Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Carl Benjamin: Progressive Elites - The "Parasitic Entity" Controlling British Politics" video.

  1. Goodness, you guys are as bad as the Marxists. i mean they worked 24/7 all over xmas on the internal you tube stage last year. Its the summer folks. Anyway I've made a few notes, not adequate to the whole discussion, but some remarks drawn from the first 10 mins or so although i have watched up to about 30:00 mins. These are very preliminary, but maybe of interest. I'll just say at the onset, I am drawing on a paper by Wilfred Sellars here called "Mental Events"(1981) which is interpreted by Willem A. deVries in "Wilfred Sellars"(2005/2014) as a correction to naturalist problems from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956). Anyone who has tried to read Sellars will know his work and themes and arguments are distributed across a whole load of papers and diverse technical issues. However there is, in his Mental Events, a fairly clear positioning within and between various formalisms, Humeian custom, and Aristotle on human action. In this he rejects each, on their own, as grounds and or giving rise to principals and ground. its discussed by deVries p.g.s 187-191. its very difficult stuff for anyone with a philosophical background and so not recommended for as a summer book, but a summer holiday is recommended guys. Part 1: Up to 8:00 mins or so Carl Benjamin was asked to comment on Nigel Farage having his bank account closed down. By "asked to comment" I mean it is left open or ambiguous what comment means her, does it mean a description, a causal account, an explanation, an interpretation, understanding and many other possible framing accounts. Certainly then he has a degree of freedom to take up the question in many ways, when there "is" (il y a) such an openness of possibility in how to take it up. Clearly the example has been picked out of an apparent infinity of events available, if indeed we want to think of this as a picking out of an event out of a structure with infinity(?) which its self presupposes a certain framework as the context, that is the notion of freedom of the pick, is seen as agent freedom of reference as picking out an event case from a set of possible, structured down to fine grained infinity of detail as well as just an imagined structured space of possibles. So one reason for choosing this event is it has already been picked out, and that this prior picked out, is due to an implicit bias by people. This bias look like a bias only when we set it against the idea of an infinite array of possibilities, that can even stretch out over space and time and down into the fine grained sand. Of course in the real world of people there never is that moment of reflection that takes in all these events possibles as its "horizon", we act in the real contextual world, but such reference and by such persons, there is an apparent problem of bias as a contrast to all possibility, for someone who either believes the structure of possibles is real, or uses it and so is committed to it implicitly. Sellars indeed contrasts a notion of picking out from a structure as problematic because the structure as presented, presents a problem of how a finite human could come to be able to present such a structure. That is Sellars I would say sees it as not just a problem of "legitimate or justified reference from within the structure but questions that there "is" such a structure at all for even the human persons reference problem to appear. That is the structure presents problem in understanding how we could "get in it" in the first place. Sellars clearly has in mind here a Criticism of Platonism he talks of carving nature at the joints, but he will not accept a straight Humean account, for it lacks any rule at all, or a straight Aristotelian account. In this Sellars want to contrast a framed account of events moving forward in the scientific public space if you like space, from actions by persons as events moving forward within expectation. These belong to different spaces of reason for Sellars. The problem for him is to see how these relate for example in getting mortgage I have expectations of earnings and value increase as an investment personally, and there is a instituional system that tries to manage continuity instituional. People of course must operate with both in mind, while for most its about orientating ourselves to the system but for a few in institutional power they can treat the structural system of continuity as if its modelled on their own cause and action with expectation. This mean though for them and not others they have a public and private synthesis of sorts, they can bend the structure to suit their private interests and adjust their private interests and expectation in the knowledge of policy they make to create particular continuity out of many possible “Nash equilbria”. Here at the extreme they knew that their private interests in synthesis with their public instituional activity can so override the public possibility of continuity the thing disintegrates but hey have the country as a whole to bail them out as bailing themselves out. In 2008-10 Now that Nigel Farage has been picked out already is one thing but the context is that it has had high profile in the media and a a discussion point or action point from within particular political orientations. As such then our horizon of possibility is not infinite, because such an image of a space of all possible up for reason, is wrong then as a structural Platonism (see also Hemple and the Paradox of the ravens that i consider is a paradox to expose this platonic idea of a pre set logical space of propositions as a myth). Similar argument against relativism as presupposing a structuralism, which is a methodological closure.
