What would a "better" society look like?

[Hehehe]

If that is its purpose it's been remarkably unsuccessful.

I'm not claiming that government is the only form of unjustified authority in our society. Such structures exist at all levels from the household to the entire world. I think people should recognize both the unhelpfulness of these structures, the unjustness of them, and start working against them. So yes there will probably always been differences of power between people, but we should always be working to eliminate those, and work to fight against those who would use their physical strength or whatever to impose power over someone else. Murder is probably always going to take place, but that doesn't mean we should work against it.

Lack of unjustified* authority.

So we should do some sort of... policing? I'm sorry, I fail to see why your power structure would be any better than the one it is replacing. Whenever someone has power over someone else, that power may be abused. And someone will always have power over someone else. When you fight against those "who would impose power over someone else", you are imposing power over them.

Which is itself an exercise in enshrining an inequality in power.

Yes, but I fail to see why the alternatives would be any better. As I said, there will always be an inequality in power. I don't know about you but despite all of their shortcomings, I prefer my local police department to unorganized militias or tribal councils.

 

[AlpsStranger]

America exactly like today, but Texas is stripped of its electoral votes.

 

[Borachio]

Society will be run on a rational scientific basis.

At birth, every citizen, as of right, will be issued with a bicycle and an umbrella. Thus assured of a mobile workforce adequately protected against the elements, this great country can go forward once more to glory!

Second, every American male shall have their knee measured to establish that the American knee is indeed the most superior knee of all the races. The American knee is strong! The American knee is not the knobbly weak knee of the intellectual or the suspect knee of the criminal classes. No! The American knee is muscular! The American knee is on the march!

A ban will be placed on the import of foreign root vegetables. In order to ensure that the great American nation is self sufficient in all its needs the entire state of New Jersey shall be given over to the cultivation of turnips.

Legislation will be passed to make the eating of asparagus mandatory.

Railroads shall be widened in order to ease the transport of livestock.

With these measures we can be assured that nothing stands between us and our victory except defeat! Tomorrow is a new day! The future lies ahead!

The whole post is good. But the turnip position is excellent.

I disagree on the knee issue, though. Somalian knees are, apparently, a superior product.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

- M:tG restored to the pre-8th-Edition layout and pre-6th-edition rules

Please, LERF was the single best thing to happen to the game.

 

[Disgustipated]

Hey, I'm a happy optimist too. And also quite content with where I live. And my own conditions, thank you.

But I'm also a realist. And I like to think I live with my eyes open. And I see plenty of miserable people who have plenty to be miserable about - very often through no fault of their own.

But seriously, do you think the US is heaven on earth? Really now. That's stretching my credibility to breaking point.

Oh it's definitely not heaven. I mentioned we need to lower our crime rate which is pretty high for a "Western" nation. And to link to my comment in the other thread (the intelligence thread), I'd like to see free college/University education as well. Give everyone an equal chance to succeed.

 

[Joecoolyo]

Well, "individualism", as I mean it, is responsible for lots of nasty stuff like xenophobia, war, racism, excessive accumulation of wealth, exploitation of workers in third world countries, etc.

The government, likewise, can be pretty well described as merely an instrument of the powerful to maintain their power. Even the democracies we have today are hopelessly corrupted.

So that's why I think these would be absent in a better society.

You seem to be putting a lot of blame on a cultural ideal that didn't exist until the 18th century. Individualism has nothing to with all of the above, stuff like rasism and, er, wealth accumulation, happened well before there was anything called "individualism", and they all happened for their own distinct, contingent reasons. There is no blanket cultural ideal that can be blamed for all that is bad in the world, and taking it away will have no effect on getting rid of any of those ills.

And I don't think government is an object of the powerful just to retain the powerful. That argument would be reasonable in a place (and time) where every four years you didn't have the ability to kick out the guy at the top, but we do live in a country that does that. I'm not sure how it keeps the powerful in power if you only get 8 years maximum to be "powerful". And likewise anyone can theoretically rise to that position, you don't need to start off with millions of dollars in order to nab any sort of seat in the government (and I think we'll see this happen on Tuesday).

