Congratulations …
CFI regularly lobbies the government on issues of secular human importance.
@coffee Would like to tackle more seriously your comment (moved the conversation on this corresponding thread).
Bragging or not might depend on the means with which we reached those figures.
France is a country with an old and strong authoritarian and illiberal culture.
This image illustrates the chronology of France’s history. It’s in French, but I think basically you can understand the idea: a succession of Kings, Emperors, and military Generals.
This informed the thought of many of our modern liberal philosophers (for instance Descartes and Condorcet), and so the form of our today’s modern state and ideology.
As a result, even today, this authoritarian culture is very vivid. Many French people sincerely believe that society problems can and must be solved top-down by one (bunch of) ruler(s).
The Anglo-saxon tradition is more liberal, and for that, more human, because it gives more room and trust to each individual’s natural development.
Reaching 30% by top-down authority (in particular the mandatory very centralized school system) is easier than reaching the same proportion in a more liberal, human way, and maybe it leads to many unintended consequences.
I have often wished that the U.S. was more “united” than it is “states.” A republic succeeds or fails depending on the people running it. That’s the case for any form of government. A dictatorship would be very efficient, effective, and humane with the perfect person in charge. It can also be Hitler.
The U.S. has just over five times the population of France so there are also issues of scale. Sometimes it’s good to have 50 states so you can escape one state’s insanity and go to a state more suited to your needs.
My expertise is not social or governmental science. Reason is about all I bring to the table. And since religion is often the opposite of reason, religion and government are a recipe for disaster. I look less at the form of government and more at who runs it.
This is exactly why Hayek thought that the French “engineering” flavor/tendency of its “modern liberal” thought (from Descartes to Condorcet to Comte) which is embodied by the new Republic’s educational institution (1794), the engineering school École Polytechnique[1], is a “false” individualism/liberalism and will only lead to communist dictatorship.
In Individualism and Economic Order (1948), Hayek quotes Descartes from the Discourse on Method: “there is seldom so much perfection in works composed of many separate parts, upon which different hands had been employed, as in those completed by a single master”.
Personally, I think this is false. France’s modern and contemporary illiberalism doesn’t come from the French Cartesian rationalism (= the “engineering” flavor/tendency of its modern liberal thinkers) but from its centuries long authoritarian tradition. Even Voltaire was in favor of enlightened absolutism.
Mathematics and engineering were just new, more modern, means for the same end (top-down authority with one or two heads to design/control the whole society).
[1] The École Polytechnique is France’s number 1 school, which forms all the elites of the country. Symptomatically, the students undergo military training and have military status (officer cadets).
I think today’s quite not so liberal French Republic is an heir of this “false individualism” tradition; while continental Europe communism is an heir of the Catholic church.
Maybe the strong socialist aspect of this French Republic is an heir of the conciliations the moderate had to do with the communists (Montagnards) during the French revolution (cf. “fraternité”).
So Hayek, in my opinion, confuses many things. And his attack on Cartesianism is a diverted way to attack the sytematic use of Reason, the first adversary to religion and traditionalism, which, for him being a conservative, he was a supporter of. But the conservatives are always like this: using covert opportunistic arguments to defend their cause.
The U.S. government is suppose to be a country FOR the people BY the people. The problem is when there are extremes and one side wants to deny people rights, then there are BIG problems. There was a time, when we had people who thought some people were not humans could be slaves and on the other side, people who saw all people as humans and assisted those who enslave escape slavery. The slave owners believed it was their God given right to own other human beings as property and treat them as inhuman. While many say that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, the truth is it did, because the states in which slavery was legal, felt it was their state’s right to own others.
Flash forward to the 15th amendment in which Black got the right to vote. Suddenly there was strange fruit all over the South for decades, as well as obstructions to voting, like reading tests and other crap. It would still be a while before women of any colour could vote though.
Then in 1967, after years of a man and woman not being able to marry who they want, if that person was a different colour. They used the Bible for this too, but with Loving v Virginia, that crap ended and it also set precedent for LBGQ marriages too.
Women’s Suffrage led to the 19th amendment (1920) finally giving women the right to vote. Later in '72 the ERA passed, but abortion was never codified leading to today where women’s rights are being taken away, including and especially health care for women. Women are already starting to die because of it.
I could continue with examples of how one side denies others rights, but this is the problem. One side has for centuries denied rights to others, only granting them to some- like rich, white men. The other sides wants rights for everyone, gun reform, immigration reform, abortion rights, LBTQ rights, etc etc etc.
How can there be unity when there are people who don’t care if everyone has rights and health care. That side only wants rights for Big Pharma, Big Business, and Rich white men?
Did you notice they threw out two Black young men government for speaking out, while they didn’t throw out the white woman helping them, even though they thought about it? Even she thought that was wrong. One would have to be blind not to see things like that. Their constituents voted them back in again. So there is some good in the U.S., but the majority in government don’t give a damn.
1 Like
I think that SCOTUS’ ruling that, “money = free speech”, instead of a contract to “quid pro quo”, is ultimately responsible for this unfolding disaster.
I think it start with the dotard. Actually, it got worse with him, but it really started with Nixon, then the impeachment of Clinton over something that should have been between his wife, him, and his girlfriend. It really hit it’s height with the dotard.
@mriana I move this dialogue onto the corresponding thread.
You mean the extremists see these movements somehow as threatening their own power, their own influence in the society, or at least as competitors?