philosophers-from-belgium

"An illusion will only make you happy if you’re fully under its spell, and blissfully unaware of it."

"Personally, I think the Western penchant for vilifying our own civilisation has a more straightforward explanation: only a free and affluent civilisation like ours permits people to vilify it. Where else can you take your own political leaders to task in public, even insult and abuse them, without fear of repercussions? You shouldn’t try it in Russia or China, just as you shouldn’t have tried it in Europe before the rights revolution and the liberal constitutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similarly, where are you free to wage a full-frontal attack on the economic and political institutions under which you live? Where can you make a fuss about problems both real and imaginary? Only in a liberal democracy. But why would you want to bite the hand that feeds you in this way? Such critics have a variety of motives, but perhaps for many, the main appeal is that in doing so they feel they are striking a heroic posture. In a Western democracy, you can pat yourself on the back for courageously “speaking truth to power,” you can even complain about being silenced and censored, while the very fact that you are able to voice these complaints out loud proves them hollow. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a soccer player theatrically flopping down onto the field to feign injury."

"In fact, non-Westerners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali are often especially appreciative of the blessings of liberal democracy and industrial modernity because they have had first-hand experience of what it means to be deprived of them. It’s only those who have enjoyed freedom and prosperity their whole lives who tend to behave like spoiled brats."

"Is such a life of voluntary delusion really what you should want? Even if you don’t have any objections against untruthfulness per se, how can you foresee all of the consequences and ramifications of your false belief in an afterlife, or in any other comforting fiction?"

"Nowhere else in the world, and at no other previous time in history, have people ever had so much freedom to bite the hand that feeds them without being punched in the face for it. This leads to a paradox that was probably first described by American diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan:"

"There is also a rich tradition of right-wing thinkers in the West cozying up to foreign dictators, theocrats, and military strongmen, who are sworn enemies of western civilisation and its liberal values."

"Although over the past decades leftists have been more creative in inventing ever more novel ways of denouncing Western civilisation, the efforts of the Right should not be discounted, either."

"Even after the Cold War ended and most of the world’s communist regimes collapsed, biting the nourishing hand of industrial modernity remained a favourite pastime of leftist intellectuals. Postmodernists and critical theorists launched countless attacks on Western civilisation, while ensconced in cushy positions at Western universities, and Western presses published their books."

"According to scholars like Ara Norenzayan and Joe Henrich, belief in moralizing Big Gods has fostered pro-sociality and enabled large-scale human cooperation. That sounds beautiful and uplifting, but if you look a little closer, it turns out that it’s mostly the nasty, vengeful, punishing gods that bring pro-social benefits. The stick works better than the carrot."

"Rousseau’s first Discourse is one of the earliest instances of something that would come to accompany modernity wherever it gained a foothold: biting the hand that feeds you because you know it won’t punch you in the face."

"Many religious apologists argue that explaining the evolutionary roots of belief does nothing to undermine God’s existence. But it does. As Nietzsche understood, if you can explain the origins of religious faith in biological terms, then “with the insight into that origin the belief falls away.” Sure, if we possessed incontrovertible evidence for God’s existence, then the genealogy of belief would be irrelevant. But in the absence of such evidence, showing how religious faith can arise without any supernatural input genuinely weakens its credibility."

"Most people intuitively grasp the basic rules of logic and probability—we wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Human reason is a bag of tricks and heuristics, mostly accurate in the environments in which we evolved, but easily led astray in modern life. And it is strategic and self-serving, motivated to reach conclusions that serve our own interests."

"The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the wilful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel, even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020? The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion. (The "Amalek verse" referred to is Deuteronomy 25:17-19)"

"Openly expressing your aversion to Marxism from behind the Iron Curtain would have meant social opprobrium at best—but more likely the gulag. Communist sympathisers in the West, however, were free to vilify their own societies, while glorifying the totalitarian alternative they never had to suffer under. Most were savvy enough to remain hypocrites: they returned from brief visits to Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China raving about the glorious future they supposedly witnessed there, but only the truly deluded actually packed their bags for Moscow or Beijing."

