Submitted by subrosa in lobby (edited )

Today I argued with a buncha libs on Twitter, which is a complete waste of time, in the sense that it doesn't change any minds. I do it because I wanna understand the 'mechanisms' of their reasoning, or something.

Today I realized that, to most people, progress means improving what already is.

It means building on top of everything we've 'accomplished' so far, and racing towards a better future by constantly improving the status quo: Capitalism and state are inventions that changed the world, now the task is to improve them. Like we do with cars and computers. If you wanna change the system, go ahead, invent a better one and prove that it works. Otherwise we won't switch to your thing.

My own ideals and ideas are mostly defined by opposition to what is. I'm all about tearing down systems of control, borders, barriers, norms, standards, mind-prisons. This of course doesn't sit well with the 'additive progress' mindset. Tearing down stuff, to most people, is the same as losing progress. It's like giving up on something 'good' and starting from scratch. A voluntary 'game over', basically.

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El_Sabate wrote

I've noticed the same thing about liberals. The loss-aversion mechanism seems to kick in strongly for a lot of them.

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masque wrote

Not trying to sound like a STEMlord/tech bro here, but I tend to think about the difference between liberals and radicals in the context of an optimization problem. You can argue that the standard neolib incremental-improvements method of politics is basically a greedy algorithm, and is thus liable to get stuck in local maxima.

Liberals tend to assume that the local maximum of capitalism is also the global maximum, while radicals believe that the global maximum lies somewhere else, and that we need to take a more drastic step in the space-of-possible-societies to get there. Of course, such a step necessarily involves moving away from the local maximum of capitalism (i.e. things will need to get worse, at least at first, before they can get better), and this is basically what revolution is.

I'm thinking about actually formalizing this & writing it up into an essay or series of essays, but I don't know where I would publish it, or whether it would really add much to the discourse.

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Twisted wrote

To be fair, both views are correct. If you build upon an existing thing and make it better (depending on your version of 'better') it's considered, "progress". If you build something from scratch, or from the remains of the original that was torn down to rebuild it as you said, and it's 'better', then it is also "progress."

But that's just my own opinion.

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subrosa OP wrote

Yeah, I'm not saying they're wrong necessarily. Just that it's this particular idea of progress that limits their ability to grasp/envision progress outside of tiny improvements of what already is.

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rot wrote

This is why I've started describing myself as 'anti-progress'

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