Religion is about getting to Heaven. This may involve 'redemption' or God's 'grace' or talking incessant bollocks and maybe fighting pointless wars against heretics or blasphemers. Liberalism, however, was about being materially better off in this life- i.e economics- and avoiding pointless strife over the world to come or whether we really need to spend a lot of money killing or incarcerating those who take it up the bum.
Sadly, stupid academics in America tried to turn Liberalism into a Religion without God or Heaven. It was about scolding and virtue signalling so as to make this life as miserable as the Hell which it deemed not to exist. Obviously, it would have a family resemblance to Socialism, Communism, and other such atheistic ideologies concerned with demanding the destruction of the economy so as to appear to signal superior virtue while actually seeking 'interessement' or 'obligatory passage point status' so as to secure a rent or establish a countervailing threat point or nuisance value.
Alexandre Lefebvre has written a book titled 'Liberalism as a way of life' which focuses on stupid, ignorant, nutters- like Rawls- whose policy prescriptions, if implemented, would have destroyed our way of life and created endless strife.
He writes in Aeon of Rawls who
lost his faith as a soldier in the Second World War. Even so, he never abandoned a conviction that ordinary life needs to be elevated (‘redeemed’ or ‘graced’) by something beyond it.
People who write or teach stupid shite have an incentive to pretend that they are themselves the gateway or path to something beyond rationality- not to mention common sense.
I believe Rawls found that thing in liberalism and the tradition of liberal moral and political thought he devoted his life to.
No. He conflated a stupid sort of Socialism- one which didn't get that the way we deal with risk is through collective insurance- with a stupid conception of Liberty- one which didn't get that rights are actually defeasible Hohfeldian immunities and that rights' violations are expensive to remedy whether or not there is a bond of law. Thus, preserving Liberty is about mobilizing resources and doing 'mechanism design' such that 'incentive compatible' remedies are indeed available. This involves having a good fiscal policy to finance an Army, a Police Force, a Justice system etc. In other words, this is boring 'Law & Econ' stuff. It aint 'Political Philosophy' or any other type of shitting higher than your arsehole.
Rawls was not a STEM subject guy. He can't be blamed too much if he was ignorant of developments in Math- e.g. 'ugly duckling theorem' which shows you can't get rid of bias, or Djikstra's 'dining philosophers' which shows there is no non arbitrary way to break concurrency deadlock or livelock- but he should have known Kuhn's 'no neutral algorithm' theorem because Kuhn was a celebrity back then. Still, twenty years later, Rawls says Liberalism requires 'government to be neutral between competing conceptions of the good' when the plain fact is that the thing is mathematically, logically, impossible. Of course, since such conceptions are meaningless or 'anything goes', you might say Rawls didn't blunder. He just babbled meaningless shite.
He never stopped trying to work out how a life based on liberal ideals can be not only happy but worthy of happiness.
Which is like trying to work out how having a wank might involve not just ejaculating but also cause the Universe to have an orgasm. Obviously, this has to do with directing your splooge towards the black hole at the center of the Milky Way which itself is, needless to say, merely evidence of my having coming on the tits of the Night Sky.
This makes him the perfect guru for our times.
But the guru of his own times was Tim Leary. Boring kids who didn't drop acid wrote apple polishing dissertations on Rawls. But they were as stupid as shit.
To see why Rawls fits this role, I need to say something about the peculiar moment we live in. As everyone knows, religion is in decline throughout the Western world.
Fuck off! The Mosques are bursting at the seams. Demographic replacement will continue to reduce atheism in the West. True, left-liberal Episcopalians will soon be extinct. But other types of Christianity will burgeon.
To name only the most populous Anglophone liberal democracies, surveys of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand show that 30, 53, 32, 40 and 49 per cent, respectively, of citizens in these countries claim no religion.
But the percentage of Muslims is increasing. If elite Churches give up on God and Heaven, people will give up on them.
People who tick the ‘no religion’ box on the census are the fastest-growing population of religious affiliation, or in this case, of non-affiliation.
Which will make it easier to convert to whichever fundamentalist creed becomes dominant in their neighborhood. Alternatively, if the 'non-affiliated' have lower fertility, their percentage will shrink.
This raises a tricky question. If you, like me, are unchurched and don’t draw your values from a religion, then where do you get them from?
Yourself. You can be just as stupid and ignorant as some Professor of a shite subject.
From what broad tradition do you acquire your sense of what is good, normal and worthwhile in life, and – if I can put it this way – your general vibe too?
Beyonce. When I grow up, I want to be just like her.
When I’ve asked my non-religious friends, colleagues and students this question, they’re almost always stumped. Their impulse is to say one of three things: ‘from my experience’, ‘from friends and family’ or ‘from human nature’.
The answer is Tardean mimetics. You try to imitate those superior to you.
