Little thoughts on Little Horses
Added 2025-06-22 17:00:07 +0000 UTCComments
I am obsessed with dialectics, but I only recently discovered that "dialectics" was the name for the thing that I was obsessing over. Initially I called them "paradoxical truths", two opposite concepts that are both virtuous, but that oppose each other. My initial understanding of "dialectics" was that they were a kind of philosophical argument structured as a conversation between two voices. You know, where in lots of old greek philosophy texts the argument is framed as two people going back and forth with commentary. That's what I thought dialectic was, and that was not the thing I cared about. However, this short video and another video I watched about Marxism (I realized that I didn't really know what Marxism was) cracked open my thinking that dialectics are not just a structure of argumentation, or compare/contrast two things. It is examining the conflict between two opposed ideas. It doesn't say anything about the goodness or badness of the ideas, or that they are coming from two people in a discussion, just that they are two opposing ideas. In the Marx video it was about the conflicts between capitalist and communist economic ideas. So instead of dialectics being a related or tangential idea, it was really the core of my system. In my system the conflict between capitalism and communism is really the dialectic between competition and cooperation. I think that when we use pejorative or loaded words for each side of the dialectic, it makes it harder to reason about. Instead I try to make both sides virtuous. Both cooperation and competition are good and part of both human and natural systems. The problem is that we decide that either one or the other is universally best, and that leads to a pathological system. Instead we need to be pragmatic about where to apply competition, and where to apply cooperation, and design our systems of governance and regulation around that. If you have competition where there should be cooperation, you get bureaucratic infighting. If you have cooperation where there should be competition you get cartels. The systems will want to swing hard in one direction or the other, each advocating that their system is obviously superior. But the wise path is to do them both, and be strategic about where we cooperate (government infrastructure, healthcare, national defense) and where we compete (technological innovation, commodity pricing and distribution, small business creation). I can talk about this all day, so I should stop. But I wanted to just shout a "Hell Yes!" from the audience when Erudite is considering making dialectics a major part of her ideological strategy.
pol
2025-06-25 17:23:25 +0000 UTCIt's not that you are avoiding the two sides, you are embracing them or at least holding them both in your mind simultaneously. One example: altruism and boundaries. You should be altruistic as much as you are able to be, but also, you need boundaries. Too much of either will lead to different pathology. It's not that you are avoiding them and taking a middle path, it's that you are considering and/or embracing both of them, and using that to guide your actions.
pol
2025-06-25 16:32:25 +0000 UTCare you ever worried that always being between sides could make you too passive/indecisive about certain issues? (asking for a friend)
predicate
2025-06-24 16:47:43 +0000 UTC
