capitalist nations ... will face exactly the same problems
All nations are facing the same problems now, there has been a globalization of problems in this 'shrinking world'. It is merely a matter of degrees. Everything is intertwined to the extent that no serious problem is confined to any particular place. One wouldn't even know about a pandemic in a neighbouring country in times of yore; now one knows of it when it first emerges, even if it emerges half way around the world. A villager would not know that a nearby city was polluted; now we believe that pollution half way around the world is a threat to us through 'climate change'. You can find junk food even in Islam's holy cities of Mecca and Medina: historical sites sit right alongside KFC branches. No place is sacred, no place is uncontaminated by the exceedingly pathological characteristics of late-modernity.
I'd say that Mishima is economizing something that is sociopolitical: it is the liberal disease of Spinoza, Locke, &c. that opens the door for degeneration, not capitalism per se. We are witnessing a radicalizing of this disease, and Marx and his acolytes are part of the same disease, even though they are more unsympathetic than not to capitalism. The socialists and communists, being sociopolitical liberals, are part of the very same problem that they attribute to the capitalists, their sociopolitical co-ideologists.
Of course, liberalism and capitalism fit together quite nicely to the extent that Marxists think of liberal democracy as capitalism's political form and liberal theorists, such as Fukuyama, think of capitalism as liberalism's economic form. Both of them are clear that capitalism and liberalism fit together like hand in glove. It is easy to see why they fit together: for instance, which society sells more contraceptives, drugs, entertainment, and even food? The society of abstinence, of prohibition, or the society of excess, of permissiveness, that is, the liberal society?
all have the same mentality
They are exceedingly possessing of a homogenized, universalized liberal psyche. This has numerous characteristics. Amongst others, it is highly acquisitive, highly apathetic, highly commodified, highly disenchanted, highly excessive, highly hedonistic, and highly therapeuticized. It is hyper-consumptive, hyper-individualized, extremely mediatized, and extremely technologized. It lives and works to amass resources for consumption and play without end. Since it has no end, it is also deeply irrational, working with no real plan and with no real purpose in a world with no real meaning. It consumes without end: it willingly embraces the fact that mass media, social media, and entertainment of all forms bombard it constantly. Overloaded, overstimulated, it is exceedingly pathological. It over-consumes information, most of it of the most useless kind, in particular, but it also greatly over-consumes salt, sugar and all kinds of other consumables. It enjoys this, even though it does not enjoy, and is desperate to avoid, the unintended consequences, crying out for fast cures for Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and every other wretched condition that it brings about on itself. Failing to avoid them, it is beginning to embrace them. Body positivity. Fat is beautiful. Plus-sized models. Every part of it is increasingly occupied by things that are ever further removed from reality. Bizarre beliefs, cretinous concepts, incorrect ideas, terrible theories.
Little is sacred to it except that which it considers marginalized, powerless, victimized. Out with lèse-majesté laws, it demands, and in with laws that prevent the defacing of pride crosswalks. The difference is that a king is the antithesis of what they idolize: he is powerful, their idols weak. The lack of qualities is now the greatest quality: the person who proudly lists all of his mental illnesses on his social media bios, even on his electoral campaign materials, does not do so because it brings about disbenefits, but the contrary. Vote for me because I possess more disabilities, I am a greater victim, than my opponents! Liberalism's political system, it turns out, is victimocracy. May the greatest victim reign supreme!
the [Last Men]
Little did Mishima know that the Japanese just after his time would not merely be Nietzsche's Last Men, but also the last Japanese people in the most literal sense.
Liberalism does not bode a Victimocracy. It, in fact, even in it's worst form: demands a meritocracy of only the strongest (that's Rousseau's Nobel Savage). What you are looking at is a Kekistocracy which is built by Leftism and it's innate authoritarian need to promote loyalists over competents to insure the institutional power remains.
Liberalism is not a disease, it simply has a problem of being an acid. It assumes (correctly) that as you break up a tyrannical political orthodoxy that imposes itself on society, you will generate a better culture as an emergent property of freedom. This is true.
That's why you stop at the political level. You don't "liberate" people from their families, communities, gravity, food, or God. That's not what liberation means. Liberalism doesn't need to apply at every conceivable action between man and everything.
