. If it didn't fail yet, it's just a matter of waiting a few more centuries. But those failures are getting shorter and shorter in duration, while the periods societies are "failing to fail" get longer and longer.
It's a question of scale. Small groups will go through the same stages of civilisation as a much larger group, but more rapidly. There's a "rotten spot" between very small groups and very large groups where things are particularly unstable, which we have stayed largely abreast of through telecommunications, but it doesn't make us immune to those forces, just more easily dented and less easily broken.
This comment sounds like post-modernist pap. Beware -- modernism isn't the ultimate ideology, but post modernism isn't the bee's knees either. (Fyi, that "notion of continuous progress" of yours comes from Hegel.) Your comment comes off as handwavey and I think you've been "swayed" by the emotional rhetoric just as much as the next guy. It's as if you became disillusioned with communism, so you decided to become a libertarian. (No, this isn't an appeal to the balance fallacy. I'm saying reversed stupidity isn't intelligence.)
Also, what's this about cycles? Have you ever seen a population graph? It literally looks like a backwards L. But from your comment, one might expect a sine wave. And if you've been following say... Bill Gates's blog, the third world has significantly and measureably improved in the past 50 years.
Democracy has nothing to do with how well an economy operates, and it has nothing to do with how free individuals are, all it ensures is that a majority has control of who rules them. An economy operates best when individuals are free to pursue their own ideas, because the best ideas - the ones that create lasting value for the world - are spread throughout a population, they aren't concentrated within the mind of a democratically elected leader.
http://www.emersoncentral.com/greatmen.htm
This seems to be the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. Knowing more means having greater awareness that what you know is only a small part of what you could know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
If true, I wonder what caused this. Could anyone suggest cultural, social or technological reasons that may have temporarily united the intellectuals of the age?
> Could anyone suggest cultural, social or technological reasons that may have temporarily united the intellectuals of the age?
I think the Internet played a very strong hand with uniting the "unintellectuals" of our age.
As for your actual question the answer lies within that sentence "philosophy." Philosophy has been found[1] to be an excellent way to teach children how to access their intelligence; most importantly regarding critical thought. To blindly follow the stupidity of others you must have first failed to practice critical thought.
[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/21/teachin...
> I think the Internet played a very strong hand with uniting the "unintellectuals" of our age.
It seems like the Internet has the opposite effect of uniting people. By allowing people to form ever tighter communities around specific topics, it allows people to feel like they've been united closer with others, but the interests of the groups they form are narrower than pre-Internet social groups. As to whether this affects intellectuals and unintellectuals more, it's hard to say. I could definitely be swayed either way. I've observed communities that fill every square of the (intellectual, unintellectual) x (narrow interest, broad interest) matrix.
Dunning Kruger didn't show that more competent people thought themselves lesser than incompetent, just that they thought they were lesser than they actually were, and incompetents thought themselves better than themselves, not better than those more competent.
i.e. Self reporting showed a shallowing of the competency slope, not a reversal.
> the philosophical radicals formed a school of intelligent men
Does anyone know who these men were?
The Philosophical Radicals was a philosophically-minded group of English political radicals in the nineteenth century inspired by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Individuals within this group included Francis Place, George Grote (1794–1871), Joseph Parkes, John Arthur Roebuck, Charles Buller, John Stuart Mill, Edward John Trelawny, and William Molesworth.[1]
Amongst other things, members of their group were the publishers of Darwin and ran the progressive journal the Westminster Review.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Radicals
Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, Epictetus etc..
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John Ralston Saul argues it was the age of Reason that did this in the book Voltaire's Bastards going all the way back to the Jesuit schools.
http://www.johnralstonsaul.com/non-fiction-books/voltaires_b...
