Habermas's Lifeworld and My Three Peoples

I'm working on a long-form piece about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything as it applies to our modern educated Gentry. It featured what I call the German Turn of Germans from Kant through Nietzsche to Marcuse, and then I thought, whatabout Habermas?

I had read Habermas and his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, some years ago, and I thought I better take a look at what I had written on him.

The point about Habermas is that he is a lefty trying to get out of the lefty box canyon, but not if it means a really steep banked turn.

(This is flyboy talk. For pilots, a box canyon is a valley that you fly up with a cliff at the end, and maybe no way to climb over the cliff or no way to turn back without crashing into the walls of the canyon.)

What Habermas did was to convert Marx's economic and social theory of exchange labor and social labor -- taken from the classical economists -- and convert it into a two-system world of system and lifeworld.

Habermas converts the world of abstract labor and social labor into system and lifeworld. System is not just the alienating force of big bad capitalism, but of the terrible twins, rational government and rational business, the system of force and the system of money. Lifeworld is not just social labor producing social value, but, following Husserl and Heidegger, a full face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world, for being is not just consciousness of the ego, but being-there in the world, and being-with the Other.

I think it is fair to say that Habermas's lefty comrades have not really taken up this challenge to their world view. For if they did, they wouldn't be so keen on more government, realizing that big government run by noble progressives is just as dominatory and hegemonic as big business run by eevil capitalists. Let us continue.

Thus, for Habermas, humans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement. If the rational system of the Enlightenment and its instrumental reason is indeed strategic, a mechanical system that deals only in power and domination, it is only part of the truth. Humans also dwell in a lifeworld of shared cultural tradition. 

See how this applies to my reductive Three Peoples theory? For me, the Three Peoples live in three different lifeworlds, three different "communit[ies] in the world with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement", three different "lifeworld[s] of shared cultural tradition."

So it makes perfect sense that since they live in different lifeworlds they develop different moral agreements about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. The People of the Subordinate Self live in a neo-tribal community of kindred and (urban) village; their moral and cultural tradition is developed in that lifeworld. The People of the Responsible Self live in the city world of wage labor and market economy and so their moral and cultural tradition reflects that lifeworld.

And then there are our friends the People of the Creative Self, Yarvin's Gentry. The point is that their lifeworld and their moral and cultural tradition is significantly different from the lifeworlds of the Subordinates and the Responsibles. Their ethos of living the creative life makes sense to them, whereas the Responsibles and the Subordinates would regard the creative life as dangerous and reckless.

When you shine Habermas's system/lifeworld light on society it makes complete sense that, given the different lifeworlds and moral and cultural communities in which people live, that they would experience the world differently and could be easily led to believe that other lifeworlds are illegitimate, or deplorable, or exploitative.

But if you believe that humans are "diverse" and live in various lifeworlds then you are ready to start dealing with the idea that people in different lifeworlds are going to disagree about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and what to do about it.

Wait a minute! How come lefties, that worship at the altar of "diversity," are so determined not to understand the lifeworld of the deplorables? I smell a rat!