2017-11-25: Wigan Pier

Meetings
,
1

topic

https://discuss.jordanbpeterson.community/t/george-orwell-the-road-to-wigan-pier/72

podcast

  • Seems oppression is about lack of choice, in which case

    • Capitalism offers everyone choice, but more to the rich/rewarded

    • Socialism offers the poor more choice than the rich

    • Communism offers the weak less power than the strong

  • Dignity - Deus Ex Machina

  • Religion - oppression is choice?

    • Are constraints of awareness oppressive?

      • Women in Amish/Islam - they have constraints, but most worship those constraints

    • Ties in with the “Interview a Plant” from “Poppy”

  • 1984 / Brave New World - is that future choice?

  • Main takeaways:

    • @JohnBuck: Is the best way to help those lower than you, to give them the choice and ability to move upwards?
      Socialists are not putting in all this effort to help the poor out of love, but because of how much they hate the rich. They, like the Nazis, also find the poor disgusting

discussion notes

  • Place your upcoming and as you go, talking point ideas, here

  • Socialism isn’t quite only about “hating the rich”? Peterson (over)simplifying Orwell?

    • What is good for the individual *as well as *good for the whole society?

    • Is it ever just to sacrifice the individual for the "greater good"?

  • Fascism as tyranny of resentful and fearful bourgeoisie, versus Communism as tyranny of resentful and fearful proletariat.

  • Orwell’s argument against Utopianism: even if machines eliminated all work, people would still look for work to do. This is Dostoyevsky’s and also JBP’s view on Utopia:

    • “The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster…” (85)

    • Every individual is, at different time, oppressor *and *oppressed. Ideology is the oversimplification of this reality.

  • Are constraints of awareness oppressive?

    • Women in Amish/Islam - they have constraints, but most worship those constraints

  • Seems oppression is about lack of choice, in which case

    • Capitalism offers everyone choice, but more to the rich/rewarded

    • Socialism offers the poor more choice than the rich

    • Communism offers the weak less power than the strong

  • Dignity

  • @JohnBuck: not all workers imagine the utopia. They just want higher wages, etc.

    • Michael: Just as SJW’s claim to wage revolution on behalf of all LGBT people, black people, women, etc., bourgeoisie communists falsely claim to represent the universal wish of all working class people. In reality it is not that simple.

  • "The lower classes smell” – The real reason that higher classes don’t view lower classes as their equals (says Orwell).

    • Disgust sensitivity.

    • Do you agree that the reason upper- or middle-class people don’t act like working-class people is that they find them disgusting?

    • Why do we make people we don’t like disgusting? Or is it people we want to avoid?

    • Do people still have this idea about working-class people?

    • 10 minute read: Danger of solipsism: David Foster Wallace “This is water” http://metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf

      • DFW spent his entire career critiquing postmodern irony. Great writer for understanding postmodernism.

  • @theplebistocrat: Public intellectuals like Milo consider themselves parental figures.

  • Postmodernism as the overly critical destructive extreme of reasonable critique of western tradition. Arthur Douglass

  • @balupton: debating distracts from real action to solve real problems. Barbara: how often does debate actually change anyone’s mind?

  • JBP’s anti-postmodernism web application for detecting postmodern course descriptions. Shutting down women’s studies departments? Doesn’t that contradict free speech? Doesn’t it infantilize students by assuming they aren’t capable of responding critically to a postmodern course?

  • Privileged classes replace God as the oppressor.

  • @theplebistocrat’s argument against universal suffrage: universal enfranchisement divides the family unit. Definitely true.

    • Michael says: but can husbands be trusted to vote on behalf of their household, and not just themselves? Can individuals be humble enough to reduce their vote according to their knowledge, intelligence, etc.?

  • @theplebistocrat: old testament is what *is. *New testament is what could be.

  • Loving thy enemy. True strength is turning the cheek. Is this the proper male response to female physical abuse? Since as JBP says: “if you win you’re a tyrant. If you lose you’re just bloody pathetic”. Sane women need to talk sense in the radical feminists? Men can’t do it?

  • Failure as a virtue