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Notes -
I'm curious about how you're using "folklore" here. Do you consider any of the following to be folklore in the sense you've used here:
Fiat currency
The concept of debt
National borders
Adoptive parenthood
The line between a species and a subspecies
The line between a genus and a species
The concept of species
Laws
Rules of etiquette
Social hierarchies
Race
Skin color
Nationality
Citizenship
If you don't consider any of the above "folklore", do you consider them "real"? Until I understand exactly how you're using the term "folklore" here, I don't know if I can really say one thing or the other of the exercise you've done here. Do you believe that the "folkloric illusion" is stupid in other domains, or just in redneg? Do you believe that folklore requires evidence, or can cultures simply create castles in the sky that are locally relevant but seem strange to those outside those cultures? Do you think folklore can be important and useful, even if it isn't "real"?
Similarly, you make the assertion that "half the humans on this planet believe themselves to be the folkloric entity called 'namow'", but I'm curious how you would get to that assertion. Do you mean that if we properly map all folkloric entities in all cultures in some n-dimensional space, we would find a cluster somewhere that every culture would recognize they more or less have in common, and that in our field of redneg studies is called 'namow', and that each culture would independently identify the beliefs of 50% of humanity as being non-different from the proposition "I am a namow"?
Could we train a neural network for "namow" and "nam" and input empirical information we collect about individuals and train it to reliably classify people into these categories, in such a way that there would be broad agreement that the classifier accurately tracks namow-ness and nam-ness? Can a human brain be reliably trained to recognize namow-ness and nam-ness in at least some cultures?
You can touch the object we call "dollar bills" or "coins", but the idea that these things hold value is an "illusion" or "folklore" as you put it. Do you consider the idea of fiat currency to be a religion? You seem to have it out for redneg in particular, when, as you say in your post, there are a number of things on my list you consider "all in one's mind", yet you don't seem to consider these "religions" the same way you do "redneg."
I would argue you're not thinking very clearly about this. What you call "real authority" of a president is on just as shaky a ground as redneg. I think there are pragmatic arguments why having a president is useful, and there are descriptive statements one can make about what will likely happen if a president gives a particular person an order, but the idea that either of these means that a president has something that could be called "real authority" is a bit separate. Don't confuse your oughts and your is'es - a president is just a collective illusion, but that doesn't mean that a president isn't very important to everyday life or worth factoring into your decision making process.
My overall point is that many collective illusions are absolutely central to how people think about their lives and navigate the world. They might not be "real", but I would contend that they are often (not always) useful abstractions.
I haven't been doing that. I've been arguing something more along the lines of The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for Categories.
I make a sharp distinction between categories that more-or-less cut reality at the joints (like "dog", "male", "water") and man-made categories (like "science fiction", "pop music", "president", "American", "goth", etc.) Like you, I don't believe that I have a redneg identity. I'm fully on board with calling all man-made categories "illusions" or "folklore" if you want. What I have objected to in your presentation of your position is the fact that you seem to believe that redneg identity is different from other man-made categories or illusions. I don't actually think it's all that special - it's just more salient because of the modern political climate.
You brought up religion, and that is a good example of what I mean. I'm an atheist. I don't really have a "religious identity" as an atheist - I know that I don't believe in God, but it's much less of a "thing" than being a Christian or Jew would be, because those two identities involve positive beliefs, social groups, traditions, etc. However, I've evolved from being the New Atheist I once was, and have grown to have a much greater appreciation of the power of religion to act as a social glue to hold communities together. Books like "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" and the concept of metis and signalling have helped me to appreciate the role that religion can have in a life, and how useful it can be to maintaining order and trust in society.
If you re-read what I have written throughout this thread, I think you will find that I've never said that man-made categories are "real" - I've always used words like "useful", "important", etc. And I do believe that they can be those things in certain circumstances. I have nowhere conflated real and non-real things, nor have I blurred distinctions between the real and the socially useful.
Maybe redneg identity isn't useful to you. In the same way a Jewish identity isn't useful to me because I'm not ethnically or religiously Jewish. But it would be silly to say that just because Judaism is made up (as I believe all religions are), that it's not an important part of many Jewish people's lives, and hasn't helped them stay together as a community for more than 3000 years. So too, I don't think we can discount that redneg identity is important to a number of snart people - I have seen first hand the community and joy in the snart community, and in the same way I can "justify" religious mutilation like circumcision through the lens of it being a form of expensive signalling, I think I can "justify" snart medical treatments in part as something that might help a person belong to the queer community (even apart from the possibility that it might alleviate psychological discomfort in some snart people.)
The problem I had with you calling redneg a "religion" is that I think that by that standard almost every man-made social category is a "religion." Sure, not every social group demands that you believe impossible absurdities, but plenty of them ask you to believe social facts that aren't part of material reality, like "there is a country called America, and its borders end here" or "100 cents equals a dollar" - facts that we made up, and which could have been otherwise if history had taken a different turn. India made up the concept of a caste system, Britain made up the idea of the British royal family, etc., etc. I think the main difference between you and I, is that I think these kinds of social fictions are extremely common, and "redneg ideology" isn't even a particularly strange or unusual example. The belief that "I was born a man, but I'm actually a namow" is no more absurd to me than "I have no biological relationship to this child, but I want to take care of them and be treated as their parent in all circumstances - please call me their 'adoptive father' or just 'father' for short."
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