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  2. So for us it stands there already standing forth from i might say a hermeneutic political space, even if many players in this space imagine it is a Platonic Space or use Justice and equality with this image of a pre given structure of possibles. I should say that this dialectic between structure and person as a "how to get in" problem i saw in the Matrix movie but was discussed in a paper at the Metametaphysics Conference about 2019 at Dusseldorf University by Sophie Allan. So it would seem to require an explanation of why he was picked out in the first place. Here we have accounts drawing on the idea of a network of middle class who are politically and culturally an homogeneous group in opinion on who to pick out before the law and a principle say of justice and difference. While Marxist or the left would want to cite here a community who reflectively and self consciously see themselves as group due to having shared economic interests and so friends and enemies, the cultural signals are after the fact. People who do not believe in this kind of reductive ground or foundation in economic determinism, such as conservatives perhaps, might want to foreground an the economics of this coalition, they want to see the values and principles as having non reductive role, or even a dominant role here. that is the rich as well as the poor are inn also unluckily in a morally unfortunate position to have to adopt such values to retain belonging that they sees as value and policy inclusion. From this thicker, always already "in", political context then the understanding of such a group is not easy jsut as economic shared interests since many are not middleclass or could even get in. if we miss how this "group" are a group in a network and political structure we might turn to description like "is it, are they, like a religion or is a totalitarianism or a cult even? This would not prohibit the criticism that there are the in group in the know and then the rest who are deluded and under a false consciousness false reflection of really having genuine shared goals. Of course the formal problem can be made to appear solved with the idea and naturalisms of climate change. Climate change goes proxy for the universal standpoint in the sense it is meant to impact all as hypothesised, but the impact varies depending on disposition or place and economic location. Climate change seems to function in a similar ways to how Adorno took up the threat of thermonuclear war. Its like the event of “all people” as a unity is done by reference to a universal risk. Similar to the banking bailout then, and perhaps thermonuclear war and climate change are a distraction from the later. We could draw an analogy with religions or apocalyptic religions. The risk is in this approach like the mirror image of naturalist attempts at drawing on biology and animal groups as a limit or as the emergency. This is the root taken in parts of “The Diversity Illusion” by Ed West. Though what is interesting is he gives an account of conflict and the manifestation of substantive difference at the boarders of groups he calls something like a "doughnut effect" (?). Its modelled on geography but he extends it to public and private housing w.r.t immigration and it could be stretched further away from geography also. It is a Schmittian friend enemy and difference only at the boarders of groups groups not just understood as requiring geographical proximity of coalition and so boarder not then primarily a geographic notion. It’s a strange accident of intellectual history that Goetha account of the splitting of light into colours was based on the fact that the split was at the boundary of light and dark a difference, not as Newton thought as just a splitting of column of light into a rainbow. That aside Schmidtt had the view like Hobbes of man essentially in conflict. I think Schmitt has to be seen as a response to socialism following the Russian Revolution and what many saw as its surprising success against expectations. Schmidtt then just alters the socialist universal but vertical divide and conflict between classes into a lateral cultural political divide. The political theology was his attempt to ground the State as ontological against international socialism, as well as maintaining that the fragility of the State cannot be expressed in terms of determineing such limiting cases of existential risk, in terms of principles, rules, laws, and customs. It requires a decision (or political judgement, I would say) and it is this decisional openness and freedom towards acting on an events or group of nexus events, that is the ground of the Sovereign as the necessary exception to institutional rules and custom or moral and ethical value as underdetermining the action. This then he projects as an exceptional God, but it is the agent and the act. What we have now in response to this as totalitarianism and dictatorship, is the idea that science and rules can do this within “complex” multi-institutional action. But that makes science and materialism and self interest as economic science the absolute. People then can argue over the science and the rules since they are manifold and nexus and open over cases and the totality. What is a real worry is then contrary to Schmitt no one seems to be responsible even if someone gets picked when the music stops. The complexity and instituional diversity just allows exculpation…bad decisions are orphans. I will try and do a better and fuller job of response later, especially I think to read or re read some of your references. Many thanks to Harrison Pitt, Evan Riggs, and Carl Benjamin.
