The Philosophy section is in the state of a newly opened construction site. Work will continue sporadically, whenever the mental struggle against irrational, suicidal militarism doesn't require the full effort for creating relevant blog articles.
Developing and Assembling Modules
You don't have to reinvent the wheel. This saying has a very concrete meaning in the technical field from which it originates, in that today's inventors and engineers have the idea module "wheel" at their disposal, which they can use for ever new purposes and applications.
This modular principle also applies to the further development of forms of human coexistence. Over the course of history, many social models have developed, which can be divided into democratic and autocratic ones, among others. And many individual considerations have been put forward that can be understood as suggestions for changing existing social conditions in certain directions. Some such considerations, as those found in collections of quotations, are parts of entire philosophies. These worldviews ideally represent logically consistent structures of thought. But their grounding in reality regularly exhibits identifiable deficiencies. The almost unfathomable complexity of this reality makes a practical approach considerably difficult.
To arrive at improved philosophies, some additional new individual considerations are certainly needed, but in principle, the existing ones form a vast, highly valuable collection that can be rearranged according to the modular principle. In this sense, even in the humanities, one doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, but simply apply it in new contexts. In this way, new philosophies can emerge mainly using existing building blocks of thought.
From a seemingly mature draft, one can move on to practical implementation in social coexistence. In practice, one will then discover opportunities for improvement and incorporate these into the concept. This fundamental emergence of philosophies, worldviews, and general views explains why they usually represent a mixture of right and wrong elements, with only the proportions varying.
It was not for nothing that Karl Marx was one of the most controversial philosophers of all time. Due to his pronounced ego, he was extremely convinced that his system of thought was absolutely correctly rooted in reality. He saw the implementation of his ideas as a path to salvation for humanity, even the historically predetermined and thus only one. The attempt to translate his ideas into political reality had disastrous consequences, as is well known, and cost, according to estimates, approximately 100 million human lives.
The reasons are manifold and range from the financing of a Lenin—hand-picked according to their interests—by Western financial aristocrats to Marx's ignoring of already viable democratic paths that would have made revolutions unnecessary. While, among other things, psychological science refutes Marx's ideas on the subject of private property, the line of thought initiated here does not amount to the sometimes-held view that a peacefully established Marxism—without the significant distortions by Lenin—was the historically predetermined or even the path to be strived for.
Psychology and sociology demonstrate, among other things, that the need to develop private property is part of the innate human character profile and can hardly be completely eradicated even with massive counter-conditioning attempts. A functioning market economy knows no ruins; everything finds a user and a use at the market price. This also applies to intellectual edifices such as Marx's philosophy. For Marx's great ego was based on a truly superior intelligence that provided the world with some extremely useful insights without these being put to appropriate use.
Before returning to this, an interim consideration seems appropriate: Why doesn't Marx's philosophy remain in use at least as a collection of partly correct, partly incorrect thought modules for integration (or explicit non-integration) into new, more advanced worldviews? Why is it presented, as it was 150 years ago, as an indivisible dogmatic block that can only be either revered or rejected? - One of the answers is because we in the West don't live in the kind of undisturbed market economy we believe we do. – There is neither an economic nor an intellectual free market.
On the intellectual level the principle requires free development of individual ideas and complex concepts in a free market of ideas. Fair competition among these ideas presupposes the absence of any form of censorship. Protection from censorship must also include protection from psychological pressure to subscribe to certain views. The only limit to authentic freedom of expression lies where calls for criminal acts, especially violence, occur.
The Great Mistakes and Insights of Karl Marx
Unlike the autocrat Lenin, the freethinker Marx made some valuable contributions to this liberal approach to ideas, albeit partly in an immature, not yet practical form.
One of his insights is that human history represents evolution. With the well-known disastrous consequences, Marx failed to draw the conclusion from this potentially groundbreaking insight that historical processes and the political decisions that lead to them are therefore also subject to the laws of evolution. Evolution means adaptation to environmental challenges, always following the pattern of change and endurance. Changes in social conditions correspond to biological mutations, and when a new social model emerges using elements from other models, this corresponds to the factor of recombination in sexual reproduction. If the model (e.g., the socialist-planned economy) must subsequently prove itself in competition with other models, this corresponds to the evolutionary factor of selection. For anyone who doesn't let the mainstream media 'explain' the world to them, it's obvious that our liberal-democratic civilization, distorted into the rule of oligopolies, cannot pass the test on its current course, but is headed for its replacement by rival models.
Marx also had an explanation for such failure, albeit not a fully thought-out explanation. He spoke about repetitions in history and concluded that the same event would be a farce the second time around. The expanded interpretation is this: If historical mistakes are made and they repeat themselves at some point, then it is a farce simply because no lessons have been learned from the past. Thus, we are currently heading toward World War III because no sufficient lessons have been learned from two world wars. This would actually be the sixth major European fratricidal war, as World War I was preceded by the Crimean War (1853-1856) against Russia; before that, there were the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815), and before that, the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). And we are already experiencing the fifth Middle East war.