DocWatts

Probably has everything to do with what stages you've integrated, and what stages you've developed a shadow around. I don't find it too difficult to have productive cross-paradigmatic discussions when there's a shared context that can ground the discussion. On the contrary, I actually quite enjoy discussing metaphysics with people hitched to an Orange materialist paradigm because I understand where they're coming from, and it's something that I myself embodied earlier in my life and can empathize with. Trying to do the same thing with say, Red, for example has typically been a frustrating experience because there's not a whole lot I can empathize with from the stage, even if on an intellectual level I realize that it's a necessary developmental stage. Or more generally I suppose with someone living in a completely different version of Reality where there's not an easily identifiable place where the Venn diagrams overlap that can ground a productive cross-paradigmatic discussion. Obviously this is a limitation of my own perspective, with Red for instance, it's only through the luck of the Birth lottery that I wasn't born in to challenging Survival circumstances where Red was necessary to meet my physical and emotional needs.

I'm comfortable saying I'm very familiar with Richard Dawkins, and have read and enjoyed many of his books. I can't say I have nearly the same familiarity with Hitchens, so I don't really have a strong opinion one way or the other. In my mind I associate Hitchens with aspects of Dawkin's paradigm that I find less interesting than his work on evolutionary theory (namely his anti-religiousity and his advocacy for atheism), but I realize that might not be doing justice to Hitch's body of work.

Richard Dawkins has a particular paradigm that he's locked in to every bit as much as JP is, and there's limitations to his worldview for sure, but he manages to embody that worldview with integrity. That and unlike Jordy P, Richard Dawkins can actually answer a question in a straitforward manner without the sense that he's being evasive and trying to obfuscate. If and when Jordy P writes something half as well written, thought provoking, and important as The Selfish Gene I'll consider taking him seriously as an academic.

In your view are there any contexts at all where it's okay for a white person to say the n-word? By that I mean are the any scenarios where it would be non-offensive in your view? (I'm genuinely asking by the way, not trying to lead towards an answer one way or the other).

Ancient Greece was home to some of the most actualized and forward thinking (for thier time) people in all of world history. Athens was not only the brithplace if democracy, but one of the birthplaces of philosophy (and by extension, science). I'm not sure if technological achievement should be the bar that we use to evaluate earlier cultures (or at least it shouldn't be the primary way of doing so). None of this is to take away from the ingenuity behind some of the technology the Greeks were able to employ. Between the video above and Archedemes Claw, it's very cool very impressive stuff. Actually as someone interested in the history behind computers and computer science, this kind of thing is right up my alley.

Oh okay, I was missing some of that context, as I haven't seen the Destiny discussion that you're referring to. I tend never to know in advance whether Vaush's discussions will actually be productive or turn in to a trainwreck, where I end up questioning why I just listened to two people talking past each other for an hour... Something like Theories of Everything or HealthyGamerGG is a million times better in that regard, which considering that both of thier hosts embody Tier2 values is hardly surprising...

You should pasted a link to that on the forum after it gets posted on his channel, I'll definitely want to listen to that.

Sure, but he should be wise enough to realize that the things he's talking about require internal transformation. You can't just drop this into someone's lap who doesn't have the development to grok it, the same way that you can't teach a six year old about postmodern theory. That would be like trying to introduce someone to something like Buddhism by just dropping it's most advanced teachings in to thier lap without any context or groundwork, rather than by teaching that person the basics of things like meditation as a starting point...

@Roy I'm not so sure that adversarial tactics of trolling are an effective way to have cross-paradigmatic discussions. The irony being that I'm finding the discussion between Vaush and Mikhaila a much better embodiment of cross-paradigmatic discussion than Vaush and Mr. Girl, who almost certainly understands Green better than Mikhaila. From the way you describe it, it sounds like a poor man's version of the 'sincere irony' of Metamodernism. If the goal isn't to have a productive cross-paradigmatic discussion, I have to wonder what was even the point of trying to have a discussion with Vaush and his Green audience ..