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  3. Part 2: I guess that most political interested people listen to YouTube political programs, for moves against an enemy that they already have a clear view of as in someway distinct from themselves, the distinction or boundary usually “expressed” as a simple “is” verses “is not”. The “is” is their own vague numbers capacity, and the “not is” is, their opponents position. Each posits themselves as the, is, and the other as the “not is”. What geos for the is, here are equivocal or multiple empirical logically customary and personally in capacity group. A level of depth can be given to this say in many metaphysical terms but then the ability to operate a boundary cannot be expressed by an is verses and is not without difficulty or impossibility. In this way the political boundary, makes each attempt to conceptually annihilate the opponents position, place it from a “not is” place to a non-sense place: to make it unjustifiable to de legitimate it in a sense similar to J F. Lyotard notes of silencing. So most people probably look for this kind of move of negation or annihilation and silencing of the opponent across the border. This fails to account for or grasp the opponent’s position both as real and in some ay not distinct but related to their own, this can be accounted for by looking at the history of political and economic ideas (e.g. marginal economics was a response to socialism, and the new left a response to marginalism) are always a response to the opponents position. Thus a notion of an in group, having its being in itself alone and independent of its opponents is a myth. The boundary here then is one of difference not essence. It ironic that Social justice has moved from reflective understanding of its position as resistance to thinking it is a position in itself. This results in very strange construction of identities and person. This means the clearer the apparent distinctness and so brutal utility of a move on the other, the more likely it is full of errors, that often return to bite them. The unclear path though is deep and difficult to be always feeling out of ones depth. In the end must be policy apt and understandable but make a difference, and there is the problem: if professional philosophers are unclear, and solutions are complex what use is this in real politics, who on earth is going to understand it. It may lead one to think we need a group of philosophical experts to do metaphysics for the uninitiated who then take it on trust. This Platonic move of course repeats the problem the distinction between the expert middle class philosophers with opaque capability and the lower class with its multitude capacity. This is not as such just ta theory practice distinction, since the very division of middle class experts and the lower classes is a philosophical distinction. What is the shape of this boundary. What I like about Carl Benjamin’s discussion is the confession of how difficult this level is to grasp and express. We have someone who does not seem to have a clear view a public apt language of expression that mirrors a private grasp and understanding. That is we don’t get a earnest position on these questions. It is unclear what he thinks but not due to lack of public able expression, but something like “it’s not clear in his head or his private mind”. There is a long tradition that considers, thought and reason that has no public expression is nothing, a “not”. In a similar way the middleclass think of the lower class as being disordered only potentially or possible capacity as a unity, there are separate perhaps Aristotelian persons here persons here but no unity or hegemony to convert their private interests pointing in all directions, into a unified capacity as apt for middle class public capability. Here a distinction operates between the lower classes as disorder private space, that is supposed then, really as a functional nothing, and the middle class who operate with form as an ordering of the multitude into a unified capacity and policy function. A general way to characterise this similarity I am stressing here between on the one hand thought and public expression and on the other the disordered private lower classes and the public middle classes, has been that the private realm of thought consists of merely unexpressed public language. It’s called the language of thought hypothesis in say Sappier/Wolf I think it can be found in Montesquieu for example. Sellers describes this as a erred model: that the private thinking is modelled on public Language that has to be constrained by the semantic rules appropriate to a public, that it is not then makes is subordinate to public expression or a myth, or both the job of the middleclass then is to de mythologise the lower classes of the idea of being and legitimacy without the middle class functionality. The private sphere only has being so far as it is potential apt for public policy rules and so on. This is Sellers early position in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”(1950’s) and the less discussed myth of Jones, it is taken up in more detail in his 1969 lectures (that are on the internet for free, enjoy!). The Sellars discussion here owe much to the so called Private Language Argument from Wittgenstein and addressing Ryle. I said to someone doing a paper on subjectivity and narrative that Wittgenstein thought of a private language as wheels spinning an a void, they said even wheels spinning inside a void is something. If the private is nothing or disordered and has only dependent secondary being to the public then it offers no boundary to public access since it is not real a private space at all only disorder, and in need of formal ordering. That is not just the left position but the right also they only disagree on how the ordering is to take place and why. For the left it ordering thinking to the universal the international legal and justice order. For the right its about ordering one’s life into a kind of Strawson individual person agent or Aristotelian business start-up actor. There is in Hume along with tradition and custom a kind of subjectivity or idealism or solipsism going on, but he himself recognised like Kant that there is no person here no unified subject available to this private subjectivity it’s bundles of ever changing perceptions. Sellers claims Hume lacks with Kant a rule, that can be expressed for all the above in practical terms as a distinction between anticipation in mind and act and constructed public rules though institutions. here though the metaphysics of the two: "private" anticipation and public (social) rules constructing the future as continuity, are not simply isomorphic or could be made so without subtraction and loss. Thus in politics this three or four fold public solution to the problem of "disordered" lack of being of privacy manifests as conflict between three or for institutions or potential institutions. Its as if the public positing of a disordered private realm (for a person or the lower classes) drives the ideas of different politicised institutional forms for public ordering of the private, and so the conflict and disunity posited in the private realm is sublated into conflict between politicised institutions the public realm. Hobbes's Nature at war Civil War is not atomistic or like conflict between nations but an internecine warfare between institutions. To make matters worse this is also draws in other nations via the institutions alignments between similar institutions of different states. This because one state copies or is forced to adopt institutional alignment with other states. Indeed relations between apparently ontologically separate States is always in play and happens via interstate institutions spread, uptake or as the result of various forms of force or soft power. Thus the distinction between foreign and domestic is not ontological or essential in any easy way. Later though in Mental Events (1981) Sellars reassesses this view. Hopefully more to follow soon.
