The necessity of "degenerates" - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

All genuine progress is preceded by a partial weakening. "Degenerates" provide that weakening.

• From Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human (1878)
  • Some basic principles / processes that apply not only to humankind, but to all of nature (and beyond)
    • "The danger to these strong communities founded on homogeneous individuals who have character is growing stupidity, which is gradually increased by heredity, and which, in any case, follows all stability like a shadow."
    • "degenerates" in a community or society are essential
    • they are individuals with the weakest ties (or fewest); they are more uncertain about the accepted dogma of a society and less likely to tow the line; they have a "weaker drive" to do so
    • in this "wounded and weakened" position of the degenerate in a community, THIS is where the whole system gets "inoculated" with something new, a new idea (and perhaps new paradigms start here)
    • like a vaccine, the organism (society) must be strong enough to take it in, and then the system grows stronger still through its learning to adjust to this insult
    • "The strongest natures hold fast to the type; the weaker ones help to develop it further"
      • LOVE this because it's counter intuitive in terms of considering strength and weakness and their functions
      • weaker here means less absolute or wholly brainwashed by the beliefs of the community
      • think most philosophers of science in the average university (stereotype)
    • The linking of antifragile processes at both the individual and societal level is brilliant here. The same principles are working at both those system levels (above is societal, below individual):
      • Individual: "rarely is degeneration, a crippling, even a vice or any physical or moral damage, unaccompanied by some gain in the other side."
        • But cf. Lermontov, who says the opposite, believing that amputations damage people's character
        • Cf. also arguments that intelligence/looks are just symptoms of underlying fitness. E.g.
        • On the other hand, there are examples like deafness improving vision, blindness improving hearing, etc. No idea the data on these or if they're folktales or what.
      • "the sicker man in a warlike and restless tribe, for example, may have more occasion to be by himself and may thus become calmer and wiser; the one-eyed will have one stronger eye; the blind will see more deeply within, and in any case have a keener sense of hearing."
        • You could also argue that the sick become embittered.
      • the task of education: "the educator must wound him, or utilize the wounds destiny inflicts upon him; and when pain and need have thus developed, something new and noble can then be inoculated in the wounded spots. His whole nature swill absorb this, and later, in its fruits, show the ennoblement."
        • related to Lukianoff and Haidt's Coddling of the American Mind Jonathan Haidt
        • Kafka: I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us.
        • Jesse's notion that learning has to be uncomfortable
        • Ericsson's notion that deliberate practice needs to be uncomfortable overview
        • Children below a certain age probably require less violence. See bit about authority figures in 2021-05-03

• See Zechariah 13:3-4
• Prophets are killed in times of stability, consulted in times of uncertainty
• Relates to stability vs plasticity. Pruning and Plasticity

• From his major work, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942):

  • The process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. [1942, chap. VII; Schumpeter’s emphasis]

  • From the phrasing, he definitely got this from Marx, but he also liked Kondratiev waves
• One of the few early 20th century economists who did not see progress as gradual
• Did Nietzsche get it from Marx? It's sort of present in the Manifesto, but definitely present in the Grundrisse (1857)
• May well have influenced Kuhn

• This continues, via Darwin (a geologist first and foremost, and a uniformitarian), today in Gould (punctuated equilibrium) vs Dawkins (gradualism)