"Wokeist" - When people talk about progressivism without acquaintance

[Angst]

there's a difference between a sense of accomplishment and the current capitalist work environment's ideas of it. the former is indeed near universal. the latter is specific to our society

 

[Lexicus]

there's a difference between a sense of accomplishment and the current capitalist work environment's ideas of it. the former is indeed near universal. the latter is specific to our society

I disagree that it is "universal" in the sense you and akka seem to mean. Most hunter-gatherer tribes have been observed to use various social mechanisms to downplay individuals' pride in their achievements as while this is a basic human instinct it is also recognized as having the potential to destroy the social fabric.

And it is simply not true that hunter-gatherer tribes were like liberal utilitarians, just "getting rid of" people who didn't pull their weight. True, many of these cultures practiced infant exposure but on a ritual basis rather than on any kind of objective evaluation of the infant's ability to "contribute" (I have no doubt that the evpsych rebuttals are coming: "WeLl AcTuAlLy, exposing e.g. hermaphroditic infants was an evolutionary adaptation that objectively improved a tribe's "fitness" by cutting out the dead weight! I am totally not projecting my own eugenicist views backwards in time and claiming they are ordained by nature!")

 

[Akka]

*citation needed

Yeah, no, if you're intent on being actively stupid for the sake of an Internet argument, feel free to do so, but don't expect me to have to source that water is wet.

there's a difference between a sense of accomplishment and the current capitalist work environment's ideas of it. the former is indeed near universal. the latter is specific to our society

Sense of belonging and being recognized before self-accomplishment.
Obviously each society will express it in a different form, but that's just expression, not source.

 

[Gorbles]

Yeah, no, if you're intent on being actively stupid for the sake of an Internet argument, feel free to do so, but don't expect me to have to source that water is wet.

Allow me then: citation needed.

This is not "water is wet". This is "poster claims a fundamental psychological motivation on behalf of the entire human race".

 

[Lexicus]

Yeah, no, if you're intent on being actively stupid for the sake of an Internet argument, feel free to do so, but don't expect me to have to source that water is wet.

Do you ever get tired of angrily referring to your own opinions and interpretations as self-evident facts and claiming that anyone who disagrees (or merely asks for evidence) must be trolling?

 

[Angst]

I disagree that it is "universal" in the sense you and akka seem to mean. Most hunter-gatherer tribes have been observed to use various social mechanisms to downplay individuals' pride in their achievements as while this is a basic human instinct it is also recognized as having the potential to destroy the social fabric.

And it is simply not true that hunter-gatherer tribes were like liberal utilitarians, just "getting rid of" people who didn't pull their weight. True, many of these cultures practiced infant exposure but on a ritual basis rather than on any kind of objective evaluation of the infant's ability to "contribute" (I have no doubt that the evpsych rebuttals are coming: "WeLl AcTuAlLy, exposing e.g. hermaphroditic infants was an evolutionary adaptation that objectively improved a tribe's "fitness" by cutting out the dead weight! I am totally not projecting my own eugenicist views backwards in time and claiming they are ordained by nature!")

a few points here
- as far as i know, i don't agree with akka
- sense of achievement is healthy for us in the sense that even idly making socks in your spare time feels nice. human practice of achievement and the healthiness we get out of it is very near universal. it's why people do art, why people like playing games, even consuming (yuck, english) media plays with the function due to playing with our pattern recognition
- but i think there's a real difference here between this sense of accomplishment as a psychological phenomenon and the way it's structured in modern society. a job sorting mail for 10 hours a day or working heavy machinery for that same period is not correlated to this base function. it is soul crushing
- so the protestant/liberal/whatever idea of fulfilling work as part of your life is very detached from what it actually is
- i'm also well aware that pre-agrarian society did not just abandon lesser abled. of course it varies between anthropological observations but it's incredibly reductive to claim that weeding out people on purpose is standard human practice. we're way too social a species for that, too much empathy

 

[Lexicus]

- sense of achievement is healthy for us in the sense that even idly making socks in your spare time feels nice. human practice of achievement and the healthiness we get out of it is very near universal. it's why people do art, why people like playing games, even consuming (yuck, english) media plays with the function due to playing with our pattern recognition

I agree with this, the sense of achievement can come from almost anything, including many, many things that no employer today would pay you to do (probably the biggest one we could all agree on is raising children).

