DocWatts

I thought I might share a write up on perspective-taking for my philosophy book, which is part of a chapter about how All Perspectives Are Partial. In this chapter, I explore the limitations of both Relativism and Absolutism, while offering Pluralism as a more productive alternative for navigating ambiguity without getting lost in it. (If you found this write-up useful / interesting, you might also like this earlier article on Perspectives And Purposes) https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/108568-perspectives-and-purposes/ _____________________________ Perspectives - Localized, Limited, And Incomplete This article is part of an ongoing series about how all perspectives are partial. 'Partial' means localized, limited, and incomplete - inevitable consequences of having a perspective at all, rather than a God's-eye view. The pivotal insight we'll be exploring is that our assessments are never neutral or purpose-free. Instead, they have everything to do with where we stand in relation to the world. Relativism - Freedom Without Direction When our cherished certainties hit a dead-end, how do we find our way to a more promising trail? Road-weary from trusting in failed certainties, we might be tempted to forsake paths altogether and veer off into the meandering forest of relativism. The thicket beckons to us because buried within lies a genuine insight. The revelation? Our viewpoints aren’t straightforward snapshots of Reality - they’re interpretive lenses that reveal and distort. Much like the fovea is to the human eye, our interpretive lenses have a focal point which brings certain selective elements into sharp clarity - and a periphery where everything else recedes into a blurry, indistinct background. The crucial insight? These focal points aren’t universal or arbitrary - they’re intimately tied to a horizon of significance that we negotiate with our culture. Negotiate, because our individual viewpoint is always situated within a social landscape that serves as our starting point for sensemaking. We can adapt, refine, and push back against this inherited framework - but we can never step outside of it entirely. To state it more simply: what we see depends on what we’ve been taught to look for - and what’s important to us. To see this in action, consider two archetypal lenses with very different focal points - the view of a scientist, and the gaze of a mystic. One directs their attention towards aspects of Reality that can be modeled through precise, mechanistic investigation. The other turns their perception to the ineffable horizons of our lived experience. What’s in sharp focus for one viewpoint is an indistinct blur for the other, yet both are attending to different aspects of the same shared Reality. Crucially, neither of these contrasting lenses is worn by a detached observer - their adoption is an outgrowth of our concernful involvement in the world. And each is drawing from a shared pool of human experience, namely an appreciation for wonder and the joy of discovery. In the end, what separates these viewpoints is not the Reality they inhabit, but which aspects of it direct their gaze. Relativism too emerges from our entanglement with the world. The emotional impetus? To not be fooled by false certainties - and to prevent ourselves from being weighed down by the baggage that accompanies them. Following relativism into the brambles, aspirations towards a ‘view from nowhere’ are unmasked as a naive pipe dream. Certainty? A bedtime story for children, not the currency of serious thinkers. With an unapologetic smirk, relativism is the irreverent iconoclast to our holier-than-thou pretensions. Emerging from the forest of equivocation, it takes a flattening steamroller to our patronizing dismissal of rival perspectives. In the midst of a shouting match between ‘obviously correct’ viewpoints, relativism announces that the referee is a fraud, and the rulebook is full of holes. And instead of offering up a replacement, it insists that the rules are made up and the points don’t matter. If throwing out the epistemic scorecards sounds like a cop-out, consider the host of everyday situations where we have no trouble applying it. When we see two paintings of a sunset hanging next to one another in a gallery, we don’t hem and haw over which one is the ‘correct’ interpretation. And the fun of arguing that chocolate is objectively superior to vanilla stems from the obvious absurdity of the question. What relativism forces us to confront is that this interpretive dimension reaches beyond the trivial into domains with tangible stakes. Scientific paradigms, ethical frameworks, political ideologies - all are to some degree conditioned preferences without a universal measuring stick to determine which is ultimately ‘correct’. When confronted with the smug assertion that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’, relativism responds with cool confidence that ‘there’s no such thing as an uninterpreted fact.’ Make no mistake: the truths of relativism are partial. Masterful at tearing down self-supposed ‘certainties’ long past their shelf life. And conspicuously absent when the time comes to build something better in its place. When we’ve been suffocating under stifling absolutism, relativism’s insights can be a revelatory breath of fresh air. But just as we wouldn’t want to spend the rest of our days in the oxygen tent that saved our life, relativism serves us better as a waystation than a final destination. Liberating as it feels on first arrival, we soon discover that the trackless forest isn’t a long-term home. While “it depends” can be a valid response in some situations, it’s of little guidance when the world pushes us to pick a lane. The equivocating compass of relativism proves itself a poor tool for distinguishing promising directions from those that lead nowhere - and those that would send us tumbling off a cliff. Beyond mere impracticality for real-world decision making, there’s a sunless valley within Relativism’s domain that attracts predators. While a ‘live and let live’ policy to perspectives may sound benign, in practice it can be a Trojan horse for dangerous bullshit. One where opportunists emerge from the shadows to offer us ‘alternative perspectives’ on established facts about everything from vaccines to the Holocaust. Its liberating potential isn’t just for the genuinely marginalized - it’s also a boon for charlatans and extremists. Meander long enough through the trackless forest and sooner or later you’ll catch sight of a stray Nazi. The Path Of Pluralism - Calibrating Perspectives With Purposes So where does this leave us? Fortunately, a Sisyphean trudge over the same dead-end path - or wandering aimlessly through the woods, for that matter - are not our only options. If we adjust our focus from the obvious to the overlooked, we may notice a road less traveled - the path of Pluralism. Less traveled because it demands more from us - more humility than the rigid certainty of absolutism, and more discernment than the equivocation of relativism. Offering neither the false comfort of the former nor the illusory freedom of the latter, the Path of Pluralism provides its practical dividends for those who are willing to put in the work. This is because pluralism is a practice - not something you believe in, but something you do. Why seek out this more demanding trail? Because the utility it provides is worth the trouble. In a world where control is an illusion and detachment from outcomes is a tall-order for most, pluralism gives us needed tools for navigating ambiguity without getting lost in it. The essence of its pragmatic wisdom? Pick a lane - but know where the offramps are. Stated simply, there are usually multiple valid vantage points for approaching a given situation. Yet this openness comes paired with the astute recognition that there are often very good reasons to reject some approaches out-of-hand. In a messy Reality where control is an illusion and complete information is a pipe dream, it’s attunement rather than perfection that’s sublime. Attunement means calibrating our perspectives with our purposes. The key lies not in finding the perfect setting, but in adaptive adjustment. Like balancing on a bicycle, it’s a continual process of minute course corrections in response to ever-shifting conditions. Our initial vantage point doesn’t have to be perfect - it just needs to be a reasonable first-approximation that’s receptive to the changing terrain it traverses. ‘Receptive’ means structured to evolve methodically rather than haphazardly in response to situational feedback, with clear criteria for where it applies and where it doesn’t. And crucially, this entails being capable of abandoning our approach if it’s no longer serving us. Or, to put it plainly: while there are multiple ways to crack an egg, that doesn't mean that the edge of a bowl and a sledgehammer are equally effective methods for making an omelet. Pluralism acknowledges a diversity of viewpoints while recognizing that some of these serve our purposes, while others leave us with a mess.

