Talkin’ about a Revolution

Fear, Rationality, and Future Orientation

• Several comments challenge the idea of being “frightened into rationality,” arguing fear narrows attention to short-term threats, undermines long-term planning, and crowds out visionary risk-taking.
• Others counter that acute danger can force more realistic, calculating thinking, though courage and fear are both seen as instinct-driven rather than purely rational.
• Optimism and pessimism are both framed as non-rational “fills” for uncertainty: optimism can drive change but invite exploitation; pessimism can become self-fulfilling. A “juggling” of both is proposed as rational.

Is the World Getting Better or Worse? What Is “Normal”?

• One side argues the West is overly pessimistic after an unusually “golden” post–Cold War period; the current turbulence is a return to historical volatility.
• Others insist current regression is real: greed, inequality, and fragile high-tech systems make modern civilization especially vulnerable (nukes, drones, climate, ecology).
• A long-horizon view (“200 years probably fine, next 30 dangerous”) is contrasted with people’s focus on their remaining lifetime; many say distant optimism is cold comfort if the next decades are bleak.
• Some see today’s widespread doomerism and cynicism as a cultural mood, not inherently more realistic than optimism.

Democracy, Internet, and Culture Wars

• Debate over whether democracy will expand or retreat: some extrapolate from history toward more democracy and better lives; others point to failing democracies, coups, and weak institutions as reasons for doubt.
• Several argue a truly free global internet may be incompatible with stable democracy, predicting walled gardens and cryptographic origin-tracking as future “soft firewalls.” Others suggest the internet is exposing what “true” democracy looks like and we dislike it.
• The US “culture war” (e.g., around Project 2025, abortion, gay and trans rights) is portrayed as a genuine struggle over morality, identity, and state power, not mere “mild disagreement.”
• There is concern that religious conservatives, feeling they’ve been “losing” since the 1960s, now seek to use federal and judicial power to reshape culture, with some warning this is playing with fire.

Morality, Human Nature, and Social Change

• One recurring claim is that material conditions improve but human moral nature (greed, fear, basic intuitions of fairness) changes little.
• Others say moral frameworks do change significantly over time (e.g., attitudes toward sexuality), though built on relatively stable core intuitions (fairness, reciprocity, harm).
• Cynicism is linked to a sense of broken social contracts—taxes without adequate services, perceived injustice, and declining trust in institutions.

Revolution, Violence, and Democratic Transitions

• Using Syria as an example, some argue democracy’s advance can entail enormous human cost; others dispute whether the post-revolution outcome is actually better, pointing to extremist control.
• This becomes a deeper argument about whether enduring tyranny is “cowardice” or whether violent upheaval risks simply swapping one form of oppression for another.

Philosophy, Academia, and Grand Theories

• Commenters agree with the article’s critique that contemporary academic philosophy, driven by hyper-specialization and publication incentives, rarely produces broad, synthetic theories.
• Philosophers who do grand system-building are often mocked; public “philosophical” voices are seen as either narrow specialists or media-savvy simplifiers/charlatans.
• The problem is generalized to academia: both universities and industry are described as incentive-corrupted, leaving little room for Enlightenment-style, high-risk, contemplative inquiry.
• Proposed “third ways” include DARPA-like institutions, patronage/Patreon, or independent research supported without immediate market or publication pressure, though concerns about populist or dual-use distortions remain.

Attitudes Toward Idealism and Canonical Philosophers

• Some commenters strongly disparage idealism and grand theorists like Hegel, citing historical critiques and even blaming such systems for ideological catastrophes.
• Others note this kind of intra-philosopher invective is longstanding (Hegel vs. Schopenhauer, etc.), hinting at how much philosophy is also about rhetorical status battles.

History, Progress, and Meaning

• There’s skepticism about using history as a guide when facing genuinely novel phenomena (e.g., anthropogenic climate change at current scale, AI, possible “singularity”), though some argue human-made climate influence is historically continuous since agriculture.
• One thread laments that history lost value when it abandoned the notion of objective facts; others reply that disagreement doesn’t make something non-factual.
• A recurring undercurrent is that “progress” is contested: is it material improvement, moral development, expanded democracy, or people realizing more of their potential?

Academia/Industry, Geopolitics, and Individual Agency

• A commenter highlights how seemingly arbitrary personal experiences of individual leaders can shape major geopolitical stances (e.g., one politician’s bad encounters leading to a broad anti-European posture).
• This feeds into broader unease about fragile power concentration: a few unstable or vindictive people can trigger cascading crises in a highly interconnected, nuclear-armed, automated world.

Nuclear Arsenals and Western Responsibility

• One objection targets the article’s focus on US/Russia/China nukes while ignoring UK and French modernization and expansion, calling this a European blind spot regarding their own role in nuclear risk.