Hume's Paradox

this particular paradox concerns the relation of “the masses” to the “governing elite”. in mostly any society, there is a “ruling class” of some sort which is proportionally much smaller than the class of individuals that are subject to being ruled or governed.

the masses cannot be ruled except by force (as in a dictatorship or fascist state) or by controlling popular/public opinion…by the “manufacture of consent”, through the dissemination of propaganda (as in a “democracy”). the paradox states that the majority, the masses, (the ruled) have more power than they are led to believe, and should they decide to exercise this power (through popular struggles for various sorts of rights and/or benefits), the elite ruling class would not be able to contain them and they would eventually have to give up some (if not all) of their power. the power relationship between the rulers and the ruled is always precarious and somewhat illusory or artificial.

here’s Chomsky to explain things much more clearly than I ever could:

(from The Prosperous Few and The Restless Many):

let’s hear some of your thoughts!

-Dark Magus

this is also covered in La Boetie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Why do we choose to be governed? I think it’s because originally the governors/dominators were able to stop the contagious violence that jumped from person to person. Sorry I’m writing so abstractly. I will ground this a little later

h3m

When I was a graduate student studying sociology of education, I came across a very disturbing reality. Paolo Freire, for example, wrote some books called Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Education for Critical Consciousness (and others). His whole thing is that the oppressed (and oppressors) need to think critically about their role in society so that the oppressed rise up against being an object in society to being an active subject in society, etc.

Now here’s the disturbing part. ANY TIME reform oriented educators have tried to instill this sort of critical thinking in U.S. public schools, some rich (I hate to be so stereotypical, but it tends to be white man) who is not an educators but instead has political interests totally squash these programs. I have seen in time and again. Mathematics for social justice, history programs meant to promote critical thinking on participatory democracy, etc - its actually a crazy heated political war.

In other words, I think the masses do not rise up because they/we? are explicitly kept ignorant.

Mole, I’m with you 100% on this.

The U.S. is in no way immune to the tendancy of the “ruling class” to try to manipulate the views of the “working class” to thier own advantage, even to the degree of keeping educational programs from being enacted that might upset thier control.

this is really amazing. you have to say more about this! my jaw dropped when i read that because i’ve had that suspicion for a long time but i’ve never been able to come up with any decent concrete evidence to back it up. MOLELOVE …ILP MVP!

and nugan… what did you think, the US was a democracy?! DID YOU THINK THE RICH ELITES ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT ANYTHING OTHER THAN MAKING PROFITS??! LOL

i’m not laughing at you, buddy. seriously i’m not.

i dunno… i was thinking about this actually a few nights ago, i believe that in todays world the ruling class could invariably beat the masses if they decided to make that decision to do so. The problem is, in the end there will no longer be a “masses”. If a government with weapons such as nuclear weapons chose to do so, they have the power to exterminate every living being on the planet, to say nothing about a select population that is being a thorn in the side of a rular.

The first quote of Chomsky implies that the governed let them be governed. Molelove quote says the governors are pulling the strings.

It is my belief that the majority of people just want to live their lives as trouble free as possible, which can mean not having to deal with any outside interference, but also not having to resolve any of their internal issues. Submitting to a government can be about agreeing to a social contract, whether written or not, by which you expect them to look after you if you agree to live by their rules, thus minimising outside interference. People may not seek even better ways to live their lives since it may involve having to deal with their own unresolved issues, or just be too hard work. Dunne said something about ‘the price of freedom is eternal vigilance’.

I agree, I believe the smaller the group is like “elites group” the more quickly its components will converge and unite, and the larger the group is like “masses” the more time its components “millions of ordinary people” will take to unite. I believe this is already happening!! … if we look through history revolutions do come but they take time … time to get those masses united on some idea … slowly but gradually this happens … eventually the ruling elites become so unpopular and all their games become so well understood that the ordinary people start understanding them, and the change comes, but in case of empires which contains WMDs I am really worried cause these elites now has so much power at their fingertips that they can blow up the whole world as a last attempt to secure their power.

