I think a more defensible position than “everything is political” is that “everything is politicizable” or that “everything has potential political implications”.
There’s nothing inherently political, for example, about the fact that the Earth is round, until you have a political faction that makes it a marker of their identity to deny its rotundity. The question to ask in response is “should we politicize everything?” and the answer is pretty clearly no.
Math is racist (cuz Pythagoras was a white patriarchical asshole obv) and Earth is flat ( I heard it on roan podcast bro, CIA is totally corrupt and lies to us )
1) it’s vanishingly rare for someone to change someone else’s core belief or worldview simply by out-arguing them. I’m not surprised your professor changed so few minds. 2) “everything is political” seems more to be a framing mechanism than a statement of fact. A more precise, but less pithy framing might be, “everything related to human behavior has an element of politics, aka the distribution of power and decision-making ability within a group of individuals. Still maybe not 100 percent accurate, but a useful lens. 3) “Edginess” as motivation is an easy pot shot to lob at people who see things differently than you, but I don’t think it’s nearly the core motivation you make it out to be. Cynicism might be a better fit — many people don’t trust information provided directly, and always assume an ulterior motive. It’s why so few love songs say “I love you.” These two axioms speak to that distrust, and provide a potential framework for their adherents to navigate life without being bamboozled. Their view may not be correct, but it’s resonant for them.
All 3 of your examples seem to be deepities, a term coined by Daniel Dennett.
“The term refers to a statement that is apparently profound but actually asserts a triviality on one level and something meaningless on another. Generally, a deepity has (at least) two meanings: one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound, but is essentially false or meaningless and would be "earth-shattering" if true. To the extent that it's true, it doesn't have to matter. To the extent that it has to matter, it isn't true (if it actually means anything). This second meaning has also been called "pseudo-profound bullshit".”
An example: “everything happens for a reason.” Trivial meaning: everything has a cause that happened earlier in time. Deep meaning: there’s some deeper, spiritual purpose connecting everything.
“Everything is political” is one of these. Trivial meaning: everything you do is impacted by society and the social structures around you, because you have to exist within some system. Deep meaning: No action is neutral — even private choices are part of a grand political struggle.
“People always act in their own self interest” trivial meaning: literally the 3 steps you say in the article. Deep meaning: even when people are helping others, they’re completely selfish and don’t care what happens to others.
“Everything is relative” - you explain both meanings
To be honest, I’m pretty sure Bentham knows about deepities, and this is just his article about it without naming it, given the coincidence that all his examples are this very specific thing. That’s fine, except he’s using these examples to prove the completely wrong point! Deepities DON’T work because they’re cynical, they work because of the double meaning, so I feel they’re terrible proof that the world will accept cynical opinions, even if I agree with that opinion.
“Everything is relative” sounds vaguely sinister but “everything is connected” is a deepity people will nod along to that sounds positive and spiritual. “Everything happens for a reason” is the opposite of cynical — it’s used when something bad happens to justify it vaguely through God to make you feel like a tragedy wasn’t as bad! “You’re exactly where you’re meant to be” works too. Put up a poll of how many people agree with that.
You can’t find a phenomenon that makes people agree with certain statements more than they probably should, then pick ONLY the cynical ones you can find, then use it as proof “wow people will accept cynical arguments more than they should!!”
The 20% mind change is actually massive for something like that. Any debate I’ve seen has only seen a few percentage point shift when polled after the fact, so that’s a huge success for mind changing standards.
I can easily imagine you bringing a false advertising lawsuit after ordering an everything bagel and finding out that it does not in fact contain everything.
Yeah, if you use a Heideggerian ontology where "the being of Dasein is care" and think care is political, you can come to believe all objective appearances arise out of political attention. If, further, you take the view that "noumena" beyond appearances are not properly things, then everything is political. Goes along with The Social Construction of Reality type arguments and Foucauldian Knowledge/Power, which are pretty influential and more adaptive than they might sound, though they're definitely minority views and probably couldn't become majority views.
> Everything is political??? Everything! Do you have any idea how many things there are? Consider some planet that was destroyed 8 billion years ago, that never existed at the same time as any politics existed in the entire universe.
Not a few days ago I made a very similar argument about your statement that no one wants to kill transgender people. I was assured that the ordinary meaning of no one is “virtually no one.” Yet now I see you talking about planets billions of light years away.
Seems like everyone you disagree with is held to a much higher standard of technical correctness!
(Also, amendment to my prior objection: “no one” wants to kill transgender people is obviously false because it does not consider the unsetly many people in other infinite universes who want to kill transgender people, under your anthropic argument).