And no, I don't see our government as hopelessly corrupted. We're one of the least corrupted nations in the world, and although I do believe we can take a lot of money out of politics, we're no where near as bad as some other nations. You should be lucky you don't live in a place where you have to bribe the police in order for them to help you.

I'll answer the thread without a response particularly to the society in the OP:
-A capitalist economic system with some intervention in place to prevent abuse (much like we currently have)
-Two tiered health care system
-Campaign finance reform that eliminates Super PACs and caps the maximum donation at around $5,000 (what it currently is)
-Candidates stop talking about religion and creationism is not a thing
-Voter participation levels at around 80%
-Public Universities are cheaper
-Higher education levels
-Less advertisements on the internet

^This is good, very good.

 

[GhostWriter16]

America exactly like today, but Texas is stripped of its electoral votes.

Seriously? Perpetual democrat dominance is your ideal? They're that good, in your view?

I'll say one thing and one thing only. "Thou shall not steal" made an absolute.

And if we're talking about morals as well as legality, "Love your neigbor as yourself" also made absolute.

 

[ace99]

The whole post is good. But the turnip position is excellent.

I disagree on the knee issue, though. Somalian knees are, apparently, a superior product.

Hence my policy of the measurement of knees which will be the only way to properly ascertain which knee is superior.

I would like to point out the nature of the American earlobe that all free-born Americans bear. Has every any lobe been so perfectly designed by nature in order to ensure it's superiority over the lobes of other races? Truly is the American earlobe a work of glory.

If you approve of my turnip position, then you will be even more pleased by my position on potatoes.



None of you got the reference. No P.G. Wodehouse fans?


Link to video.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_Spode

 

[luiz]

I'm not sure what you mean by individualism and what I meant by individualism are the same thing(I'm not a totalitarian, obviously). Could explain more?

Individualists are people who view individuals as ends in themselves; collectivists are people that view the collective (which may be a tribe, a city, a nation, a class whatever) as the only true end.

In the Republic Plato purposefully identified egoism with individualism and altruism with collectivism (and this view is influential until today), but truth is it doesn't have to be so. You can be an altruistic individualist or a selfish collectivist (someone who wants everything for the particular collective he favors and nothing for everybody else).

 

[Traitorfish]

It is the one huge disagreement I have with the OP.

Khrushchev said it best: "Labor alone ennobles the spirit of man and provides him all the necessities of life."

Of course he did; he was a bourgeois. Bigging up the moral value of toil is kinda their shtick.

Your society, with its lack of authority, is in an extremely delicate balance...

Historically, the opposite actually seems to be the case. "Balance" is largely a concern of authoritarian political societies, because they have to find ways of keeping a highly complex and centralised order together. Libertarian political societies, in contrast, tend to be far more fluid in their composition and adaptable in their nature, and are able to re-shape themselves around changing circumstances and needs without compromising the basic distribution of power in a way which very few if any authoritarian systems appear capable of. (Would the Kingdom of England c.1600 have survived an epidemic that killed over 95% of its population, as the contemporary Iroquois Confederacy did? It's very far from certain that it would.) A polity isn't a solid structure, something that straightforwardly persists until an external force intervenes against it, but an ongoing collective project, and the more limited the number of people able to act effectively on that project, the less stable it tends to be. I think Park put it quite well a while back, pointing out that while people describe polities as if they were houses that are "built" and "destroyed", they're really more like spinning plates; not so much built as set into motion, and not so much destroyed as allowed to come apart.

...and your insistence on the destruction of individualism and a total commitment towards society at large seems to imply a very massive amount of conformity in order to work. No longer will there be individuals, free to do as they want, but rather, just this massive, amorphous blob of "society".

I don't agree that the individual and the community exist in this dichotomous relationship. The inversion of individuality is not community, but conformity, and the inversion of community is not individuality, but alienated. Capitalist/state society is both deeply conformist and deeply alienated, and a post-capitalist/post-state society would correspondingly be both individualised and communal.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Of course he did; he was a bourgeois. Bigging up the moral value of toil is kinda their shtick.

