'member this cartoon? It's dumb for a number of reasons. The first is of course that it's completely glossing the hypocrisy issue, mogging it with "I'm signaling that I'm smart". It's not really slick rhetoric.pic.twitter.com/NeaFnhon46
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'member this cartoon? It's dumb for a number of reasons. The first is of course that it's completely glossing the hypocrisy issue, mogging it with "I'm signaling that I'm smart". It's not really slick rhetoric.pic.twitter.com/NeaFnhon46
The people this cartoon is intending to defend are "those who complain about X but participate in X". It's not wrong to call this hypocritical; "hypocrites" are actors or pretenders, this cartoon tries to reverse the "pretender" role, unsuccessfully.
i.e. "I pretend to be smart by noticing something that could be construed as hypocrisy". Let's be frank: there are multiple issues at stake and this completely missing the plot.
First: people who complain about X but participate in X, or allow X, can be read as hypocrites. If, indeed, they have the power to stop X but aren't really interested in doing so, because if X stops they lose some benefit, that's plain hypocrisy, genuinely so.
More than likely however, your typical hypocrite is just a slave of some sort; take people complaining about capitalism, who are generally the people this cartoon defends. They hardly know what it is, how to stop it. These people are "hypocritical", but mainly they're whiners.
Third some people in this class are genuinely opposed to X and struggling against it; most Christians are struggling against things they oppose, but not in the sense above, mainly in the personal sense, in terms of rightness of will & one's own actions.
In this case, you're still a little bit hypocritical, but not because you are weak (a whiner) or meretricious (a true hypocrite) but because you are at war, in process of eliminating it. "You oppose the Carthaginians and yet they are allowed to remain in Rome? Mox, absunt."
But all of this misses the most powerful defense of allegedly hypocritical involvement in a system you oppose! It's so silly once you realize it, and perhaps your average communist-aligned cartoonist doesn't understand things very deeply. I don't know.
First of all, communists don't want to improve society; they want to destroy it. Yes, I understand the fabians thought they could improve their way there, but the ultimate goal IS the abolishing of society as it is! This is the goal of all those who follow Locke!
But more than this, consider that the theory which is the end of liberation-struggles is nothing other than the removal of all coercion upon all people, and government is at root coercion. If indeed coercion IS society, liberation necessitates its annihilation at some point.
Therefore all who follow Locke in some way - this includes Marxists of all kinds, people who believe in Huxleian paradises, Libertarians and of course all anarchists, are in fact hypocritical for participating in society. That's how philosophy really works.
By this I mean, when you adopt a philosophy, unless you follow its tenets you're being hypocritical. Hypocrisy itself is not about immortal/universal standards, but about pretense; what is put forth, honestly or dishonestly. "By your own words you will stand or fall."
Now to clear something up, most of these folks view society and government as different things - they think of society as simply "relationships" between people that form the "community", whereas gov't is coercion. Society has always been governed, so they imagine a "new" society.
I take the historical view, which is in this case less Plato and more Aristotle you might say - that no society is without government. Therefore society must be governed, to eliminate coercion is to dissolve society. History backs me up here, although this isn't the point.
However, the moral point about hypocrisy and the concern about destroying humanity by destroying its "interlinking" fabric miss a very much more important point! And it has all to do with a dumb nursery rhyme, "the lady who swallowed the fly."
In "the old lady who swallowed the fly", the woman tries to get rid of one pest with another, or, in short, she develops X to destroy Y, after which X becomes a new pest! Imagine if a socialist developed a government to destroy government... well, you get it.
So the Leninists, in order to get rid of the evils of government and bring on the classless society, create a government to destroy the evils of government, which proceeds to become a new, perhaps more virulent form of government. Ah.
But let's say, what if... what if one as able to use the system to destroy itself? It would be hypocritical to engage and in fact in some ways help the system, but if successful, X destroys X, and X-X=0, the fly eats itself.
For this reason, in conclusion, accelerationism and decelerationism are identical movements, separated only by their expectations of what will happen after the "bifurcation" - an eruption, an AI, whatever, as Decelerationists will realize they need to use tech to destroy itself.
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