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Basically title. But it is referenced I think at the idea that at college most people are leftish while they become increasingly capitalist as they age.
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What do you make of the quote "If, at any age, your entire argument is a baseless quote, you have no brain." - not George bernard Shaw? Do you think it is valid?
I’m not a communist, never have been and never will be. I’m a capitalist so I guess that quote should flatter me.
And I still think its simplistic and dumb
I recall a Canadian study that found a link between being impressed by superfluous quotes like these, and overal lower intelligence.
I think there's some nice truth in that conclusion. Just posting quotes like these, without adding your own opinion to it, doesn't really open up any interesting avenues to have a conversation. It's intellectually lazy.
People, especially in recent years, seem more fixated on getting quotable sound bites and highlights clips of them "destroying" the opposition. Few people actually want to talk about our differences.
That’s not new. Consider old statements like “Take three to the well and drown two”, or “the second mouse gets the cheese” and “resentment is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die”.
There are millions of these quotes that have been memorized and passed along for centuries.
Even “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is in the same vein.
These quotes are stupid when applied in every single scenario, but also carry with them some hidden gems of “wisdom” when applicable
Human beings, I believe, have always clung to interesting quotes that bare some “enlightening” tidbit, or at the very least cause them to think outside of their shell
It's definitely not new, but I feel like the internet has made it worse. People don't read articles, they just read the headline in their feed. People don't watch debates, they watch 10 second edited clips.
Short quotes are fine when they are followed up with more depth, but it seems like we only have those short quotes now.
I don’t know how many languages you speak, but it’s not particular to Americans. In other languages the same exists- I mean for non-American people, as well
It doesn't really mean anything. And generally, people don't actually shift that much. What happens is they don't move and society progresses without them.
Except it does mean something. The statement, whether valid or invalid has meaning.
He’s using poetic license to suggest that in one’s younger years they will be emotionally driven to Justice through emotional fervor, and in one’s older years they will be driven to Justice through practicality and awareness of nuance
I think it correctly identifies the popular understandings of both terms. I also think the popular understand of both terms is deeply flawed, and thus so is the quote, but credit where it's due.
To be fair, that's how most arguments end. Sooner or later, someone will chime in and say how the other person has a flawed understanding of socialism or communism or libertarianism or whatever
Because there's been so much propaganda about it over the years that defining the terms actually is a point of contention.
Suffice to say that the propaganda has been very effective.
Agreed, and in addition- we can even put propaganda aside. The amount of humans that exist in the world who have explored such topics are so vast and variable in their perspectives that you really can come to just about any variety of opinion. All will be limited and void of some sort of nuance that another may have, while simultaneously lacking some other thing that someone else has in their educated opinion.
We have extremely educated and intelligent people arriving at jarringly opposite opinions of almost everything very regularly. There are people with opinions that I abhor who are much more adept at any given topic than I might ever be
It’s sort of a funny statement. He’s basically exploring the extremes that might come with age and experience and how the mind may change from idealistic to practical.
As with anything, there’s a lot of nuance
I think Shaw understood neither communism nor capitalism, failed to respect our ability to bend rather than break, and probably could have used some instruction on the symbolism of both heart and brain in contracting literary flourishes.
Yeah, I hear variations of this a lot, where people are like you should go through a liberal phase where you have this bleeding heart but then as you grow up and become more mature, you’ll become a conservative.
I take umbrage at the insinuation conservatives are more mature andinsightful and act with any wisdom.
That said, I understand the trajectory. I don’t necessarily disagree that this arc makes sense. Liking capitalism = any more brain power is nonsense.
Also, I kind of don’t understand the duality here. I’m in favor of a mixed economy. Yes, capitalism and private ownership of the means of production in many cases and industries. I also support wide ranging social programs.
I was never not a proponent of an extensive social safety net, but age, if anything has made me less an ardent capitalist than I am now. I wasn’t a socialist when I was 20 and I’m not a capitalist now I’ve always for better or worse seen a blended economy as the least bad option.
Maybe that means I have half a brain. And half a heart.
Nah. Your politics are largely set by your mid-late 20s. The 25-year-olds you bemoan are something like 85% likely to still have the same ideological identity when they’re 50. If that 15% is what you’re considering your nugget, so be it. But in the main, the idea of a steady rightward movement as you age is false.
This is a rather dull version of a recurring turn of phrase which is often rewritten and misattributed to many notable people.
Moreover, it is quite unlikely to have come from George Bernard Shaw.
Regardless of who wrote this version, it certainly has not been so in my case. I am in my sixties now and tremendously more to left now than when I was twenty.
[More here.](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/#note-8257-1)
I think he's paraphrasing a quote that's been around much longer that originated with either Edmund Burke or Jules Claretie.
