Collectivism versus Individualism

-Our Weekly Coffee

Key-

+ = A new topic

– = Continuation or addition to a topic

M = Metaphysically Conceited

T= Takezo

+Outline of Collectivism versus Individualism

M: “We’ll begin with defining terms, individualism is the habit or principle of being independent or self-reliant, and collectivism is the principle or practice of giving a group priority over an individual. Manifested as a system of government, individualism is anarchy and collectivism is totalitarian communism.”

M: “I’ll start with a section from James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, where he asks ‘what is a nation?’, and in the scene an individual who identifies as a Hungarian-Jew is in a bar surrounded by individuals who identify as Irish, and the conversation goes essentially like this, ‘what is a nation?’ and the response is ‘A nation is the same people living in the same place.’ So, it brings up the interesting idea that a nation is how you identify. It has more to do with political loyalty, in relation to a national culture/political system, rather than a geographic location, because he’s Jewish, but he’s lived in Ireland for so long that he’s also Irish.”

T: “I think the Jewish people are in an interesting place, because someone might say ‘I’m Jewish’ or ‘I’m an atheist Jew’, and it’s an interesting question…”

M: “Also, the Jewish people have been displaced so much that its hard to say where their home is anymore.”

T: “…and then you have to distinguish the ‘Jewish people’ which are adherents to the religion of Judaism and the ‘Jewish people’ which are the Semitic tribes originating from Palestine.”

+Evolution of a Nation or Civilization

T: “I think you start off with random tribes scattered around…and everyone living together has the same culture, but it gets more complicated when people start spreading out with their culture and intermixing with other cultures. I have cultural ties to one group, but for some reason I live with another cultural group. It’s like the shift the Ancient Greek City-States went through before and after they became part of the Roman Empire. After they became part of it, stoicism started springing up, which is the idea that I’m a citizen of the world now, and a reorientation of their loyalty.”

T: “…I think what makes up a culture is not so much their geography as the way they see the world.”

+Cultural and Diplomatic Ties Between Nations

M: “Civilization is really just the mutual acknowledgement of each other’s legitimacy for the purposes of diplomacy and trade.”

M: “This is opposed to the other two distinctions, barbarians and savages. Their two words that you think of as very similar, but there is an important difference. The distinction is that a barbarian people are typically an invading group, such as those present in The Dark Ages, where as savages are thought of as a native people who are the recipients of an invading party. This leads to a vastly different treatment of the two groups, they almost treat the ‘barbarians’ with more respect, like a wild animal with the potential to cause damage, while ‘savages’ is a sort of derogatory term used to imply that they aren’t properly utilizing their land and resources in a ‘civilized’ manner.”

+Analysis of “Brave New World” and “1984”

M: “There are a lot of similarities between these books, but they achieve it through different means. So, essentially, to distinguish these two books, you have to divide the human aspect into the emotional and the logical. In this book (Brave New World), they destroyed the logical, you’re not so much thinking as you are just feeling constantly. In this one (1984), they are controlled by fear, which has the interesting distinction as an emotion to actually end up, when you think about it, it’s a product of logic. A hyperbolic logic, but logic never the less. Fear brings on a frenzy of thought. You feel fear, but when you get down to it, fear is a thought that takes over all the emotional aspects.”

T: ” ‘1984’ is about logic and controlling the means to reason.”

M: “What’s interesting about these books is that they’re two different paths to the same goal, ‘Brave New World’ destroys the logical, where as ‘1984’ destroys the emotional. The truth doesn’t matter in either book, because truth is a product of emotion and logic, and without one you can’t have it.  The reason truth has been held on such a special pedestal is because humans have always felt a divide between the logical and emotional, and understanding and knowledge in general is a sort of alignment of the two aspects, when you reach a sort of epiphany, or religious experience, if you will. Kierkegaard defined despair as the mis-relationship between the spiritual (emotional) and the physical.”

T: “I mean, in ‘Brave New World’ only a few people are unhappy, because they’re conditioned to be happy from the beginning.”

M: “The particularly chilling thing about it is that we’re looking at it from an outside perspective, so we’ve always known an alternative, where as if we had been born into their world, would we be unhappy? Would you choose to go to the island or stay among everyone else?”

