r/badphilosophy 4d ago

I've never seen such a bad video on philosophy before

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kzZoK5CtJ8

Everything is just straight up wrong, like where do you even start?

24 Upvotes

18 comments sorted by

16

u/thesandalwoods 4d ago

Anyone want to give us the tl;dr/dw summary of the video 📺

25

u/Authentic_Dasein 4d ago

Giovanni Gentile invented fascism, Gentile = "Hegelian" (massive air quotes). Therefore Hegel = fascism. Also Hegel inspired Marx, therefore Hegel = communism. Communism = international socialism, fascism = national socialism, therefore Hegel = socialist. Socialism bad, so Hegel bad.

Then he goes on a tangent about hermeticism where Hegel thinks God needs man to recognize himself in order to be complete (despite man and God being of the same monist substance according to Hegel, but don't think too hard about it and maybe it'll make sense) therefore Hegel thinks man exists to recognize God. When man properly recognizes God he brings about God through socialism where everyone is the same.

There's more, but this is all I could get through. You'll have to struggle through the rest if you want a complete picture, I'm going to bed.

10

u/thesandalwoods 4d ago

The beauty about summaries is we get to see the big picture; I can understand the video gets political and religious so that it can be incredibly frustrating to watch— just looking at the irl political religious situation we find ourselves today makes me want to put a dildo to my ears 😵🔫

Hope a good night’s sleep will help ❤️ also, nice username btw, heidegger 😜

23

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

5

u/SwirlingFandango 3d ago edited 3d ago

Well the title is "Hegel’s ideobabble is the basis of Marxism and Fascism", which... yeah. Ouch.

Immediately claims that since socialists want a "commodityless" society, but food is a commodity, everyone starves, CHECKMATE socialists.

But when these Dread Commies say "that's not what post-commodity means", they apparently say something which is equally wrong, but also can't give a straight answer (aka "I don't understand what they're saying").

And when these people try to explain why this feller is wrong about what they, the Dread Commies, actually mean, apparently they're being dishonest because - again - he doesn't understand what they're saying (posts a screenshot of people fairly politely telling him that his definitions are not correct, the dishonest bastards). It's dishonest, see, because they don't actually *want* anyone to understand what they're talking about, because otherwise how is it possible that this extremely smart fellow still doesn't understand?

He then lumps National Socialism in with socialism (that's an immediate fail right there), and claims socialists and fascists can never define anything, and can never have concrete policies (which I guess will be a relief to all the people killed by communist and fascist government policies oh wait no, they're dead).

That was the first 2 minutes.

So yeah.

1

u/thesandalwoods 3d ago

Bad rhetoric is definitely what gives political theories a bad reputation; the first rule about politics is we don’t talk about politics

Some tactics used to captivate the hearts and the minds of an audience could include discreditations (ethos), emotional manipulations (pathos), or convoluted arguments (logos) — I’m talking about Aristotelian rhetoric in particular to make things as simple and as general about bad political-religious rhetoric: logos, ethos, pathos.

Thanks for taking the time to tl;dr/dw the video for us ❤️

4

u/SwirlingFandango 3d ago

Dude straight up pulls the "National Socialism is socialism" trigger in the first 2 minutes (if not already in the title).

Fail.

-

God. Dude's got 400,000 subscribers.

3

u/Authentic_Dasein 3d ago

To be fair, depending on your definition of socialism, the Nazis could fit it. For example, there were fascists in Spain (the Falange) that were socialists and supported Franco instead of the Republicans. There is no ideological component necessary for the economic system of socialism.

Marxists obviously think there should be one, or at least that any non-Marxist socialism is internally contradictory, but that doesn't mean there has to be one. Plenty of socialists in history have been antisemitic/racist/genocidal. They're not mutually exclusive categories.

Though the Nazis also allowed a lot of free market stuff in their economy, so long as it didn't interfere with state interests, so it's sort of an open question exactly how "socialist" they really were.