The problem is that smart people (setting a low bar to include anybody who doesnt have deep-seated prejudice or inviolable beliefs rooted in ancient superstitions) who don't think critically are subject to propaganda. They'll be told that opposing Hitler is simply being intolerant of intolerance, and that makes them no better than the Nazis. If they don't think about it critically, they'll agree, but if they do think about it critically, they'll realize that one side is being intolerant of oppression and violence, while the other is being intolerant of regular people being allowed to peacefully exist. During Hitler's rise, there were many prominent Nazi sympathizers in the US, and this was solved not by a pandemic of critical thinking but by instituting war propaganda in the opposite direction.
This is the same problem that plagued abolitionists in the 19th century, women's suffrage at the turn of the last century, civil rights in the 60s, apartheid in the 80s, and gay rights and refugees today, some of which had to be solved by counter-propaganda by those in power, and some of which had to be solved the hard way by those with little power loudly promoting critical thinking.
> smart people (setting a low bar to include anybody who doesnt have deep-seated prejudice or inviolable beliefs rooted in ancient superstitions)
I think this hits on what I disliked about the quoted Russell passage. He uses "intelligent" as if it is objective and obvious who is included, and that it is those who he broadly agrees with. You're doing something similar by dismissing from your definition of "smart" anyone who is prejudiced or religious. It is clear to me that there are extremely intelligent people who are one or the other or both. What do you achieve by excluding them from your definition of intelligence? It is better to attack prejudice as misguided on its own, rather than as the product of stupidity.
This applies to Russell as well; in thinking his opponents are just stupid, he deprives himself of the ability to understand their viewpoint well enough to debate it. The worst way to win an argument is to think the other side is just stupid and you're just smart, so there's nothing to talk about.
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"In this gloomy state of affairs, the brightest spot is America. In America democracy still appears well established, and the men in power deal with what is amiss by constructive measures, not by pogroms and wholesale imprisonment."
Oh.
How the mighty have fallen.
I dunno. Life would not have been that great for me in 1950s America.
On a large-scale, I agree. On the one hand, I would like to see the US transition to being a regional power, not a global one. Think UK now, versus UK 100 years ago. That said, human nature abhors a power vacuum, and I would rather live under US rule than under Russian, Chinese, or Islamic rule. I know what to do and what not to do under US rule. Also, I can do most things that I want to do without having to deal with common-place gangsterism.
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"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." - Winston Churchill
Hm? I feel like this still applies reasonably well to America.
For all of the radical lunacy in our politics, our government's actual actions remain fairly moderate. (Of course maybe that's because political gridlock prevents us from having time to enact radical policy.) And we still are leading the world in all sorts of things, like scientific progress and technological progress.
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That's an incredibly prescient piece of writing, to see that clearly what would happen in the next 14 years and to write it down so un-ambiguously and tersely. Who is our present day Bertrand Russell?
It's me, I'm the smartest man on Earth. I'm still waiting for people to catch up. I find it strange to predict the next 14 years when the world is exploding with Africa/Asia literacy and the internet mainstreamization, and the technology. It's like trying to guess the flow of streams, with the waves beating. In 1935, it was a smaller scale of events. It doesn't matter, anyway. The world doesn't need more ideals and high-level thoughts, people function less than they think at that level, and there is progress enough, it needs empathy and respect, and fixing the bottom, for a more cohesive whole. These days I worry about what Africa will be when pacified, since it seems to be the major change, with internet, and they have a different culture, and they got shafted a lot, it seems. Africa is 1.1B people, US+Europe, so with our level of education, it'd be a crazy actor. http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ourworl... People rave at the impact of major works, but the impact of achieving literacy in one generation, and opening all these infinite doors to half of humanity, this is a major event, and you can predict it just as well as you can predict the path of an engulfing ouragan... I'm in such a poetic and verbose mood. Alright, I give up the title. Another day.
Chris Hedges writes alot about this nowadays. His background as a war reporter for nyt gives him a bit of a radical perspective, but like much of modern social commentary, it makes me depressed reading too much of it.
