We Can Work It Out - Politics & Philosophy | Page 61 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Wigwam said

Socialism has failed everywhere that it’s ever been tried over any length of time…….Everywhere.

Not as much failed as “has been sabotaged by the USA”. The reality is, socialism has never been given the chance to succeed, because the US comes down on it with all their might every time it appears, whether it’s through blockading them of imports, fighting proxy wars or by launchings coups and installing dictatorships. Now I’m not actually a socialist, and I think that DO is spot on by saying “we can have elements of socialism without becoming a socialist nation” but I do have to call out the one-sidedness of this viewpoint.

I’m also not going to defend the governments of places like the USSR and China. But I really don’t understand why It’s So Hard to understand that authoritarian dictatorship is not socialism. Socialism is workers control of the means of production. This was not the case in the USSR and its not the case in China now. In my book, unless a country is democratic, then any ‘socialism’ it pursues is deceiving itself, because the whole point of it is freeing the people. 

I’m already hearing on here….. ‘it’s America’s fault they failed because of meddling’ Really? Russia? China? The 6 million Ukrainians that starved to death in the 1930s America’s fault!!

Have you… ever heard of the Cold War? 

The failures of the USSR can be put down to a great many reasons, sure, but denying that the US played a huge role in their eventual downfall is absurd. The US’ tactic is well documented – force them into spending all their money on controlling a large ‘buffer zone’ of countries to protect against nuclear missiles, escalate the astronomically expensive arms race as far as possible and then draw them into various proxy wars for the same reason. 

Now capitalism is far from perfect. The inequalities of wealth extreme. Some caused by ancestry, some by criminality…….But most by productivity, genius and bloody hard work.

Now you’re getting to the point. Here’s the thing – capitalism is great at creating wealth but terrible at distributing it. And once that wealth has been consolidated in the hands of specific families in the form of classes, it persists, widening the gap in equality further and further until social mobility based on hard work (the ENTIRE point of capitalism) becomes borderline impossible. 

In a socialist country it’s harder to stomach that, everyone…. everyone who has more than you has got it by stealing it from you. That reality is really appealing to the darkest side of humanity….And it justifies corruption…..’They got what they got by corruption I must do the same to succeed’

This exact same criticism could be attributed to capitalism. 

Socialism’s appeal to the young en mass, and the well intentioned but naive …….(I can see it here) is a product of our education.

So you’re saying that people becoming more educated leads them to stop being blindly subservient to capitalism? Gee, what a surprise! 

Most people know about WWII and the Nazis…..but they know next to nothing about Russia and China….Their brutality…The millions and millions who starved to death. We fought a cold war that nearly destroyed the planet to defeat that poison……..

Erm… not really. It’s pretty well documented how terrible the crimes of the USSR were, and few except the really ignorant wouldn’t know about that. If anything, people are more ignorant to the crimes of capitalism, as demonstrated by your next quote. I’d say more people know about the crimes of Stalin than say, the Wall Street Crash. 

Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system developed. Study, (but you won’t) how it has lifted the standard of living in China……

Didn’t you just cite China as a failed socialist country? But yes, I mostly agree with this point.

Finally some hope for agreement through reflection……Close to DO’s last comment above…….Consider the countries most quoted and admired as Socialist, in truth practice compassionate Capitalism. That’s a very different kettle-of-fish. And your generations best hope.

In essence, I agree with you, particularly here. Socialism is not a terribly sound ideology, and hopefully won’t be necessitated again. But your criticisms and understanding of it seems to be way off. I think we both would end up reaching the same conclusions overall: capitalism is good, but its worst elements should be tempered by the state. I guess the difference between us would be that you see capitalism as a positive, whereas I see it as a necessary evil. 

As for Jordan Peterson… spare me. That man may hide his hatred of other people under several layers of incomprehensible word salad and seemingly well meaning ancillary information, but hatred in what he is implying is always present. 

Precisely. On the one hand, it has its advantages. A system where, say, four extremely hardworking and talented songwriters and musicians like The Beatles can rise to the top and get the success they deserve is a good thing right? Or as wigwam puts it “bloody hard work”. 

But then I look around me and see the corrupting influence of capitalism everywhere, and the ways it dehumanises and turns us into commodities. I want to be worth something more, and for my life to have more meaning, than just my material wealth and my ability to generate further wealth. When technology inevitably eventually advances further into the automation of existing jobs currently performed by humans, I don’t want to become homeless, jobless and worthless. And if I am successful, I don’t want it to be at the cost of other people’s quality of life. 

