Saturday, December 15, 2018

Nate Silver isn't an idiot, and yet...

There are lots of reasons Ocasio-Cortez drives certain Republicans crazy, foremost among them her race and gender. But it's also that she's quintessentially a New Yorker and DC political culture is formal and prudish when NYC mostly isn't those things.


If you don't regard the first sentence of Silver's tweet as beyond the pale, you may be beyond the pale yourself.  It is, in the parlance of our times, a prime instance of assuming the worst about an opponent.  On top of that, the empirical support for it is non-existent, seeing as how all the empirical evidence points to the primary cause of Republican reaction to AOC being her status as a self-identified democratic socialist who doesn't even know basic facts about American government.

(She claims to have "self-corrected in real time" when she said ca. 11/18/18: "If we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress — Uh, rather, all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate, and the House."  The only "real-time correction" involved here is replacing one falsehood with another.  She actually thinks she self-corrected, though, which only further demonstrates the ignorance involved.  With this kind of ignorance, there is no real-time or short-term correcting.  What we have here is the Democrat version of the Republican ignoramus Sarah Palin, whom the conceited/arrogant/hubristic/smug/complacent/lazy Democrats take to exemplify the ignorance of Republicans generally.  The only issue is whether non-ignoramuses of intellectual integrity from either side of Democrat/Republican divide can acknowledge when someone on their own side is an ignoramus who shouldn't be coddled or have excuses made for him or her.)

So basically Silver is engaged in a form of epistemic gaslighting that desperate Democrats in the Age of Trump seem to think a warranted and necessary corrective to Trump's own 'War on Truth.'  They did it in the case of Brett Kavanaugh.  Instead of the best explanation that makes sense of the evidence in front of my own eyes - AOC is an ignorant socialist, a Palin-of-the-Left - Silver would have us question whether we have crucial evidence (to the effect that the GOP reaction to AOC is based on anything other than her socialist ignorance) missing from our observed data set.

Which of the following is more plausible:

Republicans act more or less the same toward socialist ignoramus AOC as they act toward socialist ignoramus Bernie Sanders.

Republican reaction to socialist ignoramuses will vary depending on the race and gender of the socialist ignoramus.

If you're a person of common sense, the answer here is easy.  If you're a morally deranged Democrat in this day and age - this may be a redundancy with notable(!) exceptions like Dershowitz - then you may have some trouble with this one.

Maybe Silver should stick to his area of expertise - statistical modeling - and not be a dishonest sonofabitch abusing his reputational status and platform when venturing into other areas?

[Note: there is a weasel-word in Silver's tweet that still won't get him off the hook: "certain Republicans" are driven crazy by her race and gender.  Which ones?  Any ones of consequence?  Anyone not already considered beyond the pale by reasonable and honest political observers?  No.  He's bullshitting, is all.  Maybe the explanation here is that Silver is a trolling New Yorker, so his blatant disingenuousness is contextually okay.  Perhaps Silver could tell that to the Trump-Deranged crowd that insists that Trump lies basically all the time even though, well, Trump is a trolling New Yorker.]

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Leftist intellectual sloth, exhibit A

This article was praised on (loathsome leftist law-prof.) Leiter's 'philosophy' blog as "a brilliant and illuminating essay," with "real insight and a synoptic vision of the "big picture."" I consider it a prime example of the pathologies of leftist/anticapitalist thought.  I would call it "leftist lying" but it may just be the product of severe and debilitating cognitive bias.

Now, there are certain key claims made constantly by leftists as to a certain inbuilt dynamic in capitalism toward: (1) greater inequality and (2) negligible-at-best improvements for the non-rich. 

Streeck marshals forth evidence about inequality levels within OECD countries in recent decades. At the same time, he repeatedly mentions the global-scale workings of capitalist finance. Global-scale workings would in fact give us a true *big picture* view beyond just the OECD countries. But - and this has been very consistent among leftist "analyses" of capitalism of recent years - he doesn't present us global-scale data in the wake of increasingly globalized capitalism. Data, for instance, that indicate a level or falling global gini index. Streeck discusses the declining growth rates of the OECD nations in recent years, but what about the global growth rate? No coverage there. What about the global poverty rate, which has been declining big-time?  No mention of that. But, again, such omissions are very typical of leftists, indicating a serious bias if not flat-out dishonesty.  (How does Streeck omit mention of Mises and Hayek alongside "[main] bourgeois theorists such as Weber, Schumpeter, Sombart and Keynes"? How shoddy and/or ignorant can one get?)

Another *typical* instance of leftist intellectual malpractice appears in Naomi Klein's recent book, 'This Changes Everything, which I cover here.

Another instance: the history of early industrial England includes a doubling of England's population from 1800-1850, supposedly the worst period ever for the proletariat, and another doubling of population from 1850-1900, but I've never seen a leftist mention this fact.

It seems to me that perhaps Leiter should stick to jurisprudence and Nietzsche studies and leave the analyses of the global capitalist order to real experts (which doesn't appear to include any leftists).

