THE DISCOVERY OF ZERO
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Identity and Democracy

12/23/2023

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​​I've been thinking a lot about Dannegal B. Young's description of how Social Identity impacts our ability to acquire new truths about the world that she summarized recently in this presentation.
 
According to Dannegal, identity shapes our Values/Theories/Beliefs, which in turn shape our observations about the world.  Our observations are thus motivated by what she calls "the Three C's": comprehending the world to feel good about our "team", control the world to benefit our team, and create community centered around our team.  As we sort more and more by identity, strong "mega-identities" form that include strong political and ideological stances.  These mega-identities are then target rich environments for politicians and propagandists to manipulate, providing us observations about the world designed to align with our identity-based hopes and fears.  This further reinforces our identities in a virtuous cycle of activation and control.
Dannegal G. Young picture showing how identity threat is manipulated

Her final slide shows the recursive way in which identity-targeted observational propaganda input realigns and shapes identity to allow for more coherence to ideological control.

As new information, carefully crafted to a particular social identity valence, is absorbed, the identity itself evolves to a baseline more coherent with the target ideology, thus encouraging future acceptance of additional manipulation.
 
A big problem in political (and factual) discourse is the seeming intransigence of belief.  No matter how many facts or bits of evidence are presented, people seem immune to adjusting their beliefs according to new information.  Dannegal's description explains this intransigency as rooted in observations/facts about the world being filtered primarily through identity and - most importantly - the degree to which the new information represents a threat to our identity.  
 
But it seems that not all Theories/Values/Beliefs (in relationship with social identity), have the same susceptibility to identity threat.
 
The history of modern pluralistic, democratic, and multicultural thought is defined in large part by a determined project to strengthen itself against identity threat by actively embracing other identities.  This can be summed up in the term "tolerance", which is designed to separate mere religious, cultural, or racial/ethnic identity from actual harm.  That is, throughout history humans have blurred the lines between real threat and other identities.  This has allowed us an easy, simply way of exploiting a seemingly innate human susceptibility to in-group preference such that populations can be consolidated behind particular political power and projects of domination and submission. 
 
A classic example would be slavery, in which slaves were seen as an out-group (reinforced by tradition, and then the more powerfully destructive race-based pseudo-bio/social science) that could be exploited and fit into a "natural" hierarchy of subordination.  Another example would be women, considered an out-group of sorts in relation to men (again according to traditional and pseudo-science).  By placing them in a position of subordination, men could dominate 50% of the population by default, enjoying the fruits of their labor and submission.  Some groups, such as LGBT, were simply dealt with by absolute taboo - their sexuality was too dangerous to be exploited, and better to be considered entirely taboo and unthinkable, for fear of cultural contagion.
 
While the notions of pluralism and democracy - and even multiculturalism, were long established by the 20th century, they were highly blinkered with caveats and carve-outs designed to overcome obvious contradictions, e.g., if all men were created equal, people of color were simply defined as "subhuman".  Yet as the century wore on, the progressive movement for civil rights was slowly able to enlarge definitions so as to draw the circle of who is "in-group", and thus entitled to dignity, respect, and human rights ever-larger.  Nearing the first quarter of the 21st century, our old habits of oppression of out-groups through legal and social means have weakened, but still remain strong.   
 
A fundamental impediment to true pluralism, multi-cultural and democratic society seems to still reside in the space where theories/values/beliefs still do not accept these fundamental principles and are even designed by opposition to them.
 
We see in the US - and globally - an allergy to the notion that a healthy society, one in which all citizens enjoy the same access to basic human rights - requires active embrace of out-group identities, and a separation between identity and real harm.  Those opposed to this project maintain that certain religions, racial or sexual groups are inferior or dangerous.  Their social identities - with no small amount of help from various propagandists - are still defined by this anti-pluralism and anti-multiculturalism.
 
This seems to be the soft underbelly - the weak spot in the well-armored vehicle attacking democracy.  New information and appeals to reason, or even empathy seem unable to penetrate this armor.  But if the identity itself is designed to require fear of the out-group and taking as its sustenance pseudo-science/sociology that serves to reinforce its defense (and offense), then maybe striking at this deeper identity is a fruitful strategy for prying off the subsequent defenses that have built upon it.
 
