Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - What Liberalism Is - Ideology [1⧸4]

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Sept. 26, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

08:29

What Liberalism Is - Ideology [1⧸4]

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	Hello tubes.
	So street fighting posh boy Oliver Thorne, aka Philosophy Tube, recently made a video critical of the milquetoast fascist enabling scourge of liberalism.
	This video will be a response to that.
	Liberalism is an ideology.
	Yes, it is.
	What does that mean?
	What is an ideology?
	Oh, well, it's a certain view on what exists in society, an ontology, and on what the words used to talk about society mean, a semantics.
	Closely related to these, liberals also adopt a particular methodology, a particular way of doing things, which is individualistic.
	Liberalism says when we look at a society, the units we should be using are the individual.
	We analyse a society in terms of the decisions that individuals make.
	We describe a society as basically a collection of individuals.
	And when we explain what happens in a society, the explanations we will give will reference individuals.
	That's right.
	However, it doesn't just stop at explanation.
	It also covers how liberals make evaluations, such as when they seek to judge the value of a particular policy suggestion, a process typically undertaken by liberals in terms which also reference individuals.
	The benefit or harm the policy in question might bring to individuals, or its status in the light of individual rights or the executives' obligations to such rights.
	This in itself does not entail dog-eat-dog atomism, a war of each isolated and indivisible homo economicus against every other in some kind of free market death match.
	Unless, of course, one adopts a rather extreme anarcho-capitalist view of the individual.
	Now, obviously, you're not an anarcho-capitalist, Ollie.
	Or are you?
	Interestingly, liberalism often markets itself as not an ideology.
	No, that's not quite fair to liberalism.
	But to be fair to you, it's an understandable mistake, given what some liberals claim.
	And justice's furnace, man.
	Given their methodology, liberals believe society is an aggregate of individuals.
	But, at least in the Anglophone tradition, they also view those individuals as having purposes and projects of their own devising, as particular and oft peculiar characters, and thereby, en masse, as pursuing a diverse range of undertakings, undertakings which may not harmonize, neither with each other, nor especially with the singular vision of a ruling elite.
	Unlike conservatives, liberals also tend to view the resultant plurality, critical friction and dynamism of difference as a good thing.
	Liberals are thereby, on these premises, reluctant to wade in with a comprehensive conception of the political good.
	That is, with a one-size-fits-all idea of what's socio-politically desirable, to be imposed on a great many aspects of individuals' lives, regardless of their private consciences.
	This reluctance leads some liberals, but not all, to go so far as to suggest that liberalism must only ever advocate for a right structure, a constitutional form that's maximally respectful of the rights of all and minimally prescriptive to the moral conscience of each, thereby denying that liberalism is a political good and thus an ideology.
	Nevertheless, such a denial is not a necessary condition of liberalism.
	One can be a liberal whilst admitting that liberalism is a political good, an ideology.
	So when you say this image liberalism projects is a false one, it is an ideology and like all ideologies, emphasises and even constructs the facts that it finds useful.
	In applying the denial of ideology to all Liberals, you're effectively beating down a straw man.
	A political ideology identifies who are the acceptable targets of violence.
	Human nature dodges aside, no one denies that some guidance is required as to when violent restraint is warranted and that sometimes, in some circumstances, it is.
	Including liberals, who, despite the American misunderstanding of the term, acknowledge the need for a police force and for a military accomplished in breaking things and killing people.
	So there's nothing wrong with liberals using their own ideology as others use theirs to decide who is and isn't an acceptable target of violence.
	If we look at the history of liberalism, we notice a trend.
	It places a lot of emphasis on things like civil rights and freedoms.
	Great.
	But if we go back to the founding texts, writers like John Stuart Mill and John Locke, they build explicit exceptions into their systems.
	And making exceptions to the normal rules is a defining characteristic of a liberal ideology in practice.
	It's not a defining characteristic.
	It would have to be unique to liberalism to be definitional.
	But any system rooted in obligations and duties, liberal or otherwise, has to accept exceptions in order to be applicable in practice.
	This is deontology in general, disclosing its close relationship to divine command.
	It's not unique to liberalism.
	And yet it's liberalism that's picked out here for its hypocrisy, as if it were uniquely afflicted.
	It would also of course be fallacious to claim that liberalism is racist because people were more racist in the old days and liberalism started in the old days.
	To cherry-pick liberals, past and present, who've said one thing and then done another as if this refutes what they said, or to associate liberalism with political head figures as if they exhaust liberal ideology.
	Assuming they agree these errors of thought aren't acceptable, I'll leave it to viewers to pass judgment on your remarks about Mill, Locke, the authors of the US Constitution, Her Majesty's Government's immigration policy, or Margaret Thatcher.
	There we see liberal ideology in operation, making exceptions to the ordinary rules in order to justify violence against somebody on the basis of some fact that it thinks relevant.
	Really?
	Really?
	And to accept that liberalism is uniquely hypocritical on the basis of a bunch of fallacious assertions?
	Well, no.
	And why no?
	Well, because you're yet to muster anything like a cogent argument to support this accusation.
	I thereby remain at liberty to dismiss it.
	Indeed, to continue to suspect that you and your anti-far chums might, in your fervor to dismantle the safeguards of a liberal democracy, not so much be fighting fascism as inviting fascism.
	There's one last big feature of liberalism, and that is capitalism.
	And we're going to be learning all about that in episode 2.
	Okay, so next time you'll be transubstantiating liberalism into a goat and projecting all the sins of capitalism onto it.
	Splendid.
	Until next time, then, thank you for listening.
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