Problems with leftism

(Posted previously in another venue; in the new-material queue: Prof. Amy Wax vs. the intellectually lazy left (only the pattern repeats all over the place [going meta: Ayn Rand vs. the intellectually lazy left [[going meta: Aristotelianism as dialectically alien/other to the left: time to synthesize. of course!]] ] ).  Also, I'd like to stress once again that leftists may be loving and wonderful people in their private/civilian lives; it's just that when it comes to politics they become illiberal buttheads whose arguments can easily be taken out by the most astute libertarians if not conservatives [who are, these days, basically libertarians in denial since, of course, that's where the best arguments lead, on political matters at any rate...].)
--

To make a full case would require something much longer than a facebook comment, but I'll put it in a few essential bullet points, and I treat the Left as a spectrum more or less like it's presented in the wikipedia article (from mainstream liberals to the radical left), and my view is that the further left one goes the more deranged it gets.

1. The hostility to capitalist or free-market values and receptivity to socialist ones.  Socialism proper has been a complete failure despite many decades of support among the intelligentsia, although a few far-left nuts still proclaim the moral and economic superiority of socialism and evil of capitalism.  OWS is but one example.  The more mainstream closer-to-center view of "liberals" and "progressives" wants more redistribution, more big govt, in the name of "social justice" and "fairness" despite very mixed-at-best results.  The Great Society programs have done next to nothing to reduce the overall poverty rate in 50 years, while nondefense govt spending in the USA (federal state and local) has increased from about 19 to 28 percent of GDP, fueling deficits and debt.  Further, their moral justifications for such policies are dubious; they take it as a given, as a dogma basically, that, for instance, there are human rights to healthcare, food, housing, education.  They grant to the state (by its nature a coercive institution) the moral authority to dispose of some people's lives - "the privileged" - for the sake of others (the "less advantaged").  This brings me to point 2.

2. The "liberal" as well as further-left moral compass consists of a lopsided emphasis on "social justice and fairness" to the exclusion of a more well-rounded set of values as seen in conservatives.  Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has gone into this in considerable detail (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory for an overview).  The left-wing worldview is so focused on the political as some way of addressing problems or improving lives that they have lost sight of the more foundational need to do soulcraft.  I come at this topic not just as a libertarian but more importantly as a philosophical Aristotelian (which makes me more or less a Randian).  Central to Aristotle's conception of the good life is the idea of *virtue*, good habits or practices that normally lead to a flourishing life.  I hear a lot more about virtue coming from the Right (although it's usually presented as an illicit package-deal with religion).  There is more hostility to religion on the Left than on the Right, and this hostility has involved throwing out the comprehensive-vision-of-life baby with the religious bathwater.  The Left is more receptive to moral licentiousness and to overthrowing traditional values.  The Left also seems very reticent to discuss the problems that arise from the increase in the rate of single-parent families, not just in minority communities where the rates are higher but also among whites (not as high but rising over time).  They'd rather shift focus and attention to "addressing the structural/institutional causes of poverty" - again, showing their one-sided approach to moral and social questions.  (This isn't to suggest that the left hasn't had insights about the injustices of the mass-incarceration state, the failed Drug War, and such things to victimize POC at a higher rate.  But it's not the whole story.)

3. Cognitive biases and a lack of willingness to engage in serious dialogue with the strongest opposing positions.  (In the case of Rand especially, left-wing rebuttals involve sloppy and lazy caricatures, poor reading comprehension, massive point-missing - about, e.g., the theme of 'Atlas Shrugged,' "the role of the mind in man's existence," and other cognitive vices.  But it goes for the other strongest representatives of libertarian, conservative and capitalist thought such as Mises, Hayek, Friedman and Nozick.)  I've brought up the case of reasonable black conservatives/libertarians like Sowell and Williams whom those on the left have determined don't merit engagement or rebuttal.  But the pattern is endemic in the way the left operates.  A lot of this has to do with the lopsidedness of the academy - lots of leftists and much fewer rightists.  This probably has a lot to do with many of the better minds on the right going into the business world and generating value that way.  One major exception in the academy is the economics profession which is centrist or right-leaning, and many indicators show that among social scientists the economists have the highest average IQ.  In the humanities it's the philosophers and there is plenty of rigorous debate going on between the left-of-center Rawls-types and the libertarian-types, if you bother to look for said debates.  (There is also serious scholarship being done in the academy in the area of Rand studies, but you'd have to be intellectually curious enough to seek it out because the left-wing academic mainstream does not to volunteer any such information.)