Joe Bageant (RIP) is really good too, and he can be funny aswell. Hedges is never humorous.
We should add Chomsky to the list, although I can't stand reading his stuff. I'm sure it's good what he writes, but he is just too high-brow for me.
Chomsky is obviously strongly influenced by Russell, he's usually on the mark but takes 25,000 words where Russell takes 500 or so to make the same point and much stronger.
Chomsky's output before the mid-70's was very highbrow, but most of it subsequently is very readable and straightforward.
Not loved by all, but maybe George Monbiot
Stephen Pinker. Just about the only person from a humanities field that left me in awe of his intellect when I saw him speak.
Michel Houellebecq?
I'd go with Alain De Botton. I like Sam Harris too but a lot of people hate him. He's not a philosopher per se but he's willing to have strong opinions about controversial issues.
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Good choice. And if he were still alive, Christopher Hitchens.
Replace Germany with Russia in article and you would be describing the sad state of things in modern Russia, the most brutal and stupid are running the show there now.
Aside here is an interesting article regarding this > https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/russia-great-for...
Hm.. as opposed to Germany, Turkey, UK and the US?
Yes (except Turkey - Erdogan wants to become what Putin is).
Don't forget France. A politician noticed a PS4 console in a terrorist's room and concluded that that's what they used as a super-secret communication channel. Turns out they used good ol' SMS. Already intercepted. They announced that from now on they'll also intercept the PS4 messaging traffic anyway.
Then there's the plan to put ankle bracelets on "known extremists"...
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It is not the stupid who run Russia, in fact looking at Syria Putin seems to be the only one with a realistic goal in that war. The Russian interests are their access to the Mediterranean and following from that they want to aid their ally, the Assad regime, both clearly attainable military goals. Contrast that with the western engagement in Syria, ISIS was created in Iraq during the occupation, and now the West tries to put down by bombs what was created by bombs, a strategy that did not work for Israel in the last 50 years. So perhaps Russia is run by the cynical, but certainly not by the stupid.
I never said Putin was stupid, but he does have an army of "willing idiots" both and home and abroad helping and supporting his goals.
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Why is @yc1010's comment downvoted? It's exactly where Russia stands right now.
"civilised world" is kept together by midddle- and working class people. What people need is hope and predictable outcomes from their personal efforts.
The Great Depression of 1929 struck America hard but Weimar Germany much harder. Incremental changes and hard work did not produce improvements. Life was uncertain and critical amount of people felt that life was unfair to them. They were ready to try stupid and unorthodox.
I find it unlikely that radical and stupid ideas alone can rock liberal democracies. They are always present. What is needed is personal uncertainty and fear of the future that resonates with the society.
> "civilised world" is kept together by midddle- and working class people.
Well, sort of. I think first you need technological innovation, and then the middle- and working class fill the labor to maintain that technology, but they for the most part didn't create it. They are users of it. Companies do investments and allocation of capital to produce that technology. Without a central source of capital, it would be hard to get the investments needed to research and produce it. I think technology (in all its forms from basic to advanced) is what enables the motion of society and individuals and the freedoms.
And also civilized society is just as much about daily life and consumption of information and perceived oppression or unfairness as it is pure work. It feels like a lot of modern arguments are about these perceived unfair situations, but on a personal level rather than systematic level. This leads to systematic "macro" chaos but predictable individual "micro" movement in the system (based on emotion and current view of the world). As long as the technology and resources can be maintained, there will be some order in the basics in society, since everyone needs food, shelter, clothing, security and so forth, so I would say, the whole system is what keeps the civilized world going and then some day, something fundamental breaks in some way, due to the accumulated macro momentum of micro scale movement, and then the macro breaks, or something like that.
Edit: also as an addon, these micro movements are decided today, by so called "thought leaders", and so these thought leaders are also responsible for the civilized world in that sense. An idea or representation of something has a huge effect I think.