Greetings! If you're tackling an expanded fundamental ontology, you're in good company. And if you managed to grok Heideggar at 22, I'm impressed. Back at the ripe old age of 30, 'Being and Time' was among the most difficult (but ultimately worthwhile) books I've ever read. My own project pulls from Heideggar alongside Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus, Ken Wilber, Fransisco Varella, George Lakoff and others. 'World disclosure for dummies' might not be a bad description, since I'm writing for a non-academic audience that may be ready for more advanced insights -- but doesn't speak phenomenological jargon as a second language. Look forward to seeing you on the Forums!

I'd consider Hanzi Frienacht's approach to metamodernism and Ken Wilber's Integral Theory to be the gold standards. But just like any theory (meta or otherwise), there are higher and lower quality applications of both. Each is useful for seeing how the partial truths of the perspectives that these TOEs (Theories Of Everything) map can be slipped into and out of in a purposeful way - and for giving useful heuristics for when and where these mental models are applicable. With any meta-theory, there's always that temptation towards epistemic bypassing - since metatheory isn't a replacement for domain-specific expertise. My take on these metatheories is that they're more useful if you've already got a firm epistemic and sociological foundation under your belt.

For the record, I think our epistemic intuitions are largely aligned (the first subsection of the chapter I'm writing is called 'perspectives and purposes'). In the above scenario, when we can't agree on shared norms or goals or validation criteria then I'd say we've run headfirst into an incommenserability problem - one that's potentially unbridgeable unless somebody is willing to meet the other party part way on at least one of these pillars. What makes this potentially really challenging is that our foundational criteria are largely intuition driven - with our intellectual frameworks to some extent serving as post-hoc rationalizations of these emotionally grounded starting points. Just like the color red remains stubbornly ineffable if we're trying to explain it to someone without vision, certain intuitions can be stubbornly ineffable without the requisite life experience that makes it significant. Sometimes the best we can do in these types of scenarios is make sure the disagreement doesn't turn ugly. To that end, it can be beneficial to cultivate relationships with people that we disagree with, so that there's a reasonable benefit of the doubt that we're at least disagreeing in good faith.

I would argue that all forms of normative realism fall prey to an epistemic, ontological, and existential framing problem. The epistemic mistake, as I see it, is thinking that there's a single, transcendental way that all the puzzle pieces fit together, and that our perspectives are correct or incorrect to the degree that they're approximations of this god's-eye-perspective (ie, 'correspondence' theories of truth). Perspectives are always situated within a lived context. By definition, this means that they're inherently localized, partial, and incomplete. This isn't a problem for us in practice, however. When we leave the realm of the abstract and take a look at how actual human-beings use knowledge to guide our decision-making, we routinely make decisions based upon necessarily imperfect information. Reliable knowledge doesn't require absolute certainty - we just need a threshold of certainty that's well-calibrated for what we're trying to accomplish. What constitutes 'certain enough' isn't a fixed metric, but a moving goalpost that shifts with the situation we're trying to navigate. The ontological mistake is reifying our constructed abstractions as inherent, mind-independent features of Reality. Reality doesn't consist of 'things' as such - because 'things' are constructed abstractions that have no underlying substance without a someone or something that's doing the discerning. They're how our minds slice an undifferentiated reality into manageable chunks that we can more readily understand. Things, then are 'real', but not in the observer-independent way that transcendental frameworks would have us believe - they're instead interactionally real. There's also a deeper existential misunderstanding here as well - thinking that our lived perspective within Reality is a puzzle to be solved, rather than a mystery to be unraveled and experienced. Our expectation that there an ultimate or final perspective is as misguided as thinking that there's a full proof set of rules that can tell us when we should kiss a potential romantic partner for the first time. The problem isn't that no one's been able to crack the code- it's that there's no code to be cracked, because the task itself is a quixotic misunderstanding of our situation with Reality. In a Reality where control is an illusion and complete information is a pipe dream, it’s attunement rather than perfection that’s sublime. Attunement means calibrating our epistemic heuristics with our purposes. The key lies not in finding the perfect setting, but in adaptive adjustment. Like balancing on a bicycle, it’s a continual process of minute course corrections in response to ever-shifting conditions.

Very true! But the rub is that there are also multiple valid meta-perspectives for integrating the same territory. Pluralism might not necessarily go all the way down (agnostic on this point), but it does run quite deep.

Because it starts from where we actually are — rather than taking the end-product of a long chain of abstractions and treating that as our starting point. Think of it like this: color vision isn't a 1:1 representation of the electromagnetic spectrum in its raw form. This would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, human perception evolved to use just a narrow slice of that spectrum — the part most relevant to our survival needs as living beings. Likewise, we don't reside within a raw, undifferentiated Reality - this too would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Instead, our minds enact a curated version of Reality — one that’s intelligible, livable, and scaled to our cognitive and existential capacities. My term for this human-sized slice of our shared Reality is the Life-World: that shared, experiential world that serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. Because we can't completely step outside of our human perspective within Reality, any generalizations we have about capital 'R' Reality will contain the fingerprints of this situated starting point. Mind you, that doesn't invalidate the conclusions we draw - it just means that any inferences we draw about The Absolute will necessarily reflect our own relationship to it. Just like physics is still valid despite the fact that it's not exhaustive of Reality, when we talk about The Absolute what we're necessarily talking about is our relationship to the Absolute. The Absolute may be what-is, but our relationship to what-is is always partial. That's my working thesis, anyways. True to the spirit of Pluralism, there are usually multiple vantage points we can approach an issue from that are each valid without being exhaustive. Being-As-Absolute and Being-As-Understanding are no exceptions to that.