The cognitive biases are most obviously on display in the way leftists tend to cite and characterize data in connection with capitalism.  I point to one such example in a recent facebook post.  (The "Leiter" mentioned therein is Brian Leiter, a leftist who runs "Leiter Reports," the most-accessed philosophy blog.)  The lack of willingness to engage in serious dialogue with strong opposing positions is all over the place (not that certain varieties of Rightists aren't really bad in this area as well, but I see more of it on the Left; in any case we need a lot more philosophy in our political discourse), but one particularly egregious, disgusting and saddening instance of such occurred at the University of Pennsylvania, about which I already made a link in this thread: https://www.google.com/search?q=amy+wax+bourgeois+values .  (None of the facts about faculty behavior during this episode are in dispute.)  The lefty resort to the "Racism!" "White supremacy!" charges has become so excessive and so tiresome in response to decent opposition arguments, that it not only grows tiresome but it also damages the credibility of those doing so.  It's rather evident to me that Left and Right today don't even agree on the boundaries of what constitutes racism, but the Left appears content to cry "racism" wherever they think they see it, and assuming that everyone else should just go along.  But dialogue about the boundaries of racist speech, conduct, etc.?  I'm not seeing it.  The intellectuals and philosophers are supposed to be of use here but they seem, on the whole, in on the act at the universities (the Amy Wax episode being a manifestation of such dialogue-impoverishment).

I am more inclined to give credit to "the left" when it comes to genuine achievements in social justice and equality, when it comes to things like LGBT+ rights, where all too many conservatives (but not libertarians) dragged their feet for far too long.  But it's also the case that a conservative attorney, Ted Olson (who won the Bush v Gore case), made the arguments for marriage equality in front of SCOTUS.  https://www.google.com/search?q=ted+olson+gay+marriage  Other than some victories such as this, the Left has pushed a number of bad and damaging things under the guise of "social justice/equality."  (What's more, the world is too multi-dimensional to reduce social relations to axes of hierarchy and oppression, which is neo-Marxoid talk of "class struggle" in new garb.)  Their good intentions don't suffice for moral credit.

Friday, December 7, 2018

A couple thoughts on the orange man (Season 1, Ep. 1)

Anyone who paid close attention (as I just so happened to do) to the 2016 Republican Primary debates knows that whatever you say about her private sector record (about which I heard mixed assessments), Carly Fiorina almost surely gave the most impressive debate performances.  What's more, it just so happens that one of Fiorina's Stanford degrees is in Philosophy, and she has demonstrated a familiarity with Hegelian dialectic.  So I would naturally kinda relate to her as a presidential candidate.  She'd have been my first choice, followed by one or other of Bush, Christie, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio.  She also happened to be only of the 17 GOP candidates who was a woman.

So what happened when the orange man, Donald J. Trump, was asked about Fiorina?  A google search says . . . Trump the rude and crude (and wisdom-deficient lookist) homed right in on "that face".  Fucking asshole, huh?

Still, what if the alternative is Crooked Hillary Clinton & Co.?  Gotta give the orange man credit for so memorably helping to discredit her alleged progressive moral superiority.

The other thing for now, is:

So, can we get some details, at long last, on Mexico paying for that wall? ^_^

Socialism vs. freedom, in a nutshell

In a nutshell?  Socialism in its original sense means the abolition of private property "in the means of production," to be replaced by some form or other of social control of "the means of production."  If you see the modification of the term at the supplied google search link - a necessary modification to reduce the perceived moral and economic ugliness of the idea - the meaning has mutated into "production, distribution and exchange [being] owned or regulated by the community as a whole."  In other words, if there is a considerable amount of regulation of an economy, then it (apparently) now falls within the range of socialist ideas, although I prefer the term "socialism-lite" so as to highlight the morally odious socialist elements of a broadly leftist/"progressive" vision of a just economy.

In her landmark essay, "What is Capitalism?", Rand presents a shortened, nonfiction version of much of the "Galt speech" in Atlas Shrugged.  The theme of Atlas Shrugged?  "The role of the mind in man's existence."  The strength of Rand's case for capitalism stands or falls with her arguments concerning the role of the mind in human existence -- in the case of capitalism, the role of the mind in the process of economic production.  It is this role that socialists of whatever stripe seem to have a very poor grasp on.  Evidence of this poor grasp is how socialists/leftists tend to react to Rand's writings themselves (i.e., quite cluelessly, resting content with caricatures or downright smears), but a wider body of evidence is available: how do socialists treat the subject of entrepreneurial creativity and vision?

Many of the richest people in capitalism-lite societies of today are visionary entrepreneurs, who create value-added using rare and hard-to-replace skills.  At the margins, these value-added skills are rewarded handsomely, which is how (in this age of advanced wealth accumulation) the top-net-worth individual[*] can surpass the next individual on the list to the tune of billions of dollars.  It is this combination of skills and the usual monetary incentives that explains how we now have four "tech" companies well within striking distance of $1 trillion market capitalization each.  (In the true spirit of Making America Great Again, we should be following the lessons from the successes of the MAGA giants, i.e., Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon.)