"We should cherish the naysayers. The more mud they fling, the better. Anti-capitalists, postmodern relativists, and Putin apologists are canaries in the free speech coal mine—we should start worrying if they suddenly fall silent. Still, although self-criticism is important if we want to learn from our mistakes, ritual self-flagellation is not just unproductive but actively harmful, especially when it involves glorifying alternatives that would make all of us much worse off. A healthy body needs a robust immune system to protect it from infections, but if that immune system is overzealous, it will wreak the body’s destruction. Enemies of liberal democracy like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei must be rubbing their hands with glee as they watch us disarm ourselves without a fight. They don’t even have to denounce our free societies—we’ve already indicted ourselves."

"Moreover, in evolutionary accounts of religion there’s always a flipside to pro-sociality: being friendly to “us” also means being hostile and aggressive to “them”. There is a dark side to human pro-sociality that is often sanitized in popular accounts."

"Machine learning can be used to recognize faces (and even recognize emotions based on analysis of the faces), make search suggestions, drive a car, make personality predictions, predict who is going to re-offend, or recommend music to listen to."

"The danger is, once again, the exercise of power without knowledge and (therefore) without responsibility—and, worse, others being subjected to this"

"AI is already happening today and it is pervasive, often invisibly embedded in our day-to-day tools and as part of complex technological systems."

"Scientists used to create theories to explain data and make predictions; in machine learning, the computer creates its own models that fit the data"

"Darwin and Freud dethroned our beliefs of exceptionalism, our feelings of superiority, and our fantasies of control; today, artificial intelligence seems to deal yet another blow to humanity's self-image"

"Even if transparency were desirable and possible, it may be difficult to realize it in practice. For example, private companies may not be willing to reveal their algorithms because they want to protect their commercial interests."

"I regret everything. But if I had done things differently, it would never have been as compelling."

"I did learn in the meantime that there are two categories of people: those who are for me and those who are against me. I don't think there is a middle species."

"When the taxman had taxed everything, I was forced to drive a Rolls. It was terrible. Such a raggedy car that broke down every five minutes. I could barely manage 200 kilometres per hour with it. I eventually sold it, because I would rather walk than drive that Rolls."

"I always start from a truth that I dress up and sugarcoat. For example, if I've been to a restaurant and it was quite expensive, I say, 'The four of us went for dinner and we consumed a hundred thousand francs.'"

"I want to talk about it with people who know something about it. You are politicians, you know nothing."

"I am still in debt to the taxman. A little. 17.5 billion."

"I did the math once: I must have smoked about 3.8 million cigarettes in my lifetime. I easily smoked eight packs a day, one cigarette after another. That's more than two hundred cigarettes a day."

"I know that in my life I have bought 128 or 138 Ferraris, a lot of paintings, 7 castles I have never seen, 2 planes and an $89 million yacht."

"I have been an asshole, but an interesting one. I have made horrendous mistakes and made wrong decisions."

"I smoke a lot, yes. The proverbial Turk could take a punt on it. Et alors? I am not afraid of dying. If I have to, I have to."

"Vive la république d’Europe!"

"Under the influence of Marxism, a sixth form of division of labour also emerged in world history, the nomic technical division of labour. It was first introduced in the Soviet Union in 1917 and disappeared with the fall of the Wall in 1989. Working people were led to believe that it was a form of nomic division of labour that had arisen spontaneously and was not enforced by the government. But in reality, it was not communism; on the contrary, it was state capitalism. On paper, communism still prevails in the People's Republic of China, but only because paper is very willing there (no wonder, since paper was invented in China precisely). Hard forms of communism continued for a short time after the Fall of the Wall in Cuba and Albania, but have since disappeared there too. Only in totally isolated North Korea has the nomic technical division of labour persisted to this day. It certainly did not lead to a death of the state, as Marx predicted, but to a crushing state apparatus controlled by the unscrupulous power clique around the revered Leader."

"I am no longer afraid of death. A longing for death even arises. Still, I would like to be able to say before the end of the year: enough is enough."

