E150| What If The Way Is Shut? | Benjamin Studebaker, O.G. Rose and Tim Adalin | Political Philosophy & AI

So the way is shut involves a couple of dual acknowledgments that are difficult to keep in your mind at the same time over a long period of time.

One is that the existing system inflicts enormous amounts of suffering and is horrifically unjust from many points of view, and yet that doesn't in any way, shape, or form mean that it has to end or that it will end anytime soon.

And another pair of, of things that's difficult to keep in mind at one and the same time is that a long-term strategy of trying to bring about revolution can't work in a system where people believe that all substantive alternatives to it are communist or fascist in the sense of Stalinist, in the sense of Hitlerian, horrific, atrocious, liable to result in enormous amounts of death and suffering that always exceeds whatever level of death and suffering, however intense, is produced by the existing constellation.

And then on the other hand, reform, which also doesn't work, and it doesn't work because the kind of system that we have is not designed in such a way that it can get control of the things it would need to get control of to substantively improve or augment itself.

So this comes back to what I, I call the unsolvable problem, which is that capital is mobile, but states are territorial.

So in response to states doing things that capital doesn't like, capital can leave.

If a government makes policy to alleviate the suffering of its citizens, that policy will result in jobs leaving, investment leaving, and what will that create? Unemployment, inflation, runs on the currency, runs on government bonds.

It will create new forms of suffering which exceed those which the reforms intend to ameliorate.

So faced with this dilemma, elected officials run for office promising to solve problems they cannot actually solve.

They either attempt to solve these problems and generate blowback, which then results in electoral defeat, or when in office, they recognize that they can't solve the problems and then kick up a variety of shows to try to distract from the fact that they're not accomplishing very much.

And in response to a politician failing with the policies that backfire or a politician failing doing nothing and just kicking up a silly song and dance where, you know, you do things like rename stuff because you're not accomplishing very much, uh, what people do is they start looking for some alternative reformer because they can't go outside the system.

They can't transgress outside the box.

Transgressing outside the box leads to authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

So each time they get somebody they-- that disappoints them, they vote in some new reformer, and so on and so forth in an endless back and forth that exhausts some people and causes some people to drop out and to retreat into what I call the four Fs, which are faith, families, fandoms, and futurism.

These become private haunts where people, uh, that people invest with their values, with their beliefs, with their hopes and dreams since they recognize that they're not going to get the state or the international system to commit to helping them to fulfill those various objectives.

The problem, of course, is that gradually over time all of those four things are wrecked and destroyed by the unsolvable problem.

Economic instability undermines the cohesiveness of the family and reduces the array of household options available to people.

The, uh, forms of religion are distorted by the need for religion to affirm the pursuit of the commodity form, to affirm getting rich, staying rich.

The- Technology becomes all about trying to maximize, you know, and get as much growth as possible and telling all sorts of fairy stories about how if you invest in a corporation and drive up its stock price, you'll alleviate all sorts of human suffering.

Stories that never prove true, certainly not on a timeline that's relevant to the people to whom they're being told.

And then, you know, fandoms which, uh, increasingly offer various forms of escapism and which get inside them all of the cultural struggles that affect mainstream politics.

So things like Star Wars become extraordinarily political.

Is a Star Wars movie representative of, of what Star Wars is, or is it an attempt to shove a bunch of identity groups into a movie? And, and the fans become just as irate and upset about that as people in, uh, political life would become about, uh, a culture war issue like gay marriage or abortion.

So we get to a stage where all of the escape routes from politics become just as infested with disagreement, fragmentation, hostility, and social dysfunctionality as the public space, uh, where people can only exit this by, to some degree, having an encounter with despair and acknowledging that there is no place, public or private, in this form of society where you can simply pursue the things that you care about and stand a good chance of being able to substantially move toward them.