I think they're assuming the representative democracies actually exist.
In the U.S. (from what I've seen - I'm envious of those with commanding knowledge of the situation) there are occasional elections with very limited, pre-chosen slates of candidates that most people don't know personally. The last time I tried to contact my district city councilperson (albeit in a fairly large city), a secretary answered my email.
There's also the assumption (not to deny the stated correlation) that satisfaction is tied to economic welfare. My opinion is that while this is necessary, it's hardly sufficient, and a major issue is not only economic inequality but a general inequality in opportunities to have any sort of influence in societal operations. I think it would be better if more people could be big fishes in little ponds. The professional class that makes up the media is defacto big fish and has a bias and blind spots to this.
Furthermore, I believe a better description of what exists in the U.S. at least is that we have a representative oligarchy - elected officials primarily representing and serving rich business interests.
Please understand that this is not really a moral judgement on my part - it seems entirely predictable and probably unavoidable for this to happen in an age of breathtaking material and technological abundance coupled with confusion about larger social questions.
We need to first ask what we mean by Free Will before contemplating whether we have it or not. So we have to ask, if we have free will what is it free of? I would propose it means free from undue influence by others.
Think of some politicians claiming they stand for "freedom". Freedom from what and freedom for whom. My freedom to do anything I want, carry a machine gun for instance, interferes from the freedom others want to be free of gun violence. So when talking about freedom we have to always consider freedom for whom to do what? Similarly "free will" must be qualified by: free of what?
I think a good answer is "free from coercion by others". Now, you can coerce me to do anything, to say anything, and really to WANT anything you want me to want, by threatening my life with a gun. So, we only have free will in as far nobody is infringing on our basic freedoms.
But how about the coercion of our own bodies? Is our will free if we're (for example) free to consume all we want, even if that consumption makes us feel worse in the long run and we know it?
And in this case, is the issue weakness of will, or is the will determined to do what seems best based on its available knowledge?
That's a novel viewpoint although maybe little schizophrenic, our body coercing our mind/will? Is that how you view it? Our mind wants to be free of our body?
I don't feel like this is a fair representation of my viewpoint, it certainly makes me a little angry. I'm afraid I'll have to discontinue this discussion.
I've recently read 19th century theologian and scholar Benjamin Jowett's introduction to Plato's Laws, where (I believe) he observes that humankind is merely in the "dawn of politics". He also points out that the state Plato conceives in Laws is in Plato's estimation the "second best" (which limits the richest to having four times as much wealth), with the one described in Republic being his ideal, which Jowett describes as "communistic" (while Jowett was a contemporary of Marx, I am unaware of any mutual regards).
It's not necessary to be a materialist Marxist to embrace Hickel's "mission statement" that “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”
We just need to stop wealth and money hording, by both individuals and companies.
We also have to do more to break the myth that many of these wealthy people earned their wealth, when if any truly did it was a very exception and very small minority.
You can't have a functional democracy based on voting and elections, they are too easy to corrupt. We need to transition to sortition and deliberative citizens assemblies.
You can't have a good functional democracy without an educated and rational population, and there are better solutions in the meantime than waiting for that to manifest.
Do you believe it is possible for the course we are on to be changed, to a degree that is in fact "substantial" (as in, after it had been accomplished, widespread opinion would be "Oh yes, that was substantial, there is no fucking doubt.")?
I am beginning to think it is not possible, to put it mildly.
Oh, I absolutely think it can be changed, but no one would be in favor of the methods needed to change it.
The way I see it, if you have an uneducated, irrational population, or being a significant portion of a population, they need to be managed. They shouldn't be having a say in everything, they are not qualified to have a say in most things. They are basically children. They're basically children.
So to get there, you need to basically eradicate that population by mandating education, and certain types of education. Those same people are going to resist, but really that's the only way, and you need to do that even if there is a cost.
This is actually a good example, because it demonstrates how "rational" people consider (based on the debacle we just went through) probabilistic predictions to equate to binary truth. Except the problem is: if that's how one thinks, one can't see the error in it.
Epistemology and non-binary logic are not just complex, they're counterintuitive.
However in this case, your excellent "and if not why not qualifier" could possibly save the day...but then it comes down to whether the judge doesn't get it wrong.
But who is qualified to be the arbiter of Truth when it comes to the reasoning?
Truth and agreement at the abstract level where we're working right now is easy, but the move to the object level is anything but (even though it seems easy).
I believe the real evil is in the conceit of knowledge, and that the gross inequalities of material wealth are actually only symptoms of this.
Roughly 2,500 years ago two giants of ethical philosophy appeared on the scene in the form of Socrates (who can be learned about best through Plato's dialogues and Xenophon's underappreciated Socratic works) and Siddartha Guatama (I would recommend Thich Nhat Hanh's Old Path White Clouds as a reasonably unified source of his life and thought).
I know bringing those guys up probably seems sentimental, but I have lived experience with poverty, and political "realism" is only beneficial to those who have not as yet suffered the consequences of harmful patterns of behavior.
I think Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol illustrates a pretty good path for the exceedingly wealthy to become heroes, but there's this problem of sentiment, isn't there? And yet sentiment is constantly appealed to in all forms of commercial advertising!
People don't even know why or how they are here. Siddartha and Socrates' responses were basically that the answers are difficult to articulate or fathom, but the real pressing issue is how best to live life, and their answers were basically to moderate and do no harm or wrong, at least as much as possible, because the real goods are non-material, and to do wrong actually harms the perpetrator more than the victim.