 

[Angst]

I agree with this, the sense of achievement can come from almost anything, including many, many things that no employer today would pay you to do (probably the biggest one we could all agree on is raising children).

yep, this is where i am

 

[sophie]

I don’t think it’s controversial to assert that humans seek and create meaning (or “value”) in life. As Marx noted, that drive rests at the very core of the human condition. How one defines that meaning and the boundaries around what is and is not acceptable or possible for a person to pursue as inherently meaningful or valuable is socially constructed and historically contingent, and rather the very question we’re seeking to answer here.

There’s a bit of an equivocation game going on here, where Lex is saying that “produce value” is narrowly defined under capitalism according to one’s ability to generate surplus value for a capitalist, which places a limit on the sorts of ways a person can pursue meaning or “produce value” (and thus is inherently unfree and life-denying), while others here are applying a much more general treatment of the term “produce value” as “an inherent drive to develop one’s faculties” and treating the two as equivalent when the latter isn’t really what is being discussed.

 

[Akka]

Do you ever get tired of angrily referring to your own opinions and interpretations as self-evident facts and claiming that anyone who disagrees (or merely asks for evidence) must be trolling?

Allow me then: citation needed.

This is not "water is wet". This is "poster claims a fundamental psychological motivation on behalf of the entire human race".

Okay.
I'm not going to waste time debating that dick contests, group dynamics and need of validation existed before modern capitalist society, though. If you want to pretend, be my guests.

 

[Samson]

I disagree that it is "universal" in the sense you and akka seem to mean. Most hunter-gatherer tribes have been observed to use various social mechanisms to downplay individuals' pride in their achievements as while this is a basic human instinct it is also recognized as having the potential to destroy the social fabric.

I think that hunting and gathering is the environmental driver of us evolving a "sense of achievement" or "desire to seek and create meaning". In my experience the process of hunting, killing and eating an animal, and to a lesser extent gathering wild food, is the rawest form of this instinct. The fact that it has transferred so well to wage labour, entrepreneurship and other forms of spending our lives in the modern world possibly has an anthropic explanation, in that if it had not we would not have them.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

There’s a bit of an equivocation game going on here, where Lex is saying that “produce value”

value in the context of "generating wealth" is definitely a different thing from "meaning in life". however, once you're sufficiently lacking in the former, it starts to cut into the ability to pursue the latter.

though for most of human history, extreme poverty (relative to today's living standards in most areas of the world) was the norm. pondering meaning? better do it while working the fields, or you die.

it's not usually framed this way here, but money/wealth has diminishing marginal utility. it's utility is enormous when you don't yet have enough to survive. it's still very high when saving for retirement or doing recreations one wants. it gets less and less as you to up. it's probably the best argument socialism has.

the problem is balancing incentives. you don't want to kill a golden goose, but you also don't want it producing stupid amounts of riches that (almost) nobody can access. tech/productivity gain and wealth/value generation are important things that raised our standard of living a lot in a very short timeframe, relative to history. i don't think it's realistic to leave that engine unregulated.

at the same time, giving people wealth for nothing is harmful for incentives. not just for people receiving, but also for those that have less as a result of that value generation being given elsewhere (this will necessarily slow down productivity gains at least somewhat, how much depends). then you have another (likely growing) pool of people who manage to game the system to acquire wealth without the productivity gain that justifies it. quite a few government services fit this category, but so do some non-government firms.

i'm also not quite sure what we can or should do as a society if automation prices the vast majority of workers out of jobs. i'm almost certainly in the population of people who can be replaced in many facets by automation in principle, too. what are we going to do about it? demand money for nothing? starve? though automation still has to produce for someone that will buy it/transfer wealth, otherwise there's no point in doing it. maybe we'll wind up like that mice utopia experiment. not a thought i enjoy.

 

[Angst]

value in the context of "generating wealth" is definitely a different thing from "meaning in life". however, once you're sufficiently lacking in the former, it starts to cut into the ability to pursue the latter.

though for most of human history, extreme poverty (relative to today's living standards in most areas of the world) was the norm. pondering meaning? better do it while working the fields, or you die.

exceot the vast majority of our time as a species, life was hunter gathering, where workload was actually much lower than after the agricultural revolution. you're technically correct as to human history being field work since writing was invented after farming became the norm, but if we include prehistory, life was actually filled with much more spare time than after we started farming. in general, modern anthropology observing nonagrarian people confirms this. humans were indeed with more (healthier) time to do art, relax, and engage in the community socially besides doing so materially. our brains were not evolved for farmwork, save the sense that picking it up was an option, and societies that did farmwork had surplus production, allowing specialization and causing a positive feedback loop that outcompeted what was healthier for the individual. if one is gonna argue by nature, posthistorical systems are not that, and capitalist work culture is not an expression of what makes us tick right

