Meritocracy (is a society in which influence (of some sort) is possessed on the basis of merit)

Westernisation (transmission and reception of European ideas, technology, lifestyles and institutions throughout the globe)

Changes in the exercise of political power that have resulted from increased transnational engagement

Isn't it odd that only two groups - drug dealers and social media dealers - refer to their target audience as "users"

Surveillance Capitalism (characterised by competition and a compulsion to grow one's productive and surplus-generating capacities, continually reinvesting surpluses and finding new avenues to accumulate capital.)

the users of technology are commodified, their behaviors, emotions, personality traits, routines, and vulnerabilities are packaged as objects (“data”) for sale in a capitalist economic system

When Google prioritized “relevance” over other criteria, they were aligning with a neoliberal episteme of supposedly giving the customer what they want and prioritizing the desires of the sovereign consumer

Democracy distinguishes itself, by being a politics not just of ends and achieving good outcomes but also a politics of means. It’s about how we achieve these outcomes. It is a far better democratic result to achieve a bad end by good means that can subsequently produce a better outcome than it is to enforce a good outcome by bad means because it leaves that outcome to subsequent attack and the corrosion of democracy.

Democracy is sustained by common everyday practices, a healthy democracy is nurtured by healthy democratic culture. Where we learn how to speak with one another, where we learn the basic rules of turn taking, that losses are never losses for good but we can take our time together and appeal together. The conditions of democratic morality is that we are each other’s teachers. That we are moral equals and hence will listen and be answerable to each other.

Contempt is different from resentment in which you can feel without expressing. Contempt you must express, it is performative. You hold people in contempt which is observable to you and to others.

In our modern age we tend to moral reason by testing moral claims through identifying the exceptions to the rule.

Instead, we ask ‘does this work for every exception’ and if it doesn’t - we critique and dismantle it. This creates a wasteland: no moral improvement, and a degradation of the moral as such.

Radical egalitarianism, fueled by the post-revolutionary fervour of the late 18th century, trades on the idea of the ‘common’: human beings share things because they are human beings. It is this idea of the common that can be appealed to social, moral and political campaigns. This means all humans have dignity and thus, deserve respect.

Social contract (Thomas Hobbs, John Locke, Rousseau - As beings born in the state, we agree to give some liberty to the state in exchange for state protection of our liberty)

The age of which we are living is not one where ideological groupings come together to empower elected representatives and give them a mandate to pursue a common project. Instead, we are living in an age of pervasive distrust in which we’ve lost faith in representative politicians.

The public is more interested in divesting politicians of their power. The public has a surveilling eye of politicians. Therefore, during elective periods - there is a growing pressure cooker of disillusionment and disaffection. In this process, opposition groups promise to throw them out/take control - a fundamentally negative message even dressed in positive affirmation. It is punitive to the party in power.

It is very easy to assemble a coalition of the disaffected. All sorts of people for all sorts of different reasons can be opposed to a common proposal. However, ask them to agree on an alternative pathway and they will be unable to. This is because of the mutual incommensurability of those reasons.

We live in a communicative environment where there is no incentive to not produce more content to fill the space, we don’t have the discipline to disengage. The online cacophony reaches the point where it becomes too difficult to discern what is true and merely conspiratorial. After a while, the cacophony reaches a din that is too hard to engage because of the difficulty to find a commonality to tune into. With no agreement on the authority of basic information on our reality, we have a disillusionment of any institution. There is no commonality of our epistemology. This makes a productive debate uniquely difficult.

people can’t get on one side of a debate. It’s that - it has almost gone fractal with chaotic inhabitations of a cacophonous world from individualistic engagement with online algorithms that prioritises divisiveness. This means if there is a moment of commonality, it is simply a mirage and will dissipate all over again.

The sewing of purposeful confusion is a political strategy to muddy the waters and distract from what is real. This is inimical to democracy, as it fixates on the short-term telos of gaining control of a situation, rather than a meaningful, productive goal on the other side of such debate. We are unable to find and hence, build a common future.

Identity in the modern age has become reversed, a radically individualised notion. “I will tell you what my identity is, and then you will reorientate yourself around that.” Terms that once connoted something deeper, richer and involved obligation - has morphed into something individualistic and claim making.

empowered individuals to express and define their identities publicly.