Have not read the article, but I think "Big Tobacco" is something of a scapegoat for a larger pattern, and basically they were just unlucky enough to produce one of the most harmful products (recognized as such once the health bills started coming due).
(edit - I may add the product probably wouldn't be so harmful if people kept their consumption to under five cigarettes a day.)
read the article. literally the first few paragraphs:
> In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables.
> The new research, published in the journal Addiction, focuses on the rise of “hyper-palatable” foods, which contain potent combinations of fat, sodium, sugar and other additives that can drive people to crave and overeat them. The Addiction study found that in the decades when the tobacco giants owned the world’s leading food companies, the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies.
it is difficult to argue that they were simply unfortunate to happen to produce one class of unhealthy products when the same companies proceeded to then move on to an entirely different product class, and somehow also engineer products to also be maximally addictive and, as it turns out, unhealthy.
They do very well on the convenience front, which is significant, but seem like the some of the last things you would want if you could have anything magically placed in front of you.
Judging by the contents of the little “USA” shelf at my grocery store in a midsize German city, enough of us are addicted. A large packet of Oreos that I would guess is about $3-4 back in the States is 10 EUR, a box of off-brand Mac & Cheese is 3.50 EUR, and I will confess to buying the latter on an approximately monthly basis, despite being able to make real mac and cheese with cheddar and cream, which actually doesn’t take any more time and only slightly more effort.
Other things we are evidently addicted to, despite objectively superior and far cheaper local equivalents: Pop-Tarts, Swiss Miss hot cocoa, Hershey’s syrup, Cheese Wiz.
> (edit - I may add the product probably wouldn't be so harmful if people kept their consumption to under five cigarettes a day.)
Even 1-4 cigarettes per day is very harmful:
> Results: Adjusted relative risk (95% confidence interval) in smokers of 1–4 cigarettes per day, with never smokers as reference, of dying from ischaemic heart disease was 2.74 (2.07 to 3.61) in men and 2.94 (1.75 to 4.95) in women. The corresponding figures for all cancer were 1.08 (0.78 to 1.49) and 1.14 (0.84 to 1.55), for lung cancer 2.79 (0.94 to 8.28) and 5.03 (1.81 to 13.98), and for any cause 1.57 (1.33 to 1.85) and 1.47 (1.19 to 1.82).
> Conclusions: In both sexes, smoking 1–4 cigarettes per day was associated with a significantly higher risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease and from all causes, and from lung cancer in women. Smoking control policymakers and health educators should emphasise more strongly that light smokers also endanger their health.
I agree mostly with your last paragraph. I'm surely not trying to encourage a habit I'm grateful to have been able to give up, but I believe 1-4 would significantly reduce the risk of emphysema - sorry, but I don't have much patience for "abstinence-nazis".
Calling people who are against public poisoning for profit "abstinence-nazis" is a very Big Tobacco PR line.
We're talking about a product that is highly addictive, highly profitable, extremely harmful, and has served no useful purpose beyond making a small number of people extremely rich.
If an individual was responsible for this they'd be jailed, and possibly (in the US) executed.
I really don't, but this is my belief as someone who has extensive experience with cigarette culture and has thought about it. You are free to disregard my opinion based on this fact, but I will still contend that if someone only smoked 1-4 cigarettes a day, then there's a reasonable likelihood (though less than 100%) that they wouldn't have any serious resultant health issues.
(edit - and it's my belief that emphysema/COPD is the most serious risk of chronic smoking, where basically the lungs just wear out.)
> I really don't, but this is my belief as someone who has extensive experience with cigarette culture and has thought about it. You are free to disregard my opinion based on this fact, but I will still contend that if someone only smoked 1-4 cigarettes a day, then there's a reasonable likelihood (though less than 100%) that they wouldn't have any serious resultant health issues.
I guess there is also a chance that if someone smokes 20 a day they won't have any serious resultant health issues, but the study I showed earlier indicates that even 1-4 drastically increases your chance of complications.
> (edit - and it's my belief that emphysema/COPD is the most serious risk of chronic smoking, where basically the lungs just wear out.)
It's possible, but shouldn't you try to find actual evidence for the likelihood of emphysema being much lower with 1-4 cigarettes per day, beyond "cigarette culture" and having "thought about it"?
(edit - but let me amend my original statement and then I'm leaving it at that: "I may add that I would guess the product probably wouldn't be so harmful if people kept their consumption to under five cigarettes a day.")
Yes, if you are going to look upwards, why wouldn't you look right to the top at banks and finance? Those who run banking are able to exercise some coordinating control over every industry.
But if you look downwards, bad food and health are choices that people make. Many people want this stuff - individuals are getting what they want.
No one is saying we shouldn't look into shady nonsense from banks.
However banks aren't directly responsible for encouraging you to consume diabetes can. heart attack crisps or cancer sticks
Hence why we push more for regulation against these industries thar are directly responsible while leaving financial watch dogs to look into banks for now.
It's telling that "white men" has become a byword, but to speak this way in intellectual terms is to subvert the very tradition that has struggled against what made it that way. (Note - I have not read the article.)
I keep trying to tell people, "What a friend we have in Socrates!" but they won't seem to listen. Maybe it would help if I said I could easily see myself being Meletus or Philebus.
It seems patently impossible. I wonder if this stems from a confusion about the nature of consciouness implied in Descartes' cognito, which equates self with thinking, which includes calculating (computing).
E.g. if a $1000 voucher is available for an apartment, why not a $500 one for a relative's room?