What's the point of 21st century socialism inspired liberalism?

[Kuya]

Okay, so let's assume modern liberalism is influenced by both those ideologies. How do we contrast them? If modern liberalism does not have concrete tenants, perhaps we can pull some out by contrasting it with its influencing ideas. The difficult part is framing them as principles and not as policy goals.

[Cadsuane]

Well for example, sort of like socialism we can say that modern liberalism emphasizes the relationship between the individual and society. To do this we need to reject conservative and libertarian ideas of naturally occuring meritocracy, which we will do with the notion of social barriers which inhibit social mobility, or movement within social classes. No one's lot in life is entirely due to their own machinations. Simply put, society matters, and to a certain extent the individual is a product of it. Certainly no one can be analyzed irrespective of it, no matter how fervently they may strive to meet their ambitions or how wantonly they commit crimes. As liberals we really have two aims: to be the architects of an improved society (or at least custodians of such a process), and also to arbitrate how society can be more egalitarian, having acknowledged that it metes out advantages and disadvantages more or less arbitrarily. Since meritocracies don't naturally occur, we will try to manufacture one, which incidentally will be what we concieve of as a just society.

Unlike socialism though we're not necessarily going to limit our analysis of the social order to the relationship between labour and capital, since the social forces we are concerned with can be cultural as well as economic. This is also where we depart from dialectical materialism. As such we aren't going to require state ownership of what is traditionally the private sector, though we are going to require a larger civil service to accomplish our goals. This is how we approach classical liberalism.

[Kuya]

Good. I think another thing we can probably posit to be a part of modern liberalism is that, rather than humans being innately rational, we can instead say that humans CAN be rational when they ATTEMPT to be. Humans often rely on intuition and common sense to make decisions, and are often influenced by culture and ideology. In this case, rationality is an aspiration and it is something that requires effort and maintanance.


It follows from this, that if humans are only rational when they try to be, then human affairs do not mearly organize themselves, but rather, require concerted efforts to reach certain results.

The principles behind socialism don't really make pronouncements on the nature of the human, but from i gathered from Marx it is likely that he would agree with the liberal idea that the human has a rational disposition. We can say that humans are not only rational, but that they are more easily emotional than they are rational.

[Kuya]

I say this from all the anti-reason, pro-intuition movements associated to the left. Such as the hippie movement and certain new age movements. We can instead take that and say that emotion is important, and perhaps no less important than rationality given that we are social animals and emotions are the means by which we communicate non verbally. It is a way we relate. But rationality is not bad, it is only that rationality requires effort and maintance because it does not happen by itself. And that people shouldn't necessarily put reason above empathy and emotion, and instead judge the circumstances. We shouldn't aspire to be machines nor rebel against reason.

[Kuya]

In terms of socialism, i think we can also say that, the values and ideologies of a society are not exclusively define by an upper class, and that even this upper class is influenced by ideology and culture. We can say that due to this, those in more advantagous positions may not recognize that they may be exploiting others, and instead come to rationalize the status quo. It is not that the upper class of any given society or even most of it is explicitly helping develop and maintain an order that exploits others, but they may not see it as such.

I think that from this might follow a bit of moderation rather than assuming malice where there is none.

[quannum]

[Mertron]

boys have a penis, girls have a vagina

[quannum]

liberals speak for the weak and opressed; want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos

from video, sounds correct to me if changed to "liberals think they speak ..."

[Kuya]

I've heard the whole people believe in liberalism and conservatism because they value certain aspects of human nature over others so many times. The problem with this guy is that he should have used different terms for grouping. People might value nurture and harm more, and they might be prone towards the political ideology that exists in America known as liberalism. Did you see what i did there? Liberalism is a social construct. This guy is using terms in an a-historical fashion, which only confuses people.

All in all, this presentation is not very useful for our discussion. Since this discussion relates to historically contextualized political ideologies and not the reasons people identify as X or Z.

[quannum]

it doesn't seem to matter 1 type of person is more concerned with stability/security and another is more concerned with change/charity, w/e the historical context(of course i am generalizing). i posted it for the 5 "value" stuff, which you said you already know.