Cancel culture/ Woke Politics. (young, socially conscious generation trying desperately to remedy the injustices they see, but having been left with wholly inadequate tools for the job)

These pledges often seem vague, but what matters most is the act of submission. Confession and apology are central because they help articulate and reinforce the new orthodoxy. They put confessors in a bond with their own words so they cannot retreat without multiplying their sin

Problem with cancel culture is that while it intuits liberalism is insufficient and attempts to dismantle it, it cannot escape it. Cancel culture adopts a postmodern version of identity that becomes highly individualistic. So, on gender (though not on race) identity is largely determined by individuals who declare themselves into existence, then require society to recognise them on those terms. Therefore, it adopts the same liberalistic qualities of individualism, identity and a shared moral culture. That moral culture, being underpinned by Liberalism’s scrutiny of harm and discrimination, is a framework that Cancel culture operates in.

Liberalism has always struggled to grapple with the problem of power: namely that those who already have power can achieve more with their freedom than those who don’t, and that often this power discrepancy corresponds to our membership of certain groups

There are things that happen to us that are simply misfortune. You cannot assign blame to it, it's the accident of birth, the slings and arrows of misfortune that constitutes human life as such. However, once misfortune is accepted politically or acquiesced to socially then misfortune becomes injustice, it becomes inequity.

It is that experience of inequity that is the hardest thing of all to bear. It is the frustration of an injustice that could be addressed by others such as sacrificial philanthropy, charity, renunciation. Therefore, when others through indolence or contempt refuse to address these inequities it transports this experience into the moral dimension. It is not that one has undergone misfortune, it is that you are now undergoing humiliation. It is this experience of humiliation, a sociopolitical sting, that breeds distrust, of viewing one another as threats.

Social cohesion is the affective dimension of democratic life. It is the extent to which we feel connected to one another. We regard and purport ourselves to one another not as threats for some scarcely available good but as people who are participants in a common life.

More-advanced technology means the given authority of the environment around us becomes increasingly attenuated. Regardless of the moral considerations of technology, it affects us in profound ways of how we think about the world and imagine our place in it. All these developments have served to weaken the authority of the natural world and persuade human beings of their power.

We are living in a world which it is increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires, and not something that we necessarily need to conform ourselves to or passively accept.

Modern thinking serves to shatter the idea of the individual as one whos best interests are served by being educated to conform to the canons and protocols of society. And that is the intellectual foundation for the first reversal, whereby therapy ceases to serve the purpose of socialising an individual. Instead, it seeks to protect the individual from the kind of harmful neuroses that society itself creates through its smothering of the individual’s ability to be herself.

Utilitarianism underpinning of society's ethical framework

The conditions that necessitate expressive individualism is one of psychological satisfaction. Satisfaction and meaning - authenticity - are found by an inward turn, and the culture is reconfigured to this end. Tailoring psychological needs to the nature of society would create anxiety and reduce someone's personhood to being inauthentic. Therefore, the social dimension to psychological well-being demands others acknowledge inward, psychological identity.

A highly psychologised and individualistic era will accord increasing importance to words as means of oppression. This represents a serious challenge to one of the foundations of liberal democracy: freedom of speech. Words become potential weapons against individualistic necessities of our psychological requirements.

Who we think we are is intimately connected to those to whom we relate - family, friends, coworkers. When asked ‘who are you?’ Typically a response would not point to the DNA code or such generalities but rather a definition in relation to other people and other things - the child of John, the husband of Catriona’. This points to our human need to belong. If our identities are shaped by our connections, then identity also arises in the context of belonging.

To have an identity means that I am being acknowledged by others. To be ignored, unacknowledged or shamed a person ceases to be recognised. While that individual continues to exist, his identity within this community is effectively erased. Thus, individual identity is truly a dialogue: how a person thinks of himself is the result of learning the language of the community so that he can be a part of the community. So that he can belong.

If recognition is the economy that underpins identity, when not recognised by others creates the possibility for tension not simply between individuals but also between the desires of the individual (to be autonomous) and concerns of the community (to be recognised). The modern West faces a problem then with reconciling two aspirations: the aspiration to radical autonomy and to expressive unity with nature and society.

Society itself is an ethical community. What this implies is that the individual finds her self-consciousness in being recognised by that society, and this occurs because she is behaving to the conventions of that society. Therefore, recognition is a social phenomenon. Both identity recognition and the framework for expressing identity are socially constructed, specific to the context of that individual. We might wish to express ourselves, but we typically do so in ways that are sanctioned by the modern society in which we happen to live.

