Deplorable Yankee
Diamond Member
To understand what it’s like to be a radical, it helps to speak to those once held under the sway of a radical ideology. Broadly defined, radicalism implies a rejection of compromise and incremental progress in favor of radical change, and for years I believed that Western capitalist society was beyond redemption and in need of a sweeping revolution. There were those who perpetuated a system of oppression and exploitation, and those who sought to overthrow it.
In The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope, the philosopher Roger Scruton outlines the fallacies underlying this mindset, such as “the best case fallacy,” which “imagines the best outcome and assumes that it need consider no other,” and “the utopian fallacy,” which insists that the perfect is the enemy of the good. These can be summed up under the rubric of “unscrupulous optimism,” a concept originally coined by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Assuming that intentions translate directly into results, radicals tend to be unscrupulous optimists in that they operate on the premise that well-intentioned radical change, however destructive, can only lead to improvement.
They forget, however, that “human societies may retrogress disastrously,” as the economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell puts it in his analysis of Marxism. “Ignoring the dangers of retrogression can mean sliding into the belief that ‘nothing could be worse’ than the existing society being criticized.” This belief is reinforced by a tendency to compare the status quo not to history but to an imaginary future of human perfection. Any society that falls short of this fantasy is seen as an abomination. This can lead to false and dangerous equivalencies. It may, for instance, obfuscate the distinction between democracy and autocracy, between being governed and being ruled, which, from a utopian standpoint, can seem like a distinction without a difference.
This attitude often goes hand in hand with what Scruton calls “the born free fallacy”—the view that the laws and institutions of modern civilized society reduce human freedom. In fact, as the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker expertly demonstrates in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, these laws and institutions free us from living in constant fear and danger of violent death. Much the same is true for poverty, famine, and a host of other scourges, which have also declined thanks to what the MIT scientist Andrew McAfee calls “the four horsemen”: capitalism, technological progress, public awareness, and responsive government.
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My Former Life as a Radical - Quillette
Democrat socialist and the leftwing hate filled nazis ...minting new free thinking men and women from all walks of life on a daily basis
In The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope, the philosopher Roger Scruton outlines the fallacies underlying this mindset, such as “the best case fallacy,” which “imagines the best outcome and assumes that it need consider no other,” and “the utopian fallacy,” which insists that the perfect is the enemy of the good. These can be summed up under the rubric of “unscrupulous optimism,” a concept originally coined by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Assuming that intentions translate directly into results, radicals tend to be unscrupulous optimists in that they operate on the premise that well-intentioned radical change, however destructive, can only lead to improvement.
They forget, however, that “human societies may retrogress disastrously,” as the economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell puts it in his analysis of Marxism. “Ignoring the dangers of retrogression can mean sliding into the belief that ‘nothing could be worse’ than the existing society being criticized.” This belief is reinforced by a tendency to compare the status quo not to history but to an imaginary future of human perfection. Any society that falls short of this fantasy is seen as an abomination. This can lead to false and dangerous equivalencies. It may, for instance, obfuscate the distinction between democracy and autocracy, between being governed and being ruled, which, from a utopian standpoint, can seem like a distinction without a difference.
This attitude often goes hand in hand with what Scruton calls “the born free fallacy”—the view that the laws and institutions of modern civilized society reduce human freedom. In fact, as the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker expertly demonstrates in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, these laws and institutions free us from living in constant fear and danger of violent death. Much the same is true for poverty, famine, and a host of other scourges, which have also declined thanks to what the MIT scientist Andrew McAfee calls “the four horsemen”: capitalism, technological progress, public awareness, and responsive government.
All links highlighted ...lil long and you can Read the rest @
My Former Life as a Radical - Quillette
Democrat socialist and the leftwing hate filled nazis ...minting new free thinking men and women from all walks of life on a daily basis