The Opposite of Political Philosophy: An Antidote to Abstractions.

in academic philosophy people primarily
play with concepts that are difficult to understand but easy to live with in the realm of politics we tend to deal with concepts that are easy to understand but hard to deal with what i'm going to talk about in this video sounds very abstruse and abstract but it's really a pragmatic fact of life easy to understand hard to live with an abstraction simply contains less information than the things it is abstracted from a generalization is always and by definition something less real than the things you're generalizing about the problem we deal with in politics again and again is that people want to treat generalizations as more real as more important than the things being generalized about so in a recent video i talked about socialism versus capitalism this way and i opened by saying hey people think of themselves as a socialist as an identity and then they they don't think about politics in terms of pragmatic problem solving like hey we need a we need to build prisons how are we going to have prisons that work well that work well for the prisoners that work well for society as a whole in terms of law and order whatever concept social harmony shall we say prisons that work well for the parents and relatives and friends of the prisoners who want to visit them there are a lot of prisons that work well for the employees of the prison let's not forget where it's humane and you have positive well-motivated employees at the prison who don't hate their lives who don't regard themselves as being punished by working in a prison too right all kinds of different factors but there's no corruption no drug dealing okay we need well-working prisons and you have people who think of themselves as socialists and you absolutely presume that the answer to this question is socialism and that the problem is capitalism meanwhile in the real world if you look around most of the worst run prisons on planet earth are socialists they're government prisons and people don't even think of them that way they don't even proceed in that way they will just say oh yeah you know in brazil the prisons are terrible it doesn't matter in kentucky the prisons are terrible in england the prison canada the present terrible it doesn't really matter oh yeah that's a bad prison it's really terrible oh really is it owned by coca-cola corporation oh no it's run by the government that's socialism right people left-wing people i'm i'm left-of-center myself what can i tell you i endorsed bernie sanders rather than joe biden in the last american presidential election even though i was a very harsh critic of bernie sanders and i found all kinds of things wrong with this program and i read his book nevertheless i'm certainly someone who's left of center right i understand that mentality i grew up with that mentality that's why i'm trying to productively criticize that mentality it's very easy to presume that any prison that is for-profit and capitalist is going to be exploitative of the workers the prisoners the system and it's just motivated by the love of profit and filthy lucr and therefore definitionally such a prison is worse than a socialist prison but if you actually let yourself look around right if you look at if you learn a truth from facts if you work from empirical reality what you're gonna find it's quite contradictory and confusing okay the reality is in some countries you can find some examples of wonderful well-run government prisons socialist prisons right and you can find the worst prisons in the world both in wealthy first world countries and in poverty stricken third world countries are government run our socialist presence and yes i followed up my last video by giving a link to an example in south africa where there's this example of a prison it may be the best prison not just in africa but the best prison in the whole world this wonderful prison in south africa that's run by a private for-profit company and it's making people re-examine the whole question of how do we run prisons in africa and how do we want to run prisons in europe and so on and you can watch this youtube video they interview the staff and the staff all seem positively motivated and happy to come to work and the prisoners are all happy and they're all learning a new trade and learning education and it's it's safe and it's clean and it's this optimistic wonderful place you go wow this is this really well-run prison and we can't reduce this explanation we can't we cannot explain this in terms of the category of socialism versus capitalism because those are generalizations right and the generalizations are less real than the things they generalize about okay what is a good university and what is a bad university some of the best universities in the world are socialist or government-run non-profit entities right many many of the worst universities in the world i would say the vast majority of the worst university in the world are socialist government-run non-profit universities and people don't even think in these terms and people like myself people left we don't let ourselves perceive reality that way we think oh that's a bad prison that prison is corrupt the prison guards are corrupt that prison is violent and brutal and dirty and depressing we don't think that's because of socialism we don't want to put it in that category right this is kind of cherry-picking that goes on and likewise the universities oh yeah we know some some high schools are bad and some universities are bad and we will blame everything imaginable except socialism and then conversely we again i'm left to center myself when we look at a really great high school or a really great university or a really great prison that is run by the private sector we will not want to put it in that column of attributing it to