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Let's talk about the Örebro Party: (Swedish) lefty socialists except they support remigration.
Key quotes from Wikipedia (emphasis mine)
They've made headlines recently (and got on my radar) because Mullvad's CEO donated €452,000 to them.
My perspective on remigration:
People should live in their own communities. I remember reading an article about a tradcath community, and presumably the article wanted to criticise and mock them, but I thought they had decent values and the world is better with them. Or the furry community, even though they can be weird, sometimes produce amazing works like this. Or the unique cultures from other countries and ethnicities...hence the appeal of reversing immigration.
Immigration has ruined communities. A massive problem with today's culture is that it has become one monoculture: everything is becoming gentrified, secured, and impersonal. Translation tools, ethnic stores, etc. are accelarating this (despite otherwise being positive by granting me interesting new cultures and vice versa), by making every culture adapt every other culture's most viral aspects (which aren't necessarily good, like arguably convenience food and tipping). LLMs are accelarating this. But immigration is perhaps most accelarating this: some immigrants are even beneficial, but immigrants who don't know or respect the culture's customs, don't socialize with the rest of the community, take more than they contribute (without an apparent excuse), commit much more crime than the existing community, and don't even speak the language...break community members' unspoken understanding, friendship, altruism, trust, and communication with their neighbor.
But remigration isn't a solution. First, because I can't imagine how to do it remotely ethically. Comparing anything right-wing to Nazism is an overused cliche, but it fits here: AFAIK Nazis initially planned to just deport the Jews somewhere (Madagascar), but ended up brutally overworking and exterminating them, because their end goal was to get rid of them and that was easiest. How would you get rid of immigrants if Somalia etc. won't accept them? What if it's too expensive? What if it's dangerous for them? What about women and children?
These are difficult questions not only morally, but the infrastructure (military tactics) to effectively implement remigration is dangerous for your own sake. It risks broadening persecution, creating a fascist state, an ugly monoculture...the exact failure it seeks to prevent.
So what to do? I don't oppose moderate immigration reform, like:
Honestly, I don't think these are enough to reverse the decay of culture and public resources, and they may seem like a waste of resources for unwanted immigrants, but I think too much immigration/remigration would be worse (for culture and public resources). A real solution must be broader than immigration. Fixing the other issues: making LLMs more diverse, further improving translation tools and incentivizing ethnic stores to include more cultural nuance, and increasing nationalism as a side-effect of addressing the elephant in the room: convincing most of the population to like their government (maybe by having it do something notable for the public and advertising it, and electing new parties with less out-of-touch politicians, even Örebro if they tone down remigration).
Arguably the above essay is another milquetoast thought experiment with the same conclusions everyone already knows: obviously government should not be so corrupt, etc. So another point of discussion is why Örebro decided to focus on this as their stand-out policy. Is it just marketing and they plan to implement something much more moderate (I realize I'm bad at marketing, but I'm skeptical this would work for a generally leftist party). Is it a radical idea to appeal to the working class? Is it only the media that's focusing on this policy, and Örebro themselves consider it a less important part of the agenda compared to the socialist policies? (Probably all of the above, especially the third.)
I do think we need some radical solution to fix societal decay, although it may emerge outside policy, like a technological breakthrough, or just younger generations replacing older ones and having a drastically different culture. I don't think it's in immigration. Maybe the Örebro party will get elected by arguing for remigration, but if they actually want to improve Sweden, I believe the bulk of their implementation must be in their other policies.
Consider that perhaps your ethics need to adapt, or die. A growing part of the population doesn't share them to begin with, and your society is failing at curbing the influx, and failing at assimilating the newcomers into your system of ethics. You know the line - If the rule has brought you to this, then what good was the rule? Dogged adherence to ethics that are proving less practicable and cost-efficient by the day, even while hostile actors have figured out how to exploit them, is to nobody's benefit. The natives will lose their country, the newcomers will no longer have a highly ethical society to exploit, and future people looking back will shrug and say "must have been a nice place, for a while, but then they lost the will to take charge of their fate and just let the whole thing careen into a wall". Paralysis by ethics is not some triumph of doing the right thing; it's proving that there can be entirely too much of a thing that was good in moderation, and then it will all go into history's dustbin and be forgotten as anything other than a negative example to steer clear of.
The conclusion drawn from it will not be "you have to be nice, even when it's difficult, and if it proves too difficult, then dammit, you just have to figure something out to make it work anyways". It will be "if you're a nice loser, then you're just a loser, and nothing in this world will be truly yours".
I ramble. I rant. I despair at this fixation on ethics as an overriding necessity. Is Western Civilization really so despicable that we must destroy it rather than adjust our ethics? Are our ethics really so supremely perfect, so outright sacred, that they brook no improvement? Remigration is only one topic of several where this phenomenon comes to the fore, but it is arguably the most salient.
In wanting to be the polar opposite of the nazis, we are repeating their chiefest mistake - starting from an incorrect conclusion, we do with great determination what is wrong, to our detriment and doom.