I've appreciated the constructive criticism. Half of the fun of doing philosophy are these types of dialogues, where a domain of shared interest is approached through a complimentary set of lenses, each attuned to a different focal point. Very much in keeping with the type of Perspectival Pluralism that I'm encouraging. Your point about bracketing metaphysical questions is a fair one. You don't have to look further than scientific realism to see how it can give rise to Performative Contradictions - where ontological commitments are smuggled in under the guise of neutrality, while denying any metaphysical framing. I'd also argue that just because bracketing can be done poorly, doesn't negate its role as a useful tool when wielded skillfully. The type of bracketing I'm doing is a form of phenomenological metaphysics - agnostic toward certain metaphysical claims that fall outside the scope of the inquiry, rather than dismissive of metaphysics as a whole. Traditional metaphysics, from Plato to Hegel to Whitehead, takes an 'outside-in' approach to ontology. Where you start from the Absolute (or some fixed metaphysical ground), and try to work your way backwards to our situated, everyday position within Reality. It treats ontology as a study of what fundamentally is. What I'm doing is taking an 'inside-out' approach to metaphysics, which starts from our situated, everyday experience - and tracing how that experience gives rise to categories, distinctions, and ontological inferences. From this vantage point, ontology becomes a kind of reverse engineering - not in order to deny capital 'R' Reality, but to understand how our access to it is structured. The divergence between these two approaches is rooted in a deeper disagreement over what ontology is for. On one view, ontology aims to describe Reality as it is in itself — timeless, essential, absolute. On the other, it aims to understand how Reality is experienced — how we carve meaning out of the undifferentiated.

Your use of 'Being' refers to the Absolute - the metaphysical ground of all that is (Being-As-Absolute) What I'm attempting to do is shift the question from what Reality is to how we experience Reality (Being-As-Understanding). Reality itself may be an undifferentiated whole, but it's always accessed from a situated position - a vantage-point rather than an everything-point. Being-As-Absolute might be what-is, but Being-As-Understanding is how what-is becomes intelligible. The former contains the latter, but the latter is more salient to our human condition within the Absolute. When we say that something is a type of thing, we’re already in the realm of Being-as-Understanding. Reality itself doesn’t consist of ‘things’ as such — ‘things’ emerge from the act of differentiation, of drawing distinctions within the undifferentiated.

Counter Claim: Ontology is always situated, because being (whether we're talking about the 'being' of entities or capital B 'Being') isn't metaphysical. It's instead a form of understanding for a particular someone, which we reify as a metaphysical substance or field due to a category error. In short, it's the most basic and primordial way that people, places, and things are first disclosed to us as people, places, and things.

