>What's the Nazi critique of capitalism?

I think they were upset about their belief that Jews were running it?

most of the billionaires, the ones we are "praising" for charity who are simultaneously against systemic change, DO in fact own their organizations. Let's bring this back to the original point - are charity and systemic changed opposed? What I'm saying is charity is not opposed to systemic change in an example like yours here, where they theoretically don't own the organization, but in many cases they APPEAR opposed, because of the phony definition of "charity" that these billionaires who own their charities use. When someone that rich uses their own charity to get richer, which indeed happens with at least a few of them, then that's where this appearance of opposition between charity and systemic change appears, an opposition that is ultimately faulty because it's not real charity being pitted against here. I'm sure that there are plenty of rich people who both donate to charity AND believe in systemic change to a significant degree (probably not billionaires because it usually takes a special level of greed to become and stay a billionaire, since the realistic needs of money in any given person's life are never that high). I'm not arguing that a rich person donating to charity and losing money can't exist, or that someone can't do that and also be for systemic change. I'm simply saying that when that joke of a system we also call "charity" because of the mask it puts up, the one fueled by billionaires, when that system is used by someone, then indeed there becomes an opposition between this and the idea of radical change, because like I already stated they're operating in "a whole other world" than us, and what they're doing is not charity.

You seem to have shifted the point.

I wrote..

>ideologues become authoritarians because “people just won’t make the obviously right choices so must be made to for their own good’.

(Now admittedly I implied so could have made clear “for their own good” according to the ideologues.)

You asked for examples where that happened.. not

>example of an ideology being adhered to the point of unexpected bad outcomes

So ?

But I would suggest that no ideology thinks of itself as the bad guy ( shout out to Mitchell and Webb “Are we the bad guys”.) I think that those ones mentioned are wrong in principle and practice. My point is that when the inevitable failure occurs then they need to blame someone and ratchet up the authoritarianism.

Me and you can't really know where he lives. But most people live a very "minimalist" life, except they don't chose to, and they have far more precarious jobs. Singer can chose what level of living he is happy with, stay there and be assured he will never be poor.

A billionaire who donates money to a charitable organization (assuming they do not own the organization) will never be wealthier or better off than they had been if they chose not to donate.

Donations to charitable causes reduce your taxable income as well as your post-tax income.

I dunno, he donates most of his income and seems to live as minimalist a life as he can. I don't think he makes it too easy on himself.

Yes, The Gates Foundation has the best PR out of any charity right now. I'm sure many would have said the same about Red Cross about 20 years ago. But let me ask you this - with Bill Gates' charity giving away billions of dollars constantly, how does he continue to make more and more money every single year? That's a hint that being charitable isn't really doing the same thing for him as it does for you and me. For example, if you look up where he's sending it, do you think he's putting it all directly in the hands of those who need it? Because the charity has also donated billions to other companies, and hundreds of millions to those they have stocks and bonds in. That's tons of money that could have gone into public infrastructure but is essentially being reinvested through the charity. I'm not saying *none* of the money has helped anyone, that would be particularly egregious. What I'm really saying is that with the laws we have in place, charity on a scale like this stops being "charity" as we know it. If a billionaire was truly charitable they would stop being a billionaire, simple as that.

>And since in practice there are only the actions of individuals working separately or together

In practice most actions that are socially significant are collective, not individual, and very hard to reduce to "many different individuals separately doing x and y". If you are asking for a step by step guide of what YOU specifically should do, this is beside the point. If the question is about what a social subject "should" do, then that is a totally different question and a very widely addressed one.

Are you vegan? Because honestly I think you're a bit naive about the public support for animal welfare. There are quite a lot of people who don't give a single shit about animal welfare. They're not the deciding factors when it comes to this kind of politics though. It's the farmers. Farmers are one of the strongest lobby groups in most countries and they oppose anything that hurts their bottom line. I'm from Israel, we have the highest percentage of vegans in the world and we had a big campaign a while ago to stop importing livestock (they would suffer a lot on the trip). The campaign failed.

I'm not saying that you can't find public support for some animal welfare policies, and many groups in the Effective Altruism space do work on that, but it's usually stuff like "hey maybe you can't keep this chicken in an individual cage where she literally can't move and instead put her in a cage with other chickens where she maybe will be able to take a few steps without stepping into another chicken". We're very far from like, banning slaughterhouses.

That would appear to beg the question. The author thinks individual actions that work within the system are insignificant and the system needs changing as a whole. Well that’s easy to say.

And since in practice there are only the actions of individuals working separately or together _ what do they do to change the whole system and what do they propose to replace it with?

It’s like people protesting to “stop racism!” - well yeh I agree …. and now how do we do actually precisely and practically do that step by step since just saying stop probably isn’t going to do it.

I was sort of describing a stance rather than presenting a stance of my own. I understand your first paragraph here to be something of an elaboration of my last paragraph.

My own stance is, however, remarkably similar to what I laid out. I don't have a particularly detailed understanding of Singer's work--I've only read brief papers by him, and not many of his longer works. However, I would describe my own position briefly, if you're interested.