M: “You definitely see the Eastern philosophy influence in ‘Brave New World’, because the Savage’s main concern is that there isn’t a balance to things, there isn’t an unhappiness to the happiness, no yin to the yang. And ‘1984’ is more Western, because it is about the infringement upon Winston’s individuality of thought.”

T: “I think ‘Brave New World’ is more pessimistic because he hangs himself in the end, where as ‘1984’ is the torture scene.”

M: “In ‘Brave New World’, his downfall is ultimately emotional, where as ‘1984’ is more logical, because it manifests itself as a thought process where he accepts Big Brother’s world, he dies an intellectual death, where as the Savage dies an emotional death, in despair, he hangs himself. Winston almost seems emotionally euphoric after his acceptance of Big Brother’s world.”

+Conversation about “Newspeak” in “1984”

T: “What’d you think about the ‘Newspeak’ appendix in ‘1984’?”

M: “Which point about it exactly?”

T: “It talks about the things that happen in the book as if they were fact, and it talks about the war with Oceania in the past-tense… it’s not written in ‘Newspeak’, but they plan to implement ‘Newspeak’ very soon.”

M: “In both worlds they chose security and stability over everything else, by different routes to be sure, but that was the end result. In ‘1984’ it was political stability, and in ‘Brave New World’ it was emotional stability.”

T: “…yeah, Wittgenstein attacks the notion of knowing something outside your own mind, because when you get down to it, you really can’t.”

M: “Winston (in 1984), when he was in his cell, he started having almost solipsistic thoughts and at the end, it ended up turning him over to Big Brother’s side, which is very interesting, because you would think that would make him more individualistic, because of the extreme skepticism of the world outside of him, but it ends up leading to a skepticism of himself as well. If you’re skeptical of the world, most of the time you’re gonna be skeptical of yourself. You can’t have one and not the other, because you’re a part of the world, and the world is a part of you. At least that’s how I see it.”

+Communism and the nature of knowledge

M: “If you think about it, every family is communism at the micro level, but you can’t turn something that works on the micro and make it work on the macro level.”

T: “Freud talks about the main drives of humans and that communism doesn’t offer any sort of competitive outlet for these aggressive drives.”

M: “If you think about the nature of thinking in general, it almost always goes from the specific to the general, just because we can observe the specific, and we can only really think in the general. You can go back down to the specific, but that’s ultimately just us trying to duplicate what we sensed or perceived first.”

-talking about the scientific revolution that lead to people viewing the abstraction of a thing first before its actual nature, such as the triangles and other mathematical abstractions that have a fabricated existence. The example is that someone viewing a marker views the shapes of it and its mathematical components rather than the object as a whole. -Takezo’s point.

M: “Typically, a good test for a system’s legitimacy is if it can be applied to itself and still be true. If it can’t, it’s a paradox, which is equally valuable, but it’s important to distinguish the two.”

M: “Something is typically only true if it is in the right ration of specificity and generality. The interesting thing about Socrates is that there’s always a statement or point that is too general or specific, and so they spend the whole discussion readjusting its position. I think we would do well to implement this more, to sort of readjust things more frequently.”

+Discussing “The Discarded Image” by C.S. Lewis

T: “You haven’t versed and memorized this yet?”

M: “No.”

M: “…a really interesting point he delves into in this book is our infatuation with the number 3, which originated from the idea that there always needed to be a mediator between two opposing elements, like daemons/angels between God and humans. I think there is a special merit to a tri-chotomy rather than a dichotomy, because…the body, the mind, the spirit, there is something more satisfying and legitimate about it.”

T: “Yeah, because you’re able to have a compromising element.”

M: “The way I think of it, it’s like this, there is a point between 1 and two that you’re trying to get to, so you put a point halfway between them. The point is halfway between the point you just made and 1, so you repeat the process, getting closer and closer each time.”

T: “It’s called a ‘Binary Search’, if you’re looking for the scientific term for it.”

M: “…but you can only go so far with this, then it becomes too specific, and as I’ve said before, truth is the correct ration between specificity and generality. And so, the thing about making distinctions of three, is that it isn’t too general and it isn’t too specific. It’s the right balance, because it is simple and yet complex.”

T: “Are you going to get a big Triforce tattoo now?”