capitalism or the free market we don't want to give credit to those right-wing or conservative ideas and ideals because we don't have a mentality of learning truth from facts of examining and analyzing empirical reality to then generalize about it we are treating the generalizations as something primary in the real world as something secondary that exists in the shadow of those abstractions so this is a real philosophical problem with pragmatic implications in the real world i have a letter from a viewer of the channel supporter of mine on patreon called ivansky i assume that's his real name he says hi isil this video referring to my old video this video has confused me a little about your views i'm not sure of what the parameters of this identity free politics problem-solving approach are so he was interpreting my video as if my point was to say look don't think of yourself as a socialist don't think of yourself as a conservative right don't let these generalizations or abstractions define your identity and define the way you think about politics instead have a pragmatic problem-solving approach and that's that's not a gross misinterpretation of my earlier video but he's slightly off the mark in an important sense right so he then asks so it's a good question it's a totally good question okay what does this mean in practice moving forward right so so so what are you saying are you saying like that quote does it mean that you're indifferent if america becomes more socialist whatever that term means so long as it adequately satisfies the challenges of the country and remains capitalist where it matters question mark or say china remains communist i guess china is interesting as it has done well in some ways being a communist country that functions very much like a capitalist country albeit under autocratic government just pause if you look at how universities are run and if you look at how prisons are run you might find communist china is no different from canada denmark the united states england that actually when you look at what the government does in practice it is neither more nor less democratic than the institutions in our own society which by the way i do not regard as a good thing i regard it as a sign of the extent to which our so-called democratic countries are in a meaningful sense not democratic at all that they are bureaucratic and aristocratic to a greater extent than we want to admit to ourselves okay continuing quote do you mean that in capitalistic societies we should simply be open to using socialist approaches where it is appropriate or efficient question mark okay so my point is deeper than that right it's more fundamental and it's more simple okay we should be open using social approaches where it's appropriate he says when is it appropriate we don't know all right we live our lives in this way where we treat the generalization and the abstraction as something first and foremost and what is it we're generalizing about we are generalizing about the behavior the conduct the intelligence of about five people any given prison the whole institution the conduct of all the employees who gets hired who gets fired the the standard of self-discipline the way the prison is run it probably reflects about five people at the top there are probably five people who are in a management role and they shape the way day-to-day activities at the prison are they shape the attitude and conduct of their employees you know it's not even necessarily that they are corrupt themselves but if they are tolerating corrupt employees right their attitudes their managerial focus then that results in corruption throughout the whole institution if they have a really upbeat positive attitude that hey we're not here to punish people we're here to educate people and help them re-enter the workforce that attitude is going to shape everyone else uh working in that prison and of course it's partly who gets hired and who gets fired and how they get trained and what their instructions are right you could have five people with a really great attitude in management positions at a prison that happens to be owned by the government and run on a nonprofit basis you have people and they might get paid really poorly they might get paid less than minimum wage but they feel for whatever combination of reasons this is the meaning of life for them this is something really important they're going to do the best job they possibly can you have a great prison that's being run that way and some idiot on youtube can sit back and generalize and say see this proves that the system works this proves that a non-profit socialist model is the best way to run a prison and then there's some other prison in the private sector like the one i mentioned in south africa that has this documentary about it why is that prison so great okay it's not because of the profit motive it's not because of the stock market it's not because of capitalism it's not like oh well it's because the five people at the top are paid a higher salary which they probably are being private sector you know the people lower down in the prison that maybe paid a lower salary by the way private sector being what it is it's not going to be something simple like the salary or the stock market or capitalism versus socialism you happen to have five people working together to make this a success to make this the best prison it could possibly be right you had people who were passionate and visionary and inspired and you did a great job running or reorganizing or renovating this prison or all of the above people who really cared right why is one restaurant good and another restaurant bad right you can try to generalize about it but these generalizations can be fundamentally counterproductive and misleading so then we have people again no offense to my audience but by and large you know the people i meet and