ok, if i were married to john rawls, this is what i'd do to him (besides making him very very happy). now if you are wondering why i am contemplating marriage to the late john rawls, it isn't because of his personal attractiveness. i guess you had to be there in the comments.
i think i felt i had kind of flubbed certain aspects of rawls. i did not precisely state the principles of justice. well, you go without notes and sometimes you choke. i did an 'errata' vid on this one. wouldn't effect the overall argument either way. yes since i refound the black nationalism vids i've been watching some of my own vids, even the card flourishes.
honestly, i feel, though i am certainly deluding myself, that the political stuff is easy, though i might lose an argument on almost anything else. easy from the highest theory and the cold white peaks of the canon to the argument at the barber shop. if you start with a whole bunch of unexamined ideological assumptions that you've adopted and assumed without argument to be the most rational position, if basically your position - and rawls is as much like this as anyone despite the huge machine - is a consensus among your social set and so held sacred but never justified, i am just going to be able to kill it real quick, even if you sort of don't think i just did. of course, you're saying, you must be just as much like that as anyone. don't you have figures you admire, traditions you respect, and so on? of course, but, um, i found them not they me. i assembled a canon, etc.
anyway i feel like you just meet very few people that can't just have their foundations undercut quite easily. you just go, wait a second...so, i can do that with reactionaries or progressives, communists and capitalists, individualists and collectivists (dems and reps aren't even worth it); i can do it with professors or counter girls or just that person at the party. i'm more often deciding that i need to hold it back, or start focusjng on the possible weaknesses in my own argument, which i might be taking seriously. hell i can do it with anarchists, and i do do it with myself, which is the key. i can do it with classical liberals, communitarians, narrative theorists, anyone you please! and yet people will just keep being marxists or something. just sort admit it's religious or some kind of club and leave it there? they think they have arguments! on the other hand, ted cruz, princeton champion debater, is going to have a difficult time explaining how he can hold all those positions simultaneously. etc. many people can do this to one side, few can want to do it to both, because it's solidarity, not rationality. maybe it helps that i'm not really talking to that many people except undergrads. but i am telling you, been a long time since i lost one. on the third hand, who's doing the judging?
or i guess i feel now like i've got all the equipment rawls had more or less, or rorty; i've done all the reading; it's all in this semi-available stock in my head. (he knew a lot more about kant. but i also am interested and semi-expert in many things he wasn't that could be relevant.) my theory is as well-developed, and so on, though it's still in publication, some of it. i was never intimidated by his obvious intelligence or his perch at harvard; that only made me want to really launch. i acknowledge that john rawls was/is smarter than i am. that doesn't really matter that much within limits, and he was definitely not as creative as i am, or as free. so i've got the weapons, but not the prepossessions. this is where i set off to get to when i was a baby, ok? (this is pretty ironic because the whole point of the original position is to remove all prepossessions. then by an amazing coincidence you end up with classical liberalism, the view to which rawls never ceased for a moment to be passionately committed, however it seemed or whatever he said. cf. descartes) my only assumption is an anti-authoritarian emotional impulse as big as all outdoors, which is precisely how i'm destroying your foundation, and why i want to. and that is where you might finish me off; you might just diagnose me. well, that's kind of irrelevant, but kind of not, of course.
i think that's an advantage too. i do know something about the psychological or biographical motive force of my positions. i have had a lot of therapy. i understand that i do not have a fully rational underpinning for all this, but that is part of what gives me leverage to show that you definitely do not either; here i will prove it to you. in my heart of hearts i think the impulse i got fighting against my parents or my school, the way i felt i had to defend myself against irrational authority, is a source of truth. i affirm it. but i realize i am not going to be able to prove the orientation. but i believe that at the very heart of most people's politics, why ultimately they believe what they believe, is that they need subordination. they need to subordinate others, and they need to be subordinated, though very often there is a particular side of the b&d transaction being emphasized. slightly toned down here or there, with various names and rigamaroles, these are arguments for human slavery, or they rest on a vision that legitimates slavery.
looking back on the arguments of john c. calhoun or whomever in favor of slavery, boy they just collapse; the real point was to find some argument to justify slavery. calhoun was a brilliant philosopher, actually, a systematic philosopher. but he himself didn't know that there was evil right at the heart of his heart, and that that was shaping his argument. every argument was an argument to the effect that he himself was not evil after all, so that he kind of lost his awareness of what was driving his own argument, not to speak of being massively uncritical of his own arguments, and unknown to himself. (and, again: calhoun was brilliant and learned; john c. calhoun was smarter than you, and smarter than i am). and plus every part of the political spectrum is like this more or less equally, especially now. it sort of detaches the political argument from the person and its own motivating force; the arguments start to seem like half-assed stuff that obviously have nothing to do with the belief: just a bunch of words trying to hide the monstrosity within.
if i'd have one hope, it would be that pretty quickly people will see the arguments that put you on the left or on the right are calhoun-style arguments for calhoun-style conclusions. it could happen! like we look back on the arguments for socialism or compulsory education and go: good heavens how did they think stuff like that? how could they make that argument? that argument was not honest.
or i could say: almost nobody ultimately has reasons for their politics, or really rests it on reasons. some people have rationalizations that consist of a shelf of volumes, though. they have social commitments. nothing wrong with that unless you claim that you're justified, or your position is rational and theirs isn't etc. like a little honesty about that would make everyone immune from the too-easy refutation. everything collapses like a house of cards if you touch it. i do try not to be cruel, though.