But to this I reply, as politely as possible, that those are not suitable answers.
only because the only suitable answer, if you teach worthless shit, is 'teechur is stooooopid'.
Personal experience, friends and family and human nature are situated and formed within wider social, political and cultural contexts.
No. Wider social contexts are formed by people who were themselves formed by vast cosmic and evolutionary processes. The smarter of those people escape shitty social or political or cultural contexts.
So I ask again: ‘What society-or-civilisation-sized thing can you point to as the source of your values? I’m talking about the kind of thing that, were you Christian, you’d just say: “Ah, the Bible,” or “Oh, my Church.’’’
Or, if you were a Marxist you'd say 'Das Kapital' or 'the Communist Party'. But this only holds for the obedient, not just the believing, Christian or Marxist.
In my book Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024), I argue that the unchurched in the Western world should point to liberalism as the source of who they are through and through.
So, you are arguing that the 'unchurched' should obey you and your stupid doctrine. Why not suggest that everybody who isn't paying tithes to a Church, send you all their spare cash? Set up your own cult. That's what L. Ron Hubbard, not to mention Richard Dawkins, did.
Liberalism –with its core values of personal freedom, fairness, reciprocity, tolerance and irony
should become a rival to Scientology under the dictatorship of this shithead
– is that society-or-civilisation-sized thing that may well underlie who we are, not just in our political opinions but in all walks of life, from the family to the workplace, from friendship to enmity, from humour to outrage, and everything in between.
So, this is a creed which asserts the Social construction of Reality. We are being programmed by the Matrix. Don't wake up sheeple. Don't take the red pill.
How can ordinary people in the modern world remain free and generous,
by being more and more productive and thus having command of sufficient resources to safeguard their freedom and also to engage in philanthropy or, at least, pretend to do so.
despite new temptations not to be?
Like the temptation to tell this Professor he is full of shit?
This argument will not be news for conservative critics who are keenly aware of how hegemonic liberalism has become.
It may have been 'hegemonic' in the mid-Victorian age. But it was predicated on things like free trade, small government, and fucking over proles, darkies, wimmin, homos etc, etc.
Ironically, though, it may surprise liberals themselves, who often fail to recognise how widely and deeply their liberalism runs.
Unless they get uber rich and run away to tax havens.
Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a ‘social and political philosophy’ based on ‘support for or advocacy of individual rights, civil liberty, and reform tending towards individual freedom, democracy, or social equality’, liberals too quickly adopt this narrow institutionalist definition and assume that liberalism is an exclusively legal and political doctrine.
Whereas, in truth, it is a doctrine which is the exclusive intellectual property of this shithead.
Liberals, in other words, fail to recognise not just what liberalism has become today (a worldview and comprehensive value system) but who they are as well: living and breathing incarnations of it.
Incarnations who think this Professor is stoooooopid.
The founders of liberalism would have been disappointed in us.
True. The only black peeps in the White House should be janitors.
A newcomer by the standards of intellectual history, it was created in the 19th century by such greats as Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Staël, Alexis de Tocqueville, George Eliot and John Stuart Mill.
Nonsense! It starts with Locke, triumphs with the Glorious Revolution, but gets bogged down with corruption. Still, with Pope's Essay on Man and then the Scottish 'common sense' school, the Continent gains a 'beamtenliberalismus'- i.e. a Liberalism of the officials. In France, the prime mover is Voltaire. Rousseau was a bit of a blind alley. Macaulay was more important than the two Mills (both were employees of the East India Company) but what really mattered was Free Trade and the Gold Standard and a Stock Exchange with a class of riskless assets- i.e. Consols. What happens next is the Marginal Revolution which framed the problem of non-convexities and externalities in a manner which enabled 'piece-meal' Social Engineering. There could be a convergence between 'Fabian' Socialism and a 'Socially conscious' Liberalism. In England, this was exemplified by Haldane's 'Coefficients' club.
While there are many differences between them, they all conceive of liberalism first and foremost in ethical terms – a ‘moral adventure’, as Adam Gopnik has called it, for living well in the modern world.
But, it failed immediately in ethical terms for a reason Malthus explained to Condorcet. So long as technological progress got swamped by population growth, Liberals realized, in the words of Christ, that the Poor they would always have with them. Still, there was a period when Liberalism prevailed over Mercantilism as driving growth. But, because of non-convexities and externalities, it was superseded by Listian 'regulated' Capitalism. But this meant War would become a heavy industry. Liberalism officially died in England on the day that conscription was introduced. America, of course, was always more liberal in the matter of lynching niggers.
As Helena Rosenblatt states in her excellent book, The Lost History of Liberalism (2018): ‘Today we may think that they were naive, deluded, or disingenuous. But to 19th-century liberals, being liberal meant believing in an ethical project.’