As far as action steps, the first thing I would advise everyone to do is to find a local, in-person pro-democracy group to organize with. Indivisible is the one I joined - it's a nationwide broad-tent pro-democracy movement that has local chapters in every state and most major metropolitan areas (https://indivisible.org/). My local group has in person meetings every month where we share intel about what's happening in our state and the country, and coordinate actions like protests. The two founders of Indivisible have a nationwide 'What's The Plan Call' that anyone can join. (In addition to Indivisible, there's also no shortage of other pro-democracy groups to join that organize around specific issues, such as immigration, climate change, workers rights, etc). In addition to finding your local group, you can grab the 5calls app and make weekly calls to your Senators and Representatives about specific issues. The only way that our politicians are going to do what we want is if there's a sustained public pressure campaign telling them to vote NO on Trump's policies and cabinet appointments. Don't assume that just because your local Rep is a Democrat that they'll do the right thing without public pressure. And don't assume that just because your Rep is a Republican that they can't be pressured on specific issues, especially if they're in a competitive seat. We also need be willing to have difficult conversations with friends and family members who've tuned out of politics since the election. While the trying to reach the MAGA Cult is likely a lost cause, there are plenty of people who aren't hostile to the pro-democracy movement, but aren't aware of the danger we're in because they haven't been paying attention. They might not know that ICE is kidnapping people off the streets like the fucking gestapo, and that Americans are being illegally renditioned to a foreign concentration camp. They might not be aware of that Trump is in the process of collapsing our supply chains, and that he's doing this intentionally to consolidate power. Don't assume people know things that are blindingly obvious to you. In sum - we need to be spending less time on the internet and more time in-person building the pro-democracy movement within our own communities. Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and powerless. Unless we have the platform of a Leo or a Destiny, there's not much we can do to fight this as individuals. We fight this by building a resilient network of communities that can come together to pursue a shared strategy.

If you happen to live in the United States and you're looking for something tangible you can do to push back against Trump's authoritarian regime, a huge nationwide protest in being planned for Sat, June 14th. On June 14th (which also happens to be Flag Day), Trump will be spending $90 million of our taxpayer dollars on a lavish North Korean-style military parade for his birthday, where tanks will be rolling down the streets of Washington DC. Indivisible and 50501, along with a broad network of grassroots pro-democracy groups, will be hosting nationwide protests throughout every part of the country - except for Washington DC. The aim is to draw the media and the public's attention away from Trump's gaudy dictatorial parade and towards the growing pro-democracy movement in the United States - and put the screws to the Big Lie that Trump has a mandate with the American people. The only way that our politicians and organizations like colleges are going to stand-up to Trump's destruction of our Constitution and the Rule of Law is if there's a sustained public pressure campaign for them to do so. In the April 5th and April 19th 'Hands Off Protests', 9 million people took to the streets in nonviolent protest against Trump's fascist agenda, with across thousands of demonstrations taking place in every state. These protests will be a great way to dip your toes into the pro-democracy movement - and they'll be happening literally everywhere in the country, from big cities like Las Vegas to small towns in ruby red districts. You can find more information on the No Kings protests here: https://www.nokings.org/ https://indivisible.org/ https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

Appreciate it! Your constructive criticism is very welcome. Mind and world are two aspects of a unified phenomena we call Reality, but that doesn't mean we have access to 'everything, everywhere, across all time' - our limitations matter. Good epistemology (in my view) uses our situated position within Reality as a starting point for making useful discernments from unavoidably incomplete information. I'm of course open to the possibility that there a levels beyond the epistemic territory I'm exploring - but if that's indeed the case, no sense moving on until the approach I'm articulating has been more fully mined for its partial insights.

Partial agreement. It might be worth clarifying my stance here, since it differs in emphasis from Leo's. I'm less interested in what's ultimately 'real', and more interested in a descriptive account of how we arrive at our conceptual distinctions. My contention is that knowledge need not have an absolute ground - regardless of whether that ground is an inferred 'mind independent Reality' (materialism) or whether it's purely mental (idealism / mysticism). Whether our shared Reality is physical or mental isn't what's important here - what's important is that mind and world blend into one another in a circular way. Our lived perspective is the canvas upon which we experience a shared Reality, yet this canvas itself is shaped by the shared Reality it presents. Trying to find an absolute ground in either of these two poles is like asking if a coin is 'really' heads or tails. The takeaway isn't some New-Age pseudo-profundity that 'you are the whole universe'. It's that the relationship between 'mind and world' is highly porous - less like a brick wall, and more like a permeable membrane where the boundaries are fluid and constant exchange is the norm. Does all this mean that the Absolute doesn't exit? Not at all - just that it can't be cleanly separated from our lived perspective within Reality. Observer dependent, but not 'made up' or 'imaginary'.

