How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free

Those critiques are necessary and valid and healthy, but only in the realm of professional discourse. As they leaked out they lost all context and contingency and infused our culture with an unhealthy distrust and skepticism of the legitimacy of scientific claims and techniques.

The concept of regulatory capture has been co-opted by conservatives as an excuse to oppose any sort of government regulation, even though the theory of regulatory capture doesn't make specific claims about the benefit or value or appropriateness of regulation. That concept is not as widely known popularly but still very widely abused far outside the academic realm. It's increasingly being adopted by liberals to unfairly criticize sensible cooperation between regulatory agencies and private business.

The Laffer Curve is similar that way, except that absurdly Arthur Laffer was the first person to claim (and continues to claim) the concept proves things it doesn't.

On the liberal side we can look at trigger warnings and micro-aggressions. The original academic debates that coined those terms were, IMO, quite legitimate and important. In 2017 is it really controversial to think that we might want to give some thought to people suffering from PTSD, such as when discussing rape in the presence of possibly unknown rape victims still feeling victimized. And the concept of micro-aggression is genius. It finally gave us a concrete, if limited, framework for discussing and addressing many of the subtle ways that our inherent cultural biases prejudice and harm people. But both ideas were co-opted and prematurely expanded and radically applied by an overly eager student movement.

There are countless others, too. They abound everywhere. Every editorial article floweths over with inappropriate citations to complex academic theories. It's like the popular psychology fad of the 1950s ballooned to encompass every field, and we all have the fever. We're all pseudo-scientists, now, credentialed to apply scientific theory, and defend ourselves with scientific theory, however we see fit. It's not new. Social darwinism is a classic example of the abuse of science by both scientists and laymen. It just seems more common and more pervasive.

Maybe I'm mistaken in thinking that the pace of radicalism was slower earlier last century and in times prior. Part of the reason I think that is because college attendance rates are way up, which I think implies that a large portion of society has been exposed to more radical and more highly technical ideas. And like the advent of cheap sugar, we've developed a taste for new, sweet ideas that's messing with our political chemistry. But maybe that's also a poor assumption, not to mention a poor analogy.

Liberal economic theory says that there's no such thing as intrinsic economic value. See Diamond Fallacy. Optimal price signaling through a free market would be a necessary corollary. (And I think the Halting Problem could be used to prove that.)

Neither seem right to me, but Marxism definitely seems far more wrong. Nonetheless, concepts like dignity and justice wouldn't exist if labor and other activities didn't have some kind of intrinsic value, however indefinite or indeterminable. The vast majority of people in capitalist societies, especially those in ultra capitalist societies, and particularly Americans, believe in an intrinsic worth to labor. And human concepts such as dignity, justice, and "the value of human life" exist precisely to define what we perceive as intrinsic value. And perhaps that's what democracy is about--a hack bolted onto free market capitalism to aggregate (in a very poor manner) our normative assessments of different kinds of intrinsic values, and to pay those costs more optimally than capitalism alone could manage.

Marxism has nice slogans, but very little attention is given to the details of what is the value of good quality paper clips or whatever.

The assumption of perfect knowledge and that wise central planners can beat bottom up and local knowledge is wrong. It's interesting what a common assumption it is too. Even though government and large organisation inefficiency is often remarked about.

This is contradiction.

> Eastern philosophy isn't abstract speculation, similar to theology? Why?

Due to its goal and its method. The goal was to find the ultimate reality, as they call it. The method was of removing nonsense, not pilling up more abstract concepts. A recursive process of reaching the ultimate base case, if you wish.

The culmination is, arguably, the Upanishads and to some extent Advaita Vedanta and the Buddhist philosophy of mind. For its time it was remarkable achievements and for the most parts in its fundamental principles it still does not have a contradiction with the principles confirmed by the findings of the classic sciences.

But the limitation I was specifically referring too was that suicide isn't like other personal choices because your body and mind act in concert against self-agency. And thank goodness that they do, but the point is that like infants we're trapped in an environment that is constitutionally hostile to any capacity for killing ourselves.

I do agree that a cowardly choice is still a choice, and that existentialism doesn't preclude seeing suicide as cowardly. But what does cowardly mean? Why might it be relevant to questions of freedom? And if relevant, how? Those are big question that hint at 1) another aspect to our rationality and self-agency, namely how they're culturally informed and intertwined with considerations of others' opinions, desires, and needs; and more generally 2) that a definition of freedom implicates other questions about the source and function of morality wrt rationality and agency.

I don't think existentialism is particularly concerned with those questions. They're not really within it's ambit. Camus and Sartre had different, even contradictory, moral philosophies even though both were authentically existentialist.