Anything at all can be an ethical project. What matters is whether talking a particular brand of shite can get you political power. Liberalism was once one such brand. It isn't any longer. One may as well say 'Farting is the freest expression we are capable of. We must re-dedicate ourselves, in a spirit of solemn self-sacrifice, to patting everybody on the head and encouraging them to fart vigorously. Only thus can we ensure that Trump does not return to the White House.'
What does this mean? Then, as now, the word ‘liberal’ (with its roots in the Latin liber and liberalis) combines two meanings: freedom (liberty) and generosity (liberality). When 19th-century thinkers (and statespersons, journalists, novelists, soldiers and more) claimed this mantle for themselves, they wrestled with a very deep question.
How to get more money or power by talking or writing stupid shite.
How, they asked, can ordinary people in the modern world remain free and generous, despite all kinds of new temptations not to be?
e.g. the temptation to masturbate rather than do your math homework.
Capitalism, for example, entices us with shiny consumerism;
Whereas Socialism entices us by the promise that we too can thrive by eating our own shit thus putting the nose of Big Food out of joint.
democracy can lull us into conformity;
or conformity can lull democracy into eating its own shit.
and nationalism ensnares us in unearned partiality.
So does being born. We should not be partial to Mummy. Only if she pays us the going rate will we give her kisses.
These are social and political dangers to be sure. But early liberals also saw them as bedevilments apt to make us mean, restless, unhappy and just generally shitty people.
So, early liberals were just a bunch of religious nutters who believed in devils and 'moral adventures' like those depicted in Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress'.
Liberalism was the ethical and political doctrine they created to try to bring these new forces under political and psychological control.
They failed. Get over it.
Which raises an important question: what the hell happened to liberalism?
It became obsolete. The Great War between Imperial cousins killed off the Aristocracy and the Church and the Cossacks and Landsknechts. From being 'the sport of Kings', war turned into a matter for industrial engineers and other such technocrats. Gassing on about 'moral adventures' was a low IQ business best left to failed priests or Godless theologians of singular stupidity.
If in the 19th century it was an aspirational doctrine for living well, but in the 20th and 21st century it retreated to a much more staid legal and political project,
boring shite taught to undergrads who hope to become lawyers or accountants or other such 'fluffers' for the pornographic projects of an obscene plutocracy. Sadly, elderly billionaires- first Perot, then, more successfully, Donald Trump, can speak- or tweet- for themselves. Thiel is lazy and thus has Vance as his mouth piece. But how long before Musk runs for President of the Solar System?
the question is why and when were its ethical guts stripped out?
It had no ethical guts though, there were certain times and places where it could show a degree of courage against autocratic Princes or Prelates back when such big beasts roamed the earth.
Historians and philosophers
are stupid and ignorant
blame different and complementary causes. Rosenblatt points to early 20th-century thinkers who, dissatisfied with New Deal progressivism, invented a retrenched ‘classical liberalism’. In Liberalism Against Itself (2023), Samuel Moyn names the Cold War liberals who repudiated the progressivism and perfectionism of their forebearers.
Some folk, back in the Thirties, believed Stalin's Russia was a paradise for the workers. This meant pretending FDR, too, had magical powers.
For my part, I focus on a branch of contemporary political philosophy (‘political liberalism’ – founded, ironically, by Rawls’s 1993 work of the same name, after A Theory of Justice) that eschews questions of the good life to work out a conception of liberalism fit for a pluralist society divided by disagreements between citizens on questions of value and meaning.
It was so fit for the plural world in which the Taliban had taken power in Afghanistan that, after a long and self-defeating 'war on terror', the Taliban is back in power in Kabul. Biden literally shat himself in his hurry to get his troops out of there.
Whatever the reason for why liberalism’s ethical side vanished, it is high time to reclaim it.
You can't reclaim what never existed.
Let me be blunt: liberals are awful at defending themselves.
Which is why, at faculty parties, you see a long queue of Marxists and Fascists and Catholics taking turns to cornhole squealing liberals.
First of all, the global conversation about the current crisis of liberalism tends to fixate on the opponents of liberalism, and how horrible populists, nativists and authoritarians are.
The problem here is that Trump isn't really an opponent of any ism. He thinks that as a business man and a deal-maker, he can do a better job of getting value for money for the tax payer than a professional politician. The reason he has a strangle-hold on his party is that he delivered for his core constituencies. His Supreme Court appointments are a gift which keeps giving. If he returns to the White House it isn't because voters have become Fascist but because they are worried about immigration. On the other hand, though Kamala is the child of immigrants, there doesn't seem to be any particular animus against her on that basis. Still, the fact is, she doesn't have a dick. All previous Presidents had dicks. This meant they could pee standing up. This is very important in winning the pissing contest between the 'Free World' and those who want to get free of its stupidity, cupidity, and foreign policy of consistently doing (to quote Obama) 'stupid shit'.
