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"Nearly anything with a soapbox seems to be a front for something that reduces to political propaganda or wallet emptying. Right or left, religious or secular, green or whatever, it doesn't seem to matter. Nothing is true; everything is an advertisement."

This seems to be an incredibly disempowering perspective.

I don't see it that way. I see it as a simple recognition of a reality and a call to engage in primary research and reasoning from first principles.

It is herds and movements that are disempowering.

It's still possible to organize too. People should organize on concrete issues and leave the ideology (levers for mass manipulation) at the door. That way it's a lot harder to leverage group identity signifiers and mythological elements to manipulate large numbers of people while masking ones real agenda. For example, we might create an agency whose goal is to reduce CO2 emissions. That's it. No other bandwagons are implied.

Don't get me wrong. I do see the universality of manipulation as a serious social pathology. I just don't know what to do about it in a world where people have to get paid. Seems to me that if money is required to make things happen, only things that are motivated by money or that serve the agendas of those with it will happen.

"It is herds and movements that are disempowering."

The Civil Rights movement.

The labor movement.

The environmental movement.

The suffragette movement.

The abolitionist movement.

The free speech movement.

The list can go on and on.

Whatever else you could say about these movements, agree or disagree with their aims or effects, its difficult to give credence to the view that they weren't effective or empowering to their members or that their goals could have been achieved without organization.

Maybe something has changed then. The only movements I see today are right wing movements that use religion to get the poor to vote against their economic interests and left wing movements that are all about maintaining high food and real estate prices in wealthy enclaves, not to mention tons of salesmanship for questionable and expensive alternative medicine products. None of it seems related to improving life for anyone disadvantaged. If anything they result in the opposite -- NIMBY induced urban real estate hyperinflation is a great example.

I see very little on the contemporary stage that in any way resembles those movements. More specifically I see almost nothing that is in any way about improving human life. It all just looks like sneaky forms of marketing or ideological wank that is irrelevant to any actual measure of freedom, dignity, or well being.

IMHO it all went off the rails in the 70s. It's interesting to me in light of Peter Thiel's contention that fundamental technological innovation has stagnated since then, a view I very strongly agree with. Maybe something really deep and fundamental broke and both these things are symptoms.

Maybe we have already won all the easy battles, and the remaining ones are the impassible disputes between powerful entities.

Or maybe the Internet has made most people not care about modern movements, and billionare backdoor power has made it safe to ignore popular unrest.

Very interesting point. A couple days ago, Thiel debated one of the earliest Occupy members, David Graeber. On that very subject you mention. (http://www.thebaffler.com/live?u=social)

The radical left (like Graeber and Chomsky) points out one factor since the 70's is the financialization of the economy. (Financial institutions prefer short-term profits to long-term development.) Also, there's the rise of "neoliberalism", which Graeber argues prefers to destroy capitalism just to achieve one success: getting people to believe there's no alternative to capitalism.

If all that capitalist propaganda's been successful in beating imagination out of people, that they can do far better than the status quo, maybe that explains why people are so depoliticized. Fewer people have passionate visions for a better world.

I'm gonna have to check that one out. I'm a big fan of Thiel even when I don't agree with him (e.g. on politics to some extent) -- he's one of those people who makes you think even when you think he's wrong.

Getting back to the pragmatic, I think environmentalism is an exception among the movements listed above. I'm not saying it has no good points -- it has many good points. Yet it's a movement that seems to embody the problem I'm talking about in a number of ways. Not coincidentally IMHO it came of age as a movement in the 70s.

(Maybe we should just strike all thought from the 70s from the intellectual record and make the calendar go 1969, 1980, 1981...?)

Case in point:

Nobody can seem to explain to me how simultaneously ditching fossil fuels and nuclear power without replacements is going to do anything other than impoverish the majority of humanity. I'm all for renewable energy, but it's not ready yet and won't be until the storage problem is well and truly solved.

If you talk to greens on this issue you get denial or cognitive dissonance. If you dig deeper, I personally have found that you run into what seems to be a quiet belief that losing most of humanity would be a good thing... especially if the loss occurred mostly among the poor. I'm not saying all greens hold this view, but it's in the milieu. Don't believe me? Head over to Reddit and read the comments to any article about the Ebola epidemic. I've also personally heard greens express this view verbally to me, like one anti-vaccination dude who told me that "there's too many people anyway" implying that we need more disease. He said that people with "a strong immune system and good nutrition" don't need vaccines -- in other words the wealthy and the genetic ubermenschen.

A century ago that would have been considered a radical right wing social Darwinist opinion and would have put you in the same camp as all the budding European fascists obsessed with the arguments of Oswald Spengler. Yet today it's a "left wing" viewpoint. Blech. What bullshit.