Arif Aziz

The problem with this is their aren’t just the elites, and the masses. There are the splitters. It’s pretty easy to get people ralleied around a negative like “Bush is bad,” but once thats gone everyone starts haveing their own ideas. Eventually one party takes hold, which will likely be a pluarity but almost never a majorority. And there you have it new elites. You just can’t have the masses without the elites.

frighter,

i’m not really sure that its in the best interest of the “ruling elites” to beat, destroy, or subdue with violence, the majority/the masses/the working class (or even consider it)! reminds me of the master/slave relationship in Camus; the slave needs the master in order to survive/exist/etc… and the master needs the slave so that she can maintain her position as “master”. so in a way, they both become slaves to one another.

speaking in practical terms for a second, if the “ruling class” destroyed the majority/the working people, there would no longer be any production or manufacture of goods, etc. the elites could no longer collect taxes from the populous with which to manufacture weapons for the military. hell, they would no longer have a military with which to defend themselves (and conduct conquests of global domination)! (members of the working class make up most of the military population… ever hear of any rich people fighting in the war in iraq?) in short, the elites rely too heavily on the masses (very broad terms i’m throwing around, eh?) for them to even consider leaving them out of the picture. its this necessary relationship that allows the elites to maintain their position.

mysteriously, it doesn’t work the other way around. this is Hume’s Paradox. the masses DON’T need anyone to control their affairs (in terms of daily life, thought, work, spending, etc). the masses could organize themselves and do just fine. that’s the idea anyway.

i too love logic, but its funny how you can sometimes miss the big picture when attempting to see everything in a strictly logical or “propositional” way. what do you have to say about the actual topic, Tuihu? i would love to hear your thoughts.

-DM

The ‘masses’ need authority, so they don’t have to figure all out by them self.

If I understand the topic correctly, the paradox is that the power is by the people, but nonetheless, the power is held by a few. What if the masses aren’t led by a few? Wouldn’t that create chaos? Community, mankind, social structures are like a flow. It’s heading some way. I think people need to overcome themself. Letting go of primal even secundary reactions. Becoming aware of themself. In this topic becoming aware of your referencepoints (the authority, idols etc.) Freedom.

Freedom is when you are ruling life yourself. But that is damn hard. Because it places yourself outside social structures.

i see the paradox as follows:

the masses hold the true power in the equation. if they could somehow organize themselves, they could topple any “elite” concentration of power or wealth. that goes for ANY social system, in any period of history. they don’t know they have the power because the elites work hard at propagandizing them or indoctrinating them (or threatening them with violence) so that they simply CAN’T come to the realization that they DO have “the power”.

Isn’t this called revolution?

There always be an elite, a few which hold the power. Even at a revolution. Elite stops to exist, when all people are and considered equal. This is almost impossible.

For example (and I’ll focus on California because that’s where I was in school at the time):

There was a very successful and widespread bilingual education movement. Both English-language-learners and native English speakers showed to benefit. Specifically, immigrant students were able to keep up with the content being taught while also learning English. Studies showed that these students were actually learning English better and faster than the “sink or swim English only immersion classes along with a separate ESL class” programs because they were able to utilize their knowledge of their native language while building an English vocabulary AND they were able to learn the math/science/history/whatever concepts being taught because they were again able to use their native language. Now, this was a success even with teachers who spoke only English because the classes were structured such that students were language resources to each other. That is, they would be able to translate for each other and explain concepts in their native language to each other and even in a bilingual sort of way, etc. Native English speaking students also benefited because the classroom kept the regular pace of topics covered, yet these students were actually learning other languages and cultures. Research showed time and again that these programs were a success.

They were totally squashed to the point that bilingual education is NOT ALLOWED in California, where there is a HUGE population of Spanish and Chinese (and of course a million other) speakers.

Who did this and why? Some random non-educator rich businessman with conservative political agenda. He ranted and raved (publicly) about how immigrants will fail if they don’t learn English in this country and how we are failing this group because they learn to rely on their native language and can’t move forward in this country, plus we are ruining the education of real American kids because the classes are watered down, etc. It was all bull. None of the research supported his claims and were, in fact, contradictory. However, when you look at his a-little-less-public rants and raves, you saw that this guy felt strongly that English is the only correct language in this country and dag-namit he won’t have no Spics and Gooks talking their SpicGook languages in his American classrooms. And, the best of all, was his claim that “someone still needs to clean the toilets in this country”. Yeah. It was ugly. In the end, the people voted against Bilingual education. Even the immigrant citizens voted against it, believing his very loud (but totally wrong) statements on how it was Liberal crap that went against the good, hardworking immigrants.

