The only thing I remember from Session 9

I fixed a family member’s Windows PC once. Stuck in an update boot loop. Had to rebuild the bootloader to fix it. It took ten minutes once I looked up the commands online. He had already taken it to a PC repair shop and they said all they could do was reinstall the operating system. Honestly, these Windows people are like handicapped because they never really interact with their computers. They only interact with a kind of software nanny that keeps them away from the scary stuff for their own good.

I love my terminal.

Liberalism holds within it a multitude of characters and we are seeing some of the design flaws now but in it’s day it was a radical dissolution of power of the state from an authoritarian norm that is alien to our modern sensibilities.

Yes, liberalism has an important historical significance. It also has a specific historical context. Unfortunately, many academics and intellectuals came to see it as a permanent, natural state; as the only paradigm that should, or even can, exist.

I think many people of today underestimate how popular the idea of “the end of history” was after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The idea that liberal “democracy” and capitalism represented the last and only sociopolitical/socioeconomic system humanity would ever need - that it was the culmination of all human history - was adopted by nearly every elite member of society. History was over, there was no alternative, and we shouldn’t try to develop humanity any further. Not only was any significant change unnecessary and undesirable, it was harmful and destructive. Human civilization had to stay in a permanent state of arrested development essentially forever.

This thinking was not restricted to just a vocal minority, it was the consensus, and with Marxism-Leninism defeated, there was no ideological opposition. Liberalism (neoliberalism, liberal democracy, capitalism) was the unquestioned champion and there were no more challengers.

But history had not ended, and no paradigm, however dominant, can remain in place permanently. Change is inevitable, humanity and civilization continue to evolve, and as new historical and material conditions emerge, so too will new ideas, just as liberalism did in its time and place.

Humanity is facing incredible challenges, and I’m not sure liberalism has all the tools necessary to adequately address all of them. Maybe no one ideology does. Maybe we need to take a post modern approach and look at all the different ideas and philosophies as tools in a tool box, and simply use whichever one we think might work best to address a specific problem. Then again, maybe humans don’t work that way, maybe the patchwork approach of “just do whatever works” is incompatible with a natural human desire to have a grand, unified, overarching ideological paradigm in place.

Regardless, I think liberalism’s ideological hegemony is rapidly falling apart. I fear it will be replaced by something worse, and by “worse” I mean even less sufficient for addressing the many challenges facing humanity today. I think that’s happening because liberalism became so entrenched, so rigid and so immovable. I just hope it’s not too late to come up with something better.

I don’t have a written record of every interaction I’ve ever had regarding this topic, unfortunately.

However, I’ve had a number of conversations or debates that have gone something like:

I will say that rights are essentially meaningless without a sufficiently strong state to enforce said rights, and they’ll reply that the state doesn’t grant rights, they can only take them away, and that the rights are theirs even if the state doesn’t recognize or enforce them. These conversations are usually with people who are very suspicious of state authority, even going so far as wanting to see the state abolished completely.

It’s kind of understandable, they’re usually American and one of the foundational documents of the US famously states that “…all men are…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Every child in the US is taught this, more or less from birth.

It evolved out of the privileges given by royalty to variable degrees of their subjects into the ideas foundational to liberalism

Seems like liberalism is falling out of favor these days.

Well, you weren’t around. In the future, I’ll be sure to consult you first.

Well, I didn’t construct this description out of thin air. It’s based on how the concept of individual rights has been explained to me by various people over the years.

Isn’t the idea of rights that they are endowed upon or imbued into each individual by some supernatural authority, like a god? I mean, aren’t rights metaphysical, in that they are not context dependent, and exist even outside of time and space itself? Like, the idea of inherent individual rights is that you can remove a person from any given time and place, move that individual to any other time and place, and their “rights” would follow with them, not unlike a soul.

I’m sure there are a lot of complex reasons. Frankly, I don’t really care why other people don’t use Linux, I use it. Exclusively.

I’ve always hated this comparison because the two problems are just not the same, at all. CFCs were nowhere near as ubiquitous as fossil hydrocarbons, and CFCs had an essentially drop-in replacement, which fossil fuels do not. There’s no non-hydrocarbon fuel that we can just replace for coal, natural gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc. None that I’m aware of, anyway.