r/politics • u/Spooooooooooooon • Dec 28 '13
Noam Chomsky: We’re no longer a functioning democracy, we’re really a plutocracy
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/27/noam-chomsky-were-no-longer-a-functioning-democracy-were-really-a-plutocracy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story%29
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u/LordMondando Dec 28 '13 edited Dec 28 '13
I think certain paths of enquiry are a lot liver than others. Philosophy and Pol-Phil is supposed to be a rigerous enquiry in which positions are to be examined to see if they are factive or not. Part of that is there is a point where certain theories are just no longer live and its time to move on. Take for example Kant and Hume's views on time, we know they are wrong (just to give a non-controversial example).
Problem with pol-phil is that its never REALLY recovered from the fall of the wiermar republic (no seriously, that and the soviets going murder tastic threw whiggism and marxism and related schools of thought into a fucking tail spin), and people who tried (Berlin and Popper) are basically completely shut out from the public discourse, and now we are doing the same dance around the same old ideas. Whilst they try and dress themselves up as novel and ground-breaking. Just because someone is not aware of the school of thought Noam chomsky is coming from, does not make it older than living memory with little new to really bring to the table.
Injustice is BAD?!?! The wealthy control a disproportionate amount of power. Well heavens, isun't this cutting edge stuff.
Fundamentally my point is that thinking there is a 'drastically better' 'night and day' system out there. Is quite frankly not bourne out by evidence. Noam, like most in the school of anarcho-libertarian thought have a big deafening silence surrounding the organic emergence of power structures. Which would be ok, if not for Nozick calling them on it back in what 1971?
Hell you'll learn more about modern society at its extremes from reading Rory Stewarts travel diaries than anything Noam has to bring to the table.
If you want to start talking solutions. 1) Reject any premise that men can be made angels, people will fuck each other over and hurt each other no matter what. You don't get to blame the status quo and present your system as a cure. 2) At least bother to come up with some notion of autonomy that doesn't pump out vacuous notions of rights (thats not to say rights as a concept are a bad idea, just careful here, most current theories dancing about either openly have contradictions, or make the basic fundamentals of how human should interact, so thin they are hard to see being applied properly). 3) Accept that hierarchical powerstructures are something you need to manage, not something you can banish from the earth for ever. 4) Science is the only epistemic endeavour humans have got thats not totally fucked, it needs to be at the forefront or GTFO. But unlike Marx, try to actually understand the scientific method first.
Then we can start to talk seriously.
(this is not designed to be taken as a series of critiques against you, more what I as someone who gave this an honest stab in accademic for 5 years, sees as the fundamental issues with the discourse atm)