Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech
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Oh my... I must be a closet communist.
Seriously though, "Oppose Book Worship" is a good read. It is pertinent for those wading in the sea of information and disinformation today.I see Wittgenstein and Heidegger as having a similar view on language. LW's "private language" argument is primitive but relevant and somewhat sets the stage for post-structuralism. Proper communication depends on terms whose meanings are agreed upon. And to agree upon a standard of meaning which can be communicated to others, one has to pretty much accept a limit of self-projection into language. Which, I think, to me, often means that effective communication is isolating and counter-intuitive. It is tautological, and really becomes a mere tool. I suppose this view has a strong Marxist angle. I believe Wittgenstein was long interested in Russia, and visited Moscow and Leningrad.
But that's quite the rabbit-hole - language as a mere tool which can be used by the state or by an economy, or any other social unit. It really does help us see through the political theater, though, I think, given how a politicians words, mannerisms, accents, ideas, and humor changes depending on the setting.
Western democracy is basically a realization of game theory. As in, the idea of competitive markets or capitalism is always strong vs weak. Price-fixing is the closest thing to a "win-win" where select monopolies can all profit equally. When there is uncertainty, each company has the schizo quality of being paranoid about competitors. The most successful must also be the most paranoid with a persecution complex, but also willingness to survive against the odds, which can simply be a will that goes beyond morals and laws (which I think is the case).
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@VehmicJuryman said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
"If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me." - Nikita Khrushchev
Well, Hitler also had been installing or attempting to install Nationalist parties in Hungary and Eastern Europe, France, Italy, etc.
My view is this war as with most others was clearly about money. My understanding is once again that Germany was not all that powerful, that these puppet colonies were not successful due to natural in-fighting and Socialist pressure from the East and native Jewry. The Allied powers saw their opportunity to divide and conquer the fascist / Axis territory. It wasn't about blood or ideology, totally a function of economics.
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What you said was nothing but facts
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Which, I think, to me, often means that effective communication is isolating and counter-intuitive.
Ray Peat in some quote I don't remember (where he described why it is that he stopped working on "flowery" art and prioritized biological work) worked with the definition of communication as being the transmission of information that makes a difference. I like that one. Nothing changes? Communication was not achieved. Even if an idea was transmitted.
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@Rah1woot
Interesting stuff. Yes and I suppose the paradox of anti-democratic "wrong" opinions and ideas is met with violence. Imperialism or Communism, both act on that impulse which is moral but also logical and rhetorical. -
Hey @Rah1woot thanks for the videos, checking them out before I comment
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Paul Cockshott is one of my favorite Marxist-Materialist thinkers. I will leave a few links.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ExkJhk7lA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BOxfq2gOm4Thanks for the links; I think I don't really have much to disagree with, as I'm not pro-capitalism, or anti-social welfare -- I guess I didn't make it very clear in my earlier comment, but that's a modern American right wing phenomenon, and not consistent with historical, or global conservatism today. I didn't see anything disagreeable in the material history of Marx, either. I believe Marx saw the world in a really novel and useful manner.
I think for the discussion to move usefully forward, can we agree on the below quote as a rough summary of Marxism?
"Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually destroy itself as more people become relegated to working-class status, inequality rises, and competition drives corporate profits to zero." via investopedia (that's also what I had remembered from my research like 15 years ago)
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@LetTheRedeemed Yes, I would agree with that summary. As I've sort of pointed at it has already largely happened especially considering that Marx was working in the 19th century. Capitalism arguably ended in 1929, and continued to end. Blackrock owns everything, but who owns blackrock in kind? The pension funds, et cetera. Capitalism in the US today is financialized and "superstructural", dependent overwhelmingly on beliefs held in the brain ("credo" as the root of "credit") rather than objective conditions of social production.
So the revolutionary act remaining is to recognize this state for what it is.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023041pap.pdf
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@Rah1woot well bro!.. I think the right and left dialectics have run their course, and it's time for communist and reactionary to hammer the horseshoe closed!
The indigenous and enduring version of hierarchy, is and will always be family. The he/him with bonkers aggro testosties will do the boink boink to the dummy thick birthing person, and then she will get preggo brained and he actually has to run their lives so they both stay alive and his in-laws don't beat him up = father and mother is the basis of all hierarchy. Father kills bear, woman nurtures babies -- even in the modern context, we see plain as day the utter chaos of genders deconstructing their sexed tasks in life. Sons who are effectively disciplined by the father learn his survival in whatever the world is today; girls vibe until a bro vibes them.
