Maybe on your side of the world, definitively not in mine.
Labor movements? yes
Let's stop third world shithole immigration by turning first world democracies into third world shitholes.
Advances in social organization (liberalism) were essential to advances in technology. Can't have one without the other (ask the local gentry).
And I thought the OP was crazy! Yikes.2/2
Technological progress ≠ social progress.
Stab in the dark and a miss. With that being said, if you can't understand what to do in the situations in the OP I don't think you should have a vote. There isn't much call for manual labour with modern technology.
Yep. Maybe universal suffrage democracy needs some kind of overrides/intervention to make sure the interests of the people, rather than the rich, are represented better. If you just let people do whatever they want they will do things like rape, kill and enslave others. At the moment those are illegal but things like you mention, which are predatory and harmful, are the norm and I'd like to think we could do better.
I don't hate the West and it would be an exaggeration to say I hate where it's going. I'm not that emotional about it, I just see that it's negative. I haven't read Leviathan or anything else by Hobbes - he, Locke and Rosseau are on my to read list but that won't happen soon. I will mention 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' as an important and underrated text on the economic aspects of this thread though. You can limit my criticism of the Enlightenment to the five points in the OP. But you can discuss other areas of it you want. Clearly some men are born superior to others. Natural caste is quite out of whack with class nowadays because we aren't in our caveman tribe.
For another simple example of me questioning whether everyone should have equal rights, I often go walking along rural paths. Every time I go I take a carrier bag, because every time people have thrown down litter. It's not like people like me, and people like them, are identical except for what we do with litter. Their mind, even soul is obviously fundamentally different to those of people like me and they influence society 24/365, everywhere they go in a negative direction.
A First World country with hundreds of thousands of troops on the streets catching and deporting illegal Third World immigrants would not be a Third World country. If you have a theoretical way of doing that without the troops, what is it? Note again I am not advocating this, just asking which people would prefer. Something similar actually happened in the US in 1954 by the way - 'Operation Wetback'. That wasn't done by the Army though, it was Border Patrol and the Police. But they only deported about a million people and there are at least 11 million illegal immigrants in the US now. I've seen 17 million quoted.
Pounding that straw man. You're assigning positions to me that I have not espoused, and your description of life in a Communist country is an absurd caricature. In fact we're gradually approaching that state of affairs in the West. Imagine if there was no minimum wage, like there didn't used to be.
(Six year olds getting scalped by factory machines while working 12 hour days for 2 shillings)
(People working full time and living in their cars)
(Foreigners living abroad own over 40 million acres of US farmland and forest, and buy $30 billion of housing a year.)
I'm sure the Founding Fathers tried hard but the Constitution has obviously failed. Apart from the fact that it has been amended 27 times. The Clintons have obviously had all those people murdered,
hundreds of politicians and celebrities have been raping children on Epstein's island, Biden and son are openly corrupt and no one does (almost) anything. At least Elizabeth Bathory and Vlad the Impaler got some house arrest. Factories and businesses etc. have replaced farmland and the Bourgeoisie have replaced the aristoracy but we're still out here working for them, usually renting or mortgaging our homes while they gorge on the fruits of our labour and behave degenerately.
Apart from a successful invasion, I don't see how anyone within the current system could put a stop to this kind of thing. Unless robots or AI or something bring something new. The only person who could change things is someone who is not beholden to the current rich elite / 'Swamp' because he has an alternative power base. In the past this could be religious but most Westerners aren't religious enough for that now, although many Muslims are. Otherwise probably a military officer, or a charismatic, populist political leader who inspires personal loyalty and uses nationalist ideology. Like Trump and MAGA/Brexit, but x10. The last person of this kind I can think of in a Western country was Generalissimo Franco, who was an aristocrat who won the Spanish Civil War for the Nationalists.
Am I Boromir with the Ring here?
Will using state/cultural power to fight evil, ultimately turn into even more evil?
Yes, there was no such thing as child labor before the XIX century, no sir.
Nirvana fallacy
Foreign investment bad.
Infinite illegal immigration is impossible. And tyranny is not necessary to enforce border security. Immigration is hugely beneficial to the country, and it's crazy how little legal immigration we allow.
People who say they want an authoritarian leader only say that if the leader is someone they agree with. You wouldn't be for it if the leader is ideologically opposed to what you hold dear.Five Points
I've tried to keep the OP as brief and simple as possible. I don't have time to write a dissertation on each point.
