Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged anarchy

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Florence and the Drones - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-florence-and-the-drones.html

machiavelli realism leadership power checks & balances

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The conventional view is that Machiavelli believed that since people are brutes then everything is permitted. Leaders should do anything they can to hold power. The ends justify the means.
  • In fact, Machiavelli was a moralistic thinker.
  • He just had a different concept of political virtue. It would be nice, he writes, if a political leader could practice the Christian virtues like charity, mercy and gentleness and still provide for his people. But, in the real world, that’s usually not possible. In the real world, a great leader is called upon to create a civilized order for the city he serves. To create that order, to defeat the forces of anarchy and savagery, the virtuous leader is compelled to do hard things, to take, as it were, the sins of the situation upon himself.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The leader who does good things cannot always be good himself. Sometimes bad acts produce good outcomes. Sometimes a leader has to love his country more than his soul.
  • Since a leader is forced by circumstances to do morally suspect things, Machiavelli at least wants him to do them effectively
  • When you read Machiavelli, you realize how lucky we are. Unlike 16th-century Florence, we have a good Constitution that channels conflict. We have manners, respect for law and social trust that softens behavior, at least a bit. Even in the realm of foreign affairs, we’ve inherited an international order that restrains conflict. Our ancestors behaved savagely to build our world, so we don’t have to.
  • But it’s still not possible to rule with perfectly clean hands. There are still terrorists out there, hiding in the shadows and plotting to kill Americans. So even today’s leaders face the Machiavellian choice: Do I have to be brutal to protect the people I serve? Do I have to use drones, which sometimes kill innocent children, in order to thwart terror and save the lives of my own?
  • When Barack Obama was a senator, he wasn’t compelled to confront the brutal logic of leadership. Now in office, he’s thrown into the Machiavellian world. He’s decided, correctly, that we are in a long war against Al Qaeda; that drone strikes do effectively kill terrorists; that, in fact, they inflict fewer civilian deaths than bombing campaigns, boots on the ground or any practical alternative; that, in fact, civilian death rates are dropping sharply as the C.I.A. gets better at this. Acting brutally abroad saves lives at home.
  • Machiavelli tells us that men are venal self-deceivers, but then he gives his Prince permission to do all these monstrous things, trusting him not to get carried away or turn into a monster himself.
  • Our founders were more careful. Our founders understood that leaders are as venal and untrustworthy as anybody else. They abhorred concentrated power, and they set up checks and balances to disperse it.
  • If you take Machiavelli’s tough-minded view of human nature, you have to be brutal to your enemies — but you also have to set up skeptical checks on the people you empower to destroy them.
Javier E

"Breaking Bad" By Niccolo Machiavelli « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...the-waves-of-chance-and-change

machiavelli virtu evil morality agency psychology

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • If a man is truly a man through force and fraud and nerve, then Walter becomes the man he always wanted to be. He trounces every foe; he gains a huge fortune; he dies a natural death. Compared with being a high school chemistry teacher? Niccolo would scoff at the comparison. “I did it for me.”
  • Walt is consumed all along by justified resentment of the success others stole from him, and by a rage that his superior mind was out-foxed by unscrupulous colleagues. He therefore lived and died his final years for human honor – for what <img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-150262" alt="466px-Portrait_of_Niccolò_Machiavelli_by_Santi_di_Tito" src="http://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/466px-portrait_of_niccolocc80_machiavelli_by_santi_di_tito.jpg?w=233&h=300" width="233" height="300" />Machiavelli calls virtu, a caustic, brutal inversion of Christian virtue
  • his skills were eventually proven beyond any measure in ways that would never have happened if he had never broken bad. And breaking bad cannot mean putting a limit on what you are capable of doing. What Machiavelli insisted upon was that a successful power-broker know how to be “altogether bad.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the cost-benefit analysis of “breaking bad” when the alternative is imminently “dying alone” is rigged in favor of the very short term, i.e. zero-sum evil. If Walt had had to weigh a long, unpredictable lifetime of unending fear and constant danger for his family and himself, he would have stopped cooking meth.
  • was he happy? Yes, but in a way that never really reflects any inner peace. He is happy in a way that all millionaires and tyrants are happy.
  • Machiavelli differs from later realists like Hobbes—and more contemporary “neorealists” like the late Kenneth Waltz—in recognizing that human agency matters as much as the structural fact of international anarchy in determining both foreign policy behavior and ultimate outcomes in world politics.
  • It should be taught because it really does convey the egoist appeal of evil, of acting ruthlessly in the world
  • The benefits only work if your life is nasty, brutish and short. The costs are seen in the exhausted, broken eyes of Skyler, the betrayal of an only painfully faithful son, the murder of a brother-in-law, the grisly massacre of dozens, the endless nervous need to be on the alert, to run and hide and lie and lie and lie again, until life itself becomes merely a means to achieve temporary security.
  • Breaking Bad should be taught alongside Machiavelli – as a riveting companion piece.
  • a leader’s choices can have a pivotal impact on politics, both domestic and international.
  • Though fortune be capricious and history contingent, the able leader may shape his fate and that of his state through the exercise of virtu. This is not to be mistaken for “virtue”, as defined by Christian moral teaching (implying integrity, charity, humility, and the like). Rather, it denotes the human qualities prized in classical antiquity, including knowledge, courage, cunning, pride, and strength.
Javier E