The families with the strongest cohesion become communal pillars of stability. They are most trusted to lead. These are preferentially selected by the community to become essentially "royalty." This is max stability. This is the type of aristocracy I was speaking of earlier. This is the origin of most chieftain societies, from Europe to Africa. This most natural social contract when evolved in antiquity, was consensual, in fact proto-democratic (why actual monarchs of history would often be more populist than supposed populist revolutions in consequence), but did not demand a hand in the decision making; the individual trusted who he placed over self, as that was his neighbor's father. The individual learned to respect positions earned in this manner. The individual organically learned how hierarchy benefited him.
This reality is cut as deep in the brain as the need for sex and food -- it can never be replaced. I hope communists can see that even they would need a leader in history past, to trust and follow when revolting...
The only thing that could screw up something this good and natural to humanity, is the forbidden fruit of democracy.
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The indigenous and enduring version of hierarchy, is and will always be family.
Practically yes, probably true for at least the next few centuries. In my personal politics I support the social support of family development by means of financial help and so on, curing alcohol addiction of parents so as to create better role models, etc. But there is no theoretical reason why this will "always" be so. Cockshott gives a good description in his book "How the World Works" of how societies changed from matriarchies (the "longhouse" that the internet right wing often complains about) to patriarchies partially as a result of the agricultural revolution, what he calls a "trophic level descent". Another trophic level descent could well disrupt even the somewhat vestigial aspects of the current reproduction relation and its consequences.
For warfare to exist you need something to fight over. Whereas warfare in pure hunter-gatherer societies seems rare [Fry, 2007; Ryan and Jethá, 2012] it has been common in societies with either herding or at least some form of agriculture. It is clear that once cattle or other beasts are herded they can be stolen, and can be the object of a war party. But fighting is not limited to what Smith called Nations of Shepherds, formidable as these have been.15 Nations and tribes that combine some hoe horticulture with hunting have been warlike. Why?
According to Meillassoux [1981] the motive for the conflict was the capture not of cattle but young women. Pure hunter-gatherer societies are nomadic, with no fixed villages, and mobility of people between wandering small bands. Agriculture ties people down. He argues that the initial form of family in the transition to agriculture is the matrilocal, which means a society in which adult women stay in their mother’s home or community. Insofar as there is mobility between communities, it is the men who move, seeking wives in other communities.
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This leads to endemic hostility and suspicion between communities. Men acquire the social role of warrior both to abduct women from other groups and to protect their own women. Such societies may remain matrilineal, with children being brought up in a relatively communal household with their uncles playing what we would regard as a paternal role. There may be no system of strict monogamy. But the beginnings of the collective dominance of men over women exist. Men as hunters and warriors develop ideologies that represent them as protectors and heroes and which justify relegating women to what are presented as menial horticultural tasks. In particular the abducted women, cut off from their own community, are likely to be in a very subordinate position.Today, IVF and egg freezing already mutate this relationship somewhat. Sheep have already been reproduced using both cloning and artificial wombs. The right wing's response to this has generally been to complain about it or point out (not necessarily incorrectly) that this is inferior to the Real Deal. But then you have something like a society which uses these methods to create "cheap" soldiers, for example, capable of conquering others that stayed with the "old way". So pearl-clutching generally puts one at a disadvantage. Just as production of energy has largely been socialized in the form of electricity, sexual reproduction has already been socialized by technologies like birth control, the medicalized abortion, "One Child Policies", most recently primitive forms of embryo selection. There is no reason to think that sexual reproduction will be untouched. Even if we realized that some of these things (such as birth control) have negative consequences.
The families with the strongest cohesion become communal pillars of stability.
Sure. But it would be wrong to extend this relationship wholesale to the present day, in which the size of communities, for example, is dramatically expanded by roads, internal combustion engines, telecommunications. To do otherwise would appeal to the naturalistic fallacy. But I don't think spending many hours a day acquiring food (as a male) and collecting water (as a female) is the ultimate calling of man. Humanity itself is inherently technological insofar as our brain was made possible by the use of the spear and such for hunting. And so the idea of the inherently natural is not only fictional, but literally deficient as a method of fighting conflict, which is one of the most important pressures on a social system.