The Leftists that are calling themselves liberals have an atomized, positivist, materialist, perspective on reality; while adapting a bizarre religious devotion to an insane hog-pog of Whig-Marxist history. They focus outside of the family, friends, community, and all the things that make up the important aspects of a man's life so that they can be manipulated by their leadership for the sake of abstract notions.
The purpose of Liberalism is to do the opposite of that: to remove all of the structures preventing you from returning to your family and prospering.
This is just a transposing of your libertarian interpretation onto the parts of what I have written that are clearly hostile to your worldview. But your attempt at a correction of sorts does not withstand this reply.
Liberalism does not bode a Victimocracy
That's why you stop at the political level.
You unwittingly admit that Liberalism is the original victimocratic ideology. The rulers-subjects distinction simply precurses the myriad oppressor-oppressed distinctions that abound in late-modernity. Once the rulers are overthrown, the logic of the political value of freedom demands that new oppressors are identified and overthrown, so that freedom ever increases throughout the world. Hence the cis-trans distinction, the man-woman distinction, &c. are simply the original Liberal battle being fought all over again, but between different categories. New sides are merely fighting old battles. Feminists are Liberals who see men as the new kings to be overthrown, homosexualists are Liberals who see heteronormativity as the new monarchy to be overthrown, and so forth. 'Ur'-Liberalism, having stopped at political power, did not realize well enough the freedom of these persons, and so for those who value freedom and/or equality, these battles must be necessarily fought and won. Since I do not value these ideals, whose appeal and benefits are strongest to the degenerate, my view on such persons is that they should be crushed. A Liberal, however, cannot embrace this position without him becoming a rank hypocrite. Freedom and equality for me, but not for thee! You are forced to tolerate such persons, since anything else violates Liberalism itself (harm principle, NAP, etc.), and so the solution requires totally breaking with Liberalism.
What you want to do is bound Liberalism such that its logic does not unfold beyond the ruler-subjects distinction: Liberalism stops at political equality. This is nonsense, since there is no way that freedom can reliably be bounded. All attempts to do so—suffrage limited to White property-land owning men, suffrage limited to White men, suffrage limited to men, marriage limited to heterosexuals—have completely and utterly failed. The bounds are always pushed back. You want to tell others what they can do with their freedom, but history demonstrates that you will always fail in your attempts to draw lines that the free are not supposed to cross.
It should be clear from my second paragraph that I reject your view of Leftism being distinct enough from Liberalism to be an opponent of it. Leftism is simply Liberalism generations down the track. Marx and the Marxists simply felt that political freedom was an incomplete freedom. Today's Leftists simply feel that political freedom and Marx's economic equality are still an incomplete freedom. And tomorrow's Leftists will view the excessive freedoms of today (paradoxically, freedoms protected by certain unfreedoms, nevertheless, society is freer than it has ever been for degenerates) as still an incomplete freedom. Each generation under Liberalism, having degenerated relative to the previous one, sees the freedom that the preceding generation brought about as slavery. This creates a self-radicalizing feedback loop, with each generation taking things closer to the Left-extreme. All that you represent is a past iteration of the same problematic ideology complaining about its more recent iterations, and thus provide no solution, since your 'solution' is to revert or rollback to an earlier 'commit', iteration, or 'snapshot'. Reverting to a rose-tinted snapshot of the 1960s or 1776 perpetuates the problem. The whole machine was corrupted from the start.
The only solution, then, is a re-evaluation of values such that freedom and equality are simply eliminated from our value system. Since both inexorably lead to degeneracy, they require replacement with pre-Socratic values, such as honour and strength. Liberalism and its Leftist descendants must simply be eliminated from the list of socially-acceptable and state-sanctioned ideologies. Nothing short of that provides the necessary counter-revolution against the Enlightenment that will bring about the survival and regeneration of Man. Anything short of that simply perpetuates Liberalism and its endless battles between those perceived as oppressors and those perceived as oppressed, and the degeneration that comes about when the superior of those groups inevitably loses to its inferiors, who always have and always will rely on appeals to freedom and equality to hand them victory.