> In America democracy still appears well established, and the men in power deal with what is amiss by constructive measures, not by pogroms and wholesale imprisonment.
Well all was not perfect even there - just a couple of years later all Japanese were "wholesale imprisoned".
Thereafter black americans since the 1970s
Thanks for sharing. We could spend hours drawing from this essay.
Let's consider this part:
"A hundred years ago the philosophical radicals formed a school of intelligent men who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are; the result was that they dominated politics and that the world advanced rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being."
Another example of this is neo-liberal capitalism: from Hayek [1] and his disciple, Friedman [2], to myriad think tanks, Reagan and Thatcher, SCOTUS (eg Powell [3]), etc. We're still living with the outcome of a generation of intelligent, organized, ambitious people united by a [flawed] ideology.
[1] Hayek - "The Road to Serfdom" http://amzn.to/1PRWyDj [2] Friedman - "Free to Choose" http://amzn.to/1QKIewt [3] Powell - "Attack on American Free Enterprise System" http://bit.ly/1Q2bHR7
Just a nitpick but Hayek and Friedman were both classical liberals.
Strictly speaking Hayek was the first Hayekian liberal - but did self-describe as a classical liberal.
Your specific objection being? Or do you consider your rhetoric sufficient?
Any comments about the enthusiasts for the currently totally unsustainable welfare states set up in the West along with the massive associated debts to be loaded onto the backs of those as yet unborn?
sufficient for here -- and from me to you
it was a case in point
I don't understand this essay. It seems to be a romanticism of intelligent individuals, but he refers to Nazi Germany as the triumph of the stupid. However, isn't Nazi Germany the product of a small group of highly intelligent individuals?
> [...] isn't Nazi Germany the product of a small group of highly intelligent individuals?
Yes, a small group of intelligent individuals, who succeeded in rallying the "stupid" masses behind them.
Wouldn't any successful political movement need the support of the "stupid masses"?
what do you mean by "highly intelligent individuals"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjalmar_Schacht
Haunting and frighteningly timely short essay. This particular part jumped out (not least because the first sentence is highlighted):
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
Around the same time (1930), Sigmund Freud articulated the concept of "the narcissism of small differences" in his book Civilization and its Discontents, a concept that is endlessly useful in understanding how otherwise like-minded people tend to tear themselves apart. A related concept in software development is "bikeshedding".
However in "bikeshedding", like-minded people tearing themselves apart over small things is a byproduct of the underlying problem: they're procrastinating the bigger issue.
Maybe that's the point. I feel sometimes like the world today is so complex, that it's hard to be sure of any politics whether it will work, or produce more misery than good. So, perhaps on a subconscious level, it's easier to bicker about details and never actually do anything.
Moral high ground is the privilege of those that don't do anything...
I think it is a potentially dangerous mistake to put the "stupid" label on all those that support anti-democratic tendencies.
Among other things, such as having a false impression of what else is possibly going on, one might be inclined to dismiss the problem too easily.
It's a classic, but I do think there's more to it than stupidity versus intelligence. It's also about conviction versus cowardice.
In my experience bullying and persecution are very often more about fear and insecurity. If you're persecuting and blaming someone else, you're not being persecuted and blamed yourself. It's a way to deflect hostility and responsibility away from yourself and on to other people. It seems to me most of the people Russel was writing about may not even have been going along with the mainstream because they genuinely thought Jews, Communists etc were a real threat, but because if everyone is having a go at them they're not having a go at me. If I join in then I become one of the team and can buy safety and security for myself that way. In the uncertain and dangerous times Germany had been through, any route to personal security and safety must have looked very attractive.
How is this relevant today? Clearly Putin is using this sort of response to great effect by using conflict and rivalry with foreigners to deflect criticism away from his abysmal record at actually achieving anything of value for the Russian people. Even having a Russian jet shot down by Turkey plays to his advantage in that respect.