 

[TheMeInTeam]

xceot the vast majority of our time as a species, life was hunter gathering, where workload was actually much lower than after the agricultural revolution.

this is true, our evolution didn't/couldn't keep up with our alteration to the basic reality of vastly different lifestyles. agriculture/tech out-competed at a rate which evolution couldn't match. as a species, we're still mostly wired for hunter/gatherer mode.

there is a disconnect though, because we broadly want the things agriculture/industrialization offers, but don't want to pay the price (and in this context i don't just mean the monetary price, since the cost extends well beyond that). most people living in the conditions created by capitalist work setups nevertheless don't willingly discard it for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. it's an unfair and dangerous ladder, but even those in poverty that make the poor of the us look very comfortable choose to attempt to climb it rather than cast it aside, and they do so pretty reliably.

 

[Narz]

I disagree that it is "universal" in the sense you and akka seem to mean. Most hunter-gatherer tribes have been observed to use various social mechanisms to downplay individuals' pride in their achievements as while this is a basic human instinct it is also recognized as having the potential to destroy the social fabric.

Really depends on the tribe. Many were like this, some were covetous & even had slaves (some of the California Amerindian tribes or maybe it was the Pacific nw and the Californians rejected slavery gotta check my book).

I agree with this, the sense of achievement can come from almost anything, including many, many things that no employer today would pay you to do (probably the biggest one we could all agree on is raising children).

Agreed. Feeling of acommplishment-wise, child-rearing trumps working for a wage any day of the week.

though for most of human history, extreme poverty (relative to today's living standards in most areas of the world) was the norm. pondering meaning? better do it while working the fields, or you die.

Maybe most of agricultural history.

exceot the vast majority of our time as a species, life was hunter gathering, where workload was actually much lower than after the agricultural revolution. you're technically correct as to human history being field work since writing was invented after farming became the norm, but if we include prehistory, life was actually filled with much more spare time than after we started farming. in general, modern anthropology observing nonagrarian people confirms this. humans were indeed with more (healthier) time to do art, relax, and engage in the community socially besides doing so materially. our brains were not evolved for farmwork, save the sense that picking it up was an option, and societies that did farmwork had surplus production, allowing specialization and causing a positive feedback loop that outcompeted what was healthier for the individual. if one is gonna argue by nature, posthistorical systems are not that, and capitalist work culture is not an expression of what makes us tick right

All true. But we also had more than 1,000X fewer human beings & a much healthier global ecosystem. Even w 1000 fold reduction in world population there would not be enough buffalo, salmon, etc to support that kind of lifestyle.

 

[Farm Boy]

Overemphasized lesser work hours or whatever for hunter gatherers ignores a key component of the lifestyle. Hunger. Moving more burns calories.

 

[Angst]

Overemphasized lesser work hours or whatever for hunter gatherers ignores a key component of the lifestyle. Hunger. Moving more burns calories.

there was a reasonable equivalency of calories to work, and yes, what was done was hard work. it just didn't take dawn to dusk all of the warm months

 

[bernie14]

*citation needed

here is your citation

People are the only animals that consciously choose to work evil and do cruelty. Even bacteria are our moral superiors.

 

[innonimatu]

exceot the vast majority of our time as a species, life was hunter gathering, where workload was actually much lower than after the agricultural revolution. you're technically correct as to human history being field work since writing was invented after farming became the norm, but if we include prehistory, life was actually filled with much more spare time than after we started farming. in general, modern anthropology observing nonagrarian people confirms this. humans were indeed with more (healthier) time to do art, relax, and engage in the community socially besides doing so materially. our brains were not evolved for farmwork, save the sense that picking it up was an option, and societies that did farmwork had surplus production, allowing specialization and causing a positive feedback loop that outcompeted what was healthier for the individual. if one is gonna argue by nature, posthistorical systems are not that, and capitalist work culture is not an expression of what makes us tick right

I think it's going to far, saying we didn't evolve for farmwork. Farming is old. And not that different from gathering, in fact some of it is gathering (reaping), and it's actually hard work at scale. Our ancestors also had industry - I know that, I stood on piles of rocks shaped most likely by neanderthals, our supposedly extinct cousins. Hunting too is extremely old, and requires a taxing, organized group effort with a burst of activity to catch and process prey, even if the hunters later rested.
Many other things, things that help give pleasure and meaning to our lives are, as far as we can know, as old as farming. Dancing, or music, or sculpture. Others are much newer. Commuting ideas to rock or paper, or whatever now. Crafting narratives, and hearing or reading them. Would you say that our brains have not evolved for that? Clearly they did - we are doing it. And would life without that be healthier? When we had open frontier land, how many people did take advance of that and escape there? It's a lonelier life. And not necessarily an easy or long one.

