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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				
User ID: 342


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Primaprimaprima


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

				
				
				

				

					2 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC
				


				
					

					
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 342


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you for posting this, I really appreciate it.


Personally if I was in charge and there was a mod decision that required a subjective judgement call, I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum.  I especially value posters like @guesswho who have alternative viewpoints on the "classic" culture war topics.  It makes these discussions a lot more interesting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Can I ask what your background in philosophy is?




I'm just an avid reader, nothing special.




How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?




It wasn't supposed to be a summary of Freud's ideas at all.  It was my own response to your claim that psychoanalysis should be dismissed because it has no "testable theories or experimental controls".  Nothing more.




At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.




Well yes, but that's basically what psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners do.  They read the theory and they think "yes, I do feel that this applies to my own cognitive processes and I find it to be illuminating for me".  It couldn't have survived for this long if people didn't find something compelling in it.




I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell.




I agree that this is a possible failure mode when you start to invoke the notion of an unconscious.  There's a risk of becoming too dogmatic if you're not sufficiently open to the possibility of falsification.  Certainly.


But are we just going to pretend that unacknowledged ulterior motives don't exist?  Certainly not!  It's pretty clear to me that they do exist!  Sometimes it feels like that's all political debates boil down to - accusations that the other side only claims to support X for principled moral reasons, when actually they just support it for their own self interest.  Should we just immediately dismiss all accusations of that sort?  I don't think so.  They should at least be given a fair hearing.  I think it's obvious that sometimes people are not entirely honest with others, and sometimes they're not entirely honest with themselves either.  You don't need a fancy theory to see that.


Sociological and political debates couldn't get anywhere if we weren't allowed to speculate about the unobserved mental states of other people.  Psychoanalysis is hardly doing anything too different from the average Motte thread, which is replete with speculation about what leftists and rightists "really think".


It's also worth mentioning that Lacanian clinical practice has this conception of the psychoanalyst as "the subject supposed to know" - key word being supposed to, as in a supposition, but that supposition ultimately turns out to be mistaken.  One of the central goals of Lacanian analysis is for the patient to come to realize the ways in which the therapist too is ignorant:




This mystery is in the last resort the mystery of the transference itself: to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other. That’s the logic of the “subject assumed to know” which was isolated by Lacan as the central axis, or stronghold, of the phenomenon of transference. The analyst is in advance assumed to know – what? The meaning of the analysand’s symptoms. This knowledge is of course an illusion, but it is a necessary one: it is only through this supposition of knowledge that, at the end, some real knowledge can be produced.




(Lacan is not Freud of course, but he's been central for the reception of Freud's ideas in the humanities since the mid 20th century.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.




I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy.  You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx.  But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way.  There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them.  It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!


Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic".  Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy.  So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I meant SS's top level post and all its replies, most of which are directly related to Holocaust discussion, not just this particular sub-thread where we're discussing meta issues.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


because I don't feel excited, but think it's probably the right thing to do, and that I will probably be glad to have a son later on, I hope.




Did you want a daughter instead?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sure, that could be the case. It’s not my preferred theory, but I won’t rule it out.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:






Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.






It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern feminist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.




This doesn't sit right with me.


Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers.  It's simple supply and demand.  Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap.  The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope.  Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task.  Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding.  Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives.  If you can't do the same, that's on you.


Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course.  If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc.  Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are.  If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The process being mostly meritocratic is a necessary but not sufficient condition to sell the surrounding story.




I agree with this. All of the factors have some weight, it’s not just one or the other.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Usually the respondents to his posts pull out a sentence or two and run with it




I don't think this is a bad thing.  I think this is a good way of interacting with long posts (so people are able to respond to mega essays without feeling obligated to respond with a mega essay of their own) and it can lead to a lot of productive and interesting discussion.  Like, on Kulak's recent post not many of the replies directly addressed Kulak's actual thesis, they just used it as a discussion prompt for sharing whatever thoughts they had on India.  I think threads like that are healthy for the forum.


That being said, this particular post did a poor job of explaining to me why I should be interested in FIRST or hyperdunbarism (although admittedly this topic is far outside of my normal wheelhouse to begin with).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I misspoke.  That was a poor way of phrasing it.


