Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

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I have been reading a lot about Russia and China recently, and I'm struck by just how much more realistic their citizenry is compared to America.

I think it ultimately boils down to how real power operates in the countries. The average Russian or Chinese citizen is way less powerful than the average American citizen. If they have a grievance to make, whether it's against a local or national policy, Russians and Chinese have way way fewer options.

Whereas Americans, if they feel aggrieved at the state of their world, can turn to any one of many many many political organizations that exist solely to collect and distribute that outrage and drive results. We may not be completely 100% satisfied with those results, but it's better than relying on the legal process.

This network of civic participation has mostly replaced the usual role of electoral politics and Americans believe in their system, secure in the realization that if some bullshit is going down, outrage will be generated and justice will be served.

The last election threw that whole system into critical disarray. It got yoked into the service of Donald Trump and the Republicans because liberal Americans trusted the system enough to stop looking to see how it was being used. Trump realized he could game the system to get elected and did exactly that.

The critical insight here is that Americans are not stupid, and they are not ignorant, they just believe in the power of systems and institutions and want to just be able to rely on them to drive better results over time. We shift public attention gradually away from everything, and slowly onto the parts of the system that aren't working.

In Russia and China, public arms of policy-making are non-existent. Citizens must therefore be extremely careful about picking their battles.

> outrage will be generated and justice will be served.

Trump is the personification of the outrage over illegal immigration, crime, bad trade deals, and the Neocon (globalist) wing of the Republican party.

> liberal Americans trusted the system enough to stop looking to see how it was being used

Umm, what? For over a year, liberal Americans were aghast at the rise of Literally Hitler and made no bones about sharing their opinion on the matter.

> Trump is the personification of the outrage over illegal immigration, crime, bad trade deals, and the Neocon (globalist) wing of the Republican party.

Exactly, it's the system working for the other side of the country. They didn't have nearly as good of a grassroots outreach mechanism, they finally built one.

The two sides cannot agree on what justice means. That's ultimately a national question and so it had to be settled in the election. It's the Republicans now that get to decide what justice means, and liberals get to lick their wounds and retrench.

The direction the world is moving in is liberalism. So this can only be a minor setback.

> Umm, what? For over a year, liberal Americans were aghast at the rise of Literally Hitler and made no bones about sharing their opinion on the matter.

Right, they pressed the outrage button thinking it was going to fix the problem, like it usually does. It didn't because Trump outmaneuvered them.

I'm curious as to why you think the world is moving towards liberalism.

Ultimately it's because of the Internet. Sharing of ideas, remixing them, iterating on them, that's all the province of liberalism. Holding on to tradition, resisting modernization, that's conservatism. Liberalism is the rising tide raising all boats. It's always happening, everywhere, behind the scenes, in people's minds. Even the most conservative person has liberal ideas.

Liberalism is imperative, conservatism only impairs. You can have individuals, groups, communities, industries, cities, provinces, countries, even whole blocs of countries espousing conservatism, but the natural trend is towards idea evolution and that's liberalism. It might take a long, circuitous route to get there, but when you take the totality of the whole world, and the logic of ideation, that's where it's going.

> the rising tide raising all boats.

FYI, usually this rhetoric is used by rich people when they are trying to screw you.

Lol, in my defense it's a more of a philosophical point than an economic or political one.

So Liberalism is good and improves things, and therefore everyone will choose it?

Assuming the first part is true, just becomes something is better does not mean it will be chosen, so I don't think that argument works.

Well, no, I'm talking about how things evolve. There's this big myth in history about technological, economic and social decline. That it's been up and down for 2000 years, fits and starts. It's not the case, things slowly and continuously evolve, you just only notice it happening in fits and starts. Also the mind is designed to focus on negative things, so we assign more weight to the negative than we would if we were being more rational.

How do you explain the fall of Athens and Rome, and the very long centuries of dark ages in Europe and West Asia?

The dark ages are a myth. This is becoming more accepted amongst historians. It's an artifact of our imaginations, not a valid narrative. Athens and Rome are only two of countless agrarian kingdoms / empires of the day. When Rome fell, the rest of Europe mostly just went on without imperial control. More wars were fought but warfare of the day was exceedingly resource-constrained and not like the total wars we see today. Kingdoms and empires rose and fall all the time, we just focus on those two because their culture survived while the other ones' didn't.

The terminology "dark ages" more refers to the loss of Christian leadership than it does of technological or economic loss. Christians love to frame things apocalyptically and that's what's responsible for the common pejorative view of that time period.

A more valid comparison would be the Napoleanic wars, but there too, you can see that really the wars were only possible because economic advancement allowed nations much more resources to devote to war. Europe had to learn how to civilize warfare three times. Each time happened after massive economic advancements.

Interesting, but it seems you're coming from the position of having already concluded what the answer is, and then going back and fitting everything to that precondition.

Reassessing historical narratives you grew up with has that effect. I'm coming to find out that nothing is as it was taught. The information you gain today should be prioritized over the information you learned yesterday, just because it comes from a better and more informed perspective.

I've been spending lots of time on Quora, I eventually learned that not a single way of thinking about events I had when I was younger was anywhere close to truth. Ignorance is the norm rather than the exception. You have to reify past events to fit current conclusions because you have no past understanding of those events that's reliable.

I'd call it "post-history" but if anything history is more important.

Definitely, but that doesn't change the simple logic that if you have a conclusion, it's very easy to lose the truth of a historical situation by instead selecting an explanation that you want.

Let's say there is a historical event, and you know of 3 different possible explanations. Explanation 1 is what you learned as a child and it's clearly wrong now because of new evidence. Explanation 2 and 3 both fit all known facts and either one could be correct -- but only explanation 2 fits with your conclusion that the world is always heading towards liberalism (or conservatism or whatever you believe).

Do you pick explanation 2? Human nature says you do, and it's something we need to be aware of.

> You have to reify past events to fit current conclusions because you have no past understanding of those events that's reliable.

Do you really have to?

> Do you really have to?

Think about it. You have an understanding of history. You can't not have an understanding of history, unless you live under a rock. As you study history more and more, you realize that all of your prior understandings of history are wrong.

What do you do then? You don't have a past anymore. The only thing that's making sense is the present. So you re-examine the past in light of the present. That's reifying. It's your only option. You're reifying today, you're going to reify again tomorrow. Because the thing doing the understanding is changing every day, so you need new understandings. You're not building, you're constantly demolishing.

Logic is only as good as your premises. If your premises can't be trusted, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Following that line, what use is history at all anymore? It's now just a hammer we can use to propagate whatever new idea we currently have. I don't really see the value in such a history.

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