Thank you. I've appreciated your thoughtful political posts over the years and, I hope you'll consider throwing your hat into the pro-democracy struggle if you haven't already. We could certainly use someone with your nuanced, pragmatic outlook. Finding my local Indivisible chapter and attending an in-person meeting was easily the best decision I've made since the election. Authoritarian regimes want us to feel isolated, afraid, and disempowered. Our cynicism and despair is their ammunition. Spending less time on the internet and more time engaged in in-person civic participation with people in my community has made me feel much less anxiously cynical than I would otherwise be. We haven't had to fight for our democracy in America in a long-time. But we're not in this alone. Millions of people are standing up this cruel, idiotic regime.

Putin has maintained a relatively high approval in Russia despite being an autocrat, because his regime is credited with the country's economic recovery. Russia's transition to capitalism was disastrous for ordinary people, producing a decade of Great Depression-like conditions following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Economic shock doctrine was traumatically ruinous for ordinary people. Despite being a brutal dictator, Russia's economic situation stabilized under Putin's regime. Conditions for most ordinary Russian citizens improved. While Putin was gutting democracy he was replacing it with a mafia-like patronage system. Millions of pensioners in Russia literally depend on Putin's regime for their survival, since state subsidies are the only thing keeping them destitution. Trump's approval rating on the other hand is hovering around %40. The first 100 days is the honeymoon period where presidents are usually at their most popular, and Trump's approval ratings are already in the toilet in a historically unprecedented way. His economic 'policy' is little more than an idiotic extortion scheme that will make life much worse for most ordinary Americans -off exactly the opposite of how Putin was able to stay in power. Americans are about to go from disliking Trump to truly hating him once we're no longer shielded from the collapse of our supply chains from his idiotic tariffs. Economists are predicting empty store shelves by the summer, the domino effects of which will almost surely spark a major recession. When I say that Trump's regime is weak and unpopular, what I'm referring to is that Trump sucks at being an autocrat. The smart play would have been to move quietly and take credit for Biden's economy. Instead he started a trade war with the world while bragging about how he's taking away out due process rights. It's almost the perfect conditions for galvanizing a large, ideologically diverse resistance to his cruel, idiotic regime. The democracy that Putin dismantled was in its infancy, within a country that was autocratic for the vast majority of its history. Trump is trying to dismantle a 250 year old democracy with the oldest written constitution in the world. Putin has had 15 years to consolidate his power before launching the disastrous invasion of Ukraine, while Trump is much earlier on in that process in a country with a much more democratic civil society.

@Hardkill @integral To clarify, I'm not a pacifist. Simply put, nonviolent tactics are much more strategically effective at challenging authoritarian regimes than violent insurrection. The long term aim with the nonviolent pro-democracy campaign is to separate the regime from its pillars of support, by engaging a large and ideologically diverse cross section of the public. Nonviolent resistance has an enormous participation advantage here, owing to its lower physical, moral, and commitment barriers relative to violent resistance. Basically, the eventual aim is for the pro-democracy movement to snowball into something too big to suppress or contain. The threshold for this is smaller than you might think - when just %3.5 of a country's population is actively participating in the resistance is when this starts to happen. There's safety in numbers, but this only works if we maintain nonviolent discipline. Violent tactics on the other hand tend to produce a rally around the flag effect. This is to be avoided at all costs, since it makes a regime's supporters much more likely to perceive the conflict as a zero sum game, pushing them to fight on to the bitter end. In addition to all that, nonviolent campaigns produce much more democratic outcomes afterwards. Violent conflict is anathema to maintaining a stable democracy afterwards, which is why civil wars - whether in Russia or China or Yemen - produce autocracies, not stable democratic regimes. In the 20th and 21st century almost every successful transition from an autocracy to a democracy happened through nonviolent resistance rather than armed conflict.

Please DO NOT bring weapons to the protests. Don't give law enforcement or the feds an excuse to crack down. The primary thing that's protecting us is safety in numbers and goodwill with the public, and that vanishes if the protests are perceived as violent. Trump's gestapo isn't arresting people at large public protests. ICE prefers to catch people when they're unaware and isolated, who they think they can get away with disappearing. If you want to purchase a firearm, keep it in your home or personal vehicle. Don't bring it to a nonviolent protest - you'd be endangering everyone around you. (Note: I'm pro second amendment, just be strategic about when are where you bring a firearm. The problem isn't an ethical one, it's strategic. In theory, I have no ethical issues with someone using deadly force to protect themselves from being abducted by ICE - gestapo lives don't matter. In practice, the regime would like nothing more than for the resistance to turn violent. Don't give Trump his Riechstag Fire Decree.)

