shapes posted:

some of this probably is genuine discontent

Andrew Collier posted:

Social science, like any science, presents ideas claimed to be true of the object studied. ... Unlike the objects of natural sciences, the object it studies ... includes ideas. For society can only exist insofar as human agents act, reproducing and transforming the social structure. And human agents act in accordance with ideas [many of which will be ideas about features of that society].

In Britain in the 1980s, a large number of people believed that unemployment was the result of the fecklessness of the unemployed. Any account of social attitudes, political behaviour, etc. in that period would need to mention that fact. But it would also need to mention the real causes of unemployment in the structure of British financial institutions, the world market, government policy, etc. Hence the explanations that were part of the social-scientific study, and the explanations that were part of the society studied, would contradict. If the social science had got it right, then the people it described who had the opposite explanation must have got it wrong. Hence the social science criticizes (part of) its object. There can be no equivalent of this in the natural sciences. Black holes may be unpleasant things to contemplate, but that is no criticism of them. They exist — or don't — and there's an end of it.

The implications of this are fairly simple. If a fact about an institution is that it must promote false beliefs in order to persist, and ceteris paribus it is better to believe true things than false things, then one would be inclined to a negative evaluation of said institution. And this, in turn, points indirectly to an even more profound result:

Collier posted:

The hardened fact/value dichotomist might respond: "The argument jumps from fact to value when it introduces the assumption that it is best to believe what is true." However, the questions 'what should I believe about x' and 'what is true about x' are not logically independent questions. In fact they are equivalent, in the sense that the answer to one is necessarily the answer to the other. It simply doesn't make sense to say 'that is true, but I shouldn't believe it' or 'I should believe that, though it is not true.'

This may seem to prove too much. For it looks as if it implies that true belief is always better than false belief. ... It is better that a would-be murderer should have false beliefs about his victim's whereabouts.

But the absolute character of the inference from 'it is true' to 'I should believe it' applies only in the first-person case. I cannot separate the question of something's truth from the question whether I should believe it ... since to believe something is to hold it true.

At the point where subject and object are one and the same, there's an ineluctable linkage between ethics and epistemology that creates a point of breakdown in the classic fact/value dichotomy. Ceteris paribus, we cannot but prefer the truth. We determine our concrete practices on the basis of what we believe to be true, what will have effect, and this practice, as Mao famously noted, is likewise reciprocally a source of correct ideas.

We might say that the truth, then, has a sort of primary moral imperative to it. Things that bring us closer to understanding reality allow us to grow, to better create the grounds for human emancipation and — to indulge in a bit of speculative metaphysics — perhaps even move, as a species, toward greater and greater complexity, higher levels of reality. It connects just as well, perhaps, to Aquinas's notions about life being ordered toward the Good. Life strives in a basic way for this perfection, veins of local anentropic processes in a universe of increasing general entropy. Mind emerged from matter, simple life gave rise to complex life, from which grew society. New nomological conditions emerge from base ones: physical to chemical, to biological, to psychological, sociological. Perhaps one day we as a species will survive to see what springs from that, at a sufficient level of development. But in all cases, progress, however defined, will come from a careful attention to the features of our shared reality.

So what can we say about those ideologies that promote a false grasp of the world, whether as a core precept or just a knob for opportunists to grip? What can we say about these people who misrepresent reality in the service of the lords of finance capital, and at the expense of a people who seek self-determination and harmonious coexistence with the world at large? How can we describe accomplices to those forces that in living memory have bred only self-perpetuating cycles of human tragedy, the deaths of millions, the ruin of entire nations?

To me, such people — whether hasbarist or gusano, spook, pig, white supremacist (but I repeat myself), or any other flavor of reactionary ghoul — are comporting themselves, in a truly fundamental way, as the enemies of humankind, if not life itself on this tiny blue speck.

It falls to those of conscience, those of class-consciousness, and those not otherwise in the thrall of capital to fight against this where possible. Counterpropaganda is, as ever, an upstream battle, but it's one unquestionably worth fighting.

(tl;dr: fibbing bad)

Edited by Constantignoble (Aug. 9, 2021 15:43:17)