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. New ideologies cannot turn around an existing bureaucracy from the top, it creates change by growing a seed.
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 if the aim of philosophy is to provide everyone with a good life, then Dunbar’s number means 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 claiming that people are variously good or evil. When you define order through adherence to your societal plan as good, then evil refers to being selfish and uncoordinated. This is arguably a 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. 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. Their entire purpose is grappling with limited resources, managing competition in order to prevent chaos. Practitioners undergo personal cultivation, adjusting their personality such that their natural inclinations lead to societally positive outcomes. The goal is that those who are selected into positions of power have developed sufficient restraint such that they have no desire to abuse that power. But if the path to power is by being the best at unrestrained grasping, then it only 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 events of the modern era 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 get to material abundance, we would still have status competition. I’m pretty skeptical of this claim, because even today when status is super-effective for obtaining resources, there is a robust strain which only participates begrudgingly and desires to get away from it all. Take away the fuel and there is still fire, but only for a while. I’m optimistic that at that point, we’ll 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. New ideologies cannot turn around an existing bureaucracy from the top, it creates change by growing a seed.
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 if the aim of philosophy is to provide everyone with a good life, then Dunbar’s number means 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 claiming that people are variously good or evil. When you define order through adherence to your societal plan as good, then evil refers to being selfish and uncoordinated. This is arguably a 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. 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. Their entire purpose is grappling with limited resources, managing competition in order to prevent chaos. Practitioners undergo personal cultivation, adjusting their personality such that their natural inclinations lead to societally positive outcomes. The goal is that those who are selected into positions of power have developed sufficient restraint such that they have no desire to abuse that power. But if the path to power is by being the best at unrestrained grasping, then it only 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 events of the modern era 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 get to material abundance, we would still have status competition. I’m pretty skeptical of this claim, because even today when status is super-effective for obtaining resources, there is a robust strain which only participates begrudgingly and desires to get away from it all. Take away the fuel and there is still fire, but only for a while. I’m optimistic that at that point, we’ll finally be free of society. Until then, we should try to coordinate to get there.