Enter the Age of the Outsiders - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-age-of-the-outsiders.html

reason anarchy institutions decentralization fringe spiritual culture meaning mission realism barbarism

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In the 1990s, the central political institutions radiated confidence, derived from an assumed vision of the post-Cold War world. History would be a slow march toward democratic capitalism. Nations would be bound in peaceful associations like the European Union. The United States would oversee a basic international order.
  • This vision was materialistic and individualistic. Nations should pursue economic growth and a decent distribution of wealth. If you give individuals access to education and opportunity, they will pursue affluence and personal happiness. They will grow more temperate and “reasonable.”
  • The uncertain Republican establishment cannot govern its own marginal members, while those on the edge burn with conviction. Jeb Bush looks wan but Donald Trump radiates confidence.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • the deeper problem was spiritual. Many people around the world rejected democratic capitalism’s vision of a secular life built around materialism and individual happiness. They sought more intense forms of meaning. Some of them sought meaning in the fanaticisms of sect, tribe, nation, or some stronger and more brutal ideology
  • In case after case, “reasonableness” has been trampled by behavior and creed that is stronger, darker and less temperate.
  • Since 2000, this vision of the post-Cold War world has received blow after blow. Some of these blows were self-inflicted. Democracy, especially in the United States, has grown dysfunctional. Mass stupidity and greed led to a financial collapse and deprived capitalism of its moral swagger.
  • The Democratic establishment no longer determines party positions; it is pulled along by formerly marginal players like Bernie Sanders.
  • Republicans blame Obama for hesitant and halting policies, but it’s not clear the foreign policy and defense apparatus believes anymore in its own abilities to establish order, or that the American public has any confidence in U.S. effectiveness as a global actor.
  • the primary problem is mental and spiritual. Some leader has to be able to digest the lessons of the last 15 years and offer a revised charismatic and persuasive sense of America’s historic mission.
  • This mission, both nationalist and universal, would be less individualistic than the gospel of the 1990s, and more realistic about depravity and the way barbarism can spread. It would offer a goal more profound than material comfort.
Javier E

Our Elites Still Don't Get It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...axes-republicans-congress.html

morality foundation narrative community institutions culture politics Crisis psychology

