[FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

Tue Oct 26 12:57:40 EDT 2021

Hi Glen, Dave, 

As my rationalism has been routed and is retreating in disarray, I am inclined to think of charisma as a social process not an intellectual one.  But I think it was Houlton who pointed out that these are not in any sense mutually exclusive, that a charasmatic idea can point to some aspects of a person and make that person seem charismatic and a charismatic person can point to some aspect of an idea and make it viral.  Was Reagan an idea or a person?   Still, I don't think Reagan would have lasted a day without his ability to make huge numbers of people FEEL that he was kin.  

nick

Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2021 8:46 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

Very cool! I've added Fragments to my wishlist. I'm wondering how/if it relates to black radicalism, of which I'm still completely ignorant. 

Egalitarianism was briefly covered in the podcast:

Holton: [...] Can you and I, as an intellectual exercise, think of anything wrong with, all people are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights? That’s not the whole story, but I can’t find anything wrong with that. Can you?

Bouie: [...] I find it difficult to find something wrong with it as well because, to me, it is a statement of sort of the inherent dignity of all human beings and an inherent dignity that must be respected in our governments and our institutions. It’s such an extraordinarily powerful statement that, for as much as I can recite every criticism of Jefferson, it makes it hard to dismiss him, right, as a person worth taking seriously and worth, in some sense, even admiring, at least admiring the part of him that wrote that.

As I alluded in my previous post to this thread, this is charisma of the *idea*, despite all and any evidence that the idea is obvious garbage. It's like the hype around AI ... or consciousness. We *want* to believe in things like "equality". So we believe in them, in spite of all the evidence around us that such a thing doesn't exist.

But if we steal a bit of persnickety semantics from the philosophers, we can better express the sentiment as "moral deserts", treating persons as ends, not means. We can be equivalent in our moral status, yet wildly different from every other perspective. Although this smacks of dualism, it doesn't have to be.

On 10/23/21 12:23 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> This seems like an appropriate point to recommend a small book:
> 
> /Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology/ David Graeber (asst. Prof, 
> anthroplogy, Yale) Prickly Paradigm Press   [love the publisher name] 
> Chicago www.press.uchicago.edu <http://www.press.uchicago.edu> 
> www.prickly-paradigm.com <http://www.prickly-paradigm.com>
> 
> I believe that, within the book, some seeds for answers to Nick's question "how do we achieve coalition without charisma," and contributions to a lot of other ideas that have popped up in various threads: "great man theory," egalitarian societies, post-capitalism, political theory, etc., might be found.
> 
> From page 1:
> 
> /"What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches of potential 
> theories, and tiny manifestos — all meant to offer a glimpse at the 
> outline of a body of radical theory that does not actually exist, 
> though it might possible exist at some point in the future./
> 
> /Since there are very good reasons why an anarchist anthropology 
> really ought to exist, we might start by asking why one doesn't — or, 
> for that matter, why an anarchist sociology doesn't exist, or an 
> anarchist economics, anarchist literary theory, or anarchist political 
> science."/
> 
> I also have on order — prepublication — Graeber's 500 page rewrite of history. Supposed to be full of insights like:
> 
> /"Before [Marcel] Mauss, the universal assumption had been that 
> economies without money or markets had operated by means of "barter"; 
> they were trying to engage in market behavior (acquire useful goods 
> and services at the least cost to themselves, get rich if possible 
> ...) they just hadn't yet developed very sophisticated ways of going 
> about it.  Mauss demonstrated that in fact, such economies were really 
> "gift economies." They were not based on calculation, but on a refusal 
> to calculate; they were rooted in an ethical system which consciously 
> rejected most of what we we would consider the basic principles of 
> economics. It was not that they had not yet learned to seek profit 
> through the most efficient means. They would have found the very 
> premise that the point of an economic transaction — at least, one with 
> someone who was not your enemy— was to see the greatest profit deeply 
> offensive."/

--
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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