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  4. Part 3: Oop's The "language of thought" is not Sapire/Wolf but Fodor as any basic book on the philosophy of language will correctly claim. note: I claimed the the disorder/conflict posited among the people becomes various takes between different institutions and so the conflict is subulate into a conflict between institutional tasks (functions continuities laying out a public rule), two points the conflict between institutions is really played out by and between people on the ground who affiliate themselves with "their" institution in terms of attachment or uptake of some institution principle they take as a public political maxim for themselves. one could say the institutions get the people under them to do the "fighting" by having them adopt its principles as personal maxims. its like a Psychology 101 move. the middle class claim the people are disordered and or precarious and in need of some institution: "I" as forming order for them. But then this produces conflict between peoples proxy for institutional political conflict, then all the institutional in sequence can claim the people of the other institution are disordered, but then its heyday for institutional claim to legitimately act as they do since the people have been made into what they claimed as only a posit :disordered risky. its looks like a labelling theory from old school Criminology, but the institutions their general terms and functions capabilities are not just accidentally in need of people as capacity affiliates in voting they need them to do the institutional action spread far and wide geographically and . conceptually. That is it is the institution that cannot have a private ordered or disordered function policy. That really is a private language when the policy propositions have no public sense, or are unworkable, or lack capacity to deliver capability, or its jsut an aggregate of disconnected disharmonious and even contradictory polices, as you might get if the people themselves or divergent policy creators each just get to put their favoured bit in by an inner private process of multiple policy production like a democracy that is wholly empirical and particular and aggregated a Humean bungle of polices. The left then have the idea of international justice and equality as a kind of meta meta reason policy and institution as the apex of a deductive logic of policy all the way down. The proposed need for order then is via the absolute idea of justice and progress ordered by the Sun that is a logical deduction sort of sun. Then the people have to have this as the structure of their mind in terms of maxims, and perhaps justice as a kind of Categorical imperative of a certain kind of freedom to capacity right. on the Right the institution is to keep this since of absolute justice at bay a freedom from right, but positively to allows the freedom for the necessity that people must have a maxim of self interest and its freedom from sort of right. a kind of equilibrium logic must follow here. So instituional action requires the shaping of peoples minds and maxims and principles. Personal Anticipation and public ruled continuity are two sides of the same coin then. But it very complex when you get into this.
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  5. Part 4: It could be argued that Thatcher's Conservativism, saw in neo liberalism not just a kind of philosophically incongruent but effective tool against the Soviet Union, rather their is a certain commonality in that both in different ways are anti foundationalist, if in different ways: traditional conservatism like Burke takes where we are as a kind of normative fact of the thrownness of exitance with no origin as such only common recognition of the ground of reasons being in agreement and so a limit of sorts, while neo liberalism has no empirical or normative ground alone rather it is "in" a dynamic equilibrium. The problem was then that neo liberalism as revolutionary becomes in contradiction to the other claim that of tradition and inheritance rights. It will break or dissolve these traditions. in this sense it was an excess when abstracted from the Soviet Union after 1989 An appeal could be made for a link between conservativism and Rights in terms of already tradition of rights to a culture rights to a community, which at first glance seems an odd right for the left to embrace, until we realise it is only used with respect to minorities and the other. I'm not at all sure this is any good though since community rights are reflective and interpreted by institutions: Global or community leaders and so on. In this sense then it makes a community in immediacy with place, a task on the model of the West doing community care for its other. that is what is immediate in a democracy becomes reflective and mediated by the universal justice and right. like treating parts of your own country as if it is recipient of foreign aid or charity. An army of international aid workers in our own country. In this though we see that the topology of the middle class and lower classes is really a domestic to foreign lateral set relation made into a vertical class relation. Conservativism needs something but not this. it a species of the general tendency to negate the lefts negation to incorporate there local to ourselves it just middle class mediation for the universal to the domestic. like thinking the response to minority and rights as expression for the other to express, is white mans rights, so white man can express. Tempting as it is, it is then mediated and subordinated by internal right instituional lexical order. One of the master problems is the implicit equation between virtues and vice on the one hand and public and private duty in institutions they are not isomorphic adverbs.