It assumes (correctly) that as you break up a tyrannical political orthodoxy that imposes itself on society, you will generate a better culture as an emergent property of freedom.
This is false for anyone who is sufficiently Right-Wing, since we do not care about inequality of power per se. It is 'true' for Leftists and Radical Centrists, such as Libertarians like yourself. More specifically:
tyrannical political orthodoxy that imposes itself on society
This is some kind of Hayekian or other liberal argument. Hayek is trying to say that 'big government' or 'statism' or some such thing is abnormal, which is false. This presupposes a hyper-individualistic Hobbesian natural state—Hobbes, contrary to common opinion, simply entertained it as a thought experiment, and did not himself believe it—resolved through a social contract, or other false origin myth for society. Unfortunately, Liberalism has warped the world so extremely that society no longer has anything but a mythical account of its own origins, with Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and most other Leftist and/or Liberal thinkers misinterpreting Hobbes' thought experiment as gospel. This has misled society into believing that society's own authoritarian collectivism is unnecessary and dispensable.
Society, however, is necessarily authoritarian and collectivist. It was built by, and is sustainable only through, such means. There never was a natural state: humans were tribal right from the start. Tribal life was 'big government' and 'statist': the chief's will was the way. Individual property was non-existent, all was owned by the tribe. Breaking laws meant expulsion from the tribe, and thus certain death. Liberalism and Leftism thus regard something indispensable as something dispensable. Liberalism's centuries-long legacy, based on nothing but myths and rationalizations for degeneracy, has amounted to nothing more than an unprecedented degeneration, from North America to Thailand to Western Europe. Without a complete re-evaluation of values, Man will be practically extinct within a few millennia, with most of the damage done within the next few centuries. Authoritarian collectivism is ultimately the only sustainable alternative to civilizational collapse. The world's longest surviving civilizations, all of them authoritarian collectivists, such as the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, attest to the truth of that fact.
The purpose of Liberalism is to do the opposite of that: to remove all of the structures preventing you from returning to your family and prospering.
We couldn't disagree more. There are no meaningful differences between Leftism and Liberalism: that's just your outdated version of Liberalism, i.e. Libertarianism, rationalizing away Liberalism's impeccable track record of failure. What Libertarians have done is taken all of those degenerative, wretched effects of Liberalism and its underlying political values which they feel are too extreme, created these bogey categories or misunderstood existing ones such as 'Feminism', 'Leftism', and 'Marxism'—in reality, merely more updated versions of your own Liberalism—and then palmed off all of them onto those, so that you are left with something blameless and rose-tinted. You paint a mythical world in which Liberalism once worked right up until one of these imagined groups—which consists of nothing more than othered Liberals, Liberals you otherized over trivialities chiefly of an economic or political-systemic and thus unimportant nature—mysteriously rose up out of nowhere and ruined it. It is a world that never existed. Liberalism was dysfunctional from its inception, and today's dysfunctions are merely a compounding of those original dysfunctions.
Finally, I can't help but note that the Leftist's reasoning in the last line is identical to yours: he wishes to 'remove all of the structures preventing you' from self-actualizing. You see, if you omitted the word 'family', your statement would be absolutely congruent with contemporary Leftism. In conclusion, the differences between you and them are trivial and the difference is chiefly in your negative rather than positive judgement of what Liberals have done since the time you believe that they went off the rails and became 'Leftists'. But that is just a consequence of being unable to accept that this was an inevitable consequence of your own political ideology and values.
The purpose of Liberalism [or Leftism] is to remove all of the structures preventing you from [self-actualizing] and prospering.
The rulers-subjects distinction simply precurses the myriad oppressor-oppressed distinctions that abound in late-modernity.
You're asserting a historical dialectic as if it follows that ruler inevitably leads to oppressor. You are assuming the Leftist dialectic from the start.
Once the rulers are overthrown, the logic of the political value of freedom demands that new oppressors are identified and overthrown
No. You are extending the concept of liberation beyond all reasonable scope. Gravity is not political oppression.
Any logical system taken to the extremes passed it's boundary conditions inevitably fails.
What you want to do is bound Liberalism such that its logic does not unfold beyond the ruler-subjects distinction: Liberalism stops at political equality. This is nonsense, since there is no way that freedom can reliably be bounded.