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • John Bowlby is the father of attachment theory, which explains how humans are formed by relationships early in life, and are given the tools to go out and lead their lives
  • “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”
  • The relationships that form you are mostly things you didn’t choose: your family, hometown, ethnic group, religion, nation and genes.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The things you do with your life are mostly chosen: your job, spouse and hobbies.
  • At our foundation, we were a society with strong covenantal attachments — to family, community, creed and faith. Then on top of them we built democracy and capitalism that celebrated liberty and individual rights.
  • The deep covenantal institutions gave people the capacity to use their freedom well. The liberal institutions gave them that freedom.
  • This delicate balance — liberal institutions built atop illiberal ones — is now giving way. The big social movements of the past half century were about maximizing freedom of choice. Right-wingers wanted to maximize economic choice and left-wingers lifestyle choice. Anything that smacked of restraint came to seem like a bad thing to be eliminated.
  • We’ll call this worldview — which is all freedom and no covenant — naked liberalism
  • The problem with naked liberalism is that it relies on individuals it cannot create.
  • Naked liberals of right and left assume that if you give people freedom they will use it to care for their neighbors, to have civil conversations, to form opinions after examining the evidence. But if you weaken family, faith, community and any sense of national obligation, where is that social, emotional and moral formation supposed to come from? How will the virtuous habits form?
  • Naked liberalism has made our society an unsteady tree. The branches of individual rights are sprawling, but the roots of common obligation are withering away.
  • Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that’s what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis
  • In my experience, most people under 40 get this. They sense the social and moral void at the core and that change has to come at the communal, emotional and moral level.
  • And that’s what we see at the bottom of society — frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction.
  • Freedom without a unifying national narrative becomes distrust, polarization and permanent political war.
  • covenantal attachments they become fragile. Moreover, if you rob people of their good covenantal attachments, they will grab bad ones.
  • First, they will identify themselves according to race. They will become the racial essentialists you see on left and right
  • Then they resort to tribalism. This is what Donald Trump provides. As Mark S. Weiner writes on the Niskanen Center’s blog, Trump is constantly making friend/enemy distinctions, exploiting liberalism’s thin conception of community and creating toxic communities based on in-group/out-group rivalry.
  • Trump offers people cultural solutions to their alienation problem. As history clearly demonstrates, people will prefer fascism to isolation, authoritarianism to moral anarchy.
  • If we are going to have a decent society we’re going to have to save liberalism from itself. We’re going to have to restore and re-enchant the covenantal relationships that are the foundation for the whole deal. The crucial battleground is cultural and prepolitical.
  • Freedom without connection becomes alienation.
  • Many public intellectuals were trained in the social sciences and take the choosing individual as their mental starting point. They have trouble thinking about our shared social and moral formative institutions and how such institutions could be reconstituted.
  • Congressional Republicans think a successful tax bill will thwart populism. Mainstream Democrats think the alienation problem will go away if we redistribute the crumbs a bit more widely.
  • History is full of examples of nations that built new national narratives, revived family life, restored community bonds and shared moral culture: Britain in the early 19th century, Germany after World War II, America in the Progressive Era. The first step in launching our own revival is understanding that the problem is down in the roots.
Javier E

Opinion | Humans Are Animals. Let's Get Over It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...humans-animals-philosophy.html

animal human nature philosophy human

shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The separation of people from, and the superiority of people to, members of other species is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.
  • Like Plato, Hobbes associates anarchy with animality and civilization with the state, which gives to our merely animal motion moral content for the first time and orders us into a definite hierarchy.
  • It is rationality that gives us dignity, that makes a claim to moral respect that no mere animal can deserve. “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality,” writes Immanuel Kant in “Critique of Practical Reason.” In this assertion, at least, the Western intellectual tradition has been remarkably consistent.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • the devaluation of animals and disconnection of us from them reflect a deeper devaluation of the material universe in general
  • In this scheme of things, we owe nature nothing; it is to yield us everything. This is the ideology of species annihilation and environmental destruction, and also of technological development.
  • Further trouble is caused when the distinctions between humans and animals are then used to draw distinctions among human beings
  • Some of us, in short, are animals — and some of us are better than that. This, it turns out, is a useful justification for colonialism, slavery and racism.
  • The classical source for this distinction is certainly Aristotle. In the “Politics,” he writes, “Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves.
  • Every human hierarchy, insofar as it can be justified philosophically, is treated by Aristotle by analogy to the relation of people to animals.
  • One difficult thing to face about our animality is that it entails our deaths; being an animal is associated throughout philosophy with dying purposelessly, and so with living meaninglessly.
  • this line of thought also happens to justify colonizing or even extirpating the “savage,” the beast in human form.
  • Our supposed fundamental distinction from “beasts, “brutes” and “savages” is used to divide us from nature, from one another and, finally, from ourselves
  • In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates divides the human soul into two parts. The soul of the thirsty person, he says, “wishes for nothing else than to drink.” But we can restrain ourselves. “That which inhibits such actions,” he concludes, “arises from the calculations of reason.” When we restrain or control ourselves, Plato argues, a rational being restrains an animal.
  • In this view, each of us is both a beast and a person — and the point of human life is to constrain our desires with rationality and purify ourselves of animality
  • These sorts of systematic self-divisions come to be refigured in Cartesian dualism, which separates the mind from the body, or in Sigmund Freud’s distinction between id and ego, or in the neurological contrast between the functions of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
  • I don’t know how to refute it, exactly, except to say that I don’t feel myself to be a logic program running on an animal body; I’d like to consider myself a lot more integrated than that.
  • And I’d like to repudiate every political and environmental conclusion ever drawn by our supposed transcendence of the order of nature
  • There is no doubt that human beings are distinct from other animals, though not necessarily more distinct than other animals are from one another. But maybe we’ve been too focused on the differences for too long. Maybe we should emphasize what all us animals have in common.
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20▼ items per page