In the literature of the Austrian economists, entrepreneurship is front and center in explanation of market processes in constant 'disequilibrium' moving toward 'equilibrium' as, e.g., arbitrage opportunities are discovered and exploited.  (Israel Kirzner is one such economist who treated this subject in much detail, applying basic Misesian observations.)  Rand adds the dimension of creativity to the entrepreneurial process.  Creativity is a unique function of human consciousness: in essence it involves taking existing elements and generating some new or original combination of them.  (The following is a tentative characterization of creative action.)  Creativity happens in almost any human endeavor where abstract thought is involved; from there it is a matter of magnitude, and some humans have demonstrated greater aptitude in this process than others.

In other words, what Rand was getting at with Atlas and "What is Capitalism?" is: the primary means of human economic production is the human mind or intellect or reason.  All the other means of production in form of (the productive value of) land, labor, and capital are consequences of this primary.  (We're assuming, of course, a value-added situation beyond that of the primitive humans.)  It is this basic feature of human economic life that socialism of every variety fails to recognize or appreciate.  In consequence, what socialism involves is some measure or degree of control over the human mind.  As Rand put it, via Galt, "When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind."

As she put it elsewhere, "a free mind and a free market are corollaries."

(I like to play games in my head along the lines of "What's your all-time starting five" and not just when it comes to NBA basketball.  So, like, in the NBA a good lineup of candidates for the starting five would be Russell or Abdul-Jabbar at Center, Lebron James and Larry Bird at the Forward positions, and Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson at the Guard positions.  Now, what are good candidates for an all-time starting five in the realm of "intellectual defenders of the capitalist system."  They would include: Rand, Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Friedman.  Now, if we liken it to another sport, hockey or soccer, we would have a goalie, and I'd have Rand at goalie.  Every argument against capitalism you might come up with would have to get past Rand-the-goalie.  When you get to Rand -- assuming you somehow managed to get past the Mises-Hayek-Nozick lines of defense -- she'll have a response invariably along the lines of "Man is an end in himself."  Or: "Man has a right to exist for his own sake."  Or: "My life isn't yours to dispose of."  The rest is the anti-capitalist going through various rationalizations to either deny these statements or mutate them somehow into a defense of socialism(-lite) along these very same morally-undeniable lines.  "Doesn't the capitalist dispose of the lives of a company's employees?" etc.)

What is to happen with entrepreneurial talent/vision in a socialist framework.  More pointedly: how does one go about providing incentives for entrepreneurial talent to be forthcoming?  Even under a "market socialist" framework (basically, a mutation of socialism from its original meaning - central ownership, planning, control - to something involved "social ownership" but subject to market processes, as a supposed response to the Mises-Hayek criticism of central planning), if what is sought is long-term economic prosperity, certain rare and marginally-very-valuable talents will have to be involved, and the judgment involved has to be exercised freely in accordance with the requirements of the creative intellect.  If what is sought is efficient financing of production projects, you need financial talent and incentives sufficient to bring that talent to market and directed toward its most optimal uses.  How does all this happen without essentially "devolving" into the very tried-and-true capitalist process?

The socialists may not still profess to adhere to a labor theory of value (although getting them to drop that theory may have been like pulling teeth), but their chief focus is on a category they call "the workers" (subordinate employees).  Do entrepreneurs do a lot of value-added intellectual work?  From what I've been able to discern, this seems to be an issue discussed very little in the socialist literature.  If we applied Marxoid phraseology (without reference to at-the-margin value or rarity), entrepreneurial labor could be categorized as multiplied or intensified unskilled or simple labor.  The less-clueless socialists will still want to distinguish between entrepreneurial or organizational talent on the one hand, and the finance-capital end of things on the other.  But what about financial-capital talent?  Is it discussed at length in socialist literature?  (If it is, it must be hidden well from view, with other themes and concerns pushed to the fore.  The main concern/theme driving all of it seems to be: inequality in the process of production.  Talents are, after all, "distributed" unequally.)

The capitalist ethos (espoused by Rand first and foremost) holds that private property rights are essential to human freedom, in terms of the products or consequences of individual value-added creativity.  In the case of the "tech titans" we might have the CEO owning a lot of the company's shares, in effect playing the roles of both entrepreneur/organizer as well as financial capitalist.  Along the lines of Locke and Hegel and Rand and others, property is an extension of self or personhood.  In some sense, the personality of a "tech titan" is heavily invested in the enterprise.  But does anyone really need a billion dollars (discovered via the loathsome leftist Leiter's blog) to properly express their personality?

It'd sure be nice to resurrect Rand in her prime to see how she would handle this kind of question.  She'd pick apart certain assumptions of the question, perhaps use the phrase "context dropping" or "blanking out the cause of the effect."  But I'm not her, I am merely me, and here's what I've got so far:

Say a tech titan reaches a billion dollars net worth.  (This is not like a billion dollars cash in the bank, it might be nearly tied up in stocks that couldn't all be liquidated at present market prices.  It's almost surely not a billion dollars that's going to be blown on hookers and coke, as good as that might be for the bottom line of hookers and coke merchants.)  So if Ocasio-Cortez and the other enlightened progressives have their way, this tech titan won't be able to amass a net worth more than $1 billion, at least not as long as there are human beings somewhere going without health insurance.  (What are we actually supposed to infer about the latter from the former, anyway?  Is one the cause of the other?  That means that our modern economy is accurately characterized as more like a zero-sum situation than a win-win one [tech titans offer comparative advantage, using talents not directly at the disposal of "the workers", . . . ].)

