Principle of explosion
In a logically inconsistent system, where a statement and its negation can both be proven, it becomes possible to prove any statement, including both a statement and its opposite.
Shenandoahhhhh has a great video out on why Abundance is the wrong path for the Democratic Party and it’s stronger than my own rebuttal. However, in it, Shenandoahhhhh also mentions that part of liberalism’s failure is assuming that culture can auto-correct and we instead need cultural governance.
In Silicon Valley there is a saying that the architecture of a software system mirrors the organization of its software developers. Cultural governance sounds like a fancy new thing, but it’s actually just plain old governance.
Without limitarianism both the extremely wealthy and monopolistic corporations corrupt both the system they are in and its culture. More importantly if your economic system contains contradictions then so will the culture of its workers.
The mistake of neoliberalism was in thinking that economic contradictions could be isolated like the sand in an oyster that forms a pearl. Instead the logic inconsistencies in our economic system took over not only the economy, but also culture and even individual ability to reason.
An American economy that is both progressive and regressive eventually tears itself apart. First a partially regressive economy automatically encourages belief in conspiracy.
Take the slave power conspiracy or slavocracy as an example. Slavery is hurting the majority of Americans yet still allowed — it’s got to be a conspiracy. Then, once many Americans believe one unproven conspiracy, the principle of explosion means there is no further logical stretch required to believe in other unproven conspiracies.
Indeed once you allow the coexistence of contradictory statements, only paraconsistent logic (whatever that is) can keep basic reasoning alive. A person living with the inconsistencies of a system creating climate change, baby bust, the extinction rate of the Anthropocene, absurd wealth inequality, and, most recently, supporting genocide no longer experiences rationality the same way as people living in less contradictory or perceived less contradictory eras.
Of course in neoliberal theory only “lefties” will be worried about such things and culture can be preserved with just a few isolated 1 = 0 anomalies that no one will think about. But isn’t that exactly what people were thinking in 1859 when America’s second largest slave auction sold over 400 men, woman, and children two years before the start of the Civil War?
Logically sweep the regressive aspects of the economy under the rug has been tried before many times. Slavery didn’t exactly end after the Civil War, but its scope and political influence continued to shrink over many decades. The Gilded Age didn’t exactly end, but many of its excesses were countered in the Progressive Era that followed. And of course post WWII stabilization required an unprecedented progressive economy.
Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of the equal rights of men, as I have, in part, stated them; ours began, by affirming those rights. They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together.
We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us. Look at it. Think of it. Look at it, in its aggregate grandeur, of extent of country, and numbers of population, of ship, and steamboat, and rail
The above is from a fragment of a speech Lincoln gave in 1858. That’s the basic logic by which America is governed. Denying that logic, even in part, immediately raises a specter of autocracy and other forms of idiocracy.
Ironically the “aggregate grandeur” of America has greatly increased since Lincoln’s speech and yet America’s inconsistencies have led many to the conclusion that autocracy must be better. America bad equals Putin and/or Trump good is obviously stupid, but the principle of explosion means we can’t expect any logic to hold.