Rarely are the strengths and virtues of liberalism talked up.
They are like the strengths and virtues of farting as a political philosophy and mode of living an authentic, ethical, life.
Moreover, when liberalism is defended, the reasons given are almost exclusively legal or political.
as opposed to loud and smelly farts.
Politicians and journalists insist on the indispensability of such institutions as division of powers,
between a SCOTUS packed by the POTUS
rule of law
which is powerless to deport illegal immigrants or, indeed, to protect tax-paying citizens from vicious criminals.
and individual rights. Certainly, that kind of defence is crucial. But by claiming that liberalism not only can be, in general, a way of life, but much more pointedly, may already be the basis of your own, I am drawing attention to a whole other set of reasons – call it ‘spiritual’ or ‘existential’, no matter how jittery such terms make liberals – for why we should care deeply about the fate of our creed.
Posh White peeps are spiritually or existentially Liberal. Thus, if nasty people say 'Liberalism has a needle dick. Also, it has to sit down to pee.' then the consequence will be that the dicks of posh White peeps will shrink. Also they will have to sit down to pee. To avert this horrible outcome, please buy this Professor's shitty book.
There is no better guide to this endeavour than Rawls.
Save for a vigorous fart.
To use an old-fashioned word, he is a superb moralist,
the best moralist teaches by example. Also, if Rawls had had an intellectual conscience, he would have altered his theory when genuine economists like Harsanyi showed he had made a mathematical error. Samuelson reworked his theory when Pigou pointed out his mistake. Rawls did not.
gifted at detecting the underlying moral commitments of a liberal democratic society
He failed utterly. The primary moral commitment of any type of society is for its members to pay to defend it by any and every means necessary. First you have to ensure your survival. Only after you have done that, can you pursue various projects.
and showing how we, as its members, understand and comport ourselves.
This is the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy. Rawls and his ilk are saying 'to be truly free you must do and be only as I say.' But, if everybody were a Rawlsian, Society would collapse because the guy had shit for brains. True, if you believe the End of Days is nigh, you may think we should fuck over Society since peeps like us are bound to be 'raptured' up into Heaven while everybody else gets sodomized by demons.
It is as if he speaks directly to our conscience to say: ‘OK, if you see your society and yourself in a liberal kind of way, here is what you can do to live up to it.’
In other words, Liberalism means doing as I say.
Then he adds: ‘Oh, I almost forgot, great joys and benefits come from living this way. Let me show you.’
This is fine if you are speaking of Heaven. I have to admit, I'd prefer the Islamic one where I get lots of wide-eyed virgins who won't know they are getting short changed in the trouser department.
We’ll get to these joys in a moment.
There are none.
Every guru, however, has an origin story and Rawls’s is worth telling. A few years before he died, he wrote a short, unpublished autobiography titled ‘Just Jack’. ‘Jack’ was what friends and family called him, and ‘just’ was a play on the meanings of justice and simply.
'Just Jack' is the title of the one-man show put on by a character on Will & Grace. Sadly, Rawls wasn't witty and Gay. He was grey and as boring as fuck.
As I said, in contrast to his tranquil decades as a Harvard professor, his youth was eventful and at times tragic. On two separate occasions as a child, he passed fatal illnesses to his younger brothers (diphtheria to Bobby Rawls in 1928, and then pneumonia to Tommy Rawls in 1929) and developed a stammer from the trauma.
So, he was himself a Malthusian check on the population. Still, he was a Darwinian winner. Jack had good genes. But that was a matter of chance, not Justice.
In 1944, he served as an infantryman in the Pacific, was nearly killed in battle, and got a Bronze Star for bravery. Yet in telling his life story, Rawls dwells on a minor incident from his early 20s, when he had to go out and get a real job. While an undergraduate at Princeton in 1941, he had wanted to go on a sailing trip with friends and expected his family would pay.
It was probably a good investment. Having gone sailing with the smart set at Princeton gives you a leg up in life.
To his chagrin, his father had other ideas, telling Jack to work if he wanted a holiday.
Daddy didn't get that America, under FDR, had become more, not less, plutocratic.
He did, and the experience was formative:
Jobs were hard to find in those days. The depression was beginning to ease by that time, of course, but the best I could do on short notice was a 12-hour job – 6 am to 6 pm, six days a week – in a doughnut factory somewhere in downtown Baltimore, whose location I have conveniently repressed. I was the helper of an older man named Ernie who operated one of the mixing machines. He had been there for 18 years and had three children to support, and it seemed he’d be there forever, breathing flour dust all his life …
Rawls spent his working life breathing the dust from obsolete volumes of psilosophical stupidity. Still, as an admirer of Wittlesstein, he should have embraced manual work- brick-laying or being a timber-jack in the Pacific North West.