(Without delving into the preposterous, just how would a committee of average-100-IQ "workers" manage to develop a company like Apple?  Again, one only need read Rand for the essentialization of the principle involved here.  It's on the same order of preposterous as imagining a committee of average-100-IQ intellects coming up with the grand-scale integrations of a Karl Marx.  Ohhhhhhhh, so now the role of the mind in man's existence becomes more clear, all of a sudden, to the myopic leftist.  Keep in mind, though, that Marxism proper doesn't place primacy on the human intellect but on "the material productive forces" of which intellectual products - including Marx's theoretical edifice itself - are consequence or superstructure.  In the last resort, of course.  And this is the leading contender for best socialist theorist to date, no less.)

Anyway, let's say I have a billion dollar net worth and any extra amount of wealth over that is confiscated (to pay for children's health insurance or whatever most noble cause).  I could just sit on my ass after that and create no more value-added.  But what good would that do anyone?  No matter, my marginal tax rate is 100% because in the last resort that meets enlightened progressive understandings of fairness, and so I can either sit on my ass or continue to create value for free.  So why should the tax code create preference for leisure time over production?  In one case (sitting on my ass) my life is still exclusively at my disposal, but in the other, doing win-wing comparative-advantage consensual capitalistic acts, the state can dispose of 100% of my marginal proceeds, i.e., my time, energies, effort, talents, mind, person.  (Nozick makes a similar point about a tax-code incentive for leisure over production in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 170.  It's basically a common-sense refutation of the moral premise of punitively high redistributive taxation, just right there.)

What part of "Man is an end in himself, has a right to exist for his own sake, and he has a right to dispose of his own life as he chooses" do the leftists/socialists not fucking understand?

So, in a nutshell: Private property is an expression of man's mind.  Socialism foolishly flouts this moral principle; pure socialism flouts it purely (see: Mao, Great Leap Forward.).  Socialist moral theorizing implies the preposterous.

(If it can be established that "capitalism causes global warming," i.e., desire for economic prosperity causes global warming, and if it can be established that warming-mitigation technology could not outpace the warming itself, then and only then would you have capitalism characterized by a monumental negative externality or non-win-win scenario.  But the socialists were basically making preposterous assertions about capitalism before global-warming became a big issue, putting their credibility in tatters.)


[*] - I'd sexistly say "guy" . . . well, why not just say "guy," since we appear to be at the tail end of a bell curve of a certain kind of intelligence, dominated almost all by men . . . a fact that cannot be sexist.  (Speaking of which, if we're going to rank-order the greatest women philosophers in history on the basis of a full accounting of their strengths and shortcomings, we'd better be sure we've got the right criteria for measurement.  What did Prof. Hospers find so fascinating about Miss Rand in particular, againAll-time starting five, at least?  And what about . . . All-Time Starting Five Philosophers, period?  What shall the criteria be?  I need to become more of a student of the history of philosophy to know for sure, but I already do know that there can be both a lot of great stuff in Rand and in the rest of the philosophy canon; need they stand over and against one another? ^_^ )

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Bitter divisions over religion and politics, or: faith and force

(with due credit to Rand)

Basically, people don't take all that kindly to alien contexts and preferences being imposed on them.  In the case of religion the alien cognitive context is one or more religions one doesn't share, differentiated in content by items of faith ultimately inscrutable by earthly reason.  So two people get into a heated debate over which of their respective revealed dogmas is the more reliable and truth-reaching.  But given that these rationally inscrutible items become the very point of contention, a matter of context not shared by the two participants, the participants are left with asserting the truth and authority of their position over and against the preconditions for rational assent by the other - an assertion or imposition of epistemic ground against the recipient's wishes, in effect.  This is because the healthy rational and skeptical aspects of personality naturally kick in when it's the other's dogma being asserted as authoritative truth over and against one's own dogma.  In any case, any differences of opinion could not in principle be solved rationally from that point forward, and that tends to rightly irritate people who are otherwise calm, cool and and collected thinkers.  They don't have time for inscrutibles.  Etc.

In the case of politics, it's much easier and simpler to explain: people don't take kindly to having others' preferences imposed on them by force, and that's what politics in this day and age is all about.  Since when does the vote give you the right to dispose of my life?  Actually, this sort of question can only be asked, without irony, by libertarians.  In fact, the libertarian will go on to say that the less of imposing preferences by force on others, the better.  So how about we, e.g., build that social safety net in some way other than passing laws and getting the state involved, shall we?  (As for Republicans imposing their preferences on Democrats via force of law - making the Orange Man president for example - the Democrats' complaint would in effect have to reduce to: the wrong sets of preferences are being forcibly imposed and on the less deserving targets of forcible-preference-imposition.  Which is to say, Democrats have cultivated lousy habits of thinking about politics so as to rationalize their ethically unidimensional fairness/equality ethos (and to ignore or strawman or weak-man the libertarian your-life-belongs-to-you-not-the-demos refutation of statism).  In sum: politics is the art of the majority forcibly imposing its preferences on the minority.  If people were more consistent in their revulsion at the element of force involved, and do their homework thoroughly, they'd be libertarians.  (Much as Republicans have their weak spots - like, how did they nominate the Orange Man when Carly Fiorina's debate performance was more impressive? - they're closer to the libertarian mindset than are the socialism-lite Democrats.)