"How many times did we hear statements along the lines of: "Scientific research showed that ..." or "It has been scientifically proven that ..." In doing so, people assume that science is always true. But how reliable is science? A lot of what we call science, and we accept as true, is neither true nor false, and belongs to metaphysics. For a short time (following the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus), it looked like we could make a razor-sharp distinction between reliable scientific statements and unreliable metaphysical statements. But Wittgenstein himself challenged that distinction with the posthumous publication of his Philosophical Investigations. Still later, (predominantly French) postmodern philosophy picked up the proposition that there is less truth contained in general science than in a simple literary poem. The days of reliable general theories seemed hopelessly over. Is that so? Has cognitive thinking become impossible? The following is a reflection. The era we live in, at least in the Western world, is called postmodernity. It is characterised by great uncertainty and a sense of increasing insecurity. Uncertainty surrounds unanswered questions related to the future of the planet, to the sustainability of energy supplies, to job security, to family stability, to declining social control, to the increase in the number of asylum seekers, to the existence of a god, and so on. Insecurity is linked to war, to terrorism, to crime. The idea is to study all these phenomena scientifically. But how sure am I that science is still reliable?"

"Launching the Marshall Plan was certainly not as philanthropic as it was presented. The reconstruction aid was first and foremost inspired by the fear that without it, another war with the Soviet bloc would be inevitable. Moreover, the Americans knew only too well that in Western Europe the reconversion from a war economy to a normal economy was still in full swing, so Europe did have to import massively from the United States, which of course greatly benefited the US trade balance."

"The higher the degree of postmodernity, the more citizens have to lose and the greater the uncertainty regarding their future (will I still be able to pay off my mortgage tomorrow, pay my rent, will my wife or husband not run off with someone else, will I still get a decent pension, will I still give my children and grandchildren an ecologically liveable world). Also, the greater the degree of postmodernity the greater the spending on the military, police and judiciary to fight crime, terrorism, or war)."

"The time is not far off when a complete Herge page will cost 10 or 20 million francs."

"No, but i do note that every minute of your life the state is around the corner, you only get into your car, you have to put on your seatbelt, decree of the state, you can only drive 120 km per hour, decree of the state, but you can pay 33% VAT, at the petrol pump you can pay 80% to the state, on every cigarette you have again state, I smoke 7 packs a day so I maintain the state."

"The fact is that the implementation of the Truman doctrine elevated the United States, in a first phase, during the Cold War, to the police of Western Europe, in a second phase, after the Fall of the Wall, to the police of the whole world, - a police escaping any parliamentary control. So is this the global power that George W. Bush and his think tanks were so proud of?"

"I have been driving 300 kilometres per hour all my life and now I meet an accident at 30 per hour. Surely that is godawful."

"Postmodernity is a way of life that has spread throughout post-industrial western society in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia at least since 1980. It is characterised by families getting smaller and smaller, by a sharp rise in divorce rates and fewer marriages, by more and more out-of-wedlock births, by a meteoric rise in computer and internet use, by a sharp rise in drug use, by more and more time spent on gaming, by a false sense of increasing freedom, by a rise in wealth, and so on."

"If a woman showing her ass and tits is already a Public Figure, it has come a long way."

"Postmodernity is, for the time being, the most recent form of society to manifest itself at the time of the anomic technical division of labour. It is the successor to modernity which was itself the successor to traditional society. Postmodernity should not be confused with postmodernism, which was a period code in art, also a (sad) way of philosophical thinking that spread mainly between 1970 and 1995 in France - an idiotic way of thinking that suggested that in science, general theories are no longer possible and that there is more cognitive truth hidden in a poem than in the complete Standard Model of Physics. Postmodern philosophy, viewed with some recul, has been a feat of pompous nonsense, if only because it denied that in human science general theories are impossible, as if the seminal work of Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann had no cognitive significance."

"The King is no longer the same; the change of character and spirit observed in him for two or three years is accentuated and makes fear of a catastrophe, at a time when he had only to let it go to be a remarkable King, perhaps to become a large figure."

"By the end of 1892, all the King's collaborators during the first and second phases of Belgian work in the Congo had therefore ceased to participate. M. van Eetvelde, who had increasingly isolated himself from them, remained alone in possession of the sovereign's confidence, with the sole program of being the passive instrument of his designs. This third phase of the administration of the state of Congo affected all signs of impending dissolution."

"Honest man, great citizen, modest servant of the country, who was always in pain, rarely in the spotlight, and who has not been replaced."

"Belgium only does pure philanthropy."

"Freedom of trade and navigation in the Congo Basin, exclusion from any differential treatment, assimilation of foreigners to nationals in civil and commercial terms, prohibition of entry rights for twenty years, condemnation of trafficking. There is only one downside: the African work does not have the international character that he would have liked."