However, not all expressions of individuality, not all behaviours that bring about a sense of inner psychological happiness for an autonomous agent, are regarded as legitimate. Society still imposes itself on its members and shapes corrals their behaviour.

When the abnormal becomes the expected, when the freak show becomes the typical, when the aberrant is now the normal we have to step back in order to see the world and each other more clearly.

The urgency, the heatedness of debate, the language of existential threat and risk compresses us to a moral hot house. Where we end up condoning things that we would never condone in ordinary time, seeing people as threats - as abstractions because the circumstances of the ticking clock seem to permit it. When people become abstractions we replace ordinary natural human sentiments, gentleness, tenderness, sympathy, compassion or replaced by political passions like tribalism, loyalty, revolution, just violence.

Withdrawal for the purpose of contemplation of ourselves, relationships enables a resetting of our understanding of our place in the world, the relationships and obligations we have. So, when we re enter it after withdrawal - we introduce new ways of being and doing. Not something that is political, but something much larger.

The urgency, the heatedness of debate, the language of existential threat and risk compresses us to a moral hot house. Where we end up condoning things that we would never condone in ordinary time, seeing people as threats - as abstractions because the circumstances of the ticking clock seem to permit it. When people become abstractions we replace ordinary natural human sentiments, gentleness, tenderness, sympathy, compassion or replaced by political passions like tribalism, loyalty, revolution, just violence.

This creates corrupted, debauched forms of speech that are merely ideological/political, which imposes a utilitarian calculus on the lives of other people.

We have relinquished the language of humanity: the means by which we speak to one another in the hopes of appealing to the humanity of one another and receiving a human response in return. When you take out the language of humanity, the idea that the receiver is fundamentally like you (with the weaknesses, the aspirations, the mournings), the degree of tenderness, sympathy, compassion.

This justifies political violence, genocide, pursuits of which compassion and empathy for humans is absent. Thus, arises contemptuous attitudes towards each other. An air of suspicion where we view one another as threats.

We have become avatars rather than complex characters, we become abstractions to each other. This means we don’t give proper heed to how our thoughts, sentiments, words will be received by others.

Friendship (The friend requires of us, fundamentally, a position of mutuality and reciprocity. The friend in their particularity brings us out of ourselves. To become strangers to ourselves - to confront things we may not have seen before.)

There's a degree of serendipity with friendship where you relinquish something of yourself in ways where you don’t know how or if you are going to get it back. This relinquishment is handing over your ability to say “I know myself best”.

Friendship ought to spell the end of self deception. Because you have someone outside of you able to call your bluff, that can see through your alibis, evasions, prevarications, and with the right degree of tact and tenderness to call you into account.

Obsessions with telos: Today, being human means being distracted, it is our new default setting. We are almost all living in a state of constant distraction, in the meantime our deepest feelings are being flushed out, forced to the surface, dissolved in the endless chatter of our heavily mediated environment. Trampled underfoot in the rush to be heard and seen.

Withdrawing from telos (from the business and hustle of life as we know it)

If solitude, withdrawal, has an active pursuit of a telos it becomes a form of moral idolatry. Whereas, any spiritual practice done properly, has a moment of not just transformation but transfiguration: I didn’t know how it was that I needed to be changed until I arrived at that moment.

Solitude is non-utilitarian, it is non-teleological. Solitude can be an opportunity for deep consideration but it is not exactly what the practice of solitude is about. Solitude allows us to wander, allowing us to be surprised by something and then to allow our mind to circle that as beauty and devotion in its own right.

In the same way that love bestows many benefits but cannot spring from their pursuit alone, beauty needs to be appreciated first as such before we can unlock its bounty of treasures

Aesthetic creation always transcends the status quo by stimulating our powers of associative and analogical thinking, inviting us to play with—and so loosen, recombine, probe, rethink—our standard conceptions about ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Beauty strikes us, hits us, overwhelms us, surprises us, and jars us out of the conventional conceptual schemes by which we order our daily routines. In the moment of first encounter, we are speechless, thoughtless, because we are concept-less: We lack the general term under which to subsume the aesthetic phenomenon at hand. We pause and become still.

Beauty enlivens. Beauty animates lifeless objects. A canvas takes on a spirit, a statue an expression, a melody a meaning. Our pulse quickens when we face a very beautiful person; what is more, their beauty alerts us to the fact that this very individual is unique and irreplaceable and, at the same time, just as vulnerable as we are.