This is an argument from totalitarianism. Everything is political, so therefore political freedom must be pursued against the political oppression of gravity. No. Again, Goodell's Incompleteness Theorem actually has weight here: No logical system can be both complete, and consistent. Ever. Under any circumstance. Even arithmetic. Something which has an unbounded scope will never be consistent. Something which is consistent will always be limited in scope. Logical deduction does not even escape this conclusion.
The bounds of Liberal models end at the boundary of politics, and not everything is within the realm of political debate. And even within the realm of political debate, most things never meet the standard of oppression or tyranny.
The only solution, then, is a re-evaluation of values such that freedom and equality are simply eliminated from our value system.
"If I remove the variable from my spreadsheet, then the variable no longer exists, and my utopia will be complete." Wrong. A society that eliminates the value of freedom does not prevent anything, but instead fosters the resentment you are hoping to cut-off at the head.
Authoritarian collectivism is ultimately the only sustainable alternative to civilizational collapse. The world's longest surviving civilizations, all of them authoritarian collectivists, such as the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, attest to the truth of that fact.
This is comically wrong. The exact level of authoritarianism, autocracy, and collectivism you cite has lead (and always leads) to the utter ruination of the civilization that imposes it, as it has no mechanism to decline. The Byzantine Empire was more liberal than most of the empires around it, and it was exterminated after it became more and more centralized. The Ottoman Empire was exterminated. The Golden Horde were exterminated. The Assyrians were exterminated. The Spartans decayed into extermination. Roman culture was exterminated. They never even had the ability to reform or morph into something else. They were simply eradicated as their institutions were, sometimes practically overnight. Within a few centuries, the entire civilization is lost entirely to myth. The children that lived in the ruins of Assyrian cities did not even know that they were the decedents of their own predecessors whom lived in those cities merely 400 years earlier. The very social and cultural ordering of these civilizations were evaporated into thin air, and the best anyone could do was pantomime the ruins.
There are no meaningful differences between Leftism and Liberalism: that's just your outdated version
You admit there is a distinction, and you assert that the Leftist re-definition is correct. Perhaps you will tell me why a transwoman is a woman. Afterall, the Leftist re-definition must be the correct one. All original definitions and meanings must be burned at the pyre of rhetorical warfare.
Finally, I can't help but note that the Leftist's reasoning in the last line is identical to yours: he wishes to 'remove all of the structures preventing you' from self-actualizing.
Again, you intentionally conflate the Leftist's totalitarianism with anti-totalitarianism. Gravity is not oppression. Gravity does not prevent you from """"""self-actualizing"""".
Bullets do prevent you from self-actualizing. They also prevent you from breathing, eating, thinking, or pretty much everything once jammed into your skull at 2,000 feet per second. That is a form of actual oppression.
All nations are facing the same problems now, there has been a globalization of problems in this 'shrinking world'. It is merely a matter of degrees. Everything is intertwined to the extent that no serious problem is confined to any particular place. One wouldn't even know about a pandemic in a neighbouring country in times of yore; now one knows of it when it first emerges, even if it emerges half way around the world. A villager would not know that a nearby city was polluted; now we believe that pollution half way around the world is a threat to us through 'climate change'. You can find junk food even in Islam's holy cities of Mecca and Medina: historical sites sit right alongside KFC branches. No place is sacred, no place is uncontaminated by the exceedingly pathological characteristics of late-modernity.
I'd say that Mishima is economizing something that is sociopolitical: it is the liberal disease of Spinoza, Locke, &c. that opens the door for degeneration, not capitalism per se. We are witnessing a radicalizing of this disease, and Marx and his acolytes are part of the same disease, even though they are more unsympathetic than not to capitalism. The socialists and communists, being sociopolitical liberals, are part of the very same problem that they attribute to the capitalists, their sociopolitical co-ideologists.
Of course, liberalism and capitalism fit together quite nicely to the extent that Marxists think of liberal democracy as capitalism's political form and liberal theorists, such as Fukuyama, think of capitalism as liberalism's economic form. Both of them are clear that capitalism and liberalism fit together like hand in glove. It is easy to see why they fit together: for instance, which society sells more contraceptives, drugs, entertainment, and even food? The society of abstinence, of prohibition, or the society of excess, of permissiveness, that is, the liberal society?