You know that the Vatican made a good choice when the American Nazis are already losing their collective shit over it. If Jesus came back tomorrow MAGA would have him extradited to the gulags for not being a christian nationalist - and for not being white.

The problems with Relativism, as I see it, are twofold. 1) It lacks a firm, emotionally compelling reason for why we should reject harmful/dysfunctional viewpoints. Relativism tells us that we should try to understand viewpoints and practices from within their own historical and cultural context - and that any judgement we pass necessarily reflects our own cultural conditioning and individual biases. This is true - but if this insight isn't paired with some other non-relativistic underlying principles, the best that relativism can do is tell us that accepting or rejecting a particular viewpoint comes down to the preferences that we've been conditioned into. When the Chinese government calls human rights 'Western rights', does our knee-jerk rejection of this just come down to cultural chauvinism? Or is it a reflection of cross-cultural principles that are worth striving for? Slavery 'made sense' from the POV's of the subcultures that enacted these practices - is there a more substantive reason for rejecting slavery, other than that it rubs us the wrong way because of the culture we grew up in? 2) It's self undermining. Basically, if relativism itself is just one viewpoint among many, why should we adopt it over the totalizing viewpoints it critiques? While this approach might look like humility, in actuality no one adheres to an epistemology without an implicit belief that it’s more valid than what it’s critiquing (otherwise, why embrace Relativism over some other viewpoint)? In short: relativism can't advocate for itself within its own framework. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Granted, there are 'strong' and 'weak' versions of Relativism, and these two critiques are much more salient for its 'strong' incarnations. You're right though - not all relativists cling to such extreme forms of equivocation. It can be applied with varying degrees of nuance. The larger point isn't that Relativism is wrong, per se - it's that it's partial. These critiques only jump to the forefront when Relativism is treated as complete viewpoint, rather than one heuristic among many that we should keep in mind when evaluating perspectives.

I thought I might create this thread as a Public Service Announcement to counter some disinformation I've been seeing on this topic. While Trump likes to puff himself up as a strong man, in actuality he's resorting to terror tactics - ICE abductions, arresting judges, sending Americans to concentration camps - not because his regime is strong, but because it's unpopular and weak. He's attempting to govern by decree like a King because his administration is too weak and disorganized to get actual legislation passed. Trump wants us to feel that he's invincible - that he has a popular mandate from the American people, and that any resistance to him is futile. This is NOT true. First up, a majority of American didn't vote for him: %31.8 of voters did, the rest voted for other candidates or stayed home. More importantly, Trump 2.0 is already historically unpopular. 100 days in, when presidents are normally in their honeymoon period, Trump is underwater on every issue - including the economy, which is what he won the election on. His 100 day approval rating - 39% as of 4 / 28 / 2025 - is the lowest of any president since the Great Depression. Biden's 100 day approval rating was at %57, for comparison. Bush and Obama were sitting in the 60s at this point in their presidencies. Any of the (undeserved) goodwill from voters on the economy is GONE as Trump's chaotic policies have thrown the markets into chaos. This will only get much, much worse when Americans start to wake up to empty grocery store shelves, as global trade to the United States dries up. Trump has set up his party to lose big in the 2026 midterms, and the GOP knows it - which is why voter suppression efforts like the SAVE Act are on overdrive. "So what", you may ask - "it's clear that Trump's intent is to become a dictator, he doesn't have to care about whether or not he's popular." This is also not true. Even authoritarian regimes require some level of public support in order to survive. The Chinese Communist Party is still around because it managed to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, despite its blatantly authoritarian policies. Hitler and Putin's ability to survive long enough to consolidate centralized power was in large part due to a national economic recovery that they were credited for. Trump's chaotic policies are INTENTIONALLY causing economic hardship, so that he can offer selective relief in exchange for kissing the ring. This mafia-like behavior is not only evil, it's a dumb strategy. A typical American may not care if the US Constitution is being ripped to shreds and people they've never met are being sent to concentration camps in El Salvador, but they will care once the price of everyday goods skyrockets as a result of his mismanagement. Blaming empty store shelves on Biden or trans people may work for Cult, but not for the other %70 of the country that are being crushed by his disastrous policy. "But the Democratic Party is even more popular than Trump!" This is true for the party as whole, but largely because the Democratic base is furious that the Democratic establishment is treating Trump's coup as 'business as usual' - rather than breaking with outdated norms to fight Trump. But this too is changing - Bernie and AOC are regularly drawing in tens of thousands of people in a year where there's NO ELECTION taking place. In April 9 million people took to the streets to protest Trump's regime, and this will only continue to snowball as the weather gets nicer and Americans are crushed beneath of the malicious incompetence of his policies. The American resistance is alive and well, and if you live in the States YOU can be a part of it. Instead of doomscrolling, find an in-person group like Indivisible or 50501, and attend a meeting. Grab the 5calls app and be the annoying person who calls every single week to demand that your Senator vote NO to Trump's bills and NO to all future cabinet appointees. In short: you are not powerless. Part of Trump's game plan is to leave us feeling isolated in our individual despair. We fight this by organizing into networks of resilient communities that fight back with a STRATEGY and a UNIFIED PURPOSE. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-lowest-100-day-approval-rating-80-years/story?id=121165473

