Brive1987 wrote:Kirb is a liberal identitarian. He firmly believes you can package up general principles that formed 200 years ago in a specific environment, in response to specific cultural pressures and out of a specific cultural worldview. Further he believed these ideas can coexist with other world views formed within a very different context. Because the enlightenment values are wonderfully general and objectively “true” or something. This colours his input. In quite the zealous fashion.
Values can't be true or false, Sam Harris is wrong about this. This doesn't mean that we can't take a look at which values produce the best outcomes.
The Enlightenment/modern/liberal democratic values just happen to work better than any other thing that's been tried. Out of the 30 countries with highest Human Development Indexes, 28 are liberal democracies. Out of the top 50, 43 are liberal democracies.
The other are oil-rich theocracies, which are rich countries but stifle innovation and are pretty much condemned to oblivion if oil will be no longer a commodity, the increasingly dysfunctional Russia (plagued by alcoholism so much so that its life expectancy is plummeting), and Singapore (the exception that proves the rule).
Countries that have become more liberal and more democratic, like Mauritius and Bostwana, have experienced economic growth and massive improvements in their standards of living, while countries with similar cultures but different political regimes have fallen hard, like Zimbabwe.
Just compare North Korea to South Korea, or East Germany to West Germany. There were little cultural differences between North Koreans and South Koreans, or East and West Germans
BEFORE their countries were split on largely arbitrary bases. But the liberal democracies prospered and thrived, while the authoritarian dictatorships either collapsed or have turned into a hellhole.
The largest amount of cutting edge scientific research is done in liberal democracies: China is pretty much the only exception. Liberal democracies get the most scientific Nobel prizes.
The longest life expectancies, lower rates of childhood mortality, highest rates of literacy, lowest rates of violent crimes are found in liberal democracies. European social democracies and Australia, Canada and New Zealand (all three liberal democracies with a far larger social spending than the US) are especially good at these stats.
Then there's peace. European nations were constantly fighting for centuries when they were kingdoms, and fought two incredibly violent wars back when many of them were authoritarian empires first, and fascist dictatorships later. Germany tried TWICE to take over Europe by force, once as an empire, the second time as a fascist regime. Today Germany is a peaceful, prosperous liberal democracy, and the idea of a war between France and Germany, or Britain and Germany, is laughable.
All the utopian political systems of the 20th century have turned into shitholes. Fascist states like Spain or Greece stagnated before crumbling. Every single communist experiment has gone bad in a spectacular fashion, with no exception. People escaped from the communist lands to liberal democracies, just like today they escape from the authoritarian clusterfucks.
Are liberal democracies perfect? Of course not, there's no such thing as perfection. Do they require maintenance and reforms? Of course. Everything does. But they're far better than any other alternative that has been tried.
So yes, the world would be a better place if all countries were liberal democracies, and we should try to find ways to promote liberal democratic principles, even if it's not going to easy, and it's going to take time, effort, dedication.
