In my last post I promised a more optimistic subject, but then life happened.
A distressing personal event that made positive thinking quite difficult; then I came across an article fitting right into the train of my own thoughts in the past few posts:
Monopoly on Knowledge: The Era of Epistemic Security – A guest post by Dr. Monika Gabriela Bartoszewicz on the John Carter Substack.
The post is superb, please read it. It is a treasure trove of references and most beautiful art. It guides us through a number of books to explore the evolution of our present state of fear and security driven zeitgeist. I cannot think of a more succinct description of the phenomenon than the title of the post.
Omnipotent Government:...
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It perfectly describes the attitudes in the conversations I am having with family and friends traveling in the Habsburg triangle (Prague – Vienna – Budapest).
The need for epistemic security seems to be overwhelming. The replacement (and even rejection) of critical thinking with blind trust in ‘authoritative’ – one could say authoritarian – sources, to the point of making any rational conversation impossible.
The concept is also a perfect tie-in to the set I was posting in the past few weeks:
- In Core belief #1 – on decision making I profess my faith in the superiority of distributed decision making over centralized systems.
- In The not-so-smart books of Yuval Noah Harari I am trying to raise the alarm over postmodernist relativism and its sleaziest advocate.
- In The allure of surrogate power I glance at the psychology of communism through short explanations of Soviet communist phraseology.
- In Misunderstood communism I make the point that Communism/socialism is a paradox that can only exist on the values it aims to replace.
- In The enduring insult of “Capitalism” I am just venting my frustration over the continuous use of the word that was always just an insult, never a well-defined concept/theory/explanation.
- In The virtuous appeal of fascism I am trying to point to the dangers of seeing reality through the lens of mob-consensus conformity, while also looking at the psychological power of dissolving one’s self in the group’s epistemic certainty.
- In The delusion of liberal democracy I try to show how this most confused of expressions gets the least scrutiny in its use. Everybody uses it as if its meaning was universally agreed upon.
The point of the whole series was to show examples of ‘epistemic insecurity’, if you will, and to demonstrate the need for a far more rigorous approach to the discussion of complex concepts.
What drives my effort is the need to understand our apparently unresolvable political differences.
What makes them so predictable?
What is causing them?
What makes people to react to the same news in fundamentally different ways?
How can we interpret policies in so predictable ways?
How did we get to this impasse, where we cannot even agree on most basic principles?
How did we lose our ability to communicate?
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How did we allow our fears to dominate our reason?
How did we get to safe-spaces and hysterical narcissism?
How did we get to the ready acceptance that knowledge is defined on the fly, at the whim of those with political power?
What could possibly effect the changes we are witnessing?
What changed in the past 75 years that led to them? Are we the victims of our own successes?
Did urbanization had something to do with it?
What is the role of ideology and the state’s incessant drive to grow?
What came first, the chicken or the egg? The fear or its shameless exploitation?
Did fear create the existential uncertainty or the other way around? In other words: is social security (for example) the answer or the problem? Will UBI create more or less existential uncertainty?
Are we living in times of weak man creating bad times or at times of evil men far beyond our control creating uncertainty to exploit?
Can we create a world where those who need safety can coexist with those who want freedom?
Can we create a world without a busybody, overbearing all-controlling government?
Can we even imagine one?