I think your characterization of the rational "social contract", in which the peasant "rationally understands" how hierarchy is good, is not correct. Julian Jaynes, in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", gives a good characterization of how the first "super-hierarchies" of God-Kings in first agricultural states in Iran and Iraq were religious structures enforced by things like replications of the God-King figure in a dedicated room in every home.
This reality is cut as deep in the brain as the need for sex and food -- it can never be replaced. I hope communists can see that even they would need a leader in history past, to trust and follow when revolting...
To your point, the "Great Leader" meme is one of the most endemic ones in Communism. Mao Zedong achieved success with the Red Army because it was highly people-oriented, and so people helped and trusted it.
This isn't incoherent, but somewhat conveniently for me, food production is a pretty good example of what Marx and Engels describe as "dialectical materialism". And as Cockshott puts forth in the above book as well.
Going lower in the system unlocks dramatically more energy. Hence the value of Sugar (produced by plants) in Peatarianism.
So I don't see why sexual reproduction relations would necessarily have to remain fixed.
In general, one aspect of Marx that you seem to overlook is Dialectical Materialism. You gesture at "dialectics running their course", but generally don't consider actual change in productive and social relations to be possible, you instead invoke the past as an example of what is correct. This is an unserious perspective as their system was completely different from ours today, just as theirs was different from the prior one.
Is taking exogenous progesterone (which is synthesized using organic chemistry techniques from yams) natural? No. Neither are the highly productive varieties of fruits that Peaters benefit from today. Nor the Nitrogen Chemistry which makes it possible to grow so many plants anyways. And yet these things offer an advantage. To reject them on the basis of naturalism would be suicidal in the face of real conflict in the world.
It is not necessarily warm and cozy to contemplate such realities, the little cliches that make up life as we know it today one day becoming limiting factors on existence. But we must make peace with their expiry (when it comes, which is not today) and find the good in the real at all costs. There is no going back.
Postscript: I suspect that when embryo selection becomes standard procedure in the socialized sexual reproduction system, only then will the medical establishment realize that genes aren't all that. Down Syndrome may well be eradicated, which I welcome. But something like "selecting for intelligence", people will eventually realize that doesn't really work. And so the paradigm will be questioned.
By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex.
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But there is no theoretical reason why this [familial hierarchy] will "always" be so. Cockshott gives a good description in his book "How the World Works" of how societies changed from matriarchies (the "longhouse" that the internet right wing often complains about) to patriarchies partially as a result of the agricultural revolution…
I believe the longhouse example should be a simple picture for explanation purposes (HR creates a helicopter parent culture where direct competition is replaced with adhering to a counter-business value – looks like a place run by a matriarch – ergo longhouse image as Lomez breaks down). But it doesn’t mean an inverse hierarchical role in ancient societies. Anyone who lives in a homestead environment or conventional conservative nuclear families today believes in “complementarianism of the sexes,” which practices something like the longhouse. Men and women playing into their strengths and weaknesses create the first division of labor. Every boy strong enough to carry tools behind his dad all day is no longer in the longhouse during daylight hours, and is inducted into a coming of age mindset – masculinity. In a patriarchy, high cooperation with the maternal instincts of the mother figure is an intrinsic value that every anti-feminist strong father figure I’ve met believes in.
I have read of how other pre-agrarian societies developed social order, and find the conventional chieftain patriarch very common. I don’t believe Cockshott’s theories regarding a whole humanity-wide development from matriarchy to patriarchy; I believe he saw thru a very limited, small window, into the human experience so far back that we rely on the trash they left on the ground, and correlates that with a few modern examples of what I’m sure are real matriarchies in primitive societies.
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I’ll try to condense the following. I don’t believe I’m using a naturalist argument (I agree that that’s a fallacy).