They are exceedingly possessing of a homogenized, universalized liberal psyche. This has numerous characteristics. Amongst others, it is highly acquisitive, highly apathetic, highly commodified, highly disenchanted, highly excessive, highly hedonistic, and highly therapeuticized. It is hyper-consumptive, hyper-individualized, extremely mediatized, and extremely technologized. It lives and works to amass resources for consumption and play without end. Since it has no end, it is also deeply irrational, working with no real plan and with no real purpose in a world with no real meaning. It consumes without end: it willingly embraces the fact that mass media, social media, and entertainment of all forms bombard it constantly. Overloaded, overstimulated, it is exceedingly pathological. It over-consumes information, most of it of the most useless kind, in particular, but it also greatly over-consumes salt, sugar and all kinds of other consumables. It enjoys this, even though it does not enjoy, and is desperate to avoid, the unintended consequences, crying out for fast cures for Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and every other wretched condition that it brings about on itself. Failing to avoid them, it is beginning to embrace them. Body positivity. Fat is beautiful. Plus-sized models. Every part of it is increasingly occupied by things that are ever further removed from reality. Bizarre beliefs, cretinous concepts, incorrect ideas, terrible theories.
Little is sacred to it except that which it considers marginalized, powerless, victimized. Out with lèse-majesté laws, it demands, and in with laws that prevent the defacing of pride crosswalks. The difference is that a king is the antithesis of what they idolize: he is powerful, their idols weak. The lack of qualities is now the greatest quality: the person who proudly lists all of his mental illnesses on his social media bios, even on his electoral campaign materials, does not do so because it brings about disbenefits, but the contrary. Vote for me because I possess more disabilities, I am a greater victim, than my opponents! Liberalism's political system, it turns out, is victimocracy. May the greatest victim reign supreme!
Little did Mishima know that the Japanese just after his time would not merely be Nietzsche's Last Men, but also the last Japanese people in the most literal sense.
Liberalism does not bode a Victimocracy. It, in fact, even in it's worst form: demands a meritocracy of only the strongest (that's Rousseau's Nobel Savage). What you are looking at is a Kekistocracy which is built by Leftism and it's innate authoritarian need to promote loyalists over competents to insure the institutional power remains.
Liberalism is not a disease, it simply has a problem of being an acid. It assumes (correctly) that as you break up a tyrannical political orthodoxy that imposes itself on society, you will generate a better culture as an emergent property of freedom. This is true.
That's why you stop at the political level. You don't "liberate" people from their families, communities, gravity, food, or God. That's not what liberation means. Liberalism doesn't need to apply at every conceivable action between man and everything.
The Leftists that are calling themselves liberals have an atomized, positivist, materialist, perspective on reality; while adapting a bizarre religious devotion to an insane hog-pog of Whig-Marxist history. They focus outside of the family, friends, community, and all the things that make up the important aspects of a man's life so that they can be manipulated by their leadership for the sake of abstract notions.
The purpose of Liberalism is to do the opposite of that: to remove all of the structures preventing you from returning to your family and prospering.
This is just a transposing of your libertarian interpretation onto the parts of what I have written that are clearly hostile to your worldview. But your attempt at a correction of sorts does not withstand this reply.
You unwittingly admit that Liberalism is the original victimocratic ideology. The rulers-subjects distinction simply precurses the myriad oppressor-oppressed distinctions that abound in late-modernity. Once the rulers are overthrown, the logic of the political value of freedom demands that new oppressors are identified and overthrown, so that freedom ever increases throughout the world. Hence the cis-trans distinction, the man-woman distinction, &c. are simply the original Liberal battle being fought all over again, but between different categories. New sides are merely fighting old battles. Feminists are Liberals who see men as the new kings to be overthrown, homosexualists are Liberals who see heteronormativity as the new monarchy to be overthrown, and so forth. 'Ur'-Liberalism, having stopped at political power, did not realize well enough the freedom of these persons, and so for those who value freedom and/or equality, these battles must be necessarily fought and won. Since I do not value these ideals, whose appeal and benefits are strongest to the degenerate, my view on such persons is that they should be crushed. A Liberal, however, cannot embrace this position without him becoming a rank hypocrite. Freedom and equality for me, but not for thee! You are forced to tolerate such persons, since anything else violates Liberalism itself (harm principle, NAP, etc.), and so the solution requires totally breaking with Liberalism.