Ernie was decent and considerate, and never spoke harshly to me.
because Rawls didn't try to sodomize Ernie. Us proles are grateful for small mercies.
He seemed resigned to the fact that he would always have that sort of job.
Because his dad wasn't a top attorney and he hadn't been to Prep Skool or Princeton Collidge.
There was no prospect of advance, really, or much hope of anything better for him.
There was no hope for Rawls or his students writing or saying anything which would make life better for anybody. The guy was a boring cunt, not Thomas fucking Edison.
As for me, I decided to look elsewhere. There must be jobs easier than this, I thought, and 12 hours a day breathing flour dust was too much …
I came to feel very sorry for Ernie. Often I’ve felt my days at the doughnut factory and Ernie’s decency and stoicism in view of his fate – or so it seemed to me – made a lasting impression.
Rawls spent his life serving up a type of confectionary which was all hole and no fucking dough.
So that was how most people spent their lives, of course not literally, but to all practical purposes: pointless labour for not much pay,
which is what you do if you teach stupid shite.
and even if well paid it led nowhere.
Rawls himself was a cul de sac of stupidity.
Even business and law struck me as dead ends.
In business, you create jobs and deliver goods or services to customers. That fosters life and propels humanity down a good path. Lawyers can secure remedies for rights' violations. They can get innocent people acquitted of capital offenses. But, for Rawls, that was a 'dead end'.
While trying not to forget the plight of the Ernies of this world, I had to find my place in life in some other way. Did these things influence me in proposing the difference principle years later? I wouldn’t claim so. But how would I know?
What was the 'difference principle'? It was that the Doughnut factory lower the wage for everybody to Ernie's level. (Assuming Ernie was the lowest paid). But this would simply mean- no fucking doughnut factory. The correct solution concept to the 'Justice as fairness' Distribution question was provided by Shapley some years before Rawls published his magnum opus. To be fair, he was misled into thinking Arrow, Sen, etc. were smart. They weren't. Also they neglected Knightian Uncertainty. But so did Harsanyi. Still, if Rawls had an ounce of common sense, he'd have understood that collective risk pooling had created almost universal access to quality High School education in Baltimore. Ernie was satisfied with his lot in life because he knew his three kids would get a fair crack of the whip. I should explain, America was unusual in that its High Schools prepared all students for College admission whereas on the Continent only a small percentage of State supported schools did so. The expansion of American High School coverage between about 1911 and 1938 is what enabled the US to quickly turn into the academic Super-Power par excellence after the Second War. The G.I Bill certainly helped, but it would have helped far fewer if it hadn't been for the expansion of High Schools that preceded it. But the ideology associated with that expansion was Dewey type Pragmatism not Liberalism per se.
Who am I to gainsay Rawls?
You aren't stupider or more ignorant than me. You could 'gainsay' Rawls by pointing out why Ernie was contented and relating this to Pragmatism which advocates 'risk pooling' of a type which creates non-convexities and generates 'endogenous' growth. True, there is some 'Liberal' type of 'cheap talk' such as is always associated with a 'pooling equilibrium'. Since Rawls was privately educated, he naturally thought in terms of the 'costly signals' associated with separating equilibria. Yet his solution concept was so fucking costly, it would have destroyed the economy. Thus, advocating it was just cheap talk. It is only the credentialist ponzi scheme presided over by Professors of shit, like this dude, which maintains this elitist availability cascade of stupidity.
Still, his thought makes a lot of sense when viewed through the prism of this experience. It might even help us learn how to live liberally in the 21st century.
Rawls did learn to live liberally in the 21st century- for almost two years. Then he failed that exam. Go thou and do likewise.
Fairness is the most important concept of Rawls’s philosophy.
No. If it were, he'd have advocated abolishing dicks. Everybody should be forced to sit down to pee.
It is, negatively speaking, the precise quality missing when a person like Ernie must toil endlessly at a job that a college student like Jack can quit after six weeks because he finds it difficult and demeaning.
Ernie wants his three kids to have a role-model who works 12 hour shifts and brings home some nice doughnuts which he helped make.
And decades later, when it came time to write A Theory of Justice, Rawls crowned it as the defining ideal of liberal democracy. Society, he states, should be conceived of and run as a fair system of cooperation.
One in which men and women would take turns having babies. It is unfair that Ernie didn't give birth to at least one of his three kids.
Or in the words of one contemporary acolyte, Leif Wenar: ‘Our country is built for everyone.’
His country was stolen from its indigenous people. A lot of the building that occurred there was done by muscular slaves brought in from Africa. Interestingly, Emerson speaks of Irish and Swedish and German immigrants as being doomed to labor in their new land and to die there so as to 'make a spot on the prairie greener.' Sadly, the fucking Irish organized themselves politically and, finally, the Catholic Kennedys displaced the Boston Brahmins.