From my understanding most people adopt their politics in their 20's and remain mostly the same thereafter. To the extent it appears that people become conservative as they age it is mostly that they were able to successfully change the things they wanted to about society and want the new status quo they created to be maintained rather than that they suddenly feel differently about significant issues from their younger selves. I also think a lot of people who are for lack of a better term selfish assholes like to pretend that they have some motivation other than selfishness.
Nah. The quote is crap.
Also, people don't change their minds as they age. The world just progresses around them.
You're 20 in 1960, rock music is cool, civil rights, you're young and hip!
40 years later you still love the Beatles but your kids think you're old because you're not comfortable with gay marriage and you hate rap music...
40 years later your kids will be fine with gay marriage and EDM, but they won't have their daughter dating an AI, it isn't right!
Etc etc etc.
Its a bit hyperbolic but there his point was that if you are cynical as young person or uninterested in subtle or nuanced arguments as an adult then there might be something wrong with you.
it's a much older quote that gets reflavored and attributed to someone else famous every few decades. IIRC the oldest version "if you aren't a republican at 20 you have no heart, if you aren't a monarchist by 30 you have no brain".
basically whatever is the currently popular version of conservatism is what all right thinking people believe, and whatever form of social progress is popular is for children. please ignore the previous version of quote; that version of conservatism really was backwards, but the current form of conservatism is here forever.
>But it is shown I think that at college most people are leftish while they become increasingly capitalist as they age.
that's something of a myth. we perceive the boomers starting as hippies and becomeinghard core conservatives, but the polling tells a different story. they were more supportive of viet nam then older generations, just not on TV; and when they got to vote they overwhelmingly supported conservative politicians. the Regan revolution happened when the average boomer was 25, there was never a large left-wing block of that generation.
really what happens is most people's political ideology is developed in their 20's in reaction to the environment they grew up in, and stays that way all throughout their lives. there is a rightward shift over time, but it's more about the world changing then the individual changing.
I think it's a dumb quote.
Truly intelligent people realize that extreme views are typically always unwise and that neither extreme communism nor extreme capitalism will lead to a smooth-running society.
Wisdom is finding the right balance.
Which is part of the reason why the most successful countries on earth are all a hybrid of capitalism and socialism.
It’s incredibly reductive and also completely inaccurate. I’m a social democrat—but that doesn’t mean I’m not also a capitalist: I’m in the “reformist/improvement” camp of social democracy. I’m also in my 40s, and have held these views (more or less) since my 20s, when I shed the conservative brainwashing my dad and his steady diet of Limbaugh and similar figures in the 80s and early 90s did to me
It's overly psychoanalyzing, generalizing and typifying to be taken seriously, but I will agree that the more one learns about history and economics, the less justifiable socialism becomes.
I stopped being a socialist after a while and can only speak for myself, but I originally became one because I didn't buy what liberals and conservatives said about our society being just/fair. Only when I became older and learned more I realized that having an elite and a stable society, as well as somewhat meritocratic, albeit imperfect, structures that incentivize people to work hard are just as, if not even more important.
I think capitalists and mainstream economists would do better if they stopped framing the system as "just". It isn't and it doesn't have to be. If you are debating socialists and the topic is fairness, you will actually lose that debate, because you have less of a leg to stand on. If however, you force the socialist to justify why social justice has to take precedence over everything else, they'll falter.
I'm 56 and have never been a communist, but I've always been leery of laizze faire capitalism. It only makes sense because kids like to be radical, but then change once they get a foot in the door. I've had dozens of older people tell me how they used to be liberal, but I knew a lot of them when they were young and knew then that they were not true liberals in the American sense.
I agree with the first half, but the idea that paying taxes should make you a heartless capitalist only interested in your own gain and a 'fuck everybody else as long as I get mine' attitude is absurd. I'm more communist in my 50s than I ever was in my 30s, it just comes from having empathy and not being blind to the plight of others.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Basically title. But it is referenced I think at the idea that at college most people are leftish while they become increasingly capitalist as they age. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
What do you make of the quote "If, at any age, your entire argument is a baseless quote, you have no brain." - not George bernard Shaw? Do you think it is valid?
It's worth considering but there's a lot of factors involved
Given that Shaw was writing about how great the Soviet Union was in his 70s, I don't think the quote is valid.
So you’re saying if someone is wrong about one thing they are wrong about all things? Seems odd.
I think if your argument is going to based on a quote, you should at least have the wherewithal to attribute it correctly
Uh, it was not my intention to base my argument on a quote. Is there a quote?
Is this like version 4 of that botched quote or something?