What you want to do is bound Liberalism such that its logic does not unfold beyond the ruler-subjects distinction: Liberalism stops at political equality. This is nonsense, since there is no way that freedom can reliably be bounded. All attempts to do so—suffrage limited to White property-land owning men, suffrage limited to White men, suffrage limited to men, marriage limited to heterosexuals—have completely and utterly failed. The bounds are always pushed back. You want to tell others what they can do with their freedom, but history demonstrates that you will always fail in your attempts to draw lines that the free are not supposed to cross.
It should be clear from my second paragraph that I reject your view of Leftism being distinct enough from Liberalism to be an opponent of it. Leftism is simply Liberalism generations down the track. Marx and the Marxists simply felt that political freedom was an incomplete freedom. Today's Leftists simply feel that political freedom and Marx's economic equality are still an incomplete freedom. And tomorrow's Leftists will view the excessive freedoms of today (paradoxically, freedoms protected by certain unfreedoms, nevertheless, society is freer than it has ever been for degenerates) as still an incomplete freedom. Each generation under Liberalism, having degenerated relative to the previous one, sees the freedom that the preceding generation brought about as slavery. This creates a self-radicalizing feedback loop, with each generation taking things closer to the Left-extreme. All that you represent is a past iteration of the same problematic ideology complaining about its more recent iterations, and thus provide no solution, since your 'solution' is to revert or rollback to an earlier 'commit', iteration, or 'snapshot'. Reverting to a rose-tinted snapshot of the 1960s or 1776 perpetuates the problem. The whole machine was corrupted from the start.
The only solution, then, is a re-evaluation of values such that freedom and equality are simply eliminated from our value system. Since both inexorably lead to degeneracy, they require replacement with pre-Socratic values, such as honour and strength. Liberalism and its Leftist descendants must simply be eliminated from the list of socially-acceptable and state-sanctioned ideologies. Nothing short of that provides the necessary counter-revolution against the Enlightenment that will bring about the survival and regeneration of Man. Anything short of that simply perpetuates Liberalism and its endless battles between those perceived as oppressors and those perceived as oppressed, and the degeneration that comes about when the superior of those groups inevitably loses to its inferiors, who always have and always will rely on appeals to freedom and equality to hand them victory.
This is false for anyone who is sufficiently Right-Wing, since we do not care about inequality of power per se. It is 'true' for Leftists and Radical Centrists, such as Libertarians like yourself. More specifically:
This is some kind of Hayekian or other liberal argument. Hayek is trying to say that 'big government' or 'statism' or some such thing is abnormal, which is false. This presupposes a hyper-individualistic Hobbesian natural state—Hobbes, contrary to common opinion, simply entertained it as a thought experiment, and did not himself believe it—resolved through a social contract, or other false origin myth for society. Unfortunately, Liberalism has warped the world so extremely that society no longer has anything but a mythical account of its own origins, with Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and most other Leftist and/or Liberal thinkers misinterpreting Hobbes' thought experiment as gospel. This has misled society into believing that society's own authoritarian collectivism is unnecessary and dispensable.
Society, however, is necessarily authoritarian and collectivist. It was built by, and is sustainable only through, such means. There never was a natural state: humans were tribal right from the start. Tribal life was 'big government' and 'statist': the chief's will was the way. Individual property was non-existent, all was owned by the tribe. Breaking laws meant expulsion from the tribe, and thus certain death. Liberalism and Leftism thus regard something indispensable as something dispensable. Liberalism's centuries-long legacy, based on nothing but myths and rationalizations for degeneracy, has amounted to nothing more than an unprecedented degeneration, from North America to Thailand to Western Europe. Without a complete re-evaluation of values, Man will be practically extinct within a few millennia, with most of the damage done within the next few centuries. Authoritarian collectivism is ultimately the only sustainable alternative to civilizational collapse. The world's longest surviving civilizations, all of them authoritarian collectivists, such as the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, attest to the truth of that fact.