An identity that embraces pluralism and multiculturalism as essential for human rights, democracy and human flourishing is resistance to identity threat from out-groups.  A larger identity that is not merely concerned with its own limited religious, ethnic, and cultural form, but expands to include those of out-groups, not by requiring their assimilation or exclusion, but by summoning the humility to stand beside them as equals, and together confronting real threats and harm to all peoples, is an identity that can resist devious and toxic manipulations of propaganda by those who would seek to divide and conquer.

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Fascism and Fundamentalism

12/16/2023

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PictureVictor Orban at CPAC

I once came across an argument on social media that the historians of fascism had all gotten wrong due to their liberal biases.  Today I came across an interesting post that basically lays out this case, and argues for a view of fascism that find more in common with left wing thought.

The thesis of this brief paper is that postmodernism, an attitude and a way of seeing reality which thoroughly permeates our western culture, is a direct descendant of fascism, and still contains many of its key elements. As an ideology or world view, fascism is an important ancestor of postmodernism that should not be ignored. That there is a strong family resemblance one barely dares suggest, though more and more brave souls are speaking out.

Originally written in 2005, it doesn't seem to have aged well in 2023, with the ascendancy of the global right as being profoundly and often explicitly illiberal, as Victor Orban, a darling of the MAGA intelligentsia, proudly proclaims.  The threats to democracy across the world come not from the left, but from Traditionalist Nationalists in Europe, Russia, India and of course the US.  These movements are incredibly reactionary, finding the modern instantiation of progressive values so triumphant that the only possible course of action is anti-majoritarian illiberalism: voter suppression, executive supremacy, gerrymandering and authoritarian legal maneuvering designed to dictate K-university education.
 
Conspiracies of course, fundamental to fascist movements, provide epistemological means to design a world in which academia, science, the media, and government are all corrupt and to be distrusted.  Post-modernism and relativism - and this article is a good example - have long been straw-manned and misunderstood as being about the non-existence of truth and morality by defenders of a hegemonic conception of Traditionalist truth and knowledge. 
 
However, they missed its core critique - that knowledge and truth, by empirical fact, are relative to social and institutional thought.  In other words, we choose our morality.  To religionists who would view their dogma as the ultimate authority, this is seen as turning man into God.  But when one makes God the ultimate authority, one is literally doing exactly this: all religious dogma is a matter of interpretation, no matter how stubbornly one clings to the narcissistic notion that one's own interpretation is correct and all others are incorrect. 
 
This is an obvious logical fallacy.  The only way to claim yours is the only correct authority is by *making yourself the ultimate authority*, i.e. putting yourself in the place of God.  This is the basic logical flaw in all fundamentalisms.  Post-modernism and relativism merely point out this error.  OK, then, if there is no ultimate authority, won't we all determine our own morality?  Exactly.  We cannot but do any differently.  So, its anything goes then, right - everything is OK, even murder?
 
 This is evidence of the perils of fundamentalist thinking, as it projects its own critical deficits onto others.  If one takes as a given that all is relative to historical place, time and society, the onus is on the individual to do the difficult work of radically examining one's prior assumptions.  Why is murder wrong?  Why is stealing wrong?  It's not actually that hard to develop very solid arguments that end up aligning quite well with most traditional moral claims.  The difference is that these claims are based not on a blind obedience and historically decontextualized fancy one chooses out of ignorance and uncritical social inertia, but rather of introspection, analysis, reading listening, learning, and above all humility that no, I am not a God.
 
Fascism is about the imposition of power over dialogue.  It is the making of man as his own ultimate authority, as his own God, and thus all debate and subservience to democracy as a form of collective understanding are shunned in favor of imposition of one's beliefs over others by brute force.  And so, we return to Religious Nationalism, in which subjugation of others to its own authority is the paramount agenda.  It is anti-pluralism, anti-multi-cultural, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-intellectual because all of these require the humility to live and let others live according to their own moral interpretations.  This is not to say that everything is true and moral - democracy is messy!  It is rather a basic recognition that other people have ways of seeing the world that are different than I, and I am not in a position to impose my specific interpretations, assumed authorities on them carte blanche.  Rather, we all work together to establish *minimum* moral rights that we can at least live with together, with the caveat that our civic duty is one of assessment, analysis, dialogue and argument with our fellow citizens as democratic equals.

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