Interestingly, there was a movement in China to reorient the CCP towards a New Confucian lens which in my opinion wasn’t particularly convincing, because it necessarily had to be designed to serve the CCP, rather than the other way around. Ideology cannot turn around a bureaucracy from the top-down, it creates change from a seed which grows.
Which is why I see more of a future in projects going in the opposite direction, incorporating Chinese political philosophy into western thinking. Libertarians can take from Daoists, EAs are inspired by Mohism, technocrats can cite Legalists, and the New Right is cribbing from Confucianism. For a while Chinese philosophy was entirely written off because it focused on society rather than the individual. But the thing is, if the aim of philosophy is to provide everyone a good life, then Dunbar’s number ensures that literacy rates have to be both high and diffuse for an individualist perspective to be viable. Society is therefore the proper level of analysis if the masses are largely illiterate.
I think this is what people miss when they describe Chinese philosophers as saying people are either good or evil. When you define good as order through adherence to your societal plan, then evil refers to being selfish and uncoordinated. Arguably this is another case where people are confusing personal preferences with moral judgement. But in a world with limited resources and viewed from a societal lens, the two become essentially the same, because a society which maximizes your preferences will necessarily trade off on the preferences of others.
This is probably where the suspicion of merchants in Chinese philosophy comes from. The entire purpose is grappling with limited resources, managing competition in order to prevent chaos. They do so through personal cultivation, adjusting your personality such that your natural inclinations leads to societally positive outcomes, with the goal that those who are selected into positions of power have cultivated restraint such that they have no desire to abuse that power. If the path to power is by being the best at unrestrained grasping, then it exacerbates the problem of limited resources.
Yet even with restraint among the select, the masses remain. Under capitalism we are all merchants and compete over resources, but then under Confucianism we all become scholars and the result is involution. The key thing to remember is that the system was created to manage a problem, and it’s a mistake to forget the purpose and start believing that the system itself is the goal. The arc of modernity showed us that between systems which allocated power either to the merchants or the scholars, one of them produces abundance at a higher rate than the other. The Confucians missed the industrial revolution by not realizing the power of positive sum competition.
With the shadow of AI hanging about, there’s a common take that even if we had material abundance, we would still compete over status. I’m personally skeptical of this claim, because even today when status is super-effective for obtaining resources, there is a robust strain which seeks to get away from it all, and only participates begrudgingly. Take away the fuel and there is still fire, but only for a while. I’m optimistic that at that point, we finally be free of society. Until then, we should try to coordinate to get there.
Interestingly, there was a movement in China to reorient the CCP towards a New Confucian lens which in my opinion wasn’t particularly convincing, because it necessarily had to be designed to serve the CCP, rather than the other way around. Ideology cannot turn around a bureaucracy from the top-down, it creates change from a seed which grows.
Which is why I see more of a future in projects going in the opposite direction, incorporating Chinese political philosophy into western thinking. Libertarians can take from Daoists, EAs are inspired by Mohism, technocrats can cite Legalists, and the New Right is cribbing from Confucianism. For a while Chinese philosophy was entirely written off because it focused on society rather than the individual. But the thing is, if the aim of philosophy is to provide everyone a good life, then Dunbar’s number ensures that literacy rates have to be both high and diffuse for an individualist perspective to be viable. Society is therefore the proper level of analysis if the masses are largely illiterate.
I think this is what people miss when they describe Chinese philosophers as saying people are either good or evil. When you define good as order through adherence to your societal plan, then evil refers to being selfish and uncoordinated. Arguably this is another case where people are confusing personal preferences with moral judgement. But in a world with limited resources and viewed from a societal lens, the two become essentially the same, because a society which maximizes your preferences will necessarily trade off on the preferences of others.
This is probably where the suspicion of merchants in Chinese philosophy comes from. The entire purpose is grappling with limited resources, managing competition in order to prevent chaos. They do so through personal cultivation, adjusting your personality such that your natural inclinations leads to societally positive outcomes, with the goal that those who are selected into positions of power have cultivated restraint such that they have no desire to abuse that power. If the path to power is by being the best at unrestrained grasping, then it exacerbates the problem of limited resources.
Yet even with restraint among the select, the masses remain. Under capitalism we are all merchants and compete over resources, but then under Confucianism we all become scholars and the result is involution. The key thing to remember is that the system was created to manage a problem, and it’s a mistake to forget the purpose and start believing that the system itself is the goal. The arc of modernity showed us that between systems which allocated power either to the merchants or the scholars, one of them produces abundance at a higher rate than the other. The Confucians missed the industrial revolution by not realizing the power of positive sum competition.
With the shadow of AI hanging about, there’s a common take that even if we had material abundance, we would still compete over status. I’m personally skeptical of this claim, because even today when status is super-effective for obtaining resources, there is a robust strain which seeks to get away from it all, and only participates begrudgingly. Take away the fuel and there is still fire, but only for a while. I’m optimistic that at that point, we finally be free of society. Until then, we should try to coordinate to get there.