Socialism explained as the expression of a conceptual disorder

Political Philosophy
1

Socialism can be explained in regards to it’s failures, as being based on incorrectly conceiving of choosing in terms of it being a process of selection of the best option.

The correct definition of choosing is in terms of spontaneity, in terms of that a decision can turn out one way or another in the moment that the decision is made.

The concept of subjectivity / opinion, depends on choosing to be defined in terms of spontaneity, in order for it to function.

Under the psychological pressure to do their best, and for other psychological reasons, people commonly prefer to conceive of choosing incorrectly in terms of figuring out the best option.

Which means, that they then have no functioning concept of subjectivity anymore. Although they still have the intuitive understanding of how subjectivity works, so that they are still able to express subjective opinions, they have no intellectual understanding of it anymore.

Having no functioning concept of subjectivity makes these “selectionists” unable to deal with their emotions, which is why their emotions become morbid.

Then the selectionists try to compensate for these morbid emotions, by generating more feelings of doing their best, which feelings are associated to their incorrect idea of choosing in terms of selection of the best option.

And that explains the basic socialist mindset. People who have morbid emotions, who then go out of their way to fight for some cause, not because they care, but just for their own emotional survival.

So this is why socialist policies on any issue will always be extremely exaggerated, because the exaggeration serves the purpose of generating more feelings of doing their best.

In this explanation of socialism there is both left wing and right wing socialism. Although I am not precisely clear what the difference would be, it seems that leftwing socialism is based on explaining human behavior in terms of the environment, while right wing socialism explains human behavior in terms of biology.

In any case socialists would never explain human behavior in terms of the subjectively identified human spirit choosing things, because of having no functioning concept of subjectivity.

Left wing socialist, communist China, moved to the political right over the last decades. Now they have eugenics policies for babies, genocidal policies towards Uygur and Tibetan, and the intellectuals there follow a dead german nazi philosopher named “Schmitt”.

So it shows that when a leftwing socialist moves to the political right, then you don’t get some generic conservative, but instead you get aspects of nazism.

The experience of being in a socialist country, would be this supercharged feeling of doing your best for everything. Whether you would be in nazi germany, or communist china, that feeling would be essentially the same.

Neither nazism nor communism is essentially hateful, it is instead coldhearted and calculating, because there are no essential subjective elements in a selection procedure.

When someone conceives of choosing in terms of it being a process of figuring out the best option, then any decision they make is by their definition of the verb “choose”, doing their best. So it means conscience doesn’t really function anymore.

When you would ask some socialist about their failures, then they would talk about it as some mistake in calculation, or refer to being overwhelmed with feelings of doing their best.

The other day I watched a short documentary on explaining attrocities of nazi soldiers, based on the evidence of what they wrote and said. Several different conclusions were offered by historians. The documentary repeatedly mentioned the soldiers being extremely obsessive in the letters they wrote, in doing their task well. That in my opinion is the key finding which indicates that the soldiers had a conceptually disordered selectionist mindset. So that the attrocities can be explained in terms of the soldiers optimizing some goal with the attrocity, and having a reduced emotional basis, because of having no functioning concept of subjectivity.

So you can chew over the evidence, and see how far you can get with my explanation, which is pretty far. For example, the communists are commonly atheists, which is consistent with having no functioning concept of subjectivity. The nazis objectified personal character with racial science, which proves they did not understand to identify personal character with a chosen opinion. etc.

And look at the current socialist social justice warriors. Would a very large percentage of them have mental illness? Which would be consistent with the prediction of emotional morbidity. Do they really care for their causes, or do they just use the feelings of doing their best, for their own emotional survival?

2

Sounds like an extreme position.

I was an inadequate socialist for some years. In Richard Rorty’s terminology, I would say I was on the reformist left rather than the cultural left, where the so-called “woke” groups are often located.

I think there are layers to any belief system. In my heyday, many socialists I knew were also Christian and saw significant overlap between the message of the Gospel and the core ideas of democratic socialism. Christian socialism has been popular in many parts of the world. Not to mention the more austere Latin American liberation theology, which remains influential in some Catholic circles today.

But don’t you think most belief systems sit on a continuum, ranging from what some might describe as “batshit-crazy” libertarian fascism through to more nuanced conservative views with a strong attachments to tradition?

I think we need to talk to individuals to understand what they think and why, rather than painting everyone with the same brush. I’m prone to pointing the finger at groups I think are defective too.

The tendency to dismiss people with different values as mentally ill strikes me as unhelpful. It shuts down understanding before the conversation has begun.

The mental illness epithet is an easy but pointless cliché, given how often it gets thrown at Trump supporters, Ayn Rand fanboys, anti-vaxxers, religious fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists, and political extremists of all stripes.

3

All this looks like a retrospective prescriptive model, with an attempt to extrapolate the conclusions into the future.

4

What about communism and nazism then, at some point an ideology has to be analyzed. And I don’t just say socialists are crazy, I make very specific accusations, so that any socialist can specifically address the idea how they think choosing works etc.

I’m not sure if nazism is on the right of the overall political spectrum, it is certainly to the right of communism.

5

Communism and Nazism are two children of Western philosophy and Western culture. They are often presented as if they were something external to the West, some kind of deviation or alien intrusion, but in fact they are two logical continuations of modernity itself.

