would you rsther live in progressive dictatorship where your life is stable or a freedom country where your life is on stable but on constant pressure to be better
disclaimer this is just a would you rather not mentioning any country
We call things good and bad every day.
A good person. A bad decision. A good society. A bad relationship. Good intentions. Bad behaviour.
But ask a simple question:
What makes good good?
The answer becomes surprisingly difficult.
We often inherit our definitions from our families, religions, cultures, political tribes, laws, or personal feelings. We know what we think is good and bad, but that is not the same thing as knowing what good and bad are.
If morality is going to mean anything beyond preference, we need a reason for the distinction.
I think that reason can be found in the structure of Reality itself.
Look closely at almost anything that exists and you will find the same basic relationship.
It is a whole.
It is made of parts.
It is part of a greater whole.
A cell is a whole, made of parts, and part of an organism.
A person is a whole, made of parts, and part of a family, community, ecosystem, society, and ultimately Reality.
A tree is a whole, made of roots, branches, cells, and tissues, while also being part of a forest.
The pattern continues across scales.
This gives us three realities that must be acknowledged simultaneously:
wholeness, composition, and participation.
And from those three relationships, I think we can derive something remarkably concrete about morality.
A whole must maintain enough integrity to remain itself.
That requires protection.
But no whole exists completely independently. It depends upon relationships among its own parts and relationships with things beyond itself.
That requires connection.
So:
Good protects and connects.
Protection honours individuality.
Connection honours relationship.
Neither is sufficient by itself.
Protection without connection becomes isolation, domination, exclusion, or stagnation.
Connection without protection becomes exploitation, dissolution, dependency, or the destruction of individuality.
A healthy boundary does both. It protects the whole while allowing appropriate connection across the boundary.
That is why goodness cannot simply mean inclusion. Sometimes exclusion is good.
Goodness cannot simply mean freedom. Sometimes limiting an action is good.
Goodness cannot simply mean survival. Sometimes a part must die for the greater whole to survive.
Goodness cannot simply mean productivity. Something can be extraordinarily productive while destroying the system around it.
Goodness cannot simply mean maximizing possibilities. Preventing someone from enslaving another person removes a possibility. That reduction in possibility is good because it protects the integrity of other wholes and their ability to participate freely in the greater whole.
Good and bad cannot be determined from one dimension alone.
If good follows from the relationship between whole, parts, and greater whole, bad follows from the failure of that relationship.
Bad fails to protect, fails to connect, or does one at the expense of the other.
Cancer is an unusually clear physical example.
A cancer cell is still a living whole. But its relationship with the greater whole has become destructive. It proliferates at the expense of the organism of which it is a part.
From the perspective of the cancer alone, unlimited growth might look like success.
From the perspective of the organism, it is catastrophic.
The mistake is treating the interests of one level as though they were the only interests that exist.
The opposite mistake is also possible. A society cannot justify destroying individuals merely by declaring that doing so benefits "the greater good." The individual is not only a part. The individual is also a whole.
Both truths matter.
I am a whole, and I am a part.
That single sentence rejects both absolute individualism and absolute collectivism.
This also explains something that simpler moral systems struggle with.
Destruction is not inherently bad.
A cell can die to protect an organism.
A tree can fall and nourish a forest.
A predator can kill and remain part of a healthy ecosystem.
A person can end a relationship because maintaining the connection is destroying their integrity.
A society can restrict someone's freedom to enslave another person.
In each case, looking at only one part of the relationship produces an incomplete moral judgment.
The question is not simply:
Was something protected?
Nor is it simply:
Was something connected?
We have to ask how protection and connection operate across the whole structure.
What happened to the whole?
What happened to its parts?
What happened to the greater whole?
This is why knowledge matters to morality.
I've said for a long time:
The more you know, the better you can do.
Imagine someone gives you a basket of fruit.
You see healthy food that can nourish people. It appears good.
Then you learn that the fruit was harvested through child slavery.
The fruit didn't suddenly change.
Your understanding of its relationships changed.
You now know something about the people involved, the process that produced it, the suffering hidden behind it, and the larger system supporting its production.
Your moral understanding changes because your understanding of Reality became more complete.
That does not mean morality itself became subjective.
It means your knowledge was incomplete.
Every conscious being encounters Reality from an individual point of view.
My experience is mine.
Your experience is yours.
Those perspectives are private, but they are not separate universes.
We encounter each other through a shared Reality.
So morality cannot be reduced entirely to subjectivity or objectivity.
It concerns individual subjects interacting within objective shared Reality.
My pain matters because I am a whole.
Your pain matters because you are a whole.
Our relationship matters because neither of us exists only as an isolated whole.
And the larger systems affected by our actions matter because we are parts of them.