IMHO there is no left today. There are reactionaries of the right and reactionaries of the "new left."

Among the greens who don't hold this view, you nevertheless get total cognitive blank-out on this issue. Either they remain committed to the idea that we could just swap out solar and wind for fossil fuels and nuclear despite the copious math that says otherwise, or they just flat out refuse to think about it in any depth.

You also see a lot of marketing of poverty as a good thing. "Back to nature," some forms of minimalism, permaculture which was called land-serfdom in the 1500s, etc. These things are poverty, folks, and you're not going to like it once the novelty of it wears off.

I'm very much for solar and wind energy-- I just think there's a long hard R&D slog between now and dirt cheap gigawatt-hour-scale energy storage. Meanwhile we need to get off fossil fuels yesterday.

I can't help but at least suspect that the movement is co-opted and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry behind the scenes with the goal of using green ideology to prevent the emergence of any real competition. I also can't help but see the Malthusian elements of green ideology as a pressure valve permitting the release of latent economic/cultural elitism and racism that are no longer politically correct to state explicitly and openly. It's a perfect example of the kind of large scale systematic deception by social movement that I'm talking about -- the actual goals are not the stated goals and are hidden behind ideological and symbolic blinds.

"I'm very much for solar and wind energy-- I just think there's a long hard R&D slog between now and dirt cheap gigawatt-hour-scale energy storage."

You might be interested in reading "Solar is Ready Now"[1] ("now" being 2011)

[1] - http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/06/09/241120/solar-is-...

>> "It is herds and movements that are disempowering."

> The Civil Rights movement.

> The labor movement.

> The environmental movement.

> The suffragette movement.

> The abolitionist movement.

> The free speech movement.

> The list can go on and on.

Indeed it does, and some will argue that, with some noteworthy exceptions, your list, and other similar lists, proves the point being made by the OP. Most public movements only postpone what they protest against -- the labor movement stands as a classic case.

> Whatever else you could say about these movements, agree or disagree with their aims or effects, its difficult to give credence to the view that they weren't effective or empowering to their members or that their goals could have been achieved without organization.

From a scientific standpoint, we cannot say whether these movements were causes or effects. By the time people were rightly condemning slave ownership on any scale in the U.S., Great Britain had abandoned slavery decades before, and many civilized people in the U.S. and elsewhere saw slavery's abandonment as inevitable.

As to the labor movement, historically it described an arc between ineffectiveness and corruption -- between a promise of a solution, to becoming a bigger problem than the issue it claimed to address.

As to free speech -- well, I see this as a classic example of modern government's basic strategy, which is to find out what people are going to do anyway, order them to do it, then try to take credit for the outcome.

I don't think it's right to doubt that these movements at least accelerated improvements.

I am sure the South would happily have held slaves for much longer than it did. I remember when I was a kid car manufacturers claimed they would go bankrupt if they had to install catalytic filters. Only the pressure from the environmental movement build up the momentum for requiring those filters. Without the labor movement we would probably still work 12 hours six days a week.

> I don't think it's right to doubt that these movements at least accelerated improvements.

But I didn't do that. I only said we cannot know scientifically whether they're causes or effects. That's an important distinction, one often overlooked in historical accounts.

"Without the labor movement we would probably still work 12 hours six days a week."

Unfortunately, many in the technology field still do, and worse. Many on this very forum advocate working much longer hours in their attempts to get rich quick through the startup lottery.

At the same time, they rabidly belittle unions, membership in which would probably be the only thing short of becoming an independent consultant that could allow them to work relatively sane hours.

"Most public movements only postpone what they protest against -- the labor movement stands as a classic case."

The 8-hour work day[1], the existence of overtime pay[2], workplace health and safety standards[3], child labor laws[4], the right to strike[5] and organize (as curtailed as these have become in recent decades) and many other labor laws in the US (not to mention Europe) would provide counterarguments.

"From a scientific standpoint, we cannot say whether these movements were causes or effects."

The causation is usually quite clear, if you educate yourself as to what happened during these movements.

Much of America saw segregation[6] as the natural order of the world and couldn't imagine that people of different races could or should "intermix". Many very powerful segregation proponents fought tooth and claw to keep it alive, killing, torturing, and imprisoning countless people that they saw as their enemies.

If it weren't for the Civil Rights[7] movement, segregation probably would have continued for many more decades, and I would surprised if people of different races could sit in the same restaurants or marry one another in the US by the turn of the 21st century.

The heart of the Free Speech[8] movement was in the Bay Area, so I would like to hope that those HN members that hail from Silicon Valley or SF shouldn't need to have its history recapped for them, so I'll just say that the University of California had dug in its heels against giving in to any of the students' demands, and were it not for their massive and persuasive protests, there's no evidence that it would have been achieved without the movement.