There’s a pretty clear difference I think. If we parse the meaning in both cases, it’s clear that the trans article wasn’t saying “there are exactly 0 people who want to kill trans people” but more “progressives might have you think that there is an epidemic of people wanting trans people to die, and that’s not true.”
When people say “everything is political” they are using the literal meaning of everything. The point of that statement is that it’s universal. So disagreeing with that part seems reasonable.
In both cases I lean more left than the articles; while it’s not the case that most conservatives explicitly want to kill trans people, it’s clear to me that there is a very intense form of dehumanization at play. Most conservatives would probably not feel as much empathy upon hearing of a trans persons’s death than they would if they heard about a cis person’s.
“Everything is political” is also more defensible than this article claims. A smart proponent of it would redefine political to mean something like “can be interpreted politically.” Obviously if the definition is so watered down, the statement basically says nothing, but I’d assume that would be the first level response and it’s weird the article doesn’t really even touch it (since I find it hard to believe people disagree with “dinosaurs did not have a political system”).
I think when people say that everything is political, they mean something along the lines of all human activity is, political, and are also using a rather broad definition of political. For example, if you publish a paper, proving a mathematical theorem, you are obviously implicitly taking the political stand that it’s good for the theorem to be publicly known. The primary difference between this political opinion and the political opinion that say homosexuality is not a form of mental illness is that the idea that some mathematical theorem ought to be publicly known is a practically universal political opinion, whereas there are some people who might disagree when it comes to homosexuality. Even if you don’t accept the actual definitions, that people who make the statement are using, I think the statement that everything is political is directionally true. For example, boycotting meet is an obviously political action. But if making a decision is political, then arguably making the same choice differently is also political. So eating meat an everyday activity is political. This doesn’t mean that people who eat meat necessarily support, factory farming, but it’s a decision about how much personal cost they are willing to endure for the political objective of reducing factory farming. You can make similar arguments about a lot of other everyday things that people normally think are not political.
I have complained about this to friends of mine for a long time - I always called it "aesthetic machiavellianism". A lot of people seem to want to believe the world/truth/solutions etc. are worse than they are. In part its because cynics seem like level-headed rationalists to a lot of people, but also its an excuse. If its a dog-eat-dog world, you've got a ready-made excuse for eating other dogs: its just how it is. Cynicism demands little of the cynic.
I think the reason so many people think these things is that they're not very smart, and beliefs like "everything is political" and "truth is relative" give them a way to not lose arguments against actual smart people.
Instead of engaging with an argument and being proven wrong, they can do hand-wavey stuff.
"40% still believed it" hardly deserves an unequivocal "this wins." Political belief needs to be understood ecologically, in terms of different populations making complementary errors and with sometimes deliberately orthogonal persuasion and cooperation patterns. The cynics may be pursuing a deliberate strategy of practicing and signaling defection against the scholarly cooperative discourse, for instance. Those defections, even when seemingly directly against reason, can make perfect sense when cooperating with the scholarly discourse is forcefully linked to other maladaptive commitments outside of the narrow context of class. It does often seem to be linked in that way to many students, for instance business students who believe that taking academic philosophical concerns too seriously will result in failure in business.
Other business leaders may recognize the value of the philosophy and more than make up for these defections with their own cooperative philanthropy, maintaining a net cooperative equilibrium between business and academia, but this is just more diversity and can also be recast negatively. That cooperation could not become a uniform social norm either, and many academics are outright against that form of "cooperation", claiming that the philanthropists distort the institutions...
Women's tears have a place, cynicism has a place, idealism has a place, rationalism has a place, and empiricism has a place. Every once in a while a breakthrough like transcendental idealism changes the space of possibilities and their social places dramatically, like flowering plants changed terrestrial ecologies, but even then, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could not stop the continued social uses of what he called paralogisms and antimonies of pure reason. He anticipated that, and he planned for continued coexistence with the old patterns even though he believed them firmly refuted.
I think people mean knowledge rather than facts. For instance, some feminist epistemologists might claim our knowledge of scientific facts are constructed from a male perspective, so yes it is ‘political’.
“Everything is political” is an idiom like “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. It’s meant to articulate a bounded truth via an unbounded statement.
Anything that humans touch at least has the potential to become political (like a rock on the edge of a cliff has a great deal of potential kinetic energy).
I feel like this should have been obvious to both sides of your motion.
I also think it comes down to how one defines politics. One of the only things I remember from my college political science class was what the professor defined politics as, which was "who gets what and why." So if one believes politics is fundamentally about resources, power and status and how they are divided between groups of people, that is extremely important but obviously not everything.
I think a more defensible position than “everything is political” is that “everything is politicizable” or that “everything has potential political implications”.
