Some practical remarks on what to believe in.
So, naturally, I'm much more interested in hunches that there's something in front of me waiting to be understood, just hiding from view at the moment, and not only if it, as they (e.g. Colt Seavers) say, stinks, but also if it feels promising, than to make the best case based on an understanding that I know to be deficient.
Obviously your understanding depends on the things that you've observed in your life, the subjects you have studied. And so the best case you can make will always reflect that and that is a source of political disagreements and the reason why statecraft overlaps with philosophy, namely that both are based on appreciating what you actually understand.
That is the reason why Plato writes in riddles and why you can amass all kinds of theories at universities, but can't teach a man to love questions.
So, the problem with people like Friedrich Merz and my aunt's son is that they've learned in their professional lives to navigate the current system, and they know how to best chart the next stage of the course within it, but international relations have to be based on common natural interests, because, as removed from concrete actions as they may be, at least you understand them, at least there's no denying them, whereas, when you desire the potential, you're counting on people and their ambitions and that usually ends badly, as it did for Wilhelm II's love affair with Britain, while in Friedrich II's case you see the exact opposite: He got Prussia into a war by insulting women in general and Elizabeth of Russia and Maria Theresa in particular. Still, despite this negligence, his basic grasp of the strategic interests of the time prevailed when Peter III rose to the throne. In such a case political leaders tend to be lucky, in the other they become tragic figures: You don't want to be an enemy of the invisible hand of natural interests.
That is my position on this issue. There's no hard proof that it's the better position, but it has a long tradition and a decent track record. There's a lot of things that people are forgetting.
Another incarnation of professional bias occurred here in Tucker Carlson's interview of Mr. Hopkins, whom I've known of since his ZeroHedge fame:
They both agree that somehow life casts you in a role - like Tucker Carlson playing Tucker Carlson. I wonder who exactly did cast him in that role. And so, when Mr. Hopkins went on to say that he's cheerful despite the shortness of his lifespan in the vast imagined expanse of time, because of a thing he heard in his youth (by the way, what he actually heard is a dadaistic pun on You can kill me, but you can't beat me), I went No, no, you're not that young. I was 5 years old then and you are much older than me, but then he didn't quote Eric Idle. And as for doing better than playing your role, how about saying I used my time the best I could?
As for Mr. Hopkins' concern, I don't really agree. Firstly, the system doesn't want anything, it's just the dynamic of the totality of all interests, and it is a heck of job to get a handle on it, and secondly, people in the west are really doing their best not to lose their systemic benefit by stepping out of line and what higher degree of compliance can the system realistically incorporate? If it's going downhill from here on out, that is where the system is headed.
By the way, I really don't want to fearmonger, but the idea that Russia and China are just capitalistic is stupid: For there to be capitalism, there needs to be a moneyed class that makes the decisions. And who would even want that? Russia today feels like Germany in the 1920s, that is a layer of sleaze on something completely different. Ukraine, by dreaming of a future divorced from the flow of history, has become the stick that stirs the available into the most reliable shape.
And as for dreaming, when I was in Crimea in 2011, I also, like Mr. Hopkins, felt a very different belief from my own, namely that the Soviet Union continued in some form, but, unlike Mr. Hopkins, I didn't feel like fleeing the place, but rather felt intrigued and mused that, as divorced as this was from the flow of history overall, it held enough truth for the people there and that they could probably proceed on the basis of that belief into the future - maybe I was thinking about the Trainman metaphor in the Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions then as well.
Labels: 44, formalisierung, geschichte, gesellschaftsentwurf, gesellschaftskritik, gesetze, institutionen, metaphysik, sehhilfen, wahrnehmungen, zeitgeschichte, ἰδέα, φιλοσοφία
