Author: Alexander Blum

Democratic Socialism or Social Democracy?

Published by Alexander Blum

Back in August, Jacobin journalist Meagan Day declared that “democratic socialists want to end capitalism.” The subtitle of her article in Vox explaining the movement explicitly stated: “It’s not just New Deal liberalism.” There is some disagreement about this on the Left. Kyle Kulinski, an independent media commentator and co-founder of the Justice Democrats, supports democratic socialist candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Justice Democrats endorse a myriad of candidates who do not take large donor capital, many of them sharing endorsement with the DSA. Nevertheless, Kulinski rejects the “post-capitalist” approach to democratic socialism, and holds that “so many people now describe themselves as ‘democratic socialists’ and they do not support a post-capitalist philosophy. In the clip above, Kulinski argues that there is a fundamental confusion of labels—politicians whose policies are entirely in line with Nordic social democracy are defining themselves as democratic socialists. He places the blame for this confusion on Bernie Sanders, who, despite a career of never praising actual socialism, has been lumped in with Venezuela and a post-capitalist ideology. If Bernie had labelled himself correctly, Kulinski …

Religions, Nations, and Other Useful Fictions

Published by Alexander Blum

In the age of Neo-Darwinian synthesis between natural selection and Mendelian genetics, it appears increasingly impossible to give credence to any idea metaphysical, spiritual, or religious. The dualism of Rene Descartes—a world reduced to machinery and a separate soul, to “measure and number” combined with Christian theology—was the origin of our modern worldview. But it has been entirely exorcised, emptied of soul and Christianity, respecting only the machine underneath. It has become common sense to consider the human subject as little more than a machine, or a computer. Subjectivity itself is a curse, expelled by theories in the philosophy of mind such as Daniel Dennett’s inclination to consider consciousness itself “an illusion.” Sam Harris has said that “consciousness is the only thing that cannot possibly be an illusion.” Harris is right, but Dennett understands more clearly the stakes for materialist philosophy. As the world grows more mechanical, religious inclination is produced from the merciless rack of empiricism and positivism. New ways of contextualizing religious belief have emerged from the tradition of Christian existentialism, which dates …

Why Jordan B Peterson Appeals to Me (And I Am on the Left)

Published by Alexander Blum

As a writer who identifies as a leftist, and who sympathizes with Noam Chomsky’s anarcho-syndicalism on a root personal level, I should theoretically be joining the chorus of critics who have decided that Jordan Peterson is a reactionary. In fact, Jordan Peterson has plenty of followers on the left, but watching the media climate surrounding his book release, you’d think he appeals only to the most reactionary, hyper-masculine discontents of the modern world. To be fair to the journalists, it is true that there are two Jordan Petersons. There is the lecturer, who juxtaposes mythological and religious themes with psychology and evolutionary biology, presenting a synthesis of science and religion, and then there is the social media culture warrior. Watching Peterson’s lectures versus watching snippets of him online, in recent interviews, you are watching two different men. It’s what the digital era does to people – it fragments them. Hundreds of hours of brilliant speeches are to be judged based on a few soundbites on Mic or Vice, or whatever dense abstractions can be made …

The Failed Hero’s Journey

Published by Alexander Blum

There is no more quintessential a model of the failed hero than Elliot Rodger. Rodger, a young man who was promised the world, turned against it when it failed to provide him with eros, love, and romance. His open hand reaching for the future became a fist clenched in opposition, an inversion of the successful hero story. Consumed with jealousy, resentment, and a rejection of the very notion of a healthy human being, Rodger indiscriminately murdered three men in his apartment, and three women at a sorority house. At twenty-two years old, he had chosen to end his life in bitter disappointment, choosing malevolent violence and suicide over the hope of continual and incremental improvement. Carl Jung understood that those who ultimately reject life itself have failed to experience the archetypal ‘hero’s journey’. To Jung, every single young person who leaves their parents’ home and forages into the world has taken the path of the hero, whether they know it or not. A hero’s journey is simply the departure from comfort, warring against the chaos …