There’s nothing inherently political, for example, about the fact that the Earth is round, until you have a political faction that makes it a marker of their identity to deny its rotundity. The question to ask in response is “should we politicize everything?” and the answer is pretty clearly no.
Math is racist (cuz Pythagoras was a white patriarchical asshole obv) and Earth is flat ( I heard it on roan podcast bro, CIA is totally corrupt and lies to us )
1) it’s vanishingly rare for someone to change someone else’s core belief or worldview simply by out-arguing them. I’m not surprised your professor changed so few minds. 2) “everything is political” seems more to be a framing mechanism than a statement of fact. A more precise, but less pithy framing might be, “everything related to human behavior has an element of politics, aka the distribution of power and decision-making ability within a group of individuals. Still maybe not 100 percent accurate, but a useful lens. 3) “Edginess” as motivation is an easy pot shot to lob at people who see things differently than you, but I don’t think it’s nearly the core motivation you make it out to be. Cynicism might be a better fit — many people don’t trust information provided directly, and always assume an ulterior motive. It’s why so few love songs say “I love you.” These two axioms speak to that distrust, and provide a potential framework for their adherents to navigate life without being bamboozled. Their view may not be correct, but it’s resonant for them.
All 3 of your examples seem to be deepities, a term coined by Daniel Dennett.
“The term refers to a statement that is apparently profound but actually asserts a triviality on one level and something meaningless on another. Generally, a deepity has (at least) two meanings: one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound, but is essentially false or meaningless and would be "earth-shattering" if true. To the extent that it's true, it doesn't have to matter. To the extent that it has to matter, it isn't true (if it actually means anything). This second meaning has also been called "pseudo-profound bullshit".”
An example: “everything happens for a reason.” Trivial meaning: everything has a cause that happened earlier in time. Deep meaning: there’s some deeper, spiritual purpose connecting everything.
“Everything is political” is one of these. Trivial meaning: everything you do is impacted by society and the social structures around you, because you have to exist within some system. Deep meaning: No action is neutral — even private choices are part of a grand political struggle.
“People always act in their own self interest” trivial meaning: literally the 3 steps you say in the article. Deep meaning: even when people are helping others, they’re completely selfish and don’t care what happens to others.
“Everything is relative” - you explain both meanings
To be honest, I’m pretty sure Bentham knows about deepities, and this is just his article about it without naming it, given the coincidence that all his examples are this very specific thing. That’s fine, except he’s using these examples to prove the completely wrong point! Deepities DON’T work because they’re cynical, they work because of the double meaning, so I feel they’re terrible proof that the world will accept cynical opinions, even if I agree with that opinion.
“Everything is relative” sounds vaguely sinister but “everything is connected” is a deepity people will nod along to that sounds positive and spiritual. “Everything happens for a reason” is the opposite of cynical — it’s used when something bad happens to justify it vaguely through God to make you feel like a tragedy wasn’t as bad! “You’re exactly where you’re meant to be” works too. Put up a poll of how many people agree with that.
You can’t find a phenomenon that makes people agree with certain statements more than they probably should, then pick ONLY the cynical ones you can find, then use it as proof “wow people will accept cynical arguments more than they should!!”
The 20% mind change is actually massive for something like that. Any debate I’ve seen has only seen a few percentage point shift when polled after the fact, so that’s a huge success for mind changing standards.
I can easily imagine you bringing a false advertising lawsuit after ordering an everything bagel and finding out that it does not in fact contain everything.
I always understood the phrase, "Everything is political," as hyperbole. Does anyone actually believe that *literally* everything is political?
Yeah, if you use a Heideggerian ontology where "the being of Dasein is care" and think care is political, you can come to believe all objective appearances arise out of political attention. If, further, you take the view that "noumena" beyond appearances are not properly things, then everything is political. Goes along with The Social Construction of Reality type arguments and Foucauldian Knowledge/Power, which are pretty influential and more adaptive than they might sound, though they're definitely minority views and probably couldn't become majority views.
> Everything is political??? Everything! Do you have any idea how many things there are? Consider some planet that was destroyed 8 billion years ago, that never existed at the same time as any politics existed in the entire universe.
Not a few days ago I made a very similar argument about your statement that no one wants to kill transgender people. I was assured that the ordinary meaning of no one is “virtually no one.” Yet now I see you talking about planets billions of light years away.
Seems like everyone you disagree with is held to a much higher standard of technical correctness!
(Also, amendment to my prior objection: “no one” wants to kill transgender people is obviously false because it does not consider the unsetly many people in other infinite universes who want to kill transgender people, under your anthropic argument).