If Republicans are going to paint anyone to the Left of Ronald Reagan as a 'socialist' anyways, far better just to own it. 'Socialism' brought us the 40 hour work week, the weekend, Medicare, Social Security - popular programs and reforms that are as American as apple pie. (I use quotes here since this is really just Social Democracy stuff, but with how uneducated a typical voter is it's not worth splitting hairs over).

Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's president who ran on a platform of Left-wing economic populism, is an excellent case study on how to do this well. There's a reason that Bernie and AOC are regularly drawing crowds of tens of thousands of people in a year with no election. It's that Left-wing economic populism ala the New Deal is genuinely popular. Dems trying to rebrand themselves as Republicans-lite is a losing strategy, as is Rainbow Capitalism idealism which spouts vapid pseudo-profundities about the 'promise of America'. The Dems need to be dragged kicking and screaming in a bold new direction, or risk becoming irrelevant. I've been to the Bernie rallies, been to the regularly occuring protests which drew out 9 million people in the month of April. The energy and excitement is there - it just needs to be properly cultivated. David Hogg, the new young vice chair of the DNC, has the right idea - fight back against Trump's fascist takeover of our country, or get primaried by someone who will.

Economists are predicting that summer is when the bottom is going to drop out from Trump collapsing our supply chains. American consumers have been largely shielded from the effects of this, but that won't last much longer as domestic inventories run out and international cargo ships aren't coming in anymore. Make sure to bulk up on those 'I Did That!' stickers with Trump's face on them for those empty grocery store shelves. I mean it. Be as obnoxious about this as the MAGAts were about egg prices during Biden's presidency. They have no one to blame for the upcoming summer of scarcity but themselves for giving the Incompetent Felon his Revenge Tour. The tariffs aren't trade policy - they're economic warfare engineered to cause hardship, so that that Trump can offer selective relief in exchange for kissing the ring. Real mafia boss type shit Imagine if you could go back in time and tell Trump voters that in six months toothbrushes will become a scarce commodity, and they'd be driving to six different grocery stores to find pet food... _____________ Americans Really Dislike Trump. But They’re About to Truly Hate Him. Welcome to the summer of scarcity and the full-blown Trump recession https://newrepublic.com/post/194705/trump-scarcity-tariffs-recession-economy

This brings to mind an article I read awhile back about the rise of Left-wing Conservative parties in Western Europe, which combines Left-wing economic populism that's framed around more culturally conservative values. https://open.substack.com/pub/discoursemagazine/p/the-rise-of-the-conservative-left?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1riug7