Why China may easily dominate an anti-sci, culturally fragmented West of the future

[C C]

Claudia Kentworth: "Because communism isn't as left as you get can anymore. In fact, it's a conservative dinosaur compared to the alien, postmodern fantasy world that Generation-Z and late Generation-Y of the West are rocketing off to."
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Have humans always lived in a “pluriverse” of worlds?
https://blog.oup.com/2021/07/have-humans...of-worlds/

EXCERPTS: In the modern West, we take it for granted that reality is an objectively knowable material world. [...] But a very different picture of reality is now emerging from new currents of thought in fields like history, anthropology, and sociology.

The most powerful of these currents suggests that reality may not be singular at all, but inherently plural. [...] In short, humans have always lived in a “pluriverse” of many different worlds, not in a universe of just one. ... it can be supported by a number of compelling arguments.

First, on purely historical grounds, it is clear enough that billions of humans have thrived in the past without knowing anything at all of our objective material reality or its timeless laws of being. Countless non-modern peoples, from ancient Egyptians to Indigenous Amazonians, have sustained themselves successfully for hundreds if not thousands of years, despite staking their lives on very different realities, on worlds full of gods, ancestral spirits, magical forces, and so many other things which our science would deem unreal. Did they all just get lucky?

Second, on ecological grounds, one could point out that our own modern reality normalizes a human-centered individualist way of life which has imperiled the whole future of the planet in just a few hundred years. [...] If, as we like to believe, this scientifically grounded order is aligned with life’s ultimate truths, how come it has diminished and destroyed so much life in its brief history?

Then there is the philosophical argument [...] Many critics would now claim that the most essential contents of any reality are relations not things...

[...] a fourth, which is ethical in nature. If humans have successfully inhabited numberless different realities, none of them more ultimately real than any other, then all established human communities should be free to pursue their own ways of life in worlds of their own choosing. This ethical imperative would necessarily rule out all forms of imperialism and colonialism...

[...] From a pluriversal perspective, the past would no longer look like a kind of ... struggle along a common path of “progress” towards western modernity. Instead, it would look like a vast panorama of autonomous worlds, where life was secured by a wondrous array of relations, beings, and forces that defy our narrow technoscientific imaginations. (MORE - missing details)

[Ostronomos]

Claudia Kentworth: "Because communism isn't as left as you get can anymore. In fact, it's a conservative dinosaur compared to the alien, postmodern fantasy world that Generation-Z and late Generation-Y of the West are rocketing off to."
- - - - - - -

Have humans always lived in a “pluriverse” of worlds?
https://blog.oup.com/2021/07/have-humans...of-worlds/

EXCERPTS: In the modern West, we take it for granted that reality is an objectively knowable material world. [...] But a very different picture of reality is now emerging from new currents of thought in fields like history, anthropology, and sociology.

This is meant to be metaphorical I assume. The terms seem to be used loosely.

[C C]

This is meant to be metaphorical I assume. The terms seem to be used loosely.

Rightly or wrongly, an external world construed as constituted of relationships inevitably invites pluralism and relativism across the board. That's why Kant installed objectivity in the concept-forms (Understanding) and spatial intuitions (Sensibility) of the mind rather than leaving it floundering at the mercy of quarreling ontological speculations.

It's pretty obvious that a particular operating system or a specific browser converts and outputs information to a screen largely the same way, regardless of the multitude of varying computers it is installed on. Insuring coherence and consistency ranging from good to outstanding in degree across the cyberworld.

Yet the idiots who came after Kant took this approach to be subjectivism, the very opposite of what Kant was trying to do. The best that continental philosophy ever came to correcting this error which it grabbed and ran away with was social constructivism. Which is hardly an improvement. Just moves the motivated perspectivism up from the biases of the individual to the population group one belongs to (or chooses to subsume one's identity under, if biological factors and family conditioning doesn't establish that from the start).

There are at least three "external" worlds or represented existential levels:

(1) The given world of perception (phenomenal) -- which despite science and philosophical tradition proclaiming a representation of the brain -- is nevertheless objective in terms of internal coherence and the inter-subjective context of people being able to consensus agree about its content (i.e., _X_ human is going to be discovered dead after being hit profoundly by a speeding truck, regardless of what a contrarian belief contends).

(2) A "scientific" world abstracted by reason and experiment from the former. Which is really just a refinement of that phenomenal world (i.e., actually still belongs to phenomenal/natural realm).

(3) And Kant's potential noumenal stratum that intellectual activity can speculate about (thus the "nous-" in it), but cannot cull the multiple contenders due to there being no empirical content (or an intellectual intuition) for that level, so to solidly "prove" any of them ("thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind").

Accordingly, with regard to the third, cultures can project onto it whatever they want to belief-wise, because it's prior in rank to the phenomenal/natural domain of the former two. Though that distinction can clearly be abused if opportunist parties don't grok slash respect that barrier, as far as this life goes. Kant perhaps abused it himself by recruiting such to justify duty-based ethical behavior, which alternatively might open the door to cliques employing it to rationalize immoral behavior.

Worse, the postmodern offshoots that the opinion piece apparently swirls around don't depend upon a transcendent world, anyway. And could as much enable via moral relativism the return of child sacrifice somewhere down the line (as Incan priests and others practiced) as the fluffy feel-good stuff they attract people initially with before returning to their underlying Jacobin-descended impulses in the course of a power rise.

Fascism arguably has the same French Revolution lineage as Marxism, which is why China could so easily flip later to minority-persecuting nationalism and parasitism on capitalism (mixed economy), while retaining the Communist Party facade. (The Nazis also used socialism as window-dressing in their name, for appealing to the masses during an era when that was popular.)