There’s a pretty clear difference I think. If we parse the meaning in both cases, it’s clear that the trans article wasn’t saying “there are exactly 0 people who want to kill trans people” but more “progressives might have you think that there is an epidemic of people wanting trans people to die, and that’s not true.”
When people say “everything is political” they are using the literal meaning of everything. The point of that statement is that it’s universal. So disagreeing with that part seems reasonable.
In both cases I lean more left than the articles; while it’s not the case that most conservatives explicitly want to kill trans people, it’s clear to me that there is a very intense form of dehumanization at play. Most conservatives would probably not feel as much empathy upon hearing of a trans persons’s death than they would if they heard about a cis person’s.
“Everything is political” is also more defensible than this article claims. A smart proponent of it would redefine political to mean something like “can be interpreted politically.” Obviously if the definition is so watered down, the statement basically says nothing, but I’d assume that would be the first level response and it’s weird the article doesn’t really even touch it (since I find it hard to believe people disagree with “dinosaurs did not have a political system”).
Have none of you people heard about quantifier restrictions?
I think when people say that everything is political, they mean something along the lines of all human activity is, political, and are also using a rather broad definition of political. For example, if you publish a paper, proving a mathematical theorem, you are obviously implicitly taking the political stand that it’s good for the theorem to be publicly known. The primary difference between this political opinion and the political opinion that say homosexuality is not a form of mental illness is that the idea that some mathematical theorem ought to be publicly known is a practically universal political opinion, whereas there are some people who might disagree when it comes to homosexuality. Even if you don’t accept the actual definitions, that people who make the statement are using, I think the statement that everything is political is directionally true. For example, boycotting meet is an obviously political action. But if making a decision is political, then arguably making the same choice differently is also political. So eating meat an everyday activity is political. This doesn’t mean that people who eat meat necessarily support, factory farming, but it’s a decision about how much personal cost they are willing to endure for the political objective of reducing factory farming. You can make similar arguments about a lot of other everyday things that people normally think are not political.
I have complained about this to friends of mine for a long time - I always called it "aesthetic machiavellianism". A lot of people seem to want to believe the world/truth/solutions etc. are worse than they are. In part its because cynics seem like level-headed rationalists to a lot of people, but also its an excuse. If its a dog-eat-dog world, you've got a ready-made excuse for eating other dogs: its just how it is. Cynicism demands little of the cynic.
"everything is political" is just hyperbole. it rings true because everything humans care about is politically related.
I think the reason so many people think these things is that they're not very smart, and beliefs like "everything is political" and "truth is relative" give them a way to not lose arguments against actual smart people.
Instead of engaging with an argument and being proven wrong, they can do hand-wavey stuff.
"40% still believed it" hardly deserves an unequivocal "this wins." Political belief needs to be understood ecologically, in terms of different populations making complementary errors and with sometimes deliberately orthogonal persuasion and cooperation patterns. The cynics may be pursuing a deliberate strategy of practicing and signaling defection against the scholarly cooperative discourse, for instance. Those defections, even when seemingly directly against reason, can make perfect sense when cooperating with the scholarly discourse is forcefully linked to other maladaptive commitments outside of the narrow context of class. It does often seem to be linked in that way to many students, for instance business students who believe that taking academic philosophical concerns too seriously will result in failure in business.
Other business leaders may recognize the value of the philosophy and more than make up for these defections with their own cooperative philanthropy, maintaining a net cooperative equilibrium between business and academia, but this is just more diversity and can also be recast negatively. That cooperation could not become a uniform social norm either, and many academics are outright against that form of "cooperation", claiming that the philanthropists distort the institutions...
Women's tears have a place, cynicism has a place, idealism has a place, rationalism has a place, and empiricism has a place. Every once in a while a breakthrough like transcendental idealism changes the space of possibilities and their social places dramatically, like flowering plants changed terrestrial ecologies, but even then, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could not stop the continued social uses of what he called paralogisms and antimonies of pure reason. He anticipated that, and he planned for continued coexistence with the old patterns even though he believed them firmly refuted.
I think people mean knowledge rather than facts. For instance, some feminist epistemologists might claim our knowledge of scientific facts are constructed from a male perspective, so yes it is ‘political’.
“Everything is political” is an idiom like “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. It’s meant to articulate a bounded truth via an unbounded statement.
Anything that humans touch at least has the potential to become political (like a rock on the edge of a cliff has a great deal of potential kinetic energy).
I feel like this should have been obvious to both sides of your motion.
I, too, am tired of everything talking pseudo-profound
I also think it comes down to how one defines politics. One of the only things I remember from my college political science class was what the professor defined politics as, which was "who gets what and why." So if one believes politics is fundamentally about resources, power and status and how they are divided between groups of people, that is extremely important but obviously not everything.