You seem to be jumping here from one argument to the other. "Before we burn everything down in pursuit of them, are we really sure that our understanding of ethics is correct?" is a different, and in my view, more valid point than "What good are ethics in general if they don't produce good material outcomes?", as you have it elsewhere in the post. Ethics, in my view, are meaningless if they are not, in fact, a statement of ideals worth dying for, of lines so dark that it is better to die than to cross them. Ethics are not a guide to material success, they are a distinct, orthogonal reward axis for human behavior relative to material success - otherwise The Prince would be a great work of moral philosophy. Saying that you are against morality if its precepts sometimes lead to self-sacrificial behavior and reap only scorn of your children's children is as much as to say that you don't believe in morality. Morality is what you get eaten by lions in Caesar's circus about.
Now again, I'm sympathetic to the other point. I don't actually think that ethics require us to burn down Western Civilization, as a matter of fact. But if they did this would not be an indictment of ethics as a concept.
I'm sympathetic to the Ruat Caelum stance. Really. But that's clearly not what Europe and/or Western Civilization are taking here. We're don't have a clearly defined line in the sand that we're willing to die for, but a vaguely-gestured-at clustering of sandheaps that we're willing to throw up our hands and be passive for. There isn't a Cato The Younger taking a hardass stance for his particular philosophy or a Christian Martyr calmly walking into a lion's maw; it's old housewives and schoolmarms using "ethics" as an excuse to lecture and censor, young activists and orbiters using "ethics" as an excuse to enhance their social status, and there is no hard consensus definition of what the ethics are, how they are to be put into practice, what the outcome is expected to be, and why they are worth sticking to.
By your definition, ethics are practically nonexistent in the real world, and belong only to rare outliers. They are not the the mass phenomenon that drives immigration policy in the West.
Well, I wouldn't say that. In the first place, I think there are a number of ethical lines that most ordinary people would rather die than cross or see crossed, they just mostly don't come up. For example, I believe that the vast majority of people I encounter in my day-to-day life, including on this forum, would rather lay down their own lives rather than allow a toddler to be brutally raped. Also and as a separate matter, I think there are even more ethical lines which people believe in their conscience they should defend unto death, even if, in practice, they might falter; ethical lines where if they fell short of defending them with everything they've got, they'd feel guilty afterwards.
Agreed.
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This sounds just like the debate between deontology vs consequentialism in ethics. For people who prefer the former, then it doesn't matter what consequences following ethical rules results in; even if it causes maximal suffering for everyone in every situation all the time, with no positive side-effects, as long as the ethics were followed properly, that is better than if the ethics weren't followed properly and resulted in prosperity and less suffering, with no negative side-effects. For people who prefer the latter, then the truthiness of some set of ethics is contingent upon the consequences that follow from people following those ethics and, as such, ethics that lead to maximal suffering for everyone all the time with no positive side-effects is just bad ethics that ought to be scrapped.
This has nothing to do with whether some set of ethics would require some sort of sacrifice sometimes, which is orthogonal to the issue. The original comment seems to be not about some sort of sacrifice for the sake of ethics, but rather a set of ethics that, when followed, just results in negative consequences and hence, from a certain point of view, is just bad ethics.
I think you are confusing consequentialism with utilitarianism. Consequentialism judges ends rather than means, but it does not require 'gross hedonic product' to be the only criterion by which to compare outcomes. We might say, for example, that as one of many discrete terminal values, we want the number of starving children in the world to be 0. A policy designed to achieve this end by any means necessary, up to and including the end of Western civilization as we know it, would still be a policy driven by consequentualism (i.e. a policy that is judged on outcomes, rather than the virtuousness of the means used to achieve them).
I'm not sure where you're getting that in my comment, as I mentioned nothing about gross hedonic product, which is certainly not an antonym of "suffering" or synonym of "positive... effects" which are the terms I used.
The very introduction of "suffering" seems to me to evidence a degree of confusion between consequentialism and utilitarianism; consequentialism needn't have anything to do with pleasure, suffering, or whatever else. A paperclip maximizer is a consequentialist, so long as it believes that it should take whatever actions maximize paperclip amount in the long term (up to and including destroying paperclips while its human handlers are watching, so as to demonstrate its supposed human-friendliness), rather than only engage in actions with directly create paperclips. There is no contradiction between being a consequentialist, and believing that the ethical course of action requires us to destroy civilization and cause untold suffering in the process; it all depends what consequences you're looking at.
I think you just have a misread of what is meant by "suffering," considering you seem to pair it with "pleasure" as if they're particularly related. "Suffering" isn't an antonym to "pleasure," not is it a synonym to "pain." "Suffering" just means "getting a less desirable consequence than some alternative." It's intrinsically tied to consequentialism, because getting a consequence one dislikes is intrinsically suffering, and consequentialism has to do with determining ethics based on the consequences that they produce.
A paperclip maximizer, to whatever extent it can "believe" things or experience qualia or whatever, is "suffering" if it's not maximizing paperclips, definitionally.
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