Stardate 20040107.1303

(Captain's log): Solipsism is a belief that only the self is certain to exist; everything else could be illusion. Indeed, it could be something you yourself create, and you may be able to learn to control it to make it what you want. At that level, it shades into mental illness, and in any case the problem with solipsism as a concept is that it is not particularly useful.

In philosophical idealism, there is at least something of an acknowledgement that something exists outside the self, but philosophical idealism (henceforth "p-idealism") still risks certain intellectual traps. I wrote a lot of background about this a couple of days ago.) Please note that p-idealism is not directly related to the normal usage of the word "idealism", though there's a tendency for believers in p-idealism to seem to be idealists in the normal sense of "one who seeks perfection as an attainable goal". P-idealism is actually a fundamental belief about the nature of the universe, which presumes that feelings and thought are primary, and that physical experience is driven by them.

If there is an underlying idea behind everything, p-idealism presumes that if someone can come to understand that idea then they should be able to understand, and even predict, everything else. Given the presumption that this underlying idea must be elegant and esthetically pleasing, then the presumption is that once you see it you'll recognize it.

In its more rational form, p-idealism at least assumes that the underlying idea exists independently of us, and that we should seek to understand it. But it's possible for that to morph, in easy stages, to a different and contradictory point of view: if one has a vision of an idea which is sufficiently elegant and esthetically pleasing, the world will change to conform to it.

Given that I am not a p-idealist I do not fully understand the underlying logic of it. From my point of view as a empiricist and a mechanist, it's utter self-deception.

I also know that p-idealism as it is commonly practiced now by one of the three major factions in the three-way war is not true to the philosophical tradition from which it derives. In such movements, there will be a core of people who have a greater understanding of it (or who think they do) and a larger number of followers who accept the conclusions as dogma without fully understanding, or even feeling they need to understand, how they were derived – if, indeed, they ever were derived rather than being excess baggage.

What is the attraction of it? I think that the development of the p-idealist faction as it now exists is largely driven by resentment and anger, as indeed are the Islamists. They have no love for each other, but they both bitterly hate the third faction, the empiricists, because it's more successful.

P-idealist followers feel entitled to more respect and influence than they actually have, and finding themselves unable to change that using the kinds of approaches that mechanists use, they have instead adopted a world-view where they actually do have that degree of influence.

About 20 years ago, Robert Nozick wrote an article titled "Why do Intellectuals oppose Capitalism?" where he was careful to explain how he was using the word intellectual:

By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, government bureaucracy.

And the problem is that they don't think they get the respect they deserve.

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals. Ludwig von Mises explains the special resentment of intellectuals, in contrast to workers, by saying they mix socially with successful capitalists and so have them as a salient comparison group and are humiliated by their lesser status. However, even those intellectuals who do not mix socially are similarly resentful, while merely mixing is not enough--the sports and dancing instructors who cater to the rich and have affairs with them are not noticeably anti-capitalist.

Why then do contemporary intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards their society has to offer and resentful when they do not receive this? Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution "to each according to his merit or value." Ap