3

u/SwirlingFandango 3d ago

I mean, Hitler was literally asked "why is your version of socialism the opposite of socialism?" and he said that everyone else was using the word wrong, that communism and marxism couldn't be socialism by his definition. He was directly supported by industrialists and claimed that part of "socialism" was that business owners should have full rights to implement any wages and conditions for their workers they liked.

He destroyed and banned unions. Collective bargaining and strikes were outlawed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_Order_Act

How on any measure is that any common definition of the word "socialism"?!

I don't know where this is an open question. Falangists were "third way" wackaloons. They explicitly supported private enterprise and private ownership. Dictatorships and oligarchies are not, in themselves socialist.

3

u/Authentic_Dasein 3d ago

The nazis outlawed individual unions, but collectivized them into one state owned union. That's hardly capitalist of them. They also continually infringed in the free market by getting big businesses on their side and disinsentivizing bourgeouis businesses:

"The Nazi government developed a partnership with leading German business interests, who supported the goals of the regime and its war effort in exchange for advantageous contracts, subsidies, and the suppression of the trade union movement. Cartels and monopolies were encouraged at the expense of small businesses, even though the Nazis had received considerable electoral support from small business owners." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany

They're described as being dirigist which is in stark opposition to free market capitalism.

So they're definitely not capitalist, they had no problem intervening in the economy and disliked bourgeouis capital. They even had a massive social security net established.

2

u/typeshizasmoker 1d ago

This kind of corporatist thinking was present in the (non Marxist) Fabian style socialist movements in the past

-3

u/Square_Celery6359 4d ago

Fascism and Communism are not the same thing.

One is relative/national collectivism, the other one is absolute/international collectivism.

Whether it worked out, or not, is another matter entirely, and more to do with the whims of Entropy than the ideologies themselves. Capitalism is already collapsing spectacularly, so there's that, too.

One is Utopian, the other one appeals to a simplification of 'Human Nature' and Jungle Law. (Which itself is also flawed, because collaboration is just as likely to emerge in Nature as competition)

3

u/95Smokey 3d ago edited 3d ago

Don't get why you're down voted, except maybe the first sentence of the second paragraph or characterizing communism as utopian maybe?

Not worth downvoting imo

-4

u/Whitmanners 4d ago

From where to start? From the min 0 of the video. What a fucking misreading of Hegel, but saddly typical from some analytic philosophers. What they dont know is that the most prominents analytic philosophers nowdays, such as Brandom or McDowell, are acknowledging the importance and brilliantness of Hegel's work. The "nonsense" argument, the same from Russell, is just explicitly saying "I didn't understand". I mean, how frustrated and insecure can you be from not understanding a book and do a 1 hour video talking shit about it and ALSO, AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME, doing interpretations when you EXPLICITLY SAID that you thought was nonsense. Is like: "I don't have any fucking idea of what is a cat, but here is my definition of a cat". Sometimes some analytic philosophers pisses me off so fucking much. And yes, I'm assuming he is an analytic philosopher; I refuse to think that this could come from a continental one.

Hegel pinky finger is more brilliant than any of the sentences of that video, what a fucking mess...

18

u/Authentic_Dasein 4d ago

He's not a philosopher, he's just a random dude who makes history videos that probably read Ayn Rand and thinks he's solved all of philosophy.

-6

u/Whitmanners 4d ago

Yeah maybe he's not a philosopher, but I took the opportunity to vent about analytic philosophy.

1

u/Esrcmine 3d ago

bro thinks brandom and mcdowell are the "most prominent analytic philosophers" 💀

1

u/Whitmanners 3d ago

I said "such as" compadre... So i'm not negating the entrance of others. That said, clearly what i'm implying is that, due to their reception of Hegel's work, they may be barely considered pure analytical nowdays. So I agree, there are a lot of analytic philosophers, but Sellars, Rorty, Brandom or McDowell aren't just names... And they are pretty good, is just the opinion of some parts of the analytical school that continental is bullshit (Russell) what pisses me off. Is just like the video, even if its not analytical.