How Rawls arrives at this notion is significant.
He gets it out of Social Choice theory- which was fundamentally misconceived. The correct solution concept was Game Theoretic and given by Shapley. However, it was Buchanan and his school which shed light on why democratic polities piss so much public money away. Rawls was useless.
Crucially, he doesn’t claim it as his own insight. Nor does he derive it from first moral or philosophical principles. He believes instead that citizens of liberal democracies by and large already see and structure their societies as fair systems of cooperation.
Loyal subjects of a despot may make the same claim. However, if you really are a free citizen of a genuinely liberal democracy, you are welcome to say that the fucking Lizard people from Planet X have taken over the Post Office and are using it as a cover to conduct anal probes on all good, decent, unemployable alcoholics like yours truly.
They have, after all, grown up in countries where all major public institutions profess to advance the freedom, dignity and equal opportunity of all citizens.
If you grow up in such a country, run away from it at the first opportunity. Go to places where public institutions do their fucking job without professing any type of bullshit.
In Australia, for example, politicians of all stripes insist on the importance of a ‘fair go’.
for kangaroos? Maybe. But Australia was built on fucking over darkies.
That’s why the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation is accessible to a wide readership: not merely because Rawls’s readers ‘know’ or ‘understand’ what he’s talking about, but much more powerfully because they already affirm it as expressing something essential about themselves and their society.
A bunch of invaders may maintain solidarity by this type of 'in-group' egalitarianism but that solidarity is predicated on fucking over the aboriginal people.
It is no surprise that some of Rawls’s best interpreters, such as Samuel Freeman, report that reading him for the first time can elicit strong feelings of déjà vu, a recognition of what we already know.
What we already to know to be stupid shit. It's okay to talk this stripe of tripe when you are in the Eighth Grade and haven't yet discovered masturbation. But, anybody who talks like this after the age of about 12 or 13 is clearly a wanker- and not in the good sense.
Rawls isn’t oblivious to real-world injustices.
Which is why he split his pay packet with the janitorial staff.
He knows that no society lives up to this ideal.
Did he? Fuck off!
Nor does he think that citizens of liberal democracies wear rose-coloured (or, worse, ideologically tinted) glasses.
Some of them don't want fetuses to be killed willy-nilly. The rest don't give a fuck but aren't too keen to pay for it out of their taxes. The real problem, after all, is dicks. Abolish them immediately!
Still, he bases his theory on the assumption that his fellow citizens recognise that the key purpose of their main public institutions is to ensure that society is seen as, and remains, a fair system of cooperation.
Fuck that. Societies have to compete with each other. If your system is so fair that Money and Talent runs the fuck away, you will fall behind the Society which is so unfair as to reward Thrift and Merit.
Virtually everyone can be expected to know, on his account, that the purpose of a legal constitution is to establish equal and reciprocal rights,
which is why everybody gets to live in the White House and enjoy equal immunity to the President.
the job of the police is to protect them,
more particularly when they are robbing or raping women who try to scratch their eyes out
and progressive taxation is meant to ensure a level playing field.
from which the uber Rich can run the fuck away.
Rawls is enjoying a renaissance in public philosophy,
among credentialised cretins who, however, won't buy each others' books.
with several authors applying his conception of fairness to different domains. In Free and Equal (2023), Daniel Chandler investigates education, workplace democracy and universal basic income,
my take down of Chandler is available here
while in his recent essay for Aeon, Matthew McManus
see here
calls for a revival of liberal socialism on Rawlsian principles. And I’ve tried to bring this notion to bear on psychology and culture to help liberals unlock the best part of themselves.
It is their arsehole which, once unlocked, can fart vigorously.
Consider Rawls’s most famous concept: the original position.
It fails immediately because firstly the Social Contract is 'incomplete' and Rawls didn't know incomplete contract theory and, secondly, no contract is valid without the passing of consideration. You never agree to bind yourself to shit unless you are paid to do so. Indeed, the agreement is not binding if consideration is lacking.
Perhaps the most influential thought experiment of contemporary philosophy, it goes like this: imagine you are with a group of people who are tasked to select principles of justice to regulate the fundamental institutions of society.
Tasked by whom? Suppose it is alien invaders. Then, you need to suggest whatever it is they want you to suggest. Otherwise they will eat you.
The plot twist, however, is you don’t know anything about yourself.
In which case there are no 'uncorrelated asymmetries' and thus no 'bourgeois strategies'. Rawls & Co. didn't know about John Maynard Smith.
You agree to step behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ and pretend
no. Rawls says you actually don't know. The situation is like that of Oedipus Rex who pronounces sentence on the killer of his father not knowing that it is he, himself, whom he is condemning. The lesson here is don't pass judgment till you have all the facts. Also, even if you commit yourself to doing something, renege if that is better for you.
that you don’t know your sex, gender, class, race, religion, able-bodiedness or anything that might distinguish you from others.