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  6. Carl Benjamin's Critique of the social/psychological science complex of "distributed/distributed ideas suppression complex" as "external" without "heart" i think is correct. Eric Weinstein's DISC woulda have to mean accounts like "spontaneously falling into line" due to training or are causal without freedom spontaneity ie without a mind. that cant work because real people in real situations are underdetermined by such nexus forces, they can still choose or judge, and so are responsible agents that the scientific image cannot grasp. That is it cannot present an event or object requiring a judgement and an aesthetic one at that. This is exactly the problem Sellars attempts to take up from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind to "Mental Events" where he attempts to bring to a synoptic vision the standpoints of bald naturalism, Humean convention and custom, Justice and personhood as rights, via the differences of their semantic spaces. Thus it is now not a problem about beings or things but of rules laws probabilities in logic reasons and language. (My motivation for this began from on line seminar sessions at the Columbia Centre for Critcial Theory (and Praxis) a few years ago. The session was one presented by Amy Allen on her book "The End of Progress: de Colonising the Normative Foundations of Critical theory". The basic idea is a notion of advancement without and end point or aim, it seems to be the kind of thing McDowell had in mind in his YouTube Google lecture "Intention in Action". It is also similar to a discussion on Novara Media recently between Aaron Bastani and Dan Evans on Evans's book 'A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of The Petty Bourgeoisie'. which got me reading Sellars again. Nice one. the trick is not to try and find a place for man freedom and reason in law like nature and rule normativity, or a place for the disposed individual in universal Right. these kind of projects are in error. rather the problem is to find what has to happen to man for the either or both the law like naturalism and the rule(s) of universal legal right to even make sense. This i get from, or was inspired by McDowell's "Mind and World". This seems to me to be Kant's question to which the Copernican revolution is the answer not the previous other two projects of naturalism or transformative law and rule.
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  7. At 10:00 mins Harrison Pitt talks about the Wasteland as an image of a void being set up from all sides by policy. I use this as an image within a nexus of Robinson Cruseau, and an Episode of TV series "The Freewheelers" called "Vertigo" from 1972 which I remember, but is now lost/erased.
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  8. On Evan Riggs's point that he has more hope for Britain's to pull themselves out of the morass of modernity, I'm sure many Britain's are mercifully bereft of the world view of modernity, they have never internalised The Myth of Disenchantment. in fact its would be impossible for a person to really become disenchanted in this sense at least, its based on a general formal representation of a rule, which would require people becomes machines. Kant on organism and mechanism in CPR Antinomies and Paralogisms and the Critique of Judgement.
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  9. At 25:00 Harrison Pitt raises the issue of what would be lost in absolute freedom from, that is what is disappearing in the Habermasian sense as the idea of absolute freedom is approached. It might be possible to read Philip Bobbitt's "Terror and Consent" as rather than three cheers for global free market capitalism, rather only two in that once it returns to the State it starts to undo its own condition. In that the now market state can only have defenders motivated by money and gaming profit verses loss though insurance against high risk, and low health and safety working environments. ie the imagined end state of global capitalism is mercenary army made of people contumely changing sides with non of the ancient virtues or modern duties. it means the economy and social justice leaving behind the poor, without middleclass moral luck, creates a possible soldier, but not a potential one. while the money would seems to work in the short run and so long as things are going well, in the long run it would require conscription and contract not to change sides. This issue was raised as a problem for Bobbitt, but i think that was his tacit point. The book is like a tricky seminar question not a how to... create a market state. Press one if you want artillery, two for Arial bombardment, three for extraction, four for contracts and bank account enquiries, or five for anything else. We're sorry but all our operators are busy at the moment. Please call again later.
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