2024-03-08 13:17:39
The sociologist Norbert Elias once asked what the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences. He attributes their special effectiveness to the fact that they can grasp their subject matter without resorting to concepts such as intention or intention, purpose or means. This abandonment of action theory extends from the early modern criticism of purposive causes to the replacement of the theory of creation by the biological theory of evolution. According to Elias, he has a double face: natural processes lose the ability of actions to be grateful or reproachable, but they can now be controlled all the more easily. Thanksgiving is losing its recipient, but there is now artificial fertilizer to compensate.
The history of the economic system shows that something like this is also possible in relation to social processes. The market implements an order without a plan, and the economic theory that follows this is consistent enough to refrain from moral reproaches even in humanely unsatisfactory conditions. She describes her system beyond good and evil, but thanks to her description you can know where the starting points for economic policy lie. The history of sociology has actually only added further renunciations of action theories. Not only in the economy, but also in society as a whole, she sees, to use Niklas Luhmann’s famous formula, a system without a center and without a top.
If it’s not God’s fault, it’s certainly Bill Gates’s fault
In a recently published essay, the Austrian sociologist Georg Vobruba has drawn attention to the fact that social science systems theories are poorly suited to explain disappointment for everyday people. They lack the advantage of action theories to offer the disappointed person not only an anonymous cause for his unsatisfactory situation, but also a culprit and thus a plausible object of aggression. So they are not particularly helpful in identifying scapegoats.
According to Vobruba, the purpose of the conspiracy theories circulating today is to remedy this deficiency. According to them, society is the way it is because there are a few people who benefit from it and who are at the same time powerful enough to impose their own will on everyone else. What is particularly striking about the closer definition of this mysterious group, to which one can attribute everything that is unwelcome, is the lack of imagination. As Vobruba shows using text samples from relevant sources, it is said to be Bill Gates and other super-rich people, who are of course also attributed superpowers here. For the sociologist, the center of the conspiracy theory lies in the idea of omnipotence within the world, and this allows him to argue in a careful analogy to the history of ideas about omnipotence outside the world.
The discovery of the nominalist theologians that God’s omnipotence would not be very far off if he were unfreely committed to the good or even firmly tied to his own history, unleashed the fear of the unpredictability of an arbitrary God. At the beginning of modern philosophy, Descartes imagines that the entire world he is familiar with, including his own existence in it, can be traced back to the deceptive intentions of a treacherous God.
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The weirdos on the internet are now experiencing a similar situation. According to Vobruba, the idea of inner-world omnipotence is only reassuring as long as one can trust in the moral quality of this omnipotent. This is of course not the case with the world government of money, and so superstitions about it can only expect the worst from the future. The interest in living in a simple world with only one enemy seems greater than that in the continued existence of this world.
A second parallel concerns the loss of certainty. If all journalists have to obtain Bill Gates’ approval before every report, their reporting cannot be trusted. On the other hand, the almighty would not be almighty if they only had war reporting in their hands and not the wars themselves. All the world events that one would like to attribute to the conspirators are only known from the mass media, which one considers to be co-conspirators. The advantage of this circular design is that it offers a high degree of freedom of choice. You can treat the message that suits you best as applicable.
#longing #scapegoat