Morality emerges from acknowledging all of these relationships rather than pretending one level is the only one that matters.
So perhaps good and bad do not need to begin as arbitrary commandments handed down to us.
They can begin with something observable about existence itself:
Everything is a whole.
Everything is made of parts.
Everything is part of a greater whole.
From this comes an ethical principle:
Honor individuality and connection.
Protect without unnecessarily severing connection.
Connect without destroying individuality.
Recognize the integrity of the whole, the needs of its parts, and its responsibilities as part of something greater.
And keep learning, because our moral judgments can only account for the relationships we are capable of seeing.
The more you know, the better you can do.
Good protects and connects.
Bad fails to protect, fails to connect, or sacrifices one for the other.
And the reason isn't simply that someone decided these things were good or bad.
It follows from what we are: wholes made of parts, participating as parts of greater wholes.
I recently got into an argument with a prominent abstract artist; his most famous piece is a banana duct taped to a page, it's relatively well known. He posted an argument about how fascists fetishize reality, and that their art reflects it, alongside he posted some of the most significant and beautiful statues from the renaissance era, inspired by classical Greek and Roman statues. We engaged in a conflict, where I argued it's foolish to compare the history of one's entire ancestors, ethnicity, and region, to one extremely militant 20th century faction which came years after and doesn't reflect the morals or values of modern Europeans. Is this just controlled opposition? Or is it ignorance on their part to see the creations of my ancestors and say it's something that it very very clearly, is not.
Edit: What is even more damning is that I learned that his version of the piece isn't even the original banana taped to a wall; he literally had to copy the idea from someone else.
Suggest me some political theory books to begin with, in order to be more active in class with good intellect value, and least personal biases. Note: I am a beginner, 2nd year pol science hons student, and the fact I get a bit bored of books🥀BUT THIS TIME I AM PROFOUNDLY DETERMINED TO READ GOOD BOOKS
Science is both an idealized method of inquiry and a fallible institutional process. Hence, we should trust an expert consensus based on the scientific method, but also should examine critically the extent to which there genuinely is such a consensus (or conversely an alleged dissensus), especially when civil liberties are infringed on scientific grounds. The more extreme the infringement, the more robust must be the scientific consensus supporting it, particularly on issues of health and safety.
We also therefore need to be aware that vested interests might distort or misrepresent the level of scientific consensus (in either direction) through means such as:
If a significant minority of qualified experts opposes a public policy as being too harmful or risky, a favorable majority opinion might still justify implementation of the policy on a trial basis, but not to the point of seriously infringing civil liberties, such as by imposing on individuals an involuntary acceptance of substantial harm/risk. Even if the majority view claims that failure to implement the policy would itself be too harmful or risky, nonexperts should not (be expected to) have greater confidence in this or either opinion than do qualified experts who reject the view in good faith. Just as nonexperts are quite rightly considered incompetent to refute an expert consensus, they are likewise incompetent to adjudicate a scientific controversy, and in such circumstances should have the freedom, individually or democratically, to choose a precautionary or minimax approach, on the reasonable (but rebuttable) presumption that each side has a non-negligible possibility of being right.
Does a young Israeli has to be morally guilty?
If he refuses to enlist and does not serve in the military, he is seen as a criminal by Israeli society and by Israel’s supporters around the world, but if he does serve, he is seen as morally guilty by those who oppose Israel and believe that Israel is violating international law or worst.
I’m only asking for the philosophical question, not for a political debate.
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Depending on the culture, era, and social structure, property is extended to living things, not just material. So if all people are entitled to life, liberty, and property, but the ownership of another person takes away the owned persons right to liberty, then does that mean that the owner’s right to property has been infringed upon? Which right is more important? What does property really mean?
Locke argues that every person owns their own body and, by extension, the physical labor produced by that body. Locke explicitly states that "every man has a property in his own person." Because your body and labor are uniquely yours, nobody else can ever own you. But what happens when language and social/governmental institutions are used to degrade the humanity of a person or people? Language is very powerful.
In the realm of human rights, there are many conflicting views that make true universalism near impossible to accomplish: Islamic, Western, and Asian. In Islamic countries, the concept of owning women is seen as normal. To Western societies, it is seen as barbaric and outdated. However, at one point in time, Western societies owned people too, and they still implement systems that make it difficult for those minorities to succeed. Scholars of Political Theory and International Human Rights have attempted to steer the ways in which we view political rights and wrongs away from Western Triumphalism and Eurocentrism.
