Philosophy exercise: call for critiques

[grysar]

So, regyt once told me that philosphy was a meta area of study, that it explored and discovered caves/topics like politics, biology, economics, and moved on while those less meta subjects explored their own cave in depth. I'm not doing full justice to the eloquence of the metaphor, but I think that gets the point across.

In that case I believe this is an exercise in philosophy. I propose, against all comers, an analytic system for understanding effective human action. Specifically for describing codes, honor, moral systems, political systems, economic systems, religions, and the like. I do not seek to describe the actions of animals, unthinking objects, computers, or any other entity that doesn't meet my human-centric definition of self-consciousness.

Namely:
All these systems humans follow hold two opposing but also reinforces forces: power and principles.

Power is both creative and destructive. It gives us drive and is tested in the forge that is reality. Thus it changes as the world changes, for the power of a cave man is not the power of a modern human. It can be internal: sharpness of mind, force of will or strength of body. It can be external: weapons, money, technology, God or gods. It can even be a fundamental rejection of the world and a realization of some truer plane.

Principles are rules, conscious or unconscious. They are restrictions on the means we can employ. They are not goals in and of themselves, except that some goals deny us certain means or demand we use others. They are law, the golden rule, cultural mandates, and the like.

Both of these aspects are necessary. Moreover in an effective system they both must be balanced. Power needs the channel of principle or it will become corrupted: see absolute power or hedonism. Principles alone will lack the ability to achieve their goals or they will stagnate without the renewal of power.

As you get into complex economic or political systems the model can be applied, but complex systems will often have multiple sub-systems that need to check and mutually reinforce one another.

So here are my contentions:

1. This model is quite helpful in understanding what makes an effective system.
   
2. This model can be applied to any of the systems I've described above.
   
3. This model can not be simplified to contain only a single force and it need not be expanded to contain three or more.
   
4. This model is a better window for understanding these systems than other dichotomies: individual/society; order/chaos; good/evil; good/bad; rationality/emotion.
   
5. Any effective system must have both of these aspects and they both must be strong forces in and of themselves.
   

So, I need a quick nap and I'm also smug, so I'll skip the examples for now. I invite anyone to challenge any of my contentions or any other contentions they think are implied. And if you provide me a system, I'll give my breakdown.

Addendum due to Ard's threat of violence. (Note, there's lots of variety, I'll just go with a common one I think of.)

System	Power	Principles
Christianity (old school)	God	Strict code of sacrifice and golden rule.
Buddhism	Enlightenment/Seeing through illusion of reality	Rejecting atachment.
Capitalism	Self-interest; hard work; competition; entrepeneurship	Basic market rules: no violence, no monopolies, etc.
Theoretical communism	Hard work; power in the hand of the workers; collective effort	Work all you can; don't take more than you need.
Totalitarianism	Centralized power without restrictions; government can guide colleective energy of entire society; shaping of individuals to best serve countries need	Unquestioning devotion to leader; leader servers interest of people
Democracy	Power is in people's hand	Must accept results of elections; follow election rules; majority must try to serve interests of all
Utilitarianism	All means are available when appropriate	Means/ends together must server greater good
Natural law	Core desires and needs of humanity	Don't infringe on other's core needs in most cases
Kantian	Moral strength; positive example influences others	Don't do anything that you aren't willing to have someone else do
Nihilism	Rejection of no-win world	Don't give a shit.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You have declared that every system is about the balance of two things. You have defined those two things. You have given the vaguest of statements about how they interact. You have made a few random contentions, which all boil down to "this model rocks" rather than explaining or justifying the model itself.

I'd say that until and unless you explain a good deal further, you can't claim to have come up with much of anything.

At best, this system as presented provides little more than a self-evident truth that is not useful for any further analysis. "Behaviours follow principles. Actions require some form of power."

I can take this, look at, for example, military actions of the Soviet Union, and say, "Well, uh, yes, there was power. And, okay, there seem to have probably been some principles at work." And then what? Well, I can't look at types of power or types of principles, since you insist that your model requires no further subdivision. I suppose the only thing it allows is for me to hazard that the ratio of power to principles is off, or possibly that they aren't interacting properly, but I'd question whether either of these statements is useful or even correct, if we continue to deal only at the general level of "power" and "principles" and not, say, good/evil, moral/ethical, individual/society, rational/emotional, or any of the other dichotomies you dismiss as inferior to yours.

Nicolas

[grysar.livejournal.com]

Damn it, lost what I was going to write.

Short version:
When i have ideas I like, I tend to try to draw attacks to clarify my thinking. Off your attack, I'm realizing that I really need to define the problem I'm trying to answer.

Maybe I'm getting at the nature of power and why it corrupts, or how power interacts with moral systems. I'm also objecting to systems that reject power or that hold that principles are just ways the weak control the strong or vice versa. I'll post when I've got more.