Because Austrian Economics believe in Therapeutic Nihilism as a "value belief", shrug
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And that is what we are talking about here Mookie, we are talking about value / moral beliefs. Some would say even religious / dogma beliefs. This is not just science in a neutral fashion, this is also about what we consider important in this life. Science will be intertwined with this always like two strands of rope braided together.
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Sometimes there can't be a meeting of minds, and the point of meeting of minds is to realize this is not the case. Here is Corey Robin on the matter summarizing Max Weber.
Corey Robin
There's so much anxiety right now on the left about whether we should try to understand the beliefs of our opponents.
It reminds me of the atmosphere after 9/11 when there was a similar taboo, from the right and from liberals, against trying to understand the motivations and meaning of political Islam, as if explanation inevitably meant exoneration.
Anyway, Max Weber had it right: "The true purpose of a discussion of values is to grasp what the opponent (or oneself) really means—
the value, that is, which is the real, not just The apparent, concern of each of the two parties...
The elementary precondition of such discussions is to understand that certain ultimate valuations may in principle and irreconcilably diverge:
'To understand all' is not 'to forgive all', and, in itself, an understanding of the other person's position does not in any way lead to an acceptance of it.
It may just as easily, and often with far greater probability, lead one to realize that agreement is not possible." —"The Meaning of 'Value Freedom' in the Sociological and Economic Sciences"
Once can not divorce an idea from the place that created it. Therapeutic Nihilism was Austrian BS from the 1850s to 1870s that was very tied to class and thus wealth. It is never the wealthy who is on the front lines doing the dying, they are happy if individual people do the dying as long as the species survives and their place in the social order never changes.
Thus they create mental rationalizations of why we can never do interventions in order to fix the problems. These mental rationalizations can become an ideology that allows one to ignore the problems of the world, and these ideologies are also tied to values. (The ignoring part helps you sooth the contradiction where you have multiple values in conflict, by not seeing you can believe oneself noble.)
Is the Cruelty the Point, is suffering and cruelty the most important issue? Or is the internal consistency to ones ideology the point? Which master will you serve cruelty or hypocrisy? This is always a personal choice and there is no answer to it besides a personal existential one.
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I am shrugging for no one is ever going to convince me to not try to do better. I was raised Catholic and even though I am not a believer in that god thing anymore... well human words and humans of the past still matter to me. The idea of what I was taught with St. Francis of Assisi has left an indelible mark on me that we have an obligation to help others.
Feel free to disagree feel free to see Government as the ultimate evil or some other nonsense. That is what value beliefs are after all, some things will not / will rarely change for our fleshy brain boxes have "Identity-Protective Cognition." That is what makes us human after all, to have some things that will change and some things that will rarely change. To strive and to struggle, to be social creatures and to recognize boundaries in another but also to cooperate.
Put another way I care about this stuff Mookie like Jeo cares about Abortion.
- 07/10/2020 09:36:22 PM
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*NM*
- 11/10/2020 10:22:56 PM
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