We couldn't disagree more. There are no meaningful differences between Leftism and Liberalism: that's just your outdated version of Liberalism, i.e. Libertarianism, rationalizing away Liberalism's impeccable track record of failure. What Libertarians have done is taken all of those degenerative, wretched effects of Liberalism and its underlying political values which they feel are too extreme, created these bogey categories or misunderstood existing ones such as 'Feminism', 'Leftism', and 'Marxism'—in reality, merely more updated versions of your own Liberalism—and then palmed off all of them onto those, so that you are left with something blameless and rose-tinted. You paint a mythical world in which Liberalism once worked right up until one of these imagined groups—which consists of nothing more than othered Liberals, Liberals you otherized over trivialities chiefly of an economic or political-systemic and thus unimportant nature—mysteriously rose up out of nowhere and ruined it. It is a world that never existed. Liberalism was dysfunctional from its inception, and today's dysfunctions are merely a compounding of those original dysfunctions.
Finally, I can't help but note that the Leftist's reasoning in the last line is identical to yours: he wishes to 'remove all of the structures preventing you' from self-actualizing. You see, if you omitted the word 'family', your statement would be absolutely congruent with contemporary Leftism. In conclusion, the differences between you and them are trivial and the difference is chiefly in your negative rather than positive judgement of what Liberals have done since the time you believe that they went off the rails and became 'Leftists'. But that is just a consequence of being unable to accept that this was an inevitable consequence of your own political ideology and values.
You're asserting a historical dialectic as if it follows that ruler inevitably leads to oppressor. You are assuming the Leftist dialectic from the start.
No. You are extending the concept of liberation beyond all reasonable scope. Gravity is not political oppression.
Any logical system taken to the extremes passed it's boundary conditions inevitably fails.
This is an argument from totalitarianism. Everything is political, so therefore political freedom must be pursued against the political oppression of gravity. No. Again, Goodell's Incompleteness Theorem actually has weight here: No logical system can be both complete, and consistent. Ever. Under any circumstance. Even arithmetic. Something which has an unbounded scope will never be consistent. Something which is consistent will always be limited in scope. Logical deduction does not even escape this conclusion.
The bounds of Liberal models end at the boundary of politics, and not everything is within the realm of political debate. And even within the realm of political debate, most things never meet the standard of oppression or tyranny.
"If I remove the variable from my spreadsheet, then the variable no longer exists, and my utopia will be complete." Wrong. A society that eliminates the value of freedom does not prevent anything, but instead fosters the resentment you are hoping to cut-off at the head.
This is comically wrong. The exact level of authoritarianism, autocracy, and collectivism you cite has lead (and always leads) to the utter ruination of the civilization that imposes it, as it has no mechanism to decline. The Byzantine Empire was more liberal than most of the empires around it, and it was exterminated after it became more and more centralized. The Ottoman Empire was exterminated. The Golden Horde were exterminated. The Assyrians were exterminated. The Spartans decayed into extermination. Roman culture was exterminated. They never even had the ability to reform or morph into something else. They were simply eradicated as their institutions were, sometimes practically overnight. Within a few centuries, the entire civilization is lost entirely to myth. The children that lived in the ruins of Assyrian cities did not even know that they were the decedents of their own predecessors whom lived in those cities merely 400 years earlier. The very social and cultural ordering of these civilizations were evaporated into thin air, and the best anyone could do was pantomime the ruins.
You admit there is a distinction, and you assert that the Leftist re-definition is correct. Perhaps you will tell me why a transwoman is a woman. Afterall, the Leftist re-definition must be the correct one. All original definitions and meanings must be burned at the pyre of rhetorical warfare.
Again, you intentionally conflate the Leftist's totalitarianism with anti-totalitarianism. Gravity is not oppression. Gravity does not prevent you from """"""self-actualizing"""".
Bullets do prevent you from self-actualizing. They also prevent you from breathing, eating, thinking, or pretty much everything once jammed into your skull at 2,000 feet per second. That is a form of actual oppression.