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Comment by spyrosg | Hacker News Reader

People who like thinking seem to overestimate the power of ideas in shaping the world. My interpretation is that it's probably the typical arrogance of the intellectual letting itself through.

For example, there are arguments that the renaissance was a result of the social and economic conditions created by the black death, not the intention of any human actor. The post-WW2 social wellness a result precisely of the war, and so on.

Not everybody agrees on what "improve mankind and society" should mean, so you're back to either submitting to a common concept of objective truth, where the "bad" but realistic model wins, or political arm wrestling for your ideas to win against the other's (on the basis of faith if you're in the middle ages, or whim if you're a postmodernist).

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>People who like thinking seem to overestimate the power of ideas in shaping the world. My interpretation is that it's probably the typical arrogance of the intellectual letting itself through.

This was not about ideas -- it's was about viewpoint, which has enormous impact in shaping the world.

>For example, there are arguments that the renaissance was a result of the social and economic conditions created by the black death, not the intention of any human actor.

Well, there were other periods similar to the renaissance throughout history, periods not affected by the black death. E.g. the rise of ancient Greece city states (from the so-called "middle ages" of pre-historic antiquity), or the rise of the islamic culture.

And even if the black death was a major factor of change, the way the change took shape is all ideas and viewpoints.

In fact a common argument is that the renaissance was indeed a response to the conditions created by the black death, but the mechanism of change was a change in viewpoints ("let's celebrate life", etc).

What seperates ideas from viewpoints essentially? I would guess largely how they dearly they are held. Another factor was what it did to existing ones. It undermined authority in both economic/balance of power sense and in "claim to being right". The church could not save them no matter how much they prayed nor how saintly their lifestyle. Nobility could not protect them - nor even themselves. It wasn't an enemy to be faced by big budgetted knights riding out to slay those who raid and pillage. It left a vacuum for growth of other forces while the society had not collapsed.

It had an interesting cultural remnant so embedded that nobody notices it - desensitization to skeletons. Nobody reacts to skeletons in an elementary school classroom or doctors office in the west.

Yet Chinese variants of video games widely censor their apperances despite other brutality. One in a moba notably changes a spell icons from skeletons to a tortured bald man - more graphic to us but not them. China does have their own hangups but it highlights how weird it is fundamentally that we are okay with dead bodies reduced to their very core and reassembled. Keep preserved other internal organs around small children and people would ask what is wrong with you. The unacceptable ethics in sourcing were the main driver for the switch to plastic if I recall correctly. Cheaper now but they started when the fine details were more expensive and at risk of being less accurate.

>What seperates ideas from viewpoints essentially?

I used the first to refer to general abstract theories (marxism etc) and the second to refer to more concrete ways of viewing the world that people share / adopt etc.

In the 60s for example there were several abstract theories about this and that, but also a shared viewpoint about the need of change, revolution, etc

I'll keep amalgamating viewpoints and ideas, as I don't see the usefulness of the distinction so far.

As you say, for the renaissance, the change in viewpoints were caused by the conditions of the time. The power of social change ultimately lies in big changes in the physical world, not in civilised humans and their thinking and arguing.

As I mentioned, that last idea seems to me to be just a covert way to pretend we have any control, when we are actually rather effete and incapable of shaping the world into what we'd like.

You mentioned the western revolutionary sentiment of the sixties in another answer. If you believe Strauss and Howe (http://www.fourthturning.com/), they didn't have a choice. That generation believed whatever humans believe when they are put into the conditions they were in, repeating a pattern with little self-consciousness.

edit: the power of change -> the power of social change

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