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Jayson_Virissimo comments on How to deal with non-realism? - Less Wrong
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Can you point to any historical examples of totalitarian regimes that adhered to an official ideology that contained non-realism (anti-realism, etc...) as a doctrine?
The Catholic Church? All this nasty material stuff isn't the real you, there's a magical kingdom "beyond" all this where you could live forever in your sparkly immaterial form, Satan has dominion over this world, always seeking ways to deceive you. It's all a big mystery you can't understand. Don't believe your mind, don't believe your senses, just believe and obey us cough cough, I mean God.
For secular antirealism, I recall Hitchens relating that the reaction to Orwell behind the Iron Curtain with respect to DoubleThink was "how does he know?" I don't believe that the communists had an official antirealist stance, however. They were supposed to be scientific socialists. But when it becomes illegal and dangerous to disagree, people are forced into making statements contradicting their own minds, which is antirealism in practice if not in "official ideology".
And of course, saying "I am antirealist" is not the kind of direct factual statement one should expect out of an antirealist. I'd expect mysterion or collectivist piffle.
Okay, it has become clear to me that you, the OP, and I are all have different definitions of "realism" in mind. Furthermore, this threads is full of confusions and people talking past each other. I lay the majority of the blame on the OP for using the term in a way completely alien to mainstream philosophy, but I messed up myself by only half-reading it and assuming he was discussing the philosophical position of realism (as it is used, say, in ethics or philosophy of science) rather than a mix of mystical thinking, circular reasoning, appeals to emotion, and selective scepticism.
Mostly agree, except I don't understand why you think the OP's use of "realism" is nonstandard.
I think his "something exists" is pretty standard philosophical realism as well.
Wikipedia:
Seems to me like the totalitarian regimes see themselves as realist. They just refuse to update when their "reality" does not match the territory. Killing the people who point out the difference is easier. Sometimes they change opinions, but then the new opinion becomes the "reality".
So I would say that totalitarian regimes profess realism. They just refuse the idea of updating, because they believe their map already matches the territory perfectly. And they also refuse the outside view, because they believe to be incomparable to others.
EDIT: Seems like I was probably wrong. I am not sure.