from General Will 2.0 In politics, there are too few words.
Even political scientists are not so optimistic as to say that they can “talk it out. Rather, what is important in real political conflicts is how to get people who are in conflict to sit down to talk. It is more important to get people to start talking than to say, “We’ll understand if we talk,” or else it will become a power struggle. In the current situation where profit politics is rampant, the final word may be “money, profit, shut up. In short, there are too few words in politics, and the reason why both Arendt and Habermas emphasize verbal communication in politics is because it is too absent in reality. In this sense, I believe that political scientists are not optimists who believe that talking will always lead to agreement, but rather they strategically emphasize verbal communication in order to counter nihilism that is based on power and money. p.295
I enjoyed the part about “strategically emphasizing verbal dialogue.”
- I see the “we don’t think X will solve the problem, but we’re currently short on X, so we’re strategically emphasizing X” construct elsewhere.
- I don’t think DX will solve everything, but there is currently a shortage of DX, or
- Related: The Ideal as Extreme
next: The concept of politics must be enriched
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