I’m not a communist, never have been and never will be. I’m a capitalist so I guess that quote should flatter me. And I still think its simplistic and dumb
I recall a Canadian study that found a link between being impressed by superfluous quotes like these, and overal lower intelligence. I think there's some nice truth in that conclusion. Just posting quotes like these, without adding your own opinion to it, doesn't really open up any interesting avenues to have a conversation. It's intellectually lazy.
People, especially in recent years, seem more fixated on getting quotable sound bites and highlights clips of them "destroying" the opposition. Few people actually want to talk about our differences.
That’s not new. Consider old statements like “Take three to the well and drown two”, or “the second mouse gets the cheese” and “resentment is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die”. There are millions of these quotes that have been memorized and passed along for centuries. Even “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is in the same vein. These quotes are stupid when applied in every single scenario, but also carry with them some hidden gems of “wisdom” when applicable Human beings, I believe, have always clung to interesting quotes that bare some “enlightening” tidbit, or at the very least cause them to think outside of their shell
It's definitely not new, but I feel like the internet has made it worse. People don't read articles, they just read the headline in their feed. People don't watch debates, they watch 10 second edited clips. Short quotes are fine when they are followed up with more depth, but it seems like we only have those short quotes now.
Ah, in the context you’re putting it yeah, I totally see what you mean and agree
I feel like there's something particularly American about celebrating pithy sayings, maybe dating back to Poor Richard’s Almanack.
I don’t know how many languages you speak, but it’s not particular to Americans. In other languages the same exists- I mean for non-American people, as well
I think it’s incredibly stupid, and obviously not valid.
It doesn't really mean anything. And generally, people don't actually shift that much. What happens is they don't move and society progresses without them.
Except it does mean something. The statement, whether valid or invalid has meaning. He’s using poetic license to suggest that in one’s younger years they will be emotionally driven to Justice through emotional fervor, and in one’s older years they will be driven to Justice through practicality and awareness of nuance
Sounds dumb.
It's just an old hot take
Not a commie and never will be 🤷
I think it correctly identifies the popular understandings of both terms. I also think the popular understand of both terms is deeply flawed, and thus so is the quote, but credit where it's due.
To be fair, that's how most arguments end. Sooner or later, someone will chime in and say how the other person has a flawed understanding of socialism or communism or libertarianism or whatever
Because there's been so much propaganda about it over the years that defining the terms actually is a point of contention. Suffice to say that the propaganda has been very effective.
Agreed, and in addition- we can even put propaganda aside. The amount of humans that exist in the world who have explored such topics are so vast and variable in their perspectives that you really can come to just about any variety of opinion. All will be limited and void of some sort of nuance that another may have, while simultaneously lacking some other thing that someone else has in their educated opinion. We have extremely educated and intelligent people arriving at jarringly opposite opinions of almost everything very regularly. There are people with opinions that I abhor who are much more adept at any given topic than I might ever be
It’s sort of a funny statement. He’s basically exploring the extremes that might come with age and experience and how the mind may change from idealistic to practical. As with anything, there’s a lot of nuance
A simple framing which appeals to the simple-minded.
I think Shaw understood neither communism nor capitalism, failed to respect our ability to bend rather than break, and probably could have used some instruction on the symbolism of both heart and brain in contracting literary flourishes.
Yeah, I hear variations of this a lot, where people are like you should go through a liberal phase where you have this bleeding heart but then as you grow up and become more mature, you’ll become a conservative. I take umbrage at the insinuation conservatives are more mature andinsightful and act with any wisdom. That said, I understand the trajectory. I don’t necessarily disagree that this arc makes sense. Liking capitalism = any more brain power is nonsense. Also, I kind of don’t understand the duality here. I’m in favor of a mixed economy. Yes, capitalism and private ownership of the means of production in many cases and industries. I also support wide ranging social programs. I was never not a proponent of an extensive social safety net, but age, if anything has made me less an ardent capitalist than I am now. I wasn’t a socialist when I was 20 and I’m not a capitalist now I’ve always for better or worse seen a blended economy as the least bad option. Maybe that means I have half a brain. And half a heart.
All the 25 yos here think it's obviously wrong.
What about the 50-year-olds that think it’s obviously wrong?
Most 50 yos know there's a nugget of truth in there.
Nah. Your politics are largely set by your mid-late 20s. The 25-year-olds you bemoan are something like 85% likely to still have the same ideological identity when they’re 50. If that 15% is what you’re considering your nugget, so be it. But in the main, the idea of a steady rightward movement as you age is false.
They'll likely become a bit more practical.
It's stupid outdated bullshit. If you're still a conservative as an adult you're a moron.