Seeing as it was spoken by a Ukrainian peasant and metalworker, I don't see how your accusation holds. As for the bourgeois nonsense, I wasn't aware you'd taken a turn to the anarchist side. Is a bourgeois now just a name for all people you don't like? Because Khrushchev was many things: a party functionary, a commissar, a bureaucrat, but he was most certainly not a proprietary syphoner of surplus value extracted from oppressed workers.

Individualists are people who view individuals as ends in themselves; collectivists are people that view the collective (which may be a tribe, a city, a nation, a class whatever) as the only true end.

In the Republic Plato purposefully identified egoism with individualism and altruism with collectivism (and this view is influential until today), but truth is it doesn't have to be so. You can be an altruistic individualist or a selfish collectivist (someone who wants everything for the particular collective he favors and nothing for everybody else).

I am pleased to see you say that communists are "individualists."

 

[Borachio]

Capitalist/state society is both deeply conformist and deeply alienated, and a post-capitalist/post-state society would correspondingly be both individualised and communal.

Hopefully.

 

[Traitorfish]

Seeing as it was spoken by a Ukrainian peasant and metalworker, I don't see how your accusation holds.

Class is neither cultural genre nor ancestry. It's a matter what you do, and what Kruschev did had very little to do with farming a small-holding or beating steel on the shop floor. Or perhaps Obama is just a university lecturer like any other?

As for the bourgeois nonsense, I wasn't aware you'd taken a turn to the anarchist side. Is a bourgeois now just a name for all people you don't like? Because Khrushchev was many things: a party functionary, a commissar, a bureaucrat, but he was most certainly not a proprietary syphoner of surplus value extracted from oppressed workers.

The Soviet Union was a society of generalised commodity production organised as wage-labour; in a word, capitalist. The party nomenklatura, as the administrators of this capitalist system, cannot be considered fundamentally different from that of Western "market" society, even if they may have possessed a different legal relationship to production than their counterparts. (And, really, was there relationship actually all that different, given that most Western capital is administered through the wholly collectivist means of the joint-stock corporation? A CEO may own a fair chunk of stock in the company he administers, sure, but he is no more permitted to wander out the door with a company-owned computer than any of his peons.) At most, we can refrain from calling them "bourgeois" on sociological grounds, because it might be said to carry certain inappropriate cultural connotations- but as Kruschev's toil-fetishism shows, it's not at all certain how great the divergence between the two actually was.

 

[luiz]

I am pleased to see you say that communists are "individualists."

Some certainly are. Soviet-style commies certainly aren't.

 

[Mr. Dictator]

Seriously? Perpetual democrat dominance is your ideal? They're that good, in your view?

I'll say one thing and one thing only. "Thou shall not steal" made an absolute.

And if we're talking about morals as well as legality, "Love your neigbor as yourself" also made absolute.

"Thou shall not steal" should be an absolute before "Thou shall not murder"?

 

[Borachio]

Thou shalt not steal someone's life? Or murder his wallet?

 

[Mr. Dictator]

Thou shalt not steal someone's life? Or murder his wallet?

If every murder were a 1up, it'd be further proof that god were evil.

 

[civver_764]

I know for sure that not everyone at CERN gets to have a say in the LHC schedule.

I'm afraid I can't really discuss this very well without the right knowledge. I don't think it would be very hard for them to figure out an efficient way of running it. The amount of people even qualified to work with this sort of technology is small enough to begin with.

Well, I'm assuming it's not the far future where people can communicate very quickly even in the absence of electricity.

What makes this a unique issue for non-hierarchical relief groups?

So we should do some sort of... policing? I'm sorry, I fail to see why your power structure would be any better than the one it is replacing. Whenever someone has power over someone else, that power may be abused. And someone will always have power over someone else. When you fight against those "who would impose power over someone else", you are imposing power over them.