The element in common to both religion and politics is how the process of independent reasoned judgment is bypassed by authoritarianism in its epistemic and social manifestations.

Now that this simple explanation is out of the way, how about we try reason and freedom consistently?

Better living through philosophy, in broad outline

In which Ultimate Philosopher addresses the question, "Is there definitive evidence, man, that better living and philosophy go together?" and then such related questions as "What if we encounter one miserable philosopher, doesn't that falsify a better-living-through-philosophy hypothesis" and then "Isn't part of wisdom learning not to be miserable (as distinct from, say, 'in physical pain'), like, ever, and isn't philosophy after all the pursuit or search for wisdom which is distinct from the having of wisdom or sagacity itself" and then such related questions about the meaning of life, etc.

So, let's begin.  What is better living?  In short, whatever it is that the ancients (Aristotle first and foremost, of course . . .) were getting at with the concept of eudaimonia.  Happiness, flourishing, comprehensive well-being, . . . a modern rendition of the concept is found in self-actualization psychology associated with Maslow and others.

Next question: are there real-world examples of self-actualized or eudaimonic philosophers, not merely philosophers who seek these things but also attain these things?  It is helpful to have real-world examples to go by.  How do we go about identifying who a philosopher is, anyway?  And surely we need to be able to distinguish between a mere philosopher and a sage, so getting the definition of 'philosopher' correct is important (for purposes of this discussion, etc.).  To best answer that question is to get into the topic of 'metaphilosophy' or philosophy (asking questions about, thinking through thoroughly, more to follow below) about philosophy.  Just what are the necessary and sufficient conditions, etc., for someone to be engaging in what we correctly identify as philosophic activity?

Philosophy is something something love or pursuit or seeking after wisdom, with the goal or telos of such activity being an actual sage.  A sage is one who has attained wisdom, and so what is wisdom you might ask?  Ah, what is wisdom.  How do we know when we have found it if we do not yet possess it?  We could say numerous things about wisdom and hopefully identify fundamental features in common to those things to form a working definition of wisdom.  Okay, so I'll cheat and see what google says.  "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.
synonyms: sagacity, intelligence, sense, common sense, shrewdness, astuteness, smartness, judiciousness, judgment, prudence, circumspection

So, like I hear about these wiseguys, you know, goodfellas?  Michael Corleone, did he possess these features?  He had to be pretty good at what he was doing to run an empire like that.  Keep your friends close and enemies closer, etc.  Or, how about when the "Meth Milf" Lydia Rodarte-Quayle from Breaking Bad discusses whether it would be, you know, wise to have Mike's good men bumped off.  That's not the wisdom the likes of Socrates, Plato and of course (duh) Aristotle spoke about, but it's something called wisdom by some, and we need to have strict guidelines for distinguishing fool's gold from the real.  And what if Corleone or the Meth Milf do possess some of the characteristics provided by the google algorithm?  Are those good characteristics to have no matter the context?  What about smartness, anyway?  Is that ever bad?  Can one be more clever than smart, more smart than wise?

Wisdom has a synonym in the ancient Greek, scientia or some form of systematized or organized knowing.  In this context it is unavoidable for me to recall a portion of historian-of-philosophy Will Durant's summary statement of Kant: "Science is organized knowledge; wisdom is organized life."  Wisdom is organized life, philosophy is the love of wisdom, therefore by ironclad deduction philosophy is love of organized life, QED, shows over, philosophy 1, non-philosophy zero.  (Plato proved this over 2,000 years ago and yet humanity has not taken to Plato in all this time.  Is it a communication problem?  Shit.)

Humans are distinguished from the animals by the faculty of intellect or reason, which enables thought and the ability to express them via language.  Intellect or reason itself is present enough in the activities of nearly all human beings (not in the category of the developmentally disabled, say) that it serves to organize experiences into a systematic-enough whole to get by to varying degrees of success in daily and often routine affairs.  But the light of independent thought and initiative and creativity is still in there, enough for legal (including criminal) responsibilities.  Some element of free will that accounts for about 30% of our life circumstances (the other 70% roughly evenly divided between genetics and environment/upbringing).

Moving on.  It is systematic approaches to reasoning in specialized areas of knowledge we tend to put under the heading of 'the sciences.'  But philosophy is something about organizing our thought processes at a higher level of sorts, of bringing together all our reasoning processes under a higher-order level of systematicity, enough so that it takes on the task of "organized living".  The pursuit of wisdom seems to be, in addition to anything else, the pursuit of better or organized living.  And this seems to happen via a process known as philosophy.

