Quote bleg

[fare]

I dimly remember a quote about the fallacy of talking of countries as willful entities, I think by a French man using the colonization of Algeria as an example, and saying that things would be clearer if instead of claiming that France send so many troups, we would say that out of a territory inhabited by so many million individuals, a few hundred

Comments

Collective will

[anonymous]

the fallacy of talking of countries as willful entities

Well, as soon as you experience living in a foreign country, you know that some of your actions, attitudes, etc. tend to be difficult to understand by the foreign nationals, while some other actions, attitudes, etc. are easier to conceive from their point of view.

This makes some movements easier and effortless, while other movements are difficult and expensive, a little bit like in a magnetic field.

Thus there is really a collective will around you which definitely interferes (positively or negatively) with your actions.

This is why it seems to me that countries as willful entities is very far from being a complete fallacy, IMHO.

[selfishgene]

It sounds like David Friedman but I'm not certain.

[turion_lugol]

http://fr.liberpedia.org/R%C3%A9ification

Where the real fallacy is

[anonymous]

In order to be accurate, you should rather say: the fallacy of geopolitics, which is the mother of all ideologies.

There is a famous paper which deals exactly with this issue of how "strategic thinking" turns human realities to bloodless abstractions. Especially:
Whether in the State Department, the Defense Department or the White House, whether in Democratic or Republican administrations, this same dehumanized pattern of decision-making on all foreign policy issues has been evident. It is the way nations traditionally carry on their business in the world. [...] The issue, then, is not the men or the particular period of this tragedy. [...] To blame the Presidents who heeded them is to dodge the harder question of why they (and so many of us at lower levels along with them) thought and acted as they did. The answer to that question begins with a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions. A liberalism attempting to deal with intensely human problems at home abruptly but

Back to square one

[fare]

"human" is no less an abstraction than "prestige", "interests" or "influence". Concretes do not allow reasoning, planning, or any kind of discrimination necessary to action. Only abstractions do. The problem is to distinguish the true from the false, i.e. those abstractions that fit the reality they are claimed to describe from those that don't (for the purpose of the considered actions). And the principles with which you discriminate them are necessarily abstractions themselves

Re: Back to square one

[anonymous]

"human" is no less an abstraction than "prestige", "interests" or "influence".

Humans are concrete beings: you can touch a human. As far as I know, I cannot touch a "prestige" or an "interest", nor an "influence".

Do you know what an abstraction is ?

Either you use the word "abstraction" as in "mathematical abstraction", which is a well-defined concept. But it would be widely irrealistic to imagine that one can reliably use such abstractions in reasoning about the real world.

Or either you mean that everything in a human's mind is an image of reality, not reality itself, and you use the word "abstraction" for this purpose, but then almost everything is an abstraction.

To be clear, we should say that most of the time, a human's mind contains partially abstracted images of the reality, and recognize that how exactly the combination of such images is performed is as a matter of fact unknownThis could perhaps cure you from an excessive self-comfidence in telling others what is the right way to think, for the truth is that in fact,

Re: Back to square one

[anonymous]

Because "human" is redundant and meaningless [...] just like you, emotionalists, with no principle to distinguish between valid and invalid abstractions, yet with the conceited pretense of knowledge despite his intellectual limitations.

Here is the opinion of somebody who knew these things much better than you:
Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
Albert Einstein