More. The Math Wars.
Math started focusing on problem solving, real world contexts, etc. Everyone was in on it, including the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics, etc. Then math educators had the bright idea of creating programs that used mathematics as a tool to understand real-world social problems. You can see these programs with kids using statistics to learn about the spread of some epidemic, etc. Really cool stuff that kids get into. However, every single program that has attempted to implement math to understand social inequities, both nationally and globally, the same rich conservative a-holes who know nothing about education and have only a political agenda start SCREAMING. They scream that what we need is a “back to basics” and that these kids won’t learn math without having to do the “drill and kill” etc. They don’t scream so loud when the social problems looked at are disease or waste management or other such things. But when the social problems get them to critically think about social inequality, then forget about it. They’ll convince parents, schools, etc that their kids are not learning math, and will inevitably fail in life due to these programs that empahsize the “wrong things”. Again, when you start looking up these guys’ agendas, it all comes down to this whole “we still need someone to clean the toilets and we can’t let everyone succeed” crap. You even see these people get paranoid that critical thinking on what it means to be in a democracy, participating actively for rights, etc is COMMUNIST propaganda. I’m serious. Its apparently anti-democratic to get kids to think critically about an active role in democracy. Its actually COMMUNIST thinking. Ha!

I can go on and on. In the end, they frame it under the rhetoric of “we are just helping these poor hard-working immigrants/poor (or whoever) against Liberal trash” but what they really mean is “we dont want these low class folks taking over our jobs in the future and, more importantly, taking over the good U.S. of A.”

1. so, I’m trying to piece together a genealogy here. Has anyone read Deleuze’s book on Hume? I haven’t. I know that it’s D’s first major book on a philosopher (it may even be D’s first publication) and that he focuses on Hume’s epistemology and metaphysics, but how interesting it is that Deleuze and Guattari will later combine Reich, Clastres, La Boetie, and some Lacan to write Anti-Oedipus - the book that aims to show us how to kill our inner-fascist (wouldn’t you live the Non-fascist life by letting your inner fascist kind of hang out in the malls and white’s only pubs of your soul?). This doesn’t make any sense does it ? Lemme 'xplain. no no dat id take too mush time, lemme sum up - La Boetie, Reich, Clastres all ask Why is it that men would come to let themselves be governed? (by monsters) Deleuze expands on this.

MOLE!!,
2. Would you be willing to find some references Online to the SPECIFIC studies on bilingual education in CA? Also Would you be willing to find the SPECIFIC conservative asshole who started the “kill the Darkies” campaign? I completely believe you about all this, it’s just that I’ll get eaten alive if I start fighting with these dumbass Florida Redneck Republicans about this shit and I throw vague punches at them. I gotta use specifics - like a Taiji or Southern Praying Mantis boxer.

3. I find this shit to be all over the place regarding history - on both sides actually - the righties don’t want to be told that most of the Culture of the SW is actually mexican or black, that the Communists are a little more complicated than “round up the rich and eat their flesh”, that the Founding Fathers, although yes Nominally Christian, took a dim and none-too-flattering view Of religion (they viewed it as a means Of social control. Every conservative commentator trots out these quotes from Adams, Jefferson, or Washington saying how society will fall apart if people don’t know how to be moral. The next sentence in the quote usually says People are scared of eternal punishment. The Founders didn’t really like Christianity) On the left, nobody wants to hear that the Northeast Indians were baby-eating savages who controlled their forest land like a tight assed Dept of the Interior prick, that Creek indians owned slaves (that’s why there are so many black folks in OK- think about the Rosewood massacre), that most environmental problems are best solved with creative market solutions, or that labor unions are usually whiney fuckers (although you NEED!!! collective bargaining!!! boy, do you!). the History of things is usually far more complicated than any ideological box.

Dude, I’m on it…

check this out first…

coe.sdsu.edu/people/jmora/BEDebate227/

The guy who squashed bilingual ed in California was Ron Unz, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Republican politico.

humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/lingu … FChr20.htm

More on the bilingual ed debacle. I’ll look for actual academic references…

Effects of the blingual ed squash years later…

humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/lingu … astats.htm