If you think about what the core value of Libertarianism is, it's the maximization of individual liberty, and the inalienable rights of the individual. Both the Left and the Right have different ideas about how this can be accomplished, and have different economic theories that each claims to pursue this goal. The reason why this may be confusing is that in America at least, the whole of Libertarianism has come to be conflated with economically Right Wing libertarianism. Which is why libertarian socialist sounds like a contradiction in terms, when it reality it only appears that way to someone who has a quite narrow definition of Libertarianism. A loose analogy would be how something like Liberalism has its roots in the European Enlightenment, and that most most liberals and conservatives subscribe to its values insofar as they believe in democracy.

Yup that's a thing. Not like Libertarian values necessarily have to right wing economic theory.

Rather enjoying the discussion between Vaush and Mikhaila so far, as it's proving to be a productive cross-paradigmatic discussion. Would much rather see more of this content from Vaush than the often inflammatory debates that he's become probably more well known for...

Fair enough. For what it's worth my introduction to Mr. Girl was through that Vaush conversation and I haven't explored his other work very much, so I'll admit that my (somewhat unfavorable) impression of him may be unfair. (Is there any Mr. Girl content in particular where he talks about going through Green? I'd be interested in listening to that if it's accessible, because I suspect it's something I will relate to, and it would be help me understand him better) As an aside, I also remember having a somewhat unfavorable view of Leo's content 6 or 7 years ago when my metaphysical horse was hitched to the materialist paradigm, so I'm fairly open to having my views on a person or idea evolve as I explore more aspects of thier work.

I really wish there was a thumbnail or something in the corner of Vaush's videos indicating whether it's going to be a debate-lord video or whether it's going to be an actual conversation. I found the Mr. Girl discussion to of be something of a trainwreck. Mr Girl may embody Tier 2 thinking but his way of expressing that was counter-productive and kind of cringy ('welcome to Yellow where we empathize with pedophiles'... Really, that's the way you want to introduce Yellow to a Green audience? *facepalm*) If JP's daughter (who I'll admit to being unfamiliar with) is a Metamodernist, I hope they can have something approaching a productive conversation...

As someone who would have considered myself a Libertarian when I was a lot younger, here's what would be like to to have worked for me; try to build a bridge between your view and values he already holds. Begin my empathizing with the positive aspects of Libertarianism, and explain that your view can be seen as the Libertarian Left (a lot of Libertarians are unaware that Libertarianism exists on both the Left and the Right). I'm assuming since you're on this forum that you embody libertarian (or Chomsky-ian) socialism, rather than authoritarian socialism. I would lean in to Libertarian half of that, and try to establish that there's plenty of overlap between your systems of values, such as personally liberty, freedom of speech, the ability to live one's life authentically. Try to demonstrate that your position is a fuller embodiment of libertarian values that he already holds, that socialism maximizes personal liberty by liberating people from oppressive power structures. You could try and draw out parallels between forms of state oppression (that he will oppose), and economic oppression that results from workplaces being run as unaccountable tyrannies.

Could you articulate what you mean a bit more? I'm not really sure what you are trying to convey in response to the previous post.

Agreed. I would only add that a society's material production base and level of consciousness are interlinked and interdependent. Just like economic changes alone won't transform society without collective developmental changes, collective developmental change won't happen on a large scale if individuals aren't given opportunities to self actualize. Hard to do that if you're a wage slave who spends the majority of your waking life performing demeaning labor that's completely disconnected from anything that individual cares about. Say what you want about Marx (and there's a lot to say), but his theory of the Alienation of Labor is highly relavant when it comes to self actualization potentials within contemporary societies.