Time out for a moment.  The first google result for 'philosophy' is:

philosophy | skin care | fragrance | bath & body | gifts philosophy.

Skin care


explore advanced skin care products from philosophy. as ...

Bestsellers


philosophy.

So philosophy as something to do with, like, beauty?  Are there objective teleological standards for beauty?  Is there an organized field of knowledge that deals with this subject?

Now, I have in mind something more like what appears on the right sidebar:

Philosophy
Academic discipline

Description

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The term was probably coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation. Wikipedia
So somehow there's a connection - I'm not entirely clear on it myself at this point - between "the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language" and self-improvement! which is what Better Living Through Philosophy might very well best be marketed as?  Have you seen philosophy journal articles where "fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language" are discussed?  A bunch of it almost goes right over my head especially if I'm not reading carefully.  Some of these things just don't interest me that much: I'm more interested in that field known as 'ethics' (link above) than I am in getting it exactly just right whether our conception of substance (this would be in the branch of metaphysics, mysteriously not linked above) is best understood in Aristotelian or Thomistic terms much less Leibnizian or Spinozist terms.  (Is there a difference between Aristotelian and Thomistic conceptions, and even if there is one, are these the best two candidates to choose from, vis a vis the likes of Leibniz and Spinoza?  Yeah, I think they may be pretty good candidates.  But like I said, given only so much available time my own personal focus has been more squarely on the topic of ethics.  This is not at all to say that getting a fully systematized understanding of our ethical concepts won't rely on metaphysical ones.  But then they might also have to rely on aesthetic ones as well, and that seems like a rather under-served area in philosophy; only a few of the most canonized philosophers - little overlap with specialists who've made their name in aesthetics (Danto, say?) - delved into that subject matter.  What is there to say about whatever it is that aesthetics studies, anyway, and what relation does it have to better living / self-help?

So there's something about the activity of philosophy - which encompasses not just (science-like) knowing or wisdom accumulation but also the activity of putting whatever wisdom obtained so far to use in organizing or systematizing the art of living better, but also an activity distinctive to philosophy per se: thought.  It is, ultimately, the activity of thought that itself aspires toward a systematic unity or completeness or wholeness, and so atop the hierarchy of the human sciences is philosophy, basically a science of what it is to live functionally or well as a human being.

This is basically the essential idea of what I think "better living through philosophy" is aiming toward, the rest being application, examples, a treatise-length fleshing-out.

Now, let's say that there are better modes of doing philosophy itself than others.  There are plenty of great philosophers in history but what crucial features account for some philosophers being more influential than others?  (Why isn't a pessimist like Schopenhauer a lot more influential than someone who's more optimistic like Aristotle who believes humans - well, Athenian citizens at least - are in principle equipped for eudaimonia?  If pessimism is true, shouldn't it sell?  And why hasn't the full range of wisdom of Plato and Aristotle, at minimum, rubbed off on all school children all of 2,000 years later?  Communication barriers?  Really?  Surely I could get polemical about the "progressive"-run schools but I'll keep it clean here.  I'll just say that a truly progressive mindset gets you to Aristotelian wisdom-pursuit and I wish I were seeing a lot more of that explicitly and systematically instilled in schools.)

So there are better and worse ways of doing philosophy, let's assume.  We should then have some way of ordering the different approaches and styles and methods (METHODS!!!) according to their value (teleological ranking).  Through to their (methods') fruits ye shall know them.  Aristotle knew a ton of shit - founded biology as a science that was authoritative for 2,000 years until Darwin in the 1800s; systematized the science of logic to such an extent that (quoting historian of philosophy Anthony Kenny in Essays on the Aristotelian Tradition) "his work was subsumed, rather than superseded, by the developments of mathematical logic at the end of the nineteenth century by Frege and his contemporaries; developed a physical science that stood authoritative until the Renaissance, systematized philosophy itself with treatises on metaphysics, ethics, politics, psychology, aesthetics, philosophical procedures and methods.  Aristotle's work (not like this stuff shouldn't be known to everyone by now) exists now only in not-always-accessible, quasi-lecture-note format; he is reputed to have written dialogues that outshone (as gold to silver) those of his master Plato.  He was hailed almost unanimously among the medieval scholars who preserved and studied his work as the ultimate in human intelligence, the philosopher "par excellance," or simply The Philosopher according to the greatest of the medieval minds, Aquinas.  (This despite having numerous erroneous views and often in areas of less specifically philosophical consequence - he didn't think his principles of the good life or eudaimonia applied to slaves or women; numerous of his scientific theories have been superseded or overturned.)