I agree that people do make things up sometimes, although I'd note that an intentional lie as an attack against a designated enemy is different from "scapegoating".


It's mainly in the context of inter-ethnic conflicts that I'm particularly suspicious of the idea of "scapegoating", because the contemporary intelligentsia is structurally incapable of acknowledging that such conflicts might be grounded in genuine concerns (unless it's the concerns of a party who has already been given a privileged position in the oppression stack).  Sometimes, group A doesn't like group B because group B really just did something to piss them off.  But acknowledging this, instead of blaming it on misrecognition, irrational fear, and the nebulous force of racism, opens the door to justifying racism, in their minds.  So there's a tendency to engage in motivated reasoning on this issue.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What high quality posters do you think we're missing?  Feel free to PM if you think it would cause drama or something.


(imo there's really only one notable poster I can think of who's been conspicuously absent lately, other than that I think the quality is doing ok, maybe even better than it was ~6 months ago.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s already been acknowledged that longstanding posters with lots of AAQCs will be given a bit of extra wiggle room, and I would simply extend that to posters with underrepresented viewpoints as well, because the mere existence of a rare viewpoint is its own type of Quality Contribution.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't mean to keep belaboring the point here.  If you're just not interested in Freud's ideas then that's fine.  But you are psychoanalyzing Freud and you're doing exactly what you accuse psychoanalysis of doing.  You're attributing unacknowledged ulterior motivations to him, in spite of his explicit protests to the contrary (he certainly claimed to be simply following the evidence where it lead him - if you told him that psychoanalysis was just based on wishful thinking, he absolutely would have disagreed.  So would you still persist in your claim that you know his motivations better than he did?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Everyone has some kind of bone to pick with porn




...which helps confirm my original thesis that it's countercultural!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do you think people can be innately straight? I do. It’s like that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's a bit hard to write a response to this because there's already so much we agree on:


    

  • I agree that environment plays a big role and the same person is capable of going down multiple different paths.
    • 

  • I agree that without the trans-industrial-medical complex and access to hormones and SRS, far fewer people would actually try to "transition".
    • 

  • I agree that society should not be encouraging people to become trans the way it currently is (although in a general libertarian fashion I think that people should be able to elect to these medical procedures if they want to).
    • 



But I still feel like I have to take issue with the account you write here (since you posted it twice I'm assuming that you think this is basically a correct story of the etiology of transsexuality):




In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when they care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.




My understanding of your general theory is that people undergo certain formative experiences, and some people process these experiences in such a way that leads them to adopt a trans identity.  It's possible that the difference between people who process the experiences in a trans-way vs a non-trans-way is biological in nature.  Correct me if I'm wrong.


My preferred theory on the other hand is as follows: some men (I'm focusing on MTFs/autogynephiles to keep things simple) start out with some sort of natural desire/sensation that is explicitly related to gender or being trans in some way - it could be a simple desire to "become a woman", it could be bodily dysphoria, it could be a general feeling of having a more "female" brain, etc.  In the right environment, where being recognized as trans and undergoing medical transition is presented as a viable possibility, some of these men will choose to undergo transition.  That's how I would describe the biology/environment interaction here.


Crucially I think these desires/sensations are pre-reflective.  They operate at a level prior to what I would normally think of as identity formation.


I don't think that the concept of a "natural desire" is at all objectionable here.  Hopefully we can agree that the majority of men naturally experience the desire to have sex with women.  Analogously, some men naturally experience the desire to be women.  They see what the women are up to and they think "yeah, that seems like a better deal to me".  It's really quite straightforward.


I really have to insist on this point that there is something in the individual himself that points him in the direction of wanting to be a woman, rather than individuals being neutral receptacles for formative experiences and just having different "processing styles".  I don't think you can fully understand the trans phenomenon without this crucial piece of the puzzle.  To my mind it's the theory that best explains the internal phenomenology of what the desires actually feel like, as well as other aspects of the phenomenon like its surprising popularity, its cross-cultural appeal, etc.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My entire post was about how people become fans of players and choose who/what to watch for reasons other than pure competitiveness.