Some decades later, a similar set of events lead to the appointment of the first Deaf President at Gaulladet.[9]

The end of Apartheid[10] in South Africa: due to a mass movement against it.

The independence of India[11] (and many others) was the result of a mass movement.

Those who already know the history of these movements must forgive me for such obvious and superfluous citations. I only do so because I fear that the only way off-hand claims of the ineffectiveness of such movements could be taken seriously is if one had a profound ignorance of history (for which the citations could hopefully make a little self-education easier, for those of a curious mind), or a deep ideological opposition to them -- which I'm afraid no citations are likely to cure.

You say, "As to the labor movement, historically it described an arc between ineffectiveness and corruption -- between a promise of a solution, to becoming a bigger problem than the issue it claimed to address."

Who other than bitter ideological opponents would describe it as such?

I'm sure many American conservatives and "pro-business" proponents see having their employees work shorter days, having to pay pesky overtime pay and compensate them for on-the-job injuries as "a bigger problem than the issue they claim to address".

I've also seen similar criticisms from Marxists who think anything short of bloody revolution is a weak compromise that only perpetuates capitalism.

These are not exactly "scientific standpoints", to use your term, but ideological ones. And I'd be interested to see a source for them other than the likes of the Free Republic or the Nation.

You also say, "As to free speech -- well, I see this as a classic example of modern government's basic strategy, which is to find out what people are going to do anyway, order them to do it, then try to take credit for the outcome."

Look at the history of the Free Speech movement. The students involved in those protests weren't ordered by the government to protest. Quite the contrary, they were bloodily opposed every step of the way. So I'm not sure what makes you say otherwise.

Of course, success has a million fathers and failure none. So it's no surprise that everyone would try to take credit for it now. But I'm not sure how this is supposed to discredit the original movement itself.

Please enlighten me.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtime

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_safety_and_health

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_action

[6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit...

[7] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_...

[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement

[9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_President_Now

[10] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

[11] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence_movement

>> "From a scientific standpoint, we cannot say whether these movements were causes or effects."

> The causation is usually quite clear

Not in a scientific sense, not at all. Your post objects to positions I didn't take. My only point is that most of these movements took place when they did because they had become historical inevitabilities, not that the movements themselves had no real effect, which no one can confirm nor deny.

> Most public movements only postpone what they protest against -- the labor movement stands as a classic case

The labor movement wasn't protesting against something in the future that could be postponed, it was protesting against the current status quo, which in many of the key aspects it was protesting against, it reversed.

Its true that over time, with less activity, some of those gains have been eroded, but I don't see there being any reasonable argument that the labor movement "only postpone[d] what they protest[ed] against".

If you think there is such an argument, I'd certainly welcome you to present it.

> It is herds and movements that are disempowering.

As an absolute statement - condemning all movements and all ideology without distinguishing between their intrinsic merits - this is extremely odd. Without "herds and movements" we'd still be clever mammals without the power of speech. Something below even tribal societies, without the ability to even teach one another how to use tools or to act ethically.

The recognition that some ideals are false does not preclude having them.

> People should organize on concrete issues and leave the ideology (levers for mass manipulation) at the door

What do you think motivates people to "organize on concrete issues" and pick a side on those issues? Ideology does, 100% of the time. How is this even controversial?

More concretely, the notion that we cannot engage in an ideological movement - a party voting bloc, for example - without being subsumed by that ideology or engaging in self-defeating behavior is demonstrably false. People form coalitions because coalitions work. It's a pretty basic thing in voting theory and political science that you win more for your side if you are willing to form coalitions with differing parties and compromise.

> This seems to be an incredibly disempowering perspective.

That depends on one's narcissism index. A sufficiently narcissistic person will see it as a challenge to be proactively engaged. Someone less narcissistic will see it as a reason to give up.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/ChildrenOfNarcissus

In general, I agree. However, I think there may be some benefits in "organic". It actually says something about how the food was produced. It's not perfect, but it is a step. Things like "natural" are beyond useless, trying to capitalize on health halo effects without meaning anything. The best bet is to source locally grown food and meat from farmers you trust. Easier said than done. :)

Why associate natural with organic? Natural is utterly meaningless label marketing while Organic (USDA) and Non-GMO are actual certifications that have requirements, the latter of which is more trustworthy. There is absolutely a scientific basis behind them, and that is that there is a lack of transgenic crops in the ingredients.

Organic and non-GMO have specific definitions (which are in scientific terms). That does not imply there is a scientific justification for believing that they are better in any way.