Having said that, on the topic of Islamic countries owning women, they also believe that having multiple women is a status symbol. Would this violate Locke’s Limits on Property even if, by Locke’s definition, people are not considered property? Would the act of acquiring more partners than you can truly care for and appreciate still violate the moral boundaries that Locke has outlined? Also, in the Lockean Proviso, he states that appropriation of resources from nature is only valid if there is "enough, and as good, left in common for others". With over 8 billion people on the planet, does this mean that there are enough people available for polygamy to not be considered overconsumption of “resources?” But then there is the statistical population differences between genders that needs to be considered.
How does one truly define property? Can culture overrule the moral boundaries Locke has established? If animals can be considered property (i.e, pets, livestock, etc), and humans are also, by definition, animals, what protections and universal definitions are truly in place now to prevent specific human beings from being defined as “animals” or “property.” If scholars are concerned about Western Triumphalism and Eurocentrism being pushed as a global moral standard for human rights protections, which aspects are the ones that should be used as the universal moral standard? If we are calling out cultural flaws in Islamic traditional practices, which Western practices should, then, replace the old ones? And, if we were to implement a universalist system, claiming that the Islamic traditional practices should be abolished under this new moral law, does that violate the social contract?
If Islamic people believe in marriage freedom and religious freedom, and the supposed “World Government” or “World Order” has forced the implementation of a universal law prohibiting the the freedom of marriage, placed restrictions on the freedom of religion, and imposed a universal moral code that violates the cultural rights of the Islamic faith, does this violate, not only the social contract, but also their rights to liberty and property? (I am not arguing for slavery. I am just wondering who gets to define these terms and who gives them the power. Is there even a social contract that can be put in place worldwide).
I call it "Transprimitivism" as well as "Futurist Rewilding" and "Wildtech".
For most of human existence, we lived as hunter-gatherers, cooperating in small tribes or "bands" of people that would often be nomadic (moving from place to place), foraging plants and hunting animals. This was until something happened, roughly 12,000 years ago that we can tell, where we discovered the domestication of plants (growing them), and this shifted towards agrarian societies. This is often referred to as the "Neolithic Revolution".
This is how civilization began. More complex and stratified societies were able to form because of the increase in food supply from agriculture, which could support more people.
This came with drastic consequences, many of which were negative, brutal hierarchies become more prevalent and systemically rooted in millennia to come, such as slavery, patriarchy, settler colonialism, etc. Consequences include environmental degrading, oppression, and social alienation. Similar to Marx, I consider our value being placed in labor to be an important part of the analysis, and this causes an alienation from our natural reality.
It goes more fundamental than technology however, language itself is a form of reification that creates an abstract version of reality that ends up imposing domination, both on nature and other animals.
The only solution in my philosophy is to return to the state of nature through a "rewilding" of the human species, back to our primitive hunter-gatherer roots.
The next part of the philosophy is a proposal of how, roughly, this could be done, and that's where things get interesting.
While Thomas Hobbes got much wrong about what the actual state of nature looked like, he wasn't entirely wrong when he described it as, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". We know nature is cruel, but it's also true that civilization was a brutal project that brought a lot of damage and oppression to the homo sapiens experience.
However, Civilization has unlocked a new opportunity, one that cannot be realized yet but may eventually be possible. AI has the capacity to replace certain parts of our language-born expressions (such as writing). Many are concerned AI will make us dumber, since it will do thinking for us. This is the first step to undoing the reification by language.
Now I will think more long term. Terraforming and artificial environments. By this time, I expect that AI will make the current expressions of language no longer necessary and lost in time. Hierarchical structures will also be less necessary since AI will be handling this process in a far more efficient manner.
This ends up transitioning to a post-civilization era, where humanity can finally rewild back to their natural reality, but in a safe and controlled manner in constructed biodome habitat environments that are governed by Artificial SuperIntelligence. There is no "nasty, brutish, and short" life like the neo-paleolithic era of our ancestors. All plants are monitored and engineered to be safe, free from viruses and cruelty towards animals, and no dangerous weather conditions. We will live in harmony, happy in our tribes, ignorant of the true nature of the world (as an artificial environment replicating the state of nature in a more safe-controlled manner) as we enjoy our simple primitivist utopia, free from the reification, alienation, and structural oppression of civilization.
I made a video tracing how the Medici family was able to capture republican Florence in the medieval period.
The question I wanted to raise:
Is electoral corruption actually maladaptive, or does it function as a selection pressure that produces states better equipped to compete in the international arena of capital?
Florence's "corrupt" system produced a leading bank in Europe (with its connection to the catholic church), an internationally trusted currency (the florin), and a state that could out-finance and outlast its less corrupted republican rivals.
If a government's ability to concentrate capital and act decisively is itself a competitive advantage in a world of scarce resources and rival states, does "clean" democratic process actually put a nation at a disadvantage?
Is what we call corruption sometimes just a more honest description of what a state actually requires to compete globally?