Could you please explain the forum rules? I submitted continue as a new topic, but it disappeared from the Pending section.
Oops, meant to post that to jkop
No worries, I figured it was something like that.
I’m not familiar with the genre, but if it’s like the other postmodern philosophies it seems to be about breaking down, or through, established orthodoxies. Which is fine when discussing the world, but when it comes to politics and running countries and societies, is likely to be destructive.
There may be some new meanings, or context, but populism always goes back to the same political ideology. Divide and rule, victimise minorities, blame outside groups, either real, or imagined. These prejudices work, which is why they are used. Particularly racism, their most powerful tool.
There may be new ways that populism on the left is working. That’s something I still haven’t got to grips with, as it’s quite new in the U.K.
Populism is primitive rhetoric designed to influence particular groups of voters.
In contemporary society, populism is practically the only language of power, or at least almost the only one.
The real question is which forms of populism are considered legitimate, and which are declared dangerous or unacceptable.
Great OP !
I think you hit the nail on the head. While the poor have long been screwed, the system that screws them is more and more dematerialized and faceless.
Have you looked into the metaphor of Moloch for incentive structures that trap those within them ?
Bostrom makes an offhanded reference of the possibility of a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered. It’s easy enough to imagine such a state. Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.
So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.
I briefly worked as a software dev, and I sometimes check in. These days it’s all about the same A. I. that threatens developer job security. So to get a job you have to hype your ability to make yourself obsolescent.
This is only part of a larger long-form essay — roughly one chapter out of eight. Please take a look at my other topics as well. I have already published one more.
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Well if it’s a politician telling you this, best not to take it too seriously.
So are we talking of the Overton window, or an academic salon?