Or Marxism, whichever you prefer.
So this is actually quite an important one to me, and was completely misread in the usual way. I find it strange, so yeah. But let’s go over it; we’re twelve years later now and you might understand a thing or two concerning it now.
So the people here and the Murricans seriously seem to have believed that I was saying that I am free to be whatever I want to be (which is a whole different question) and that I was saying that that included their favourite hobbies. Obviously, they do not understand things very well.
Let’s go over things again. I’ll do it the quick and dirty way. Very technically speaking it’s not supercomplete, but even a donkey can get the point, and that’s what matters for now.
In international relations there is the concept of soft power versus hard power. (I was originally thinking about doing this post in Chinese, but my nails are too long again, and I’m using windows right now and the input methods in windows are garbage, blahblah, so I’ll stick to the more common tongue for now.) So hard power is essentially the war machine and the financial hallelujah, and soft power, let’s just define it as something in the form of human relations. Essentially it’s a constructed thing.
Many things are socially constructed, and I find it easier to think of it that way when it comes to ‘social’ issuses instead of the usual Marxist way of the interaction of the base and the superstructure, which technically speaking is not wrong, but no one understands it. So again, the technicality of material vs non-material as pointed out by the Greeks we just simply forget here. I’m simply arguing that it’s not relevant.
So the two-camp theory, Gorbachev loving the western market system, moving from Asia to a Western country, and a whole host of things have actually a material and a socially constructed component. It can be all kinds of things.
Now sometimes there are struggles between places, and soft power becomes important. During the 90s the USA had a monopoly on both soft power and hard power; hard power needs no mention, but the US was also heralded by many as the greatest peacekeeping force and whatnot in the world as well.
Some institutions think that there is great need of having a big arsenal of soft power. I’ll refrain from giving examples, but you get the point. Other institutions almost exclusively rely on hard power.
Things can change during history; what used to have enormous soft power can diminish, and the other way around. What is more rare though is that entities almost deliberately bring out their own ruin for the sake of some really feeble nonsense, but yeah, right. Although there are the usual examples of for example the Peloponnese war (the most famous one) which ended more or less in Syracuse, right, etc, etc.
But regardless, this was quite a brutal, but very necessary show off of the little tweak of classical Marxism that enhances the importance of certain things that previously were ignored a bit too much.
And let’s be honest:
It’s powerful, isn’t it?