Here’s a pair of videos by a youtuber who I am a pretty big fan of, that pretty well sum up my thoughts on the subject.

The last and present generation is less well educated (particularly in terms of philosophy), because PC thought has increasingly taken over college faculties and students are exposed to a more limited and controlled areas of thought and opinion. The result being a push towards one PC approved direction.

But let’s not forget that we have the internet, something that previous generations lacked, a place where you can find a whole range of opinions that are all over the political spectrum. In this day of age, we have the balls to accept ideas that 50 years ago we wouldn’t even discuss. Not to mention, we have Wikipedia which contrary to popular belief is quite accurate.

People often treat progressivism and political correctness as bad things but they’re not, they only become so when people twist it for evil purposes like reverse discrimination but that’s not progressive, that’s regressive.

It is curious that the Wright Brothers are not there, but I do see quite a few white men there too. At worst, PC culture has simply overcompensated for the past exclusion of people of colour, as so many times throughout history white people have claimed credit for the achievements they didn’t actually do. 

As for Jordan Peterson, it’s not that I’m conditioned to see hate in his views, it’s just that it’s pretty obviously there. What’s frustrating about him is that he never says what you know he means, and if someone finishes his sentence (“so you believe this”) he acts all shocked and accuses them of putting words in his mouth. Take his analysis of women in the workforce. The obvious conclusion of his arguments is that women should return to their traditional gender roles or else only word in maternal or “agreeable” professions, but he never comes out and says that, he just skirts round the point.

To paraphrase ContraPoints, who I believe says it best, young disenchanted white men who haven’t achieved the success they were promised in life listen to people like Peterson and learn to blame their problems on what he terms “postmodern neo-Marxism” which basically seems to mean feminism, immigration and LGBTQ people. Here is where she’s particularly spot on – these men aren’t even wrong in saying that society is screwing them over, it’s just that it’s screwing everyone else over more and if they stopped blaming feminists for a second they would realise that the problem is capitalism. 

What I was thinking of when I made that claim wasn’t specifically inventions, more in terms of culture. Like how on the first expedition to find the North Pole, a black servant actually found it first, but his white team leader who arrived several hours later claimed all the credit. I watched a documentary on this a while ago, and I will get back to you if I remember the other examples they named. Another one is how genres of music with black origin are co-opted by labels who use the same ideas but sell them using a white artist (and make massive profit). We can see this with many different genres, the most notable examples being Elvis (rock and roll) and Eminem (hip hop). That’s not to say the white artists weren’t talented or anything like that, it’s just that they were given disproportionate amounts of financial support and promotion by companies taking advantage of the racism of consumers. 

This is the specific Jordan Peterson video I’m talking about. All the way through he talks about the problems of having women in certain roles or positions, but he never actually punctuates or defines his point. There’s plenty I hate about his actual ideas too, but I find this way he presents them really annoying, and it forces people like that unfortunate BBC interviewer (the clip of which I’m sure you’ve seen – he totally wiped the floor with her) to try and guess at what he’s getting at, making anyone who disagrees with him sound paranoid or whatever. 

——-

Here’s where I’ll respond to your points.

I agree with the following statements

I’ve heard him say he’s absolutely for equality of opportunity but not for equality of outcome. And I agree with that.

Both sexes should be able to be or do whatever they want….But the system for selection should be based on ability and fair to each.

See, people opposing JP do not disagree with these statements. The whole point of these “engineering outcomes” things is to ensure that equality of opportunity, as paradoxical as it may seem. The way I interpret affirmative action is this: ingrained and institutional sexism (or racism) has existed within most industries for decades, meaning that women in the past who might’ve wanted to become high up in the engineering industry would have been prevented from doing so through discrimination both legal and personal. These processes therefore seek to level the playing field in order to right that historic wrong. It may go against the principle of meritocracy in the short term, but in the long run it actually serves that goal as it helps ensure that sexist discrimination won’t prevent talented women from succeeding in certain fields in future. 

TL;DR by sacrificing meritocracy to some degree in the short term, affirmative action can increase it in the long run by stopping discrimination from preventing the success of women with the merit necessary to succeed. 

Here’s the part I really disagree with:

 Boys and girls in general have different proclivities. More boys take up engineering…….More girls become Vets.

See, it comes down to how we diagnose the problems of gender inequality in certain professions. While in reality it is probably a combination of multiple issues, you seem to put it down to biology, while I put it down to discrimination and restrictive gender roles.