It is a long tradition in philosophy going back to at least Plato to analogize between the individual (I almost want to put scare quotes around "individual" here) and society. I would like to do that as well. It may seem strongly disanalagous at first, but close introspection of one's own mind shows that while there is something unified or unifying about conscious experience, the mind itself is made up of many different parts, each of which has its own motivations, goals, and behaviors. Each of us can be treated like a society in and of ourselves.

This is talked about in great detail in the meditation traditions that spread out from India, as well as in various psychotherapeutic modalities, from newer modalities like Internal Family Systems and Core Transformation to more traditional modalities like paychodynamics.

When you spend some time working with the parts through therapy and/r meditation, it starts to become clear that there us a far broader possibility space for the state of the whole bodymind system than one initially thought possible. Things can be both far better and far worse than one thought was possible. One can become aware of ways that your parts interact with each other that are quite surprising. For example--over the last week in my own meditation practice, I have discovered that there is a part of me which functions as a "bliss limiter"--it tamps down on a particular body experience of fizzy joy and pleasure which the Buddhist tradition calls "piti." It has been tamping this down this experience specifically because other parts were afraid of losing control and being unable to fulfill their functions and their goals. But I have found a way to allow the bliss limited to safely ease up a little bit without threatening too many other parts.

By analogy, I strongly suspect that there are aociety-wide modes of relating which are both far better and far worse than what we experience now. And just as clinging too hard to what works now in the individual status quo can lead the individual to severe depression, anxiety, suicidality, etc., I suspect that clinging to status quo methods of working with society can also lead us to dark places.

Singer's work is a little bit like the standard advice for dealing with negative mental health states. Giving to charity and changing to more prosocial personal habits and modes of consumption is rather like eating your vegetables, getting exercise, and trying to get enough sleep. They are indeed helpful and have been shown both scientifically and in many people's personal lives to improve things overall. However, they are limited in what they can do. There are other, very surprising ways of working which can have much more dramatically positive impacts.

Similarly, I suspect that there are things we can do as a society which can improve the overall state much more dramatically than we usually think possible. I think we can point to world history over the last 500 years for many such previous examples. (As well as many times where the local situation became much worse than people thought was possible quite suddenly! Which should be a warning!)

That's not a specific example of an ideology being adhered to the point of unexpected bad outcomes, though. Nazism had the bad outcome built in and intended, so do theocratic governments.

>than come up with concrete individual actions

Individual actions are explicitly not the point though.

I think you're not wrong. I also think we can't really function if somethings are not automatic. That's why it's really hard to make a synthetic lifeform.

The philosophy of leaving things better than you found them

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in"

-Greek proverb.

I´m quite interested the philosophy, and i would like to live by it as much as i can, but sometimes I do find myself questioning if it truly fulfills me or if I´m just telling myself to do it because it makes me feel better. I also know i should not expect any reward, for following this philosophy is the reward, however I also struggle with that sometimes. I would like to hear your thoughts and opinions, and I would also very much appreciate any paper/book or quote reccomendations concerning this philosophy as a whole. Thank you in advance.

We should accept that we don't have full control on our brain. Maybe God created us this way because It was needed to. Maybe the human mind is just very weak and has difficulty controlling the brain and istincts like anxiety or mosquito hate, but very strong compared to the animal mind (the animal soul probably isn't real).

The only positive thing that can be said about this post is that the title is an accurate summary of the article.

Well I’m thinking of practically every group that has tried a form of communism, national socialism or theocratic government as an ideology.

But it is also easy to "put your money where your mouth is" when you have said job.

My guess is we simply didn't have the capacity to disprove it before. Now we have experiments capable of checking the chemicals in the brain.

The chemicals makes us do stuff. And stopping that is not automatic.

So the process will be don't move, think before you do. Think before you do.

>ideologues become authoritarians because “people just won’t make the obviously right choices so must be made to for their own good’.

Again would need an example because cannot think of any: only of supporters of the status quo claiming it's the case. Us vegans are always getting accused of somehow pushing veganism on people despite evidently possessing vastly less influence and access to power than the animal ag. industry. Usually what it actually means is 'vegans made me think about how my actions aren't in accordance with my beliefs and that made me feel bad some I'm going to blame them and call them pushy'.

Rousseau is not nearly as idealistic as he gets accused of being - he suggests people will act in self-interest and is not expecting perfection, or even, on the worse side, that means of control like religion aren't useful. It is the eighteenth century, I'm never sure why anyone expects idealism as some might mean it today from it. Which, in terms of arguable improvements, suggests 'idealists' have a point. This debate could easily be had about slavery using worryingly similar language to that applied to the oppression of non-human animals. Leftists assume the system creates the bad outcomes, not inherently the people.

Yeah, i dislike this istinct of mindlessly killing mosquitoes. When i want to slap a mosquito, i try to do It using reason.

Yes, you will have to stop your nature if you truly want to.

Like I have this instinct to slap mosquitos because I once had dengue. So I consider them the enemy. But if at one time I choose not to slap them, that's pretty much against my instincts.

It's definitely not the place of philosophy to make arguments for things people may find uncomfortable. /s

We realized that the lack of free will is an illusion the mind of the soul creates to explain the limited brain in the limited body.