For us the question is, how to treat Muslim minorities in the West, and what to do about the Syrian refugee crisis. The refugees didn't create this crisis and are the primary victims. The vast majority of Muslims in the west are against ISIS and deplore it's tactics. But blaming 'The Muslims' for all of this and using excuses such as that terrorists will infiltrate the west disguised as refugees are blinkered and cowardly. What are we going to do? Drive millions of refugees back into the Mediterranean sea?
It's going to take determination and perseverance to do the right thing. Take as many refugees as we can. Build bridges with Muslim communities in the West. Confront IS and it's backers militarily and economically. There will be further attacks. Integrating so many refugees is going to be expensive, hard work and there are going to be negative consequences and mistakes made. It's not going o go smoothly. But we still have to do it not because we are 'Intelligent' but because we have courage.
Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, individual Germans have done more to further civilisation than the individuals of any other country; during the latter half of this period, Germans, collectively, have been equally effective in degrading civilisation.
Russell here is making the same mistake as most people today. It wasn't the "Germans collectively", it was the German government, tolerated by a mostly ignorant population with a few "hawks" to show support for the government action.
Contrary to the top post here right now, this is the same thing happening in the US right now. The government bombs another country every 1-2 years and people let it happen. We're still in appeasement times but the state already gradually disrespects individual liberties and soon America will become a collective much like the one described in the article.
Well, I must disagree and say it was the "Germans collectively", at least in a large part (37% of them voted for Hitler in his last real election), but in their defense, it was the Treaty of Versailles, imposed upon the nation at the end of WWI, that basically forced them into this position.
Remember, Hitler and the National Socialist's were voted into party thru democratic means, although to be sure, democracy was never really a part of the German zeitgeist back then.
All the major players knew the ToV was going to lead to another war, and it sowed the seed for the rise of some sort of militaristic, Fascist government.
Well, with Obama (who was elected by the American people) attacking at least two souvereign countries (Lybia, Syria) will you hold the American population responsible?
More generally, if I vote today for X and tomorrow X turns out to be a murderer, will you hold it against me because I can only vote every 5 years?
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I think it would be too easy to say that it was only the German government responsible for what happened. Below is a key quote:
What has happened? What has happened is quite simple. Those elements of the population which are both brutal and stupid (and these two qualities usually go together) have combined against the rest.
And another quote from Hannah Arendt:
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
The problem might be that the "mob" is getting stronger for various reasons and there is an active elite that is eager to exploit them for their own gain.
"The government bombs another country every 1-2 years"
This is dumbing down history. The world would as we know it would not exist without all the US army involvement around the world in the last 100 years: notably WWI,WWII, the cold war, & many more.Some less glorious, indeed. But it's not "bombing every 1-2 years" but a mixture of defending freedom, sometimes financial interests, mistakes and more. But overall, there would not be a "free world" without the US power and the will to use it
If only US military involvement was only in WW1 & 2. The US was one of the good guys then, sure. Most of the other conflicts US army has taken part sound like a powertrip from an arrogant white man. Indian wars and the resulting genocide, Vietnam war where the french wanted the US to spank their unruly colony into submission... I'm sorry to say, the parties who like to smear US have quite enough fact based material.
That said, I'm not claiming US is evil but it's not a force of good either.
You might be interested in reading about Operation Condor.
FWIW, I believe one good deed doesn't "neutralize" a bad one.
Yeats's The Second Coming, written in 1919 and following the cataclysm of the First World War, conveyed the same horrific and accurate vision of the future:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Reminds me of Yeats' The Second Coming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)):
Is there a way forward? A way to avoid the same mistakes and perhaps save humanity from the triumph of stupidity?