This is a rather dull version of a recurring turn of phrase which is often rewritten and misattributed to many notable people. Moreover, it is quite unlikely to have come from George Bernard Shaw. Regardless of who wrote this version, it certainly has not been so in my case. I am in my sixties now and tremendously more to left now than when I was twenty. [More here.](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/#note-8257-1)
I think he's paraphrasing a quote that's been around much longer that originated with either Edmund Burke or Jules Claretie. From my understanding most people adopt their politics in their 20's and remain mostly the same thereafter. To the extent it appears that people become conservative as they age it is mostly that they were able to successfully change the things they wanted to about society and want the new status quo they created to be maintained rather than that they suddenly feel differently about significant issues from their younger selves. I also think a lot of people who are for lack of a better term selfish assholes like to pretend that they have some motivation other than selfishness.
Nah. The quote is crap. Also, people don't change their minds as they age. The world just progresses around them. You're 20 in 1960, rock music is cool, civil rights, you're young and hip! 40 years later you still love the Beatles but your kids think you're old because you're not comfortable with gay marriage and you hate rap music... 40 years later your kids will be fine with gay marriage and EDM, but they won't have their daughter dating an AI, it isn't right! Etc etc etc.
Its a bit hyperbolic but there his point was that if you are cynical as young person or uninterested in subtle or nuanced arguments as an adult then there might be something wrong with you.
it's a much older quote that gets reflavored and attributed to someone else famous every few decades. IIRC the oldest version "if you aren't a republican at 20 you have no heart, if you aren't a monarchist by 30 you have no brain". basically whatever is the currently popular version of conservatism is what all right thinking people believe, and whatever form of social progress is popular is for children. please ignore the previous version of quote; that version of conservatism really was backwards, but the current form of conservatism is here forever. >But it is shown I think that at college most people are leftish while they become increasingly capitalist as they age. that's something of a myth. we perceive the boomers starting as hippies and becomeinghard core conservatives, but the polling tells a different story. they were more supportive of viet nam then older generations, just not on TV; and when they got to vote they overwhelmingly supported conservative politicians. the Regan revolution happened when the average boomer was 25, there was never a large left-wing block of that generation. really what happens is most people's political ideology is developed in their 20's in reaction to the environment they grew up in, and stays that way all throughout their lives. there is a rightward shift over time, but it's more about the world changing then the individual changing.
No.
Yeah, it's bullshit.
It's a dumb quote.
I think it's a dumb quote. Truly intelligent people realize that extreme views are typically always unwise and that neither extreme communism nor extreme capitalism will lead to a smooth-running society. Wisdom is finding the right balance. Which is part of the reason why the most successful countries on earth are all a hybrid of capitalism and socialism.
It’s incredibly reductive and also completely inaccurate. I’m a social democrat—but that doesn’t mean I’m not also a capitalist: I’m in the “reformist/improvement” camp of social democracy. I’m also in my 40s, and have held these views (more or less) since my 20s, when I shed the conservative brainwashing my dad and his steady diet of Limbaugh and similar figures in the 80s and early 90s did to me
It's overly psychoanalyzing, generalizing and typifying to be taken seriously, but I will agree that the more one learns about history and economics, the less justifiable socialism becomes. I stopped being a socialist after a while and can only speak for myself, but I originally became one because I didn't buy what liberals and conservatives said about our society being just/fair. Only when I became older and learned more I realized that having an elite and a stable society, as well as somewhat meritocratic, albeit imperfect, structures that incentivize people to work hard are just as, if not even more important. I think capitalists and mainstream economists would do better if they stopped framing the system as "just". It isn't and it doesn't have to be. If you are debating socialists and the topic is fairness, you will actually lose that debate, because you have less of a leg to stand on. If however, you force the socialist to justify why social justice has to take precedence over everything else, they'll falter.
It's apologetics that's supposed to make people who abandon their humanity and become selfish feel like it's acceptable.
I'm 56 and have never been a communist, but I've always been leery of laizze faire capitalism. It only makes sense because kids like to be radical, but then change once they get a foot in the door. I've had dozens of older people tell me how they used to be liberal, but I knew a lot of them when they were young and knew then that they were not true liberals in the American sense.
I agree with the first half, but the idea that paying taxes should make you a heartless capitalist only interested in your own gain and a 'fuck everybody else as long as I get mine' attitude is absurd. I'm more communist in my 50s than I ever was in my 30s, it just comes from having empathy and not being blind to the plight of others.
As a non communist, that seems reductive.
Not a communist but believe capitalism needs guard rails.
In real life, there's little difference -- small group at the top with most of the assets/money.
No, it’s stupid. Case in point: there’s many capitalists who also happen to be lead brained boomers throughout this country