…IVF and egg freezing… cloning and artificial wombs… birth control, the medicalized abortion, "One Child Policies", most recently primitive forms of embryo selection… So I don't see why sexual reproduction relations would necessarily have to remain fixed…
I believe there is a dichotomy of mentalities we are in – I guess a “culture war”... sheesh lol
In the absence of darwinian pressures, communal cohesion takes a backseat to increased indulgences of individualism. Communal cohesion prioritizes long time strategy, and enforces beliefs in God, strong father figures, subservience to parental figures, etc, but most importantly, they survive due to medical innovation where they once perished. In the premodern era, infant mortality rates reached 50% in some cases even in advanced nations like England – this is the purest data on the health of nations, but technological advancements are able to hide that. Technology that overcomes these constraints and indulges individual weakness, desire, or vice, simply promotes the selfish individual. So, now these people exist in a duality with the God fearing peasants who, supporting the principles of sacrificial living, sanctify and preserve them via tradition and culture. We see now that this environment promotes the lower IQ demographics reproducing at higher rates than the higher IQ demographics (this includes conservative demographics with their reproducing purposes).
You’re basically saying that the technologically protected atypical person is a step in our evolutionary development as a species. I’m saying this is a mutated person with less testosterone and progesterone than a healthy person following conventional boundaries. Data seems to support this; statistically, non conservative people are uglier, shorter, have increased chance of autoimmune conditions often affecting the brain, and are more sexually deviant. People who did and do promote a deconstruction of human sexuality have uncoped mental trauma or a disorder.
Progesterone, testosterone, estrogen, cortisol, or serotonin, won’t ever start doing something different in the human brain. Making babies will still give girls “mommy-brain,” and a man guarding his wife by peering thru a window with a baseball bat or yelling at a big dog while walking down the sidewalk will still provide a surge in testosterone that a woman can never produce in a similar scenario. You can switch these roles around and try to make them do both, and it will only result in their gonads producing less of their optimized hormonal production, and this often increasing stress, producing more mutation. To change the sexual chemistry and voluntary role assumptions of the average heterosexuals engaging in sex, is to claim these hormones, or their function in the brain, will begin changing.
The families with the strongest cohesion become communal pillars of stability.
Sure. But it would be wrong to extend this relationship wholesale to the present day, in which the size of communities… is dramatically expanded…their system was completely different from ours today, just as theirs was different from the prior one.
Just more complicated.
I Believe that monarchy is the governing expansion of the family unit. I even believe that, following traditional tribal developments, a monarch can be “voted” into power. Monarchists can select loyal czars to master the masters of every industry. Traditionally, these would be next of kin – that doesn’t have to be so, the principle of monarchy is familial levels of loyalty. This manages increasingly complicated economies.
It doesn’t need to literally be family, it needs to be literally modeled after family.
I don't think spending many hours a day acquiring food (as a male) and collecting water (as a female) is the ultimate calling of man.
Agreed. I believe an esoteric sacrificial lamb who fights or feeds his demons, will do more to practically lead people into a better or worse scenario than the broader populace ever will. This will be true in a communist utopia, monarchy, hunter-gatherer society, etc. This is the way the dial moves for most people. Is this necessarily related, almost dependent, on environmental factors? Of course, but it’s always a “fall guy” who chooses to be un-apathetic enough to change something. These people may be more like the god-kings you shared… maybe Nietzsche saw a piece of this puzzle with his superman.
I think your characterization of the rational "social contract", in which the peasant "rationally understands" how hierarchy is good, is not correct.
I base this off of the accounts of how chieftains are picked, then followed, in history, and how the stereotypical men cooperate on the construction site or in a farming community like the Amish (and how they handle men who rule-break).
Just ask women, there is an innate desire by men to have a strong man, aka father figure, to lead them into glory, or become one for their fellow men – both seeking affirmation of their peers. This is actually as cooperative as it is competitive, and doesn’t automatically lead to conflict. Basically every society that reached philosopher producing levels, observed that men embody discipline, and women the sensuous. I can’t find the study, but a study found that males who have higher testosterone, are stereotypically jocks in their competitive nature, but are more sacrificial team players, while lower testosterone males are more inter-team competitors, while less competitive against the outside team.
But then you have something like a society which uses these methods to create "cheap" soldiers, for example, capable of conquering others that stayed with the "old way"
Ultimately, a lot of this argument, Marxism, is speculation, and I believe that where Marx is most right, is that there will be more no-holds-barred existential wars between these opposing dichotomies, that ends with the deconstructionist winning (entropy) – until the bigger God-King returns
