conflict theory

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 15 Sep 2023 11:05
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    • Conflict vs Mistake is a one of those SlateStarCodex pieces that, regardless of whatever problems I have with it, has become foundational to my own discourse as well as that of the Rationalist community. (His Meditations on Moloch is another and there are probably others). It inspired me to write a couple of long blog posts. Scott's a powerful and subtle thinker, and it was an interesting exercise trying to figure out just where he goes wrong; where I find myself pulling in a different direction.
    • The dichotomy he set up still resonates; I find myself more noticing conflict as such and my attitudes toward it. Something in me likes to pick fights; for better or worse, even if peaceful cooperation is obviously better.
    • Conflict theorists

      • Heraclitus

        • War is the father of us all and our king. War discloses who is godlike and who is but a man, who is a slave and who is a freeman.
        • It must be seen clearly that war is the natural state of man. Justice is contention. Through contention all things come to be.
          • – tr Davenport
      • Judge Holden Blood Meridian

        • The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. (p 260).
      • Murray White Noise

        • "I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions."
      • William Blake

        • Without Contraries is no progression Opposition is True Friendship
          • – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
      • Bruno Latour

        • Forces that ally themselves in the course of a trial are said to be durable. Each entelechy generates times for others by allying with or betraying them. "Time" arises at the end of this game, a game in which most lose what they have staked.
        • Nothing escapes the primordial trials. Before negotiation we have no idea what kind of trials there will be-whether they can be thought of as conflict, game, love, history, economy, or life.
        • There is no natural end to such controversies.They may always be reopened. The only way to close them is to stop other actants from leading those that have been enrolled astray and turning them into traitors. In the end, interpretations are always stabilized by an array of forces.
          • Irreductions
      • Walter Ong
        • (in Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness)
          • Contest is part of human life everywhere that human life is found. In war and in games, in work and in play, physically, intellectually, and morally human beings match themselves against one another....Context is one kind of adversativeness, if we understand adversativeness in the ordinary large sense of a relationship in which beings are set against or act against one another.
          • In Egypt a few years ago I met an itinerant self-styled "conflict engineer"...
      • Chantal Mouffe

        • In this book, we argued that two key concepts – ‘antagonism’ and ‘hegemony’ – are necessary to grasp the nature of the political. Both pointed to the importance of acknowledging the dimension of radical negativity that manifests itself in the ever-present possibility of antagonism.
          • The first part of this makes sense; but I have no idea what "radical negativity" is pointing to.
        • This dimension, we proposed, impedes the full totalization of society and forecloses the possibility of a society beyond division and power.
          • "full totalization of society" does not exactly make me kvell with enthusiasm. Have a feeling I am eavesdropping at a meeting of serious Marxists and I obviously don't belong there.
      • Fascists
        • War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it.
      • Charles Peirce

        • A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist.
          • Quoted by Ong
      • Stewart Brand (very sort of)

        • I vaguely remember a quote from him, something about how peace would never replace war because "conflict was too interesting". Not his most original thought, but it made an impression on me when I first came across it. Oddly I always think of him as the one sixties figure who was too smart to engage in the political conflicts of the time, preferring instead to map out creative alternatives.
    • Anticonflict theorists

      • SSC and Rationalists

        • have problems with conflict and politics. I've picked this apart elsewhere; but to put them in the best light, it's the attitude that most conflict is a tragically unnecessary waste, and if people were just smarter they could find better ways to solve their problems.
        • I'm no doubt overgeneralizing and oversimplifying, but it strikes me that your basic rationalist is perfectly fine with conflict in play, or games, or competition in a market economy. They don't like the existential to-the-death conflict of war, for obviously sensible reasons. And they don't like politics because it is too close to war.
      • Venkatesh Rao (sort of)

        • His Internet of Beefs is not exactly anticonflict, but it seems to have a somewhat jaundiced view of the tendency:
          • The mark of a knight of the vast round table of the Internet of Beefs is the relentless pursuit of the Holy Grift. A mercantile mission for the end of history.