Good example is chess, the games that top bots play with themselves are frankly more novel and interesting on a move-by-move basis than the games played between human pros, but as far as I know no one really watches bot games recreationally. The most popular streams are for the human pro tournaments where people can see the storylines and drama.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How different does sport look if all the mangers were autist?




Who knows?  Presumably autistic people aren't all identical.  They can have a diverse range of goals and values, same as non-autistic people.




At one point he said "You could be the most talented midfielder in the country but because of manager bias, your reputation and other external factors you will never reach the higher levels."




I don't know much of anything about traditional sports, but I doubt that this is literally true.  If you're literally the best in the country then I'm sure a pro team will at least sign you.


I do watch a lot of eSports though so I can make a comparison with that.  Top players will regularly stream matches, practice sessions, and analysis sessions on twitch.  Stream views are certainly correlated with the skill of the player, but it's not a perfect 1-to-1 relationship.  Some top players get far more views (and consequently, twitch sub money) than others because they have more interesting personalities, they put more time and effort into growing their streaming presence, or other chance factors.  This is unavoidable.  Especially in the smaller games there are no "managers", it's about as close to a pure free market as you can get, and when given the choice, the revealed preference of viewers is that they care about other factors besides just raw game skill.


The streamers who make a career as full time commentators or "personalities" get even more viewers than the top players themselves, which is to be expected, because they can focus 100% of their time and energy on growing their twitch/youtube presence, instead of splitting their focus between streaming and actually learning/practicing/competing in the game in question.  So things like reputation and brand recognition can't be pinned solely on "managers", the person themselves also has to take an active role and put work into growing their reputation.




This strikes me as highly inefficient




It's a game.  Why does it have to be efficient?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sorry, I was using the royal "you" there, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was singling out you in particular.  It was a message for everybody.


Personally I enjoy meta-posting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the concept of caring about truth more than happiness is incoherent in a world without objective value, and so you really ought to cleave yourself to whichever tradition forms the greatest happiness in yourself and your loved ones.




I think that's a complex issue and the proper response varies on a case by case basis.


I will note though that I only have so much control over my beliefs.  I can't just will myself to believe that modus ponens is false, or that I don't exist, or that people can fly.  There's a give and take with what the world imposes on me by force.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat




I don't think that people really do this on a mass scale, and I've never seen an actual argument put forth for this thesis.  It seems like one of those cached thoughts that just got repeated enough until everyone believed it.


Not to say that large social groups are always infallibly correct when it comes to political beliefs either.  But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing.  When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?  I don't think that's accurate.  Their complaints are grounded in actual facts, its just that there's disagreement over the cause and interpretation of those facts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Every time you write a top level post, it's a focus on your viewpoint!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You absolutely raise valid points.  I didn't have the time to treat the issue with the nuance it deserves, so I tried to find something brief that approximates my overall view.  I do think that at some point you have to find a way to accept the things you can't change and carry on anyway.  But there are still many possible attitudes that someone might take towards HBD, and I don't want to diminish the complexity of the issue.


I do understand the feeling of group honor (racial or otherwise), and I understand how it can matter even in cases where you're not "directly" impacted as an individual.


This is the sort of thing that's best worked out in an extended dialogue with the person in question, rather than me or anyone else pontificating about how you should feel.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think people are interpreting what I said too broadly.  I'm not saying that you should have free license to break the rules just because you're a contrarian.  I'm just saying that I think it would be appropriate to give them a gentle reminder or two about the rules before the mods start escalating to warnings/bans.


In particular I've noticed a pattern where people with unpopular viewpoints are more likely to get riled up during debates, which makes sense, because when your views are unpopular it's easy to feel like everyone's out to get you.  So they're more likely to get provoked into breaking the rules on civility.  For the sake of cultivating a wide array of perspectives, which is a goal I value very highly, I think it would be appropriate to keep this in mind and extend them a small amount of leniency.


If they just seemed like a very dense poster and they weren't contributing anything except standard-issue moral outrage, then I might be slightly less lenient, but again as I already said at the beginning, it's a subjective judgement call.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields […] they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls.




Marx just has a political project / ethical vision that many people find deeply appealing.  You can say what you want about the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc, but many people will always be attached to him for political reasons.