It is my view that an 'Aristotelian' approach to doing philosophy is the best one, or at the very least a suitably strong candidate for one.  I place the likes of Aquinas, Ayn Rand, and Mortimer Adler within that tradition broadly speaking.  When it comes to the "fruits" of whatever his method was, it includes a crucial piece of insight: that the human good, to be most fully or perfectly actualized, requires philosophical contemplation, and a perfecting of one's intellectual activity itself (whether as an aesthetic principle - living to kalon or for the sake of the noble, fine or beautiful - or for the sake of better living overall qua the kind of life-form one is).  I characterize this as an intellectual perfectionism; Aristotle has been variously dubbed an "intellectualist" in his conception of (the fullest realization) of eudaimonia.  The philosophic or contemplative life, and generally the progressive development or perfection of one's intellectual faculty, are in this sense a central and fundamental feature of the good life, the feature that more than any others would best explain all the other facets of a good human life (physical, emotional, social, spiritual, aesthetic,...).  For the Aristotelian, eudaimonia is best or maximally achieved through the perfection of that 'best aspect within' our nature, our nous or intelligence, that a good human life is one led thoughtfully and intelligently, that this perfection of our rational natures is in some sense the same thing as living eudaimonically, as an activity of the rational soul.  (Are living wisely and eudaimonically the same thing?  Must one be a sage to be truly or fully eudaimonic?)

Now this distinctively Aristotelian (or more broadly, Greek) conception of the good life gives us a picture of the human good in terms of both the end and the means by which it is exercised (which are in some sense united and instantiated in rational activity, or: the human good is rational activity), which places it in interesting contrast to other ethical traditions which aren't so homed in on the rational element of our soul as the central defining potentiality to be actualized in a good human life.  (This subsumes even the 'Kantian' rational-willing characteristic of distinctively moral cognition.)  The Aristotelian ethical tradition is big on the concept of virtue (or excellence, arete in Greek): what makes for an excellent human being/life?  Something something the utmost excellence of the rational or intellectual faculty.  Now, the task of figuring out general principles for the best exercise of our rational faculty?  That's for epistemology, the science of knowing as such.  And if we exercise the proper epistemic discipline, the science of knowing becomes a unity with the science of living, with practical concerns.  To live best is (inter alia) to know best, i.e., the latter is a precondition for the former.  So what do the wiseguys, the made men, know exactly, anyway?

So something like philosophic activity itself is central to the Aristotelian conception of the good life.  How much is that notion seared in the consciousness front and center when we consider alternative philosophical schools, whatever extant candidates we might look into for philosophic guidance?

As to such profoundly significant identifications being the fruit of a method, in Aristotle's case it has to do with something called dialectic, or the art of playing opinions against one another to hopefully yield a truth agreeable to all despite their remaining well-scrutinized differences.  And even though Plato is noted for having made The Grand Original Contribution to the philosophical dialogue style via The Republic and other published works, it is dialectic as picked up and applied by Aristotle that may well yield the greatest fruit.  Among other fruits of dialectical method would be what, in the final comparison, differentiated Plato from Aristotle: Aristotle adopted both Plato's 'rationalist' framework for thinking about philosophic questions (homing in on eternal, unchanging Forms or Ideas supposedly grasped by the intellect with the sense experience only providing at best a hint in Their direction), and a thoroughly empirical or experience-based one.  Ideally the Aristotelian approach should be able to provide the very definitional or formal criteria for both living well and specifically philosophical activity, along with empirical examples of such in the real world.  (Shouldn't philosophy be practical and not a lot of idle word-play?)

Dialectic has something to do with taking into account all the essential factors that come to bear on forming an opinion on anything, and ideally applies not just to analyzing and resolving differences of opinion but also in mapping our opinions onto the world itself.  (It is a common sense or classical realist assumption that there is a real world out there independent of our knowing it and that our opinions can at least sometimes match up with or more systematically map onto what our senses provide us.)  And in his inquiries into the nature of existence and our place in it, Aristotle covered a bunch of ground, really thoroughly/completely/wholly/perfectionist-like.  I take him as an example to be emulated, each in our own way (we providing for the individuating features or manifestations of this formal principle of intellectual perfectionism), and perhaps not to be superseded or surpassed.  If we propose to have a superior or more perfect alternative model of thinking/knowing/living on offer, then aren't we just re-affirming a principle of intellectual perfectionism, to the effect that we should adopt the most superior model on offer?  So this becomes like an endpoint of the conversation about the norms of an ideal human society (also known as 'end of history' or perhaps 'utopia').

So as we progress through the stages of development we see that there is the potential for, if not actuality of, better living through philosophy, but then we see that there may be better ways of doing philosophy than others, in which case we should think in terms (eventually) of the best living through the best philosophy.  And getting 'em as young as possible probably wouldn't hurt to speed up the 'end of history' collaborative project, as long as they learn all about things like the Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis and are not pumped full of philosophically-less-perfect material instead.

So this should give a taste of the gist of the 'better living through philosophy' Project that I've been consciously mulling these past 15 or so months, atop the previous context of thought already accumulated, and aided by some possibly-performance-enhancing substances.  (Substance. ^_^ )