But Rawls supplies you with an Econ 101 'plug in'. Sadly, the one he relied on neglected Knightian Uncertainty (which is the reason the Social Contract must be 'incomplete'). However, if there were no Knightian Uncertainty and no problems of computability, concurrency or complexity, then there would be an objective, canonical, 'golden path' for everything, including preferences. But this also means there would be no need for language or education or scientific research or even monetized transactions. Society would consist of Liebnizian monads in pre-synchronized harmony.
Which principles would you pick?
The principle that bad things should only happen to other people. Also, hot chicks should form an orderly queue outside my bedroom door. They don't all have to bring me Pizza. Some can bring me samosas.
As a matter of fact, guys who promulgate a Constitution are careful to accord a high degree of immunity to holders of Constitutional offices- most of which they themselves will occupy.
It’s a no-brainer for Rawls:
who had no fucking brains
those that favour fairness when it comes to basic rights, self-respect, and resources and opportunities. Why? Prudence, in part: the pie should be divided as equally as possible lest it be revealed that you’re in a less-advantaged position.
Prudence dictates the establishment of collective insurance schemes with due attention to 'moral hazard'. It is imprudent to stipulate for an arrangement with extreme moral hazard- i.e. everybody claiming to be the worst off and nobody being happy to subsidize them.
Obviously, what actually happens is that widows and orphans are welcome to suck cock for a living while Robber Barons or big Corporations pretend that, in the eyes of the law, they are actually weak and puling babes in arms and thus should not have to pay their fair share of tax. Indeed, they should be subsidized by the Public Exchequer.
But the moral oomph of the original position is to remind citizens of liberal democracies – particularly those of privilege – that the dumb luck of social position and natural abilities shouldn’t bear on issues of justice.
More particularly, a billionaire isn't rich at all. He is actually a widow and an orphan whom the Courts must protect from swindled shareholders or employees.
A liberal person should leave all that at the door.
Why not abolish dicks so that gender can be 'left at the door'? After that, we can abolish distinctions of height and weight and IQ and race through appropriate surgical interventions which, I feel sure, you, as a tax-payer, will be delighted to pay for.
This may be fine in theory but let’s make it concrete.
I just did.
Suppose this hypothetical society has only two members. Their names are Ernie and Jack, and they’ve been asked to play the game of the original position.
In which case, one of them needs to have a womb- otherwise the Society will die out quite quickly.
Ernie goes first and, frankly, he’s got nothing to lose. He can happily pretend not to know who he is because, under fair principles of justice, he stands to gain a much better deal in life. No fuss, no muss for Ernie.
There are two types of goods in this universe. Self-produced and jointly-produced. It is possible that jointly-produced goods are vital for the survival of both. This means each has an equal threat point. The 'contract curve' or 'kernel of the game', does feature an equal split of all goods. But it also features one party surrendering all self-produced goods to the other. There is no unique solution. This does not change if there is a pre-contract because of the enforcement problem which simply comes down to the threat point. One may say, the solution is 'Thymotic' as in Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic. The guy less afraid of death wins. But, maybe the slave wins spiritually.
Now it’s Jack’s turn. This involves a different calculation. Why should he – pampered Princeton princeling that he is – ever agree to bracket the positional advantages that have worked out so well for him thus far in life?
One can agree to any old shit. The problem is how to enforce that agreement. Rawls should have asked his Daddy who would explain that enforcement is costly.
Disgraced or not, a remark by the comic Louis CK is painfully apt. On whether it is better to be Black or white in the United States, the answer for him is obvious: ‘I’m not saying that white people are better. I’m saying that being white is clearly better. Who could even argue? If it was an option, I would re-up every year: “Oh yeah, I’ll take white again absolutely, I’ve been enjoying that. I’m gonna stick with white, thank you.’’’
Actually, if this dude ends up in a Federal Penitentiary, he might change his mind.
For Jack to suspend knowledge of his advantages – his good looks, impeccable WASP credentials, upper-middle-classness and all the rest – in reflecting on which principles of social cooperation to affirm might seem positively irrational.
Only Jack was stupid enough to think enforcement is costless. I suppose, this was because his Daddy had money and so, though as thick as shit, he got to be a Professor of a useless subject. But, nowadays, you might have a better chance of tenure if you pretend to be a disabled Muslim Lesbian of color who was repeatedly gang-raped in Pakistan by Neo-Liberal goats wearing MAGA baseball caps.
So why do it? What’s in it for Jack?
Jack likes talking bollocks. Ernie is grateful the Collidge boy isn't trying to cornhole him.