I believe there is, but for me the skepticism comes from my belief that there are a lot of 'well-read' people today thanks to the internet, Google and Wikipedia, although not many critical readers and thinkers. The best illustration of this for me is in the movie "Good Will Hunting", where the main character overhears a cocky college student, and puts him in his place [1]. That scene epitomizes a large portion of talk I hear about me, but with no real substance, or a Will Hunting to put them in their intellectual place. I think we don't teach basic critical thinking any more except in special classes or programs when it should be part of every class - common sense.
there's a kinda funny part in the Daodejing (or, Tao Te Ching, by the old Giles-Wade latinization of Chinese):
(3) Not to value and employ men of superior ability is the way to keep the people from rivalry among themselves; not to prize articles which are difficult to procure is the way to keep them from becoming thieves; not to show them what is likely to excite their desires is the way to keep their minds from disorder.
Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones.
He constantly (tries to) keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act (on it). When there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal.
---
I think our elites most of the time do a good job at the "empty their minds" bit. Spread a lot of confusion, FUD, and nobody dares to do anything. They are failing on the "fill their bellies" front, that's something to work on.
I find the passage kinda funny, since eastern philosophies are very popular nowadays mostly because of a hippie outlook on what they say. This part is in a way very cold and calculated. Daoism is pretty level-headed, my favorite of all eastern schools, along with some elements of Zen.
No. Just enjoy the ride.
I think it's not stupidity (nor the Dunning Kruger Effect) that leads mankind astray; it's groupthink, in any shape or form. When you blind yourself to whether you and your allies do more harm than good, in service of some abstract ideal or philosophy, you fail.
Fukuyama presents an interesting counterpoint in The End of History (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...):
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
Today, Americans shouldn't take this as luck, but as a cautionary tale.
Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Göring, and the other leaders of the National Socialist party were horribly brutal, but they were not stupid. They were some of the brightest in the most well-educated country in the world. The same goes with French influenced Marxists such as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Bertrand Russell is right on many points, but he's terribly wrong to think the enemies of civilization are stupid. Read Machiavelli.
Russell wrote this piece in 1933, just one year before US government confiscated gold from its citizens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102). "Brightest spot" didn't last long.
> The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
It was Hume and Kant who injected skepticism back into Western thought and are responsible for empowering the stupid, including the Nazis. If you know the cause of your plight then you can fix the effect.
I think it's simpler than that. Politics attract assholes and intelligent people avoid assholes.
For me it was present day US in place of Germany.
It would be interesting if people reading this would say here which country they associated Germany to. I suppose almost all the countries will be on the list.
So an interesting question would be which country you associated the US in the essay to?
Opportunist here, riding on the popularity of this post. See my recent post which is partly along the lines of thoughts expressed by Bertrand Russel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611416 Summary - readers who think that vast majority of individuals are 'stupid' - please contact me. One of the failings of 'sane' intelligent people is that we do not band together.
Written in 1933. In the same year, Heidegger joined the Nazi party.
Now go figure who was the most prescient of the two.
aka the raging cretinisation of the world or overfitting, from data science jargon; second time in a row I'm forced to write this here on HN, I'm probably overfitted too. :(
>>> By murder, by torture, by imprisonment, by the terrorism of armed forces, they have subjected the intelligent and humane parts of the nation and seized power with the view of furthering the glory of the Fatherland.
reminds of current US foreign policy.
So true and painful to read. I wonder if humanity will ever evolve and leave behind its selfish, egocentric, and brutal ways.
This does not belong here.
As opposed to all those links you posted that do belong here?
Really, if you don't like it that much and you believe it does not belong here you can flag it. But the best way to make HN into what you feel it should be is to post good links and to visit the new page to upvote the things that you feel do belong here.
Fair enough.
Meta:
We get these comments pretty regularly. Perhaps something could be done to avoid them - like the "Add Comment" page having some basic guidelines. A reminder of etiquette, the things that get downvoted, how to properly object (ie flag)?
It's a worthy sentiment but it's also a useless comment in that people who don't want to read the story should [and will largely have] just step over it whilst those who think it should appear here will read and so will naturally downvote such an objection.
