Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Mara's avatar

When I first came across the concept of "hegelian dialectic", I saw it as a flawed and dumbed down version of the empirical method.

It fails to address the alternative possibility that one or both of the contradicting ideas are wrong and shouldn't be synthesised at all.

That in fact, it could well produce something far worse.

It surprises me that anyone could use it and not notice the massive logic hole.

Expand full comment
Steve Martin's avatar

Hi Mathew.

And a warning for most, TLDR. As with only a very few other stimulating read-and-responses, I might eventually update this to a substack.

First off, I fully agree with Mara about the Hegelian Dialectic, and started writing this partially inspired by Mara's response, even before reading other responses.

When I was running the biology labs at Temple. Uni. Japan, I also taught Freshman Writing and Public Speaking. In hindsight, that made sense because as I was allotting some time in the labs to reinforce the idea that science is a bootstrapping process alternating between inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning ... (biggest influences T.S. Kuhn, Karl Popper, and C.S. Pierce), I also put a heavy emphasis on rhetoric and reasoning in the writing process for those other two classes. One technique I taught the students to recognize as a logical fallacy was "being skewered on the horns of a false dilemma".

Hmm ... wiki still has its uses. I was just checking up to see how many centuries old the formalization of that error is, but instead found something more useful. It is a subset of a "fallacy of bifurcation", and in your reframing ... the weaponization of bifurcation. Ha. A new twist on "divide and conquer". Had I been teaching those writing/speaking courses a decade or so later, I would have included examples of emergence theory, fractal theory, chaos theory, and Bayesian probability to further reinforce that fallacy.

Ooo ... found a great little video regarding the heuristics of science as I described it in labs ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3OXwpEpl8. My example in labs was leading the students through thought-experiments using different approaches (along with assumptions, variables, controls, etc.) and the strengths and weaknesses of those approaches in "proving" a certain blend of coffee was "better" than another.

One memorable take-away from those thought experiments was that a modestly achievable goal of the scientific method is to provisionally isolate some useful correlations within an infinitely complex web of causes and effects. I can scarcely imagine the absurdity of using the Hegelian Dialectic as the primary heuristics for either the scientific method or an essay or speech worth the time to digest.

In thinking about your ending question of what actors you may have forgotten, my memory automatically raced back to Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer". Though it has been some years since I read that book, I think you may have a more sharply detailed and comprehensive description of the "bad" actors than Hoffer.

But I wonder if the targets of engineering might be more than merely crowds, consumers, or the mesmerized, and every bit as diverse and specialized (individuated, or not) as the engineers? A couple of substack buddies come to mind who might be able to shed more light than myself on the victimized ... Margaret Anna Alice (Mistakes Were Not Made) and Tereza Coraggio.

I have not yet sat down to see if the following identities, psychological constructs, or temperaments can be classified as passive actor / victims for understanding modern society, or if these are just somewhat abstract qualities of those being acted upon. Similarly, I did not see "kulangeta" among the descriptions of the engineers. I'll have to re-read and ponder over a few things ...

1 — Your starting point: "Definition: Hegelian engineering is the process by which social engineers control the dialogue surrounding ideas within a Cybernetic metaschematic in order to manipulate the evolution of society." As I tend to think in pictures and diagrams, this is quite the cognitive load.

2 — I will have to re-read your list of agents to see if they are skewed towards a particular end of a moral continuum, and then either assume we share some kind of effective altruism, posit my own, or presume Hegelian engineering is an amoral phenomenon.

That problem of morality and amoral behavior is not an easy one to untangle. Here is a very good YouTube lecture (courtesy of substack writer "streamfortyseven' that reframes the Malthusian dilemma in such a way that some, particularly "the anointed" (heads up to Thomas Sowell) can act from behind a presumption of morality, yet give a glib, post-hoc reasoning for the most morally repulsive behavior imaginable (the Trolley Car problem on steroids) ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4

3 — I have yet to determine if those actors are organized according to specialized jobs or social currency within an emergent hierarchy, or a mixture of the two. Edit ... after reading Eli's comment, that also got me wondering if the kulangeta ruling class really so smart as to have quantified and organized everyone and everything, or are we looking at an emergent phenomenon?

4 — I'll have to apply a filter of Bertrand Russell's "levels of language" (levels of abstraction) to those acted upon to see if they can be cast as distinct counterparts to each of the types of engineers ... or if not one-to-one counterparts, organized along some other spectrums such as degree or kind of exploitation (e.g. human trafficking) or physical-mental suffering (such as degree of anomie, PTSDs, turbo-cancers, or homelessness).

Going abductive here, but from my experience as a marginalized white person of color in Japan Inc., some terms that immediately came to mind include:

• "Stockholm Syndrome"

• "White Knight" volunteer

• range of competence / confidence from "Dunning-Kruger to "Imposter Syndrome",

• "Flying Monkey" enablers

• self awareness and the problem of 'free will' — (Joe Scott just released a relevant YouTube about this ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TYuTid9a6k),

But even while increasingly believing in a veneer theory of history and culture, when I think of the above, I can't help but to find myself spinning a wheel in the mandelbrot set. For example, the current psychiatric parlance of "white knight" does not appear much more than a re-working of Don Quijote. The above short-list of victims (or symptoms) are just the more recent constructs for earlier archetypes that can be found in cinema and literature. When I was teaching Comparative Culture in Japanese colleges, I used characters from the original "Blade Runner", from James Thurber's "The Unicorn in the Garden and Other Fables for Our Time", characters in classics like Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times", W.F. Murnau's "Nosferatu", Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" ... all the way back from the Upanishads to Taoist-Zen inspired metaphors to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Aesop's Fables, or Beowulf and beyond. I suspect you sense that too, as you used Shakespeare and Bacon to introduce an analysis of modern society.

Lots to think about here. Enough to start a good book.

Only stopping for now so that I can get a good night's sleep as a typhoon bears down on the neighborhood. Wondering if the crows and wagtails will be waiting on the veranda for their vittles tomorrow morning?

Cheers Mathew!

Expand full comment
40 more comments...

No posts

Ready for more?