With regards to Freud, I think you'd have to look at specific examples of contemporary work that references him and analyze how it references him, but my basic statement would be something like this:


Some of the shortcomings of psychoanalysis are not as unique or severe as they first appear.  We already tell ourselves a certain "commonsense" story about psychology, a story about a world filled with agents who have intentions and beliefs and desires and emotions.  But many of the concepts that make up this commonsense story are already on questionable empirical ground, not unlike the concepts of psychoanalysis.


Consider something as basic as "knowledge", the mental state of knowing something.  We attribute knowledge to ourselves and others all the time.  I know stuff, he knows stuff, we all know lots of stuff.  But there's no empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something, certainly nothing that would cover all the edge cases and indeterminate cases.  Philosophers have been arguing about the nature of knowledge for the last 2500 years and there's still no good answer.


Or consider the sensation of pain, or any other physical sensation - I mean the first-person qualitative experience of pain.  You can't actually observe someone else's pain - you can only observe the behavioral and neurological correlates.  For all you know, other people could just be unconscious automatons who don't feel anything at all.  But you nonetheless assume that they actually do feel things, as a generalization of your own experience.


Or take the concept of desire, a concept that's very central to the Freudian psychoanalytic project.  Again, you can't truly make a direct empirical observation here - if you cut open someone's brain, you won't be able to say "yep, there's the desire, I see it right there".  You instead observe someone's behavior and infer the existence of a desire, or maybe you interpret the existence of a desire.  And what criteria do you use to make this inference?  There are a lot of difficult edge cases.  Sometimes people seem to do things that they don't actually desire to do, like a woman who stays in an abusive relationship, or a drug addict who wants to stay clean but can't.


Are these cases of genuine desire?  If you say no, and that we're instead dealing with cases of people doing things that they don't desire to do, then it starts to become even more mysterious how we can have a consistent set of criteria for moving from the empirical observation of behavior to the inference of a desire.  But let's say that, despite the outward protestations of the subjects, there is a desire at play here.  The woman who stays in an abusive relationship despite seemingly not wanting to, does in fact desire to stay in the relationship to at least some degree, even though this might conflict with other desires she has.  We're going to say that if someone persists in doing X, then they have at least some desire to do X - call this the repetition criteria.


But how far can we stretch the repetition criteria?  What if we look at not just one event, but multiple seemingly isolated events over time?  Consider a woman whose last five relationships have all ended due to abuse.  She always leaves the relationship immediately after physical abuse starts, and she makes it clear that she really hates all the terrible men she's been dating and she curses her string of bad luck - but nevertheless there's a clear pattern here.  On the most literal reading of the repetition criteria, we can infer that she actually desires these relationships!  She repeatedly persists in doing "X", where the "X" here is "enter a new abusive relationship", so we can infer that that is her desire.  (We can dispense with any worries that this would require her to "know the future" - she could arrange this with better-than-chance-odds if she really wanted to, she could filter for men who showed outward signs of criminality and acted aggressively during courtship, and so on).  If you look at any one event in isolation, there are no indications that she desires this state of affairs whatsoever, but if we look at the broader pattern of behavior, then desire starts to become evident.  So, does she have this type of desire?  If you say "no", then the repetition criteria needs some sort of modification - and this modification would be based not on empirical observation, but rather it would be based on your a priori conception of what a desire should look like.  If you instead say "yes", then we begin to approach the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious desire.


So our commonsense story about psychology already has a lot of potential problems with it.  But that doesn't mean we should jettison the whole story.  Even the most hardcore reductionist materialist, who believes that anything above the level of a neuron is ontological nonsense, isn't going to stop talking about people as if they had beliefs and emotions and desires - you can't do that, it's not workable.  Psychoanalysis simply provides a new story in addition to the commonsense one, and many people find the psychoanalytic story to be deeply compelling.  You can argue that its concepts are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious; but we're already wedded to concepts that are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious.




I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?




The short answer is that Freud provides the theory of the individual and Marx provides the theory of society - it's a natural complement.  There are a lot of contingent historical factors involved here of course, but that's the gist of it.