In a sense, one can see how the Nazis' commitment to a brutal racial hierarchy undermined their ability to win WW2 (i.e. Jewish physicists left the country). On the other hand, is this being put forth as a serious theory of historical change? Wouldn't it be better to look at objective conditions (e.g. austerity conditions imposed after WW1, rampant anti-semitism) rather than whether or not the Nazis were 'stupid'? As nasty as they were, I doubt that Hitler, Goering, Himmler, etc. would appear as stupid today. Also, wouldn't the decades long commitment to eugenics on the part of many of Russell's friends, including forced sterilization, suggest that the intelligent should be full of doubt?
I found this worthwhile.
Why not?
Oh, and because it invariably leads to comments which are in breach of HN guidelines. See these comments about Donald Trump?
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Really? This is an old text saying that nazis were stupid and americans were not. I don't think that this qualifies as "[something] that good hackers would find interesting". It must have been posted here as a way to warn people to "not be stupid" or something?
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By murder, by torture, by imprisonment, by the terrorism of armed forces, they have subjected the intelligent and humane parts of the nation and seized power with the view of furthering the glory of the Fatherland.
^ The terrorism of armed forces part is particularly important. We tend to think that terrorism is something crazy non-state actors do in religious or delusional fervor, but it is really just the use of violence to achieve certain political ends. This is precisely what the American army started doing around the world after World War II. If you include psychological manipulation with it as well, as recently evidence by the disclosure that the DOD was paying NFL to propagandize during games, we get a very concerning picture of the role of the US military in today's world and in the US itself.
In this gloomy state of affairs, the brightest spot is America. In America democracy still appears well established, and the men in power deal with what is amiss by constructive measures, not by pogroms and wholesale imprisonment.
^ How dated that sounds. Wonder what Russell would say about the America of today, with the oligarchy entrenching itself to replace a democracy, a wide-scale militarization of the police, a pogrom against Muslims in some southern states, the wholesale imprisonment of African Americans, and the popularity of near-fascist leaders like Donald Trump.
"a pogrom against Muslims in some southern states"
That's just untrue. A pogrom is an organized massacre of an ethnic group - it's not happening, in southern states or anywhere else in the US.
littletimmy, how about citing sources for these extraordinary claims ("a pogrom against Muslims in some southern states")? I can't believe it wouldn't be widely known in the current "politically correct" environment.
Even if you are now aware that "pogrom" wasn't the right word to describe something "against Muslims" that is worrying you, please do write what that is.
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He created the Russel Tribunal, so I guess he will not be very happy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Tribunal
Very interesting, I'd never heard of this. Thanks.
Oh man, I hadn't heard about the DOD thing. Here's a link for anyone too lazy to look it up themselves
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/defense-military-tribute...
$6.8 million in the context of the US defence budget doesn't seem that big a deal to me - that's a rounding error in terms of the Pentagon recruitment budget (which appears to be in the range of low tens of billions).
NB I'm not trying to be pro-military - just noting that armed forces everywhere need to recruit and they will have to spend money to get their message out there and a football game seems as good a place as any. I've seen military sponsorship of school level rugby games here in the UK.
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>it is really just the use of violence to achieve certain political ends.
That's not terrorism, that's just war. All wars use violence to achieve political ends. Terrorism is the use of the fear of unpredictable attacks against a civilian population to prompt a high-impact political response, like war or revolution. Not all violence is terrorism.
Stay-behind paramilitary organizations like Gladio were associated with old-fashioned terrorist attacks in Italy.
> How dated that sounds.
It's also somewhat idealistic. After all, it was only in 1920 (13 years before the essay was written) that in the US women got the right to vote. And even today in some states felons are not allowed to vote.
Edit: And of course people under 18 also don't have the right to vote.
And women voting in Switzerland: only since 1971:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage_in_Switzerlan...
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Donald Trump is near-fascist? I thought he is fascist through and through.
He's not coherent enough to be any one thing in political terms.