Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 23
Much of the misinformation in right-wing circles around post-modernism can be traced back to a single source: Stephen Hicks' book Explaining Postmodernism. Jordan Peterson based his views of PM on this book. But this book has poor scholarship and presents a cartoon version of post-modernism.
The following video explains the problems with Stephen Hick's book, adding much nuance to the cliched strawman of post-modernism commonly presented by right-wingers:
Ideological people, and right-wingers, cannot understand post-modernism because to understand it requires enough openmindedness to set aside your own paradigm. Hicks cannot properly do that because he's a Randian Objectivist libertarian.
My challenge to you is to be able to see each paradigm on its own terms: pre-modern, modern, post-modern. You should be able to steelman each one and see reality from any of those three lenses without being emotionally or ideologically attached to any of them. Then you will have mastered the situation and gone beyond all three. That's where the real gold lies.
This is an announcement for folks who have been trying to access the Life Purpose Course videos.
About half of the videos are down. I'm working with my video hosting provider to fix that. There have been some unusual delays on their end. I hope to have it fixed within a few days.
My apologies for the downtime.
It's amazing to see how little politics has change in 2000 years. The fundamentals of politics do not change. Which makes it the more appalling that most voters do not understand these basics enough to make good voting choices.
People have forgotten how degenerate populism can be.
It's crucial to notice that every system of government has a healthy and corrupt form. The problem isn't so much which form you have, it's the corruption that seeps into it. Any great system of government that you can imagine, I can imagine how to corrupt it to make it bad. This is why today's populism is so foolish, it assumes that just because its populist its inherently good. Furthermore, left-wing populism can also get corrupted. Corruption is not limited to any one party, class, or ideology. That's the key insight. And the key trap is to blame corruption all on your ideological enemies.
Also notice how various forms of government hybridize in complex ways. There is not pure monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy, capitalism, socialism. In practice they all hybridize with each other in corrupt ways. An authoritarian wannabe monarch will hijack democracy by stoking populist rage and align himself with oligarchs to hold power while proclaiming the virtues of socialism or capitalism — depending the peoples' mood. There is no such thing as an authoritarian without his circle of elites to whom he expropriates wealth and power and who defend him. Authoritarianism is an alliance between a strong-man leader and a small circle of the rich and powerful with whom he is chummy, and between whom they all divide the stolen wealth. It works this way in North Korea, in Russia, in Africa, in America. The most important thing to understand about power and fame is that they are wealth extraction tools.
Africa is a land of stunning natural beauty, but it is an evil land if you want to build a thriving civilization.
When you die and go to reincarnate, God asks you, Easy mode or hardcore mode this time? If you choose hardcore mode you spawn in Africa :D
Another fairly objective measure of development and lower vs higher perspective is the World Press Freedom Index.
Contemplate why press freedom is an indicator of higher development and higher perspective, so that you stop being fooled by bad relativist arguments.
(click to enlarge)
I've shared many of these indices with you at this point: Corruption Perceptions Index, Equaldex, Global Peace Index, Global Slavery Index, World Press Freedom Index. You should notice that they tend to overlap. So if a nation is low or high on one, it tends to be low or high on all. This is a nice corroborating factor which tells you that something deeper is at work here than Western self-bias.
Don't forget that Actualized.org content cannot exist in half the world, because it would be too threatening to power. You wonder why Actualized content isn't taught in schools and everywhere, well, most societies are not developed or open enough to handle it. Truth is inherently political because social structures are built on lies and corruption, which requires suppression of truth-seekers. The truth-seekers see through all the bullshit of the rich, famous, and powerful. Which is why truth-seeking is not taught in any schools, even in the West.
Continuing with our series on theft, welcome to the sneaky theft called shrinkflation:
The Devil will use any lapse in your awareness to steal from you. If you don't count every Post-It note in the package, there will be one fewer next year. Cause why not?!
Right now there is a corporate executive in a chicken coop whispering to the chickens: lay smaller eggs or we'll turn you into chicken nuggets.
This gives me the idea to steal one word from my blog posts every week. Starting next week you will get one less word than you would have gotten, just to teach you a lesson about how the world works :D