First, it’s the right thing to do. But second, just as importantly, there are great spiritual goods – great joys – that come from living up to liberal principles.
Greater joys arise from masturbating on the subway or just farting vigorously when plighting your troth to at the altar.
By engaging in the original position, Jack embraces impartiality and autonomy as core virtues.
No. He embraces stupidity. Lawyers tell you not to agree to shit unless you are paid here and now. It is a different matter that agreeing to a contract full of loopholes is inconsequential. The loophole in Rawls is that you can say anything at all is justified for the continuance of Society. Thus, slavery is cool because without it, slaves would be the first to starve to death or get raped to death and then eaten by Neo-Liberal goats wearing MAGA baseball caps.
This means liberating himself from the narrow confines of self-interest and positional bias.
Which is what I do in my day-dreams where Beyonce and me are best friend's for ever and ever and she comes to my birthday party even though the Mean Girls are spreading rumors that, like Kamala, I'm Indian, not African-American, and also that I have a dick. This is a totally baseless allegation as you can see from this recent picture of me-
In a world rife with inequality and injustice, impartiality allows Jack to see beyond his own perspective, fostering empathy and understanding for others.
But, because Jack does not understand Law & Econ, his empathy is worthless. On the other hand, Professor Amartya Sen deeply appreciates the empathy I showed him by putting fresh dog-turds on his desk. This is because I used the Szpilrajn's Theorem to show that if Sen's has partially ordered Preferences which are well defined, then there is a linear extension such that his favorite repast is canine poo. More generally, Professors of shite subjects welcome the bereavement therapy I offer them gratis for the fact that all the children of their minds fucked each to death.
Autonomy, on the other hand, empowers him to act in accordance with his values, free from external coercion or undue influence.
Why stop there? Why not say freedom empowers free people to be free and education empowers educated people to be educated and empowerment empowers powerful people to be powerful?
By embodying impartiality and autonomy, Jack also cultivates resilience in the face of temptation and adversity.
He gains magic powers by doing some stupid shit he pulled out of his own arse. Why stop there? Why not say Jack will attain apotheosis by eating his own feces?
In a consumer culture where self-restraint and stalwartness are often tested, adherence to liberal principles instils moral fortitude.
People with liberal principles have the moral fortitude not to splurge on fine dining. They are content to eat their own shit.
And if Jack gets good at navigating such ethical dilemmas,
by eating only his own shit
we might even say that he will become graceful.
Did you know that top ballerinas eat their own shit? Well, they would if they adhered to liberal principles and thus threw a mercy-fuck in my direction once in a while.
He will fulfil the requirements of justice with pleasure and relative ease.
by eating his own shit while executing a faultless fouette.
In short, Jack’s decision – and our decision, which can be made at any time – to embrace the original position is not just a thought experiment but a transformative spiritual practice.
like eating your own shit rather than spending money at a Michelin starred restaurant.
And now we return to where we began with Rawls: on redemption. Liberalism, it is true, has no metaphysics to speak of.
Sure it does. The thing is meaningless unless free will exists. Rawls was especially hard on Pelagius before he lost his faith.
The soul? The Great Beyond? The purpose of it all? ‘Pfffftt,’ goes the liberal.
Some do. Some don't. The problem with the soul and its after-life is that since 'naturality' in Justice is far to seek- indeed, for category theoretical reasons, we believe it must always have some arbitrary component- it follows that 'free will' as a doctrine is inconsistent or incomplete.
Yet we’ve never given up on the core of religion: to seek meaning in life through something beyond us.
Everything- even our farts- is beyond us. As for what is within us, why give a meaning to what supplies that meaning? It would be like me giving myself pet-names, and looking into my own eyes and whispering endearments, with the result that my wife leaves me.
Our Beyond is found not on another plane of existence but instead in something worldly just beyond our grasp – an ideal of becoming a free and generous person in a fair and just society.
Fuck that. If you are smart, make your ideal that of contributing to STEM subjects or else just making money finding applications for that high I.Q stuff. Don't waste your time trying to shit higher than your arsehole just because Rawls and Sen did so.
Redemption is not found only in a liberal way of life.
The liberal way of strife involved killing 1.3 million Muslims so they would reject the Taliban and the Ayatollahs and turn into good, decent, disabled Lesbians of color who would secure tenure teaching Political Philosophy after having been gang-raped repeatedly by Neo-Liberal Pakistani goats wearing MAGA baseball caps.
Heaven forbid.
Those who seek a Heaven on Earth can make our lives Hell unless we tell them to fuck the fuck off.
Yet it’s there too, waiting for liberals to answer its call.
Unless you have a good spam blocker on your phone. Otherwise, if you answer the call this stupid Professor mentions, you may end up out of pocket because you have bought his worthless book instead of saving your money and just eating your own shit as Rawls intended.
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