Friday, January 3, 2020

General History for Our Thought

Many old Philosophical writings prepare princes for propper rule as king. And in these times it wasn't uncommon for someone to found a city and for people to grant authority. Another set of ancient philosophy has the perspective of the people swung by fate with no authority over nature.

Philosophy in the information age takes a different perspective. We rule by aggregation with less emphasis on who has authority. There is less emphasis on right thinking and moderation. There is oly a sense that we need to attend to our desires. Particularly the unconscious quality of desire and using pop culture as a collective memory for desire.

A single ruler does not need to dote on slips of tongue or neuroses. Since the expression is singular the history of preferences is arbitrary. The idea that a ruler should abstain from passion as a model for governance helps communicate law and allow others to adhere.


When we rule as a group like how we image an open-market works, we care less about transmitting law and avoid laws as they antagonize individual choices in a system that provides a variety of selections. We also can image this system crashing if we suddenly stop desiring going shopping and make do with basic essentials.

For a brief period, this shift was seen as an optimistic necessity until people could figure out what makes them nuts and progress as an individual without a mandate from a parental form of government. Now there the optimism is gone but there is a recognition that if we seize the gears of desire everything collapses and our culture projects our desires that haunt us. The most salient projection is the post-apocalyptic genre. We cringe but do not stop and the solutions to mounting problems appear boring while the disaster after neglect appears sultry.

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