I can concede that, as according to Peterson, maybe to some degree, biology might cause some women to pursue more maternal, caring jobs reflecting their biological need to be a mother. But I would argue this is a minimal influence compared to the environment in which one is raised. For example, in PE lessons at my school, boys are taught rugby and girls are taught dancing. Similarly, out-of-school rugby and dancing clubs have similar gender divides. Correspondingly, there are far more male rugby players and far more female dancers. Does this mean that there is some innate quality of being a woman that inspires in you a passion for dancing? No, of course not. It’s not that women flock to dancing because of a biological need, it’s that we are all brought up in a society that establishes and encourages gender roles, institutionally (in the schools) or not (the choice of parents which clubs they send their children to). In short: women dance because they’re taught to, not because of any non-individual predisposition to do so. 

Jordan Peterson loves to pretend that there isn’t any evidence for my side of the argument, trumpeting one particular statistic about Scandinavian countries having strong gender divides in certain professions despite efforts to eliminate them. But he is ignoring the most obvious piece of evidence of all: the sheer fact that the workforce is pretty much split 50/50 according to gender. According to his argument, then the biological maternal instincts of women would therefore lead them to choose to remain in the housewife role rather than seeking employment. But clearly this hasn’t happened: pretty soon after employment opportunities for women appeared at all in the West, women took advantage of them very quickly, creating the pretty much even split we have today.

Now this is something we can’t really accurately attribute to societal pressure: it’s not as if women in the 1940s joining the workforce for the first time were pressured into it against their nature by the great spectre of feminism. And even if we did attribute it to, say, the need to replace men who had gone off to fight in various wars, this is still a minority of cases and the trend hasn’t really reversed once those conflicts ended. 

I’m not going to try and pretend that biology plays zero role in how men and women act, since it mostly likely does, even just on a hormonal level. But this idea that any and all gender splits are due only to innate biology (rather than vast differences in upbringing and education as well as historical sexist discrimination in many industries) is typical of the defeatist right wing attitude that we should just accept negative situations because that’s the way it is and that any attempt to improve things will be thwarted by that great deity, human nature, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. 

And this leads me back to where we started, with Jordan Peterson. (I may start making rather large reaches here, so maybe don’t take this part quite as seriously as the rest of my argument). He’s a conservative, right? So he’s opposed to attempts to ensure equality both financial and social through state engineering, and would rather leave it up to the natural process or free market to decide. Therefore, feminist efforts to create gender equality in certain professions are futile and going against the natural order. But the fact that he’s so obsessed with maintaining said order is the biggest red flag for what he’s really about. My theory is that the conservative obsessions with tradition and so forth are ways for them to keep their own prejudices, such as sexism, institutional in order to keep themselves (rich, white men) at the top of the ladder. If you can frame it so that any effort to change things in a way that will disadvantage slightly reduce the overwhelming dominance of your own demographic (rich, white men) appears like it’s futile and going against the natural order of things, you can convince people to blindly join you in upholding the status quo, even when it disadvantages them. Therefore, while it may seem like Peterson’s effects to dissuade us from levelling the employment playing field are well meaning, I believe they are simply representative of his desire to retain male superiority.  

Sure, there are differences, but my point is that they aren’t nearly as useful a predictor of behavioural norms, such as choice of career, as one’s actual upbringing.

Also, affirmative action is not making white men suffer. Let’s use the example of the US Congress, where in the 2017-2019 term, 19.4% of members were female. In this case, affirmative action would be employed so that it was corrected so that Congress was evenly split between men and women, accurately reflecting the population they are supposed to represent. The whole point of it is that white men are already grossly overrepresented anyways. Reducing the HUGE advantage that they already have to a figure actually proportional to the population is not suffering. Think about this – if you are upset by the idea of a Congress that is only 50% male, and consider that to be you “suffering”, think how bad it has been for women all these years with barely one fifth representation there. Now that is suffering. 

most of it stopped by 1970

The idea that most racism and sexism stopped after 1970… where on earth are you getting that from? Racism has thankfully been reduced over the years, but that is hopelessly naive. If sexism had really stopped, then the representation of women in Congress wouldn’t be the way it is. 

And uhhhh.. I’m not getting your logic of affirmative action being racist towards Asians. It’s not about what standards different ethnic groups are held to based on stereotypes, it’s about reversing discrimination against previously marginalised groups, including Asian people. This pushes against the dominance of practically every field by white men. 

To expand my point, here’s yet another ContraPoints video, this one talking about how institutional racism still exists in the USA long after civil rights. I believe it’s a similar situation with issues of sexism.