Stopping you from making me your slave is not the same as making you my slave.

You seem to be putting a lot of blame on a cultural ideal that didn't exist until the 18th century. Individualism has nothing to with all of the above, stuff like rasism and, er, wealth accumulation, happened well before there was anything called "individualism", and they all happened for their own distinct, contingent reasons. There is no blanket cultural ideal that can be blamed for all that is bad in the world, and taking it away will have no effect on getting rid of any of those ills.

Again, by "individualism" I don't mean some ideology, I mean the mindset where somebody sees themselves as fundamentally distinct from the rest of society.

And I don't think government is an object of the powerful just to retain the powerful. That argument would be reasonable in a place (and time) where every four years you didn't have the ability to kick out the guy at the top, but we do live in a country that does that. I'm not sure how it keeps the powerful in power if you only get 8 years maximum to be "powerful". And likewise anyone can theoretically rise to that position, you don't need to start off with millions of dollars in order to nab any sort of seat in the government (and I think we'll see this happen on Tuesday).

The guy at the top are the monied interests who control our political system and the world's resources, and I can't do anything to them. Getting to choose a new figurehead every few years is pretty laughable.

And 50% of those in congress are millionaires, contrasted with less than 1% of actual Americans. Being rich might not be a requirement but there's a strong correlation in place for a reason.

Furthermore, just because anybody can achieve insane amounts of power over other people doesn't make the imbalance of power and fairer.

And no, I don't see our government as hopelessly corrupted. We're one of the least corrupted nations in the world, and although I do believe we can take a lot of money out of politics, we're no where near as bad as some other nations. You should be lucky you don't live in a place where you have to bribe the police in order for them to help you.

Just because we aren't as bad as we could be doesn't me we aren't bad.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Class is neither cultural genre nor ancestry. It's a matter what you do, and what Kruschev did had very little to do with farming a small-holding or beating steel on the shop floor. Or perhaps Obama is just a university lecturer like any other?

Point taken.

The Soviet Union was a society of generalised commodity production organised as wage-labour; in a word, capitalist. The party nomenklatura, as the administrators of this capitalist system, cannot be considered fundamentally different from that of Western "market" society, even if they may have possessed a different legal relationship to production than their counterparts. (And, really, was there relationship actually all that different, given that most Western capital is administered through the wholly collectivist means of the joint-stock corporation? A CEO may own a fair chunk of stock in the company he administers, sure, but he is no more permitted to wander out the door with a company-owned computer than any of his peons.) At most, we can refrain from calling them "bourgeois" on sociological grounds, because it might be said to carry certain inappropriate cultural connotations- but as Kruschev's toil-fetishism shows, it's not at all certain how great the divergence between the two actually was.

The fact that state capitalism was used to bridge the gap between imperial and socialism by the communist party makes the determination of the top echelon of the economic planning system as "capitalists" irrelevant. Capitalists endeavor for profit's sake, showing disregard for the status of the rest of society that is not immediately relevant to the turning of those profits. It is clear from its outset that the Russian communists, while utilizing the developmental capacities of capitalism, were not working to profit themselves, as their lifestyles and society clearly show, to say nothing of their ideology. State capitalism was one of the tools to create socialism, or get close to it, while European working classes waited for the time for a new revolution to come, according to their understanding at the time. And all things considered, nothing less could be expected of them.

Some certainly are. Soviet-style commies certainly aren't.

I assume that means Marxist-Leninists. I will simply remark here that Stakhanovism is the direct antithesis of socialism, but also that there was little "collectivist" about the USSR, in the sense which you have yourself defined the term. I have choice words about some things which were [by your definition], but they are not really relevant to the discussion.

 

[_random_]

I'll say one thing and one thing only. "Thou shall not steal" made an absolute.

La propriété, c'est le vol!

Dammit. I was gonna go Hyperdox and claim that a perfect society already existed in 19th century Russia or the Byzantine Empire and that we just need to be exactly like them. I guess I just ruined that bit with a completely unrelated bit. I guess the closest synthesis of these views is described here.