deal with in politics by and large all of us assembled here to watch this youtube video we go through life treating the abstractions treating the generalities the generalizations i should say treating the generalizations as the primary fact guiding our decisions as what it is we know right that the choice we make is between socialism and capitalism is between for-profit and non-profit and we have this profound reluctance to deal with the muddy contradictory reality of what it is that made one institution work and another fail who today among us is studying what makes some university successful and others a failure and we have no culture of secrecy here in the west right it's not that it's concealed from us nobody cares we all treat this as a divine mystery right oh well some some universities are really good and some are oh oh yeah well it's just ridiculous and it's the most important thing in all of our lives we recognize that whether you have a successful career or not has everything to do with what university you go to and whether or not you go to university then once you get to that university whether you drop out or whether you complete the program and then whether or not you're actually prepared to begin a career after that whether or not you have a chance whether or not you have a shot at survival let's not understate the case depends on you having educational institutions in your life that are worth a damn and nobody seems to care about examining why so many of them socialist or private sector produce diplomas that are not worth the paper it's printed on and we're all bankrupting ourselves we're all going into debt taking out student loans and our parents spending their money to provide us with an education where there is no educational opportunity where we learn nothing and we become nothing and we're set up for failure got in touch with an old friend old acquaintance loosely speaking finish his degree at the same university i was at and he's now bagging groceries at the same grocery store where he had a job while he was in high school enjoy your career what did your university degree in asian studies prepare you for i've talked about this stuff you know again and again all of these things matter i mean whether it's prisons or or the education system right but our own attitude towards government is actively precluding the possibility of learning from experience where instead we try to rule we try to make these decisions in terms of generalities okay i'll just finish reading the letter so he says should we be open to using socialist approach approaches where it is appropriate or where it is efficient again i'm saying we don't know what is the best way to set up a telecom company to set up a cell phone service in a third world country what is the best way to set up uh electrical generation uh the generation of electricity every country around the world is a mix of government and private for-profit if most people never look into this most people never question where is the electricity coming out of my light bulb really come from how is it made it's a complex self-contradictory balancing act of private for profit and nonprofit socialist elements and what works and what doesn't cannot be easily generalized about okay question uh that we should be open to aspects of other ideologies question mark how does this relate to your own views on bigger economies like the us uk uh australia china etc okay the most profound problem we have in politics today is that we don't choose solutions to problems and we don't even choose the person who's going to attempt the solution we merely choose the kind of process whereby that decision is made and we call it a democracy what we have today is a system of government like arranged marriage where you don't get to choose who you marry you don't get jews who you have sex with or you fall in love with but you have a choice of several different systems of someone else making that choice on your behalf we've yet to hit the breaking point of realizing it doesn't matter whether you have a hindu family arranged marriage where you know your grandparents and aunts and uncles conspire to find you a husband or wife and set you up or if you have more of a muslim system of arranged marriage it doesn't matter if you have a 21st century website based arranged marriage we get to the point of realizing no matter what system of representation i choose someone else representing me someone else making this decision on my behalf is never going to work i have to choose who i'm going to marry for myself we have a system of so-called representative democracy where other people make decisions on your behalf all you get to choose is the system of representation and then you choose in the same way it would be like choosing what grandmother is going to choose your wife or your husband right well i don't get to choose my wife or husband but i get to i get to choose my representative within my family for who's gonna make that decision and then i and then i trust their decision on what basis do we choose these so-called representatives we choose them on the basis of generalizations we choose them on the basis of abstractions we elect bernie sanders who calls himself a socialist whatever that means and we'll get to sit here and debate what it means or we choose joe biden who calls himself a capitalist and represents 95 of the same public policies right we get to sit around and debate what that means we get to choose an abstraction we get to choose a generalization without even knowing what it is we're generalizing about and then we sit back and watch what happens to the prison system to the university system we never make the choice we never get to control what happens in our universities in our prisons because we don't have direct democracy we have a system of democracy every bit as phony as an arranged marriage