While there's validity to the idea that selfish behavior is inherent to some degree in human nature, what I would take issue with is that the extreme form of selfishness that Capitalism posits as basic 'human nature' is closer to a self serving social construction rather than a Universal truth. Understand that I'm not accusing you of saying this, but it's something that largely goes unquestioned in many parts of our culture. We don't have to romanticize earlier societies to understand that for the majority of our existence on this planet, humans lived in relatively egalitarian hunter gatherer tribes where extreme forms of selfishness by individuals posed an existential survival risk to the tribe. That's not to say that human beings are inherently selfless, just that human nature is malleable and shaped by the survival context it finds itself in. For what it's worth I think we should also avoid the other extreme, which is the mistake that comes from positing that human nature as infinitely malleable, which is a form of Game Denial with disastrous consequences. Under an atomized system where human beings are put in artificial competition for the basic necessities of life it's not surprising that selfishness plays a more prominent role in social interactions. (For the sake of clarity when I say 'artificial competition', by that I mean there's enough material abundance in first world societies so that there's no justifiable reason why the basic necessities of life such as shelter, food, and health care should be scarce in a wealthy country like the United States). Of course contemporary capitalist societies are hardly unique in this regard in pushing socially constructed values as universals of human nature. I'm far from an extreme Relativist and have good reason to think that there are many universals to human nature (because contrary to the idea that 'contexts are boundless', biology and psychology place limits on the number of contexts). Devily (as Leo defines it) is part of this, but it's far from the whole story. How much that gets emphasized has a material and sociological component (or a 'Collective Exterior' quadrant, in Ken Wilber's model).

From a dialectical perspective, World War II could be seen as the way that issues like eugenics and great power hegemonic competition got 'resolved' in Western cultures. I would argue that a war that killed 80 million people is a sub-optimal way for that to happen (to put it very mildly). While it's perhaps justifiable to see the outcome of that conflict as beneficial for mankind, it's easier for us to say some 80 years later because later generations benefited from things like fascism and eugenics being discredited without having to pay the human cost of that conflict.

Being horrified at genocide happening on the other side of the globe is 'easy', in the sense that one doesn't have to introspect about violations of human dignity close to home that one may be indirectly complicit in. It brings to mind watching 'To Kill a Mockingbird' with an SD-Blue family member, seeing them emotionally moved by the story, but unable to comprehend how the story they're watching is still relevant to contemporary conditions (in thier mind racism was something that happened in 'the old days', not something they could possibly be complicit in).

For sure. I would never claim that the dynamic you mention is unique to capitalism, the Marxist experiments of the 20th century (which to be more accurate were versions of State rather than Private Capitalism) had this same problem to the same if not a greater degree. I would argue that the Social Democracies of Western Europe have probably done the best job of accounting for this aspect of human nature, but even if it's preferable to what exists in the US it's far from perfect since in some sense the worst aspects of exploitation have simply been 'exported' to other parts of the world.

@Tech36363 My primary point was more that capitalism and democracy work at cross purposes. The reason that simply raising capital gains taxes doesn't work is that the extremely wealthy will always find ways to bend political systems to thier will, because of the incentive structure inherent to capitalism, where corporate wealth and political power are heavily intertwined. In the US, the gains of the New Deal successfully being rolled back by business interests over the later half of the 20th century is a good example of this. This is my primary critique of mainstream liberalism, by the way, namely the Game Denial about exactly this dynamic. Which is what makes it such a difficult problem, and a Catch-22. I recognize that there's no quick and easy solution, and that substantial structural changes will almost certainly be necessary to address problems like widespread wealth inequality. So I guess you can tell me whether we're actually disagreeing or not.

Allowing individuals and small syndicates to amass more wealth than a significant portion of the entire society is unsustainable in a democratic society. If left unchecked it will eat democracy, due to the divergent incentive structures between what is good for the entire society and what is good for a relatively small group of socio-economic elites. To prevent this from happening society would need to prevent individuals from amassing more wealth than entire countries. But the catch-22 is that this would require fairly aggressive wealth taxes, which is exactly the sort of thing that extremely wealthy individuals are in a position to obstruct through political system capture.

What aspect of philosophy are you interested in? Moral philosophy? Epistemology? Metaphysics? Was there a particular philosopher you had an interest in? Maybe there's a novel implication of thier work you could articulate?

Well I never said he was a particularly wise or insightful role model. If he has any utility at all, I could see him helping some young men in his audience transition from SD-Red to SD-Blue. I'm not ready to disregard people who say that JP's advice has helped them, though of course that doesn't mean he has an informed or particularly insightful view about political topics. Aside from the regressive political takes he sprinkles in to his self help, he's always come across to me as a mediocre communicator owing to the fact that he uses convoluted language to obfuscate answers to relatively straightforward questions. If something can be expressed simply it should be said simply, as Noam Chomsky put it.