(1) I would prefer not to have a dictator/absolute monarch. But what if only a dictator can prevent the situation we have now? Which is so bad we're not even allowed to talk about it openly. People will then say, ah but what about when a bad person inevitably, eventually takes power? That is a weakness of that system. Then you have a serious problem. However, we have very serious problems under the current regime.
(2) Keeping things brief, my comment on (1) covers this.
(3) As unpalatable as Postmodern Man may find this, I'm not sure this is the best way to run your society. It goes against human nature. People have caste. Here's a chart of the Old Russian / East Slavic Caste system from this page (it's in Russian).
AI can read pictures but in case it helps here's the text with basic translations. These words are not easy to translate exactly and I haven't made a great effort.
ас - In this context, a kind of god
человек - person
людина - person but with a rustic tinge perhaps (It's also 'person' in Ukrainian.)
жить - life
нежить - evil, animated things without souls, like zombies or vampires
нелюдь - non-person or person of very low quality
бес - demon
кащей - a kind of central, supernatural, evil antagonist like Satan or Loki, but less powerful
An old image I have saved:
(4) Obviously people aren't equal in ability and I suspect that giving them equal rights, to the extent that we do, scuppers society.
(5) This could easily develop into a huge tangent, with people posting white knuckle rants about Pol Pot and the Killing Fields. I would prefer that not to happen. Still there can't be many people who believe in minimum government intervention into the free market nowadays.
Prompt for Thread
From 11 - 16 my maths teacher was called Mr Pointing. Once, when we were about 12, we were on an irrelevant tangent and Mr Pointing explained that when you are driving and the traffic lights go red in front of you, the most sensible thing to do is to slow right down and time your approach so that you get to the lights as they go green. The more experience you have of that road and lights the better you can time it.
When I started driving I have always done this. I mean I would have figured it out without Mr Pointing anyway. However, I know that not everyone is the same, and that people behind you often get agitated when you do this. This evening I could see the lights maybe 125 yards away turn red. I know this road well. I took the car out of gear until it slowed to a crawl, then crept foward on idle in first. Sure enough, the two cars behind me started flashing their headlights and giving long beeps on their horns, and accelerated harshly past me, only to brake quite hard and stop at the still-red lights. I caught up and stopped, then after a couple of seconds the lights changed.
Also, every time I go to the gym, out of morbid curiosity I look in the bins. They look something like this:
They are colour coded.
There are text descriptions of what goes in each bin.
There are pictures of what goes in each bin.
Without fail things are piled up in the wrong bins. I could give more examples of course. It makes me wonder, are the creatures who do this 'people'? Would a 'person' do that? Is a 'person' incapable of understanding the above cues? Should these 'people' have votes? Should they have the same rights as someone who understands what to do in the above situations? Should they be subordinated to people like me in some manner?
Uncomfortable Questions, Unpalatable Choices
Did society work better when women were subordinate to men? How about people, for instance, who have an IQ of 85 and are the third generation of living their whole lives on benefits, in government-subsidised housing, committing petty crime? That kind of person is the only category of ethnic Briton who is having children above replacement rate by the way.
I realise this thread is quite un PC and might go to the Wasteland or get deleted but I wanted to raise these conundrums. I would like it if everyone could be free and equal and everything but the Enlightenment paradigm doesn't seem to be working out for us. Like, most people wouldn't want LGBT people to be imprisoned, as they used to be (or executed, as they were before that). However most people also don't want mass trans kids, drag queen story hour, transexual admirals and generals in dog masks etc. What if Enlightenment principles don't work, and you had to choose between the two?
What if the only way to stop moral degeneracy was bringing Christianity back?
What if the only way to stop OnlyFans/chad harems/incels was banning divorce, birth control and single mother benefits?
What if the only way to reduce/stop/reverse the gigantic Third World immigration to western countries was some kind of Fascism, with hundreds of thousands of troops on the streets?
What if the only way to stop the economy ending up in NeoFeudalism, where 0.1% own everything and we are all in eternal debt and reduced to a slavelike existence, was mass-imprisonment and expropriation of the super rich?
Source is the 7 million Venezuelan refugees.
MORENA while it does has a lot of Marxists in it, its not a Marxist party, its an AMLO cult of personality party.
