I first heard about Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in the early 2020s and I read The Concept of the Political. I first wrote about it here. It all comes down to this:
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.
But for you and I we need to make it Real Simple with the help of the experts.
Curtis Yarvin: There is no politics without an enemy.
Christopher Chantrill: There is no politics without a handout.
In other words, people in politics are obsessed with the threat of the Enemy. And they are obsessed with gifting their Friends and supporters.
Schmitt has more that one distinction, as follows:
Moral: the distinction between good and evil
Aesthetic: the distinction between beautiful and ugly
Economic: the distinction betwen useful and harmful
I came to think that the political is about power, the moral is about belief, the aesthetic is about feelings, and the economic about making things.
Ever since, I have been expanding the distinctions as a way to understand the world. My first effort included this:
Traditional: the distinction between what we do and what we don’t do.
Associational: the distinction between belonging and not belonging
Technical: the distinction between knowledge and ignorance
Mind: the distinction between conscious and unconscious
But then I thought that I should look at Jonathan Haidt and The Righteous Mind. His distinctions are all supposed to be moral:
Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation
Liberty/oppression
But I compared Haidt’s distinctions against Schmitt’s and decided that Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Liberty/oppression are all political.
Then I read Mancur Olson and The Rise and Decline of Nations and came up with the communal distinction:
Communal: the distinction between included and excluded.
Think of the fraternal orders — Masons, Elks, and Eagles. You are either in or out.
One day I was analyzing AI and I came up with the cultural distinction, a softer version of the moral distinction:
Cultural: the distinction between our way and their way.
And whatabout Claude Shannon’s information theory:
Information: the distinction between signal and noise.
Then, I thought about Jürgen Habermas and his “lifeworld,” how we experience the world day to day:
Truth: the distinction between true and untrue
Real: the distinction between the real and the imaginary
Then I thought about a bunch of economic distinctions:
growth vs, decline
boom vs. bust
startup vs. establishment
entrepreneur vs. monopolist
unregulated vs. regulated
debt vs. equity
subsidized vs. penalized
employees vs. employers
And there is the combination of the political and the moral in our liberal friends’ Allyship doctrine:
Oppression: the distiinction between oppressed and oppressor
Then, finally, I came up with the familial distinction:
Familial: the distinction between care and neglect.
That’ all for now. Until next time.