Free Speech Leftists Still Exist

Published by Alexander Blum

In brighter times, the reprimanding of Lindsay Shepherd at Wilfrid Laurier University would have found strong condemnation among left intellectuals. Instead, left publications largely chose to ignore the issue. You will find no pieces on Vox covering Wilfrid Laurier or Bret Weinstein’s clash with overreaching faculty at Evergreen, nor will the incrimination of BDS activism by US lawmakers find exposure outside of niche outlets like The Intercept. The free speech debate, in other words, has become too partisan. When Lindsay Shepherd revealed that Jordan Peterson’s fears about Bill C16 were well-founded, and that pointing out that sex differences exist was considered by Wilfrid Laurier’s administration to be comparable to Adolf Hitler, the response of left publications was either disinterest or full-throated attacks on Peterson as a reactionary monster. If one sought to hear out Lindsay Shepherd, the outlets willing to speak with her were mainly conservative or libertarian YouTube channels belonging to figures like Stephen Crowder and Stefan Molyneux. The perception, understandably, follows that the right is in favor of free expression, and the left has become wholly illiberal. But the hyper-partisan atmosphere …

Using the Blockchain to Fight Corruption

Published by Alexander Blum

The Blockchain Trust Accelerator Initiative, according to cofounder Tomicah Tillemann, has a plan to increase voter turnout and make election tampering impossible. A decentralized record of all votes cast in any election could be kept on blockchain ledgers, which cannot be altered or changed without leaving obvious traces of tampering across the entire ‘chain’. If votes are cast via smartphone, creating new blocks as thousands of votes pour in and are permanently recorded, then all the chaos of making it to a polling place, and hoping that your vote is actually counted, vanish entirely. In Myanmar and Indonesia, companies are using blockchain to eliminate high-level bribery and corruption – all financial transactions would be preserved on public ledgers of chains of information blocks, and subject to public scrutiny. Blockchain technology has the power to render the dealings of businesses and nation states into open books, purged of secrecy and the privacy of elite cabals. Microsoft and Accenture are already working on a blockchain system that would contain the fingerprints of refugees, to create a trans-national digital record of their existence that is as accessible to Turkey as it …

American Centrism Has Failed

Published by Alexander Blum

Editor’s note: this essay is part of an ongoing series hosted by Quillette debating the merits and spirit of centrism. If you would like to contribute or respond to this essay or others in the series, please send a submission to pitch@quillette.com. The American political centre, which supported Hillary Clinton and rejected all arguments of her corruption, was hit last week hit with a political blow that, in ordinary times, would be a scandal capable of unwinding the entire Democratic Party. Donna Brazile, the former chairperson of the DNC, blew the whistle on the primary process a year and a half too late, telling many Sanders supporters exactly what they had suspected – that the Clinton campaign had been running the DNC since 2015. When Elizabeth Warren flatly stated on CNN that the primary was ‘rigged’, any notion of centrist unity around Hillary Clinton fell apart. Consider the two politicians who have arguably received the most disdain from Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton and John McCain. What do they have in common? Despite being supposed partisan rivals, they …

Jung and the Trumpian Shadow

Published by Alexander Blum

Carl Jung was done a disservice by the sanitized spirituality of the New Age movement. Jungian archetypes were shoved into the same bucket as the zodiac, astrology, and healing crystals, lost in the blur of wishful thinking that had captured the late 1960s and 1970s and its desire to create a better society out of love and mercy alone. But the short-lived optimism of the sexual revolution and the hippie movement meant its demise in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration saw the rebels hang up their flowers and instead don suits, taking to Madison Avenue and extinguishing the flame of creative renaissance that wanted so badly to break free from the Cold War West. Perhaps there is some parallel here with the Obama years culminating in the election of Donald Trump. During the Obama Presidency, American progressives became pacified, trading economic arguments for cultural dissatisfaction, forsaking the ideas of the New Deal for an emotional and ideological clamp upon the unconscious forces of racism and sexism. There was a pervasive sense that history had …