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Democracy and Good Life Part 3: Consumer Packaged Ideology
We think of an ideology as being a coherent set of principles encompassing a system of values and based on some fundamental set of assumptions and principles. But that’s not at all what modern political ideologies are. From a philosophical perspective, they are an incoherent mass of contradictory policy positions bundled in a giant, nicely…
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Exhalation: Transformative Experience and AI
Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is one of the best collections of short science fiction that you can find. It also happens to have several stories directly concerned with transformative experience and decision-making. That’s unusual. Most short science fiction stories are idea driven. They take a concept and run with it. In Exhalation, for example, Chiang writes…
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The Discipline We Demand, The Price We Pay
The idea that people in Western society are extraordinarily disciplined may be surprising. Yet few societies have ever asked for as much discipline as ours. It’s a burden not everyone can bear. For these people, the freedom of liberal society is a literal hell, and the help of the welfare state just another ball-and-chain.
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Hello Boredom, My Old Friend
The one ill no one would expect in our society is boredom. Our lives might not be good, but surely they are too frenetic and occupied to make boredom a problem. Yet people are bored and the evidence is everywhere – not least in the immense value we place on entertainment and distraction. What boredom…
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Materialism and the Void: The Emptiness at the Heart of Modern Culture
Our culture provides such extraordinary opportunities for rich and interesting lives that it is hard to understand how we mostly end up doing so poorly. Our problem is not opportunity, it is execution. And when it comes to building a good life, not just giving us the tools for it, our culture often works against…
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Intelligent Virtue and the Beauty of Modern Virtue Theories
Virtue theory is the flip side of transformative experience. Though L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience concentrates on rationality theory and choice optimization, the implications of transformative experience lead directly to some form of virtue theory. If you are choosing between experiences that will change who you are (like going to college or enlisting), you need some…
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The Virtues of Modern Society for an Ethical Decision-Maker
It’s always fashionable to knock the party you’re at. Our particular party (modern Western culture) does have a lot of problems – and dealing with those problems is very much the subject in hand. Yet it’s neither wise nor truthful to forget about the good stuff, and it’s genuinely important (and encouraging) to realize how…
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The Open Society as the Enemy
The interaction of our embodied selves with the world creates cognitive structures that instantiate preferences, values, dispositions, and skills. Much of this requires neither thought nor justification. One can choose to attach reasons to liking steak more than pork, or blackjack more than poker, but the exercise is post-hoc and unnecessary. This isn’t to say…
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Capital and Ideology and Ideology and Ideology
Not many authors have ever made as big a cultural splash as Thomas Piketty did with Capital. His 2019 follow-up, Capital and Ideology, is a big book dedicated to the same general themes but expanding their scope both philosophically, historically and geographically. At the very beginning of Capital and Ideology, Piketty steps outside the narrative…
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Apollo, the X-Prize and the Art of Making Better People
I’ve been listening to Julian Guthrie’s “How to Build a Spaceship” which tells the story of the X-Prize, the $10 million prize that helped kickstart the private space industry and transform the space program. It’s a compelling story with dozens of fascinating people, from Burt Rutan and Paul Allen (who ultimately won the prize) to…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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