Communists are the far left, so almost everything will appear more right-wing in relation to them. In that sense, saying that Nazism is “to the right of communism” does not tell us very much.

6

Could be. I think there’s some agreement on that.

Apart from the odd exemption, calling belief systems “crazy” probably isn’t sufficiently insightful. As I suggested earlier, belief systems come in both extreme and moderate forms, and sometimes outliers are taken to represent the entire group when they are, in fact, only a negligible percentage.

Of course, any evaluation of a belief system has to be made against some standard. If you say Reform UK is extreme, one might ask: compared to what? Compared to other anti-immigration groups? Compared to the centrist positions most mainstream parties tend to promote? Or compared to historical forms of extremism?

People come to their views from different places. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of today’s supposedly “woke” views become standard social views in decades to come. But who knows? I’ve met a few “woke” people and they strike me as sincere and sometimes zealous. Many are articulate and well read. I think of some “woke” people as resembling religious figures, with an overwrought drive to protect what they see as sacred. I wouldn’t want to spend much time with them, but to be honest, some of the hippies I met were equally earnest and also not fun to be around.

7

What a bizarre claim. I’m a democratic socialist, and no more mentally ill than the average Joe or Jane. I’m curious: what would prompt you to categorize a mainstream philosophical or political position as a mental illness?

8

You both aren’t responding to the extremely specific argument I made.

What matters in regards to my theory, is whether socialists conceive of choosing in terms of selection, like I say they do, or if they conceive of it in terms of spontaneity. And then what logically follows from conceiving of choosing in terms of selection.

So you can chew over the evidence, and in my opinion the evidence clearly shows, as clear as you can ever be with these kinds of issues, that it’s true. I already mentioned various evidence. You can just explore the issue, and come to a conclusion.

For instance it is shown that “liberals” in the usa have a very significantly higher rate of mental illness than conservatives.

Or that kind of performative gushing over values. It is expressive of the values that are used in a selection procedure to evaluate the options with.

9

Do you live in the U.S.? Do you consider yourself a conservative? Tell us a bit more what you understand that to mean. Who are some public figures who you think exemplify the political views you espouse?

10

OK, I can see this is going nowhere.

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11

Nowhere would be an improvement.

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12

I have engaged with what I take to be the salient point, but you seem so attached to your preconception that perhaps you are unable to register this.

As per above, it’s a broad group with different reasons for holding the beliefs they have, not to mention holding a range of different beliefs.

In relation to left leaning folk having higher levels of mental ill health, even if this is true, it doesn’t tell us if their political positions are wrong. Mental illness, like depression, may well be formed in part by experiences of bigotry and trauma which may be useful lived experience to help inform progressive politics.

if the view is simply that leftists are mentally ill and therefore their beliefs are erroneous and delusional, you’re just in the same hyperbolic space the extremists of the left and right play in.

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13

No, it’s just non-responsive to the argument. Certainly for nazism you should understand that we have to analyze it in regards to it’s failures. To then say, oh nazis were all kinds of people with different reasons for coming to it, that is unsatisfactory analysis. There are lots of historians and also philsophers analyzing nazism, and they have the diverse conclusions. And then I also have my theory about it, which applies more broadly to socialism in general.

By all means, if you disagree with my theory, then state that it doesn’t appear to you that socialists are significantly more selectionist in their idea of what it means to choose, than average.

You can explore the issue, and come to a conclusion about it.

14

But this I would say is precisely correct about Nazism. That’s certainly what I got from my reading of the history of Nazism and from first hand accounts of my parents who were caught up in the war in Europe. People come to things for different reasons, they are rarely monolithic.

No, they are not more anything precisely because they are not monolithic. What counts as socialism and how socialism is understood varies greatly between socialists.

But there might be common ground between extremists of any persuasion - are ultra woke and MAGA types similar in how they frame issues? Perhaps.

What part of your quesion does this miss out on?

Maybe you can rewrite this so I can understand what precisely you mean by it as it is pretty vague: are significantly more selectionist in their idea of what it means to choose, than average.

15

I won’t know if I like Socialism until I can smell it first. My guess is that it’s more like patchouli than it is ‘Red Moscow’ - the official perfume of Communism. :wink:

16

It’s from the perspective of understanding of how subjectivity works. The spirit chooses, and the spirit is identified with a chosen opinion. Decisions are made out of emotion, and emotions are identified with a chosen opinion. Decisions are made out of personal character, and personal character is identified with a chosen opinion. The logic of subjectivity only functions when choosing is defined in terms of spontaneity, because then you get the link from the decision, to the subjective emotions and personal character doing the choosing, as belonging to a decision-maker.

But when choosing is conceived of in terms of selection of options, then the decisions refer back to the values that were used to evaluate the options with, and not to the subjective emotions and personal character.

So if people conceive of choosing in terms of selection of options, then they have no functioning concept of subjectivity. And then you get a selectionist mindset, where the emotions become morbid because of not having a functioning concept of subjectivity, which is then compensated by generating feelings of doing your best, which feelings are associated to the idea of choosing in terms of selection of the best option.

And this is what I argue is the basis of the socialist attitude.

And then everywhere it is indicated that socialists don’t understand how subjectivity works, then it is evidence for the thesis. And where it is indicated that they do understand it, then it is evidence against the thesis.

17

Thank you for a polite discussion. Pretty sure I have nothing further to offer on the subject. Take care.