One of the things that capitalism has done to much of mankind was indeed it foreclosed on the possibility of fleeing from its imposed framework for how to live, into different systems. Fail to follow its rules and you starve, urbanized populations can't easily leave and settle somewhere else. Or get thrown in prison for violating property rules, or whatever. But this too is an extension of old social group dynamics. Everything is build on past revolution.

Small town populations still could - think classical antiquity, the greeks sending colonists and establishing new cities, or even much more recently the early european colonization of the americas. These had to grow their own food, establish new political institutions - had the know-how to do it. At least the ones who survived! Those who dared could try.
By the late 19th century the borderlands closed. The world was all taken, and governed. No virgin lands, no weak tribes to steal land from. This also coincided with the triumph of capitalism. And with alienation, loss of a sense of possible autonomy. But was it capitalism or imperialism that did it? Early socialists were concerted with the interplay between the two, we I fear lost sight of the full meaning those discussions because it's so far out of our living experience - we were born into this world without blanks on the maps. In any case ours are different problems because history marched on, the world changed.

Hence I do not subscribe to critics of capitalism based on looking back to some supposedly more free eras. The materialistic evolution of history is also a social evolution - there is no turning back to escape the problems, because the problems would show up again for the next generations as they advanced again. Even if we could go back, which we can't short of civilizational collapse. Neither the romantics nor the corporativists (or the fascists more generally) had a real alternative for capitalism's problems because (among other problems these had) they looked backwards. If capitalism's constrictions on our species are to be overcome it must be with "new" ideas. Marx was indeed far ahead of the other socialists of his time, the anarchists (who also looked backwards, romantic excrescences) or the cooperative movements (cousins to the corporativists). But while Marx warned against those and provided an explanation of capitalism and its problems, a warning that history moved and society had to move with it not against it, and a suggestion on how to move past capitalism, he did not provide any framework for post-capitalist society that avoids falling back into capitalism. That was to be completed.

And so the temptation remains to look backwards. To romanticize, to think of the noble savage as an only if. Don't fall for it, it's a dead end. Gone. The future is a different country. Not that of the past, not these of the present. Unfortunately what passes for "progressivism" is just empty talk about the present country. Promised tweaks here and there that don't even materialize.

 

[Angst]

I think it's going to far, saying we didn't evolve for farmwork. Farming is old. And not that different from gathering, in fact some of it is gathering (reaping), and it's actually hard work at scale. Our ancestors also had industry - I know that, I stood on piles of rocks shaped most likely by neanderthals, our supposedly extinct cousins. Hunting too is extremely old, and requires a taxing, organized group effort with a burst of activity to catch and process prey, even if the hunters later rested.
Many other things, things that help give pleasure and meaning to our lives are, as far as we can know, as old as farming. Dancing, or music, or sculpture. Others are much newer. Commuting ideas to rock or paper, or whatever now. Crafting narratives, and hearing or reading them. Would you say that our brains have not evolved for that? Clearly they did - we are doing it. And would life without that be healthier? When we had open frontier land, how many people did take advance of that and escape there? It's a lonelier life. And not necessarily an easy or long one.

One of the things that capitalism has done to much of mankind was indeed it foreclosed on the possibility of fleeing from its imposed framework for how to live, into different systems. Fail to follow its rules and you starve, urbanized populations can't easily leave and settle somewhere else. Or get thrown in prison for violating property rules, or whatever. But this too is an extension of old social group dynamics. Everything is build on past revolution.

Small town populations still could - think classical antiquity, the greeks sending colonists and establishing new cities, or even much more recently the early european colonization of the americas. These had to grow their own food, establish new political institutions - had the know-how to do it. At least the ones who survived! Those who dared could try.
By the late 19th century the borderlands closed. The world was all taken, and governed. No virgin lands, no weak tribes to steal land from. This also coincided with the triumph of capitalism. And with alienation, loss of a sense of possible autonomy. But was it capitalism or imperialism that did it? Early socialists were concerted with the interplay between the two, we I fear lost sight of the full meaning those discussions because it's so far out of our living experience - we were born into this world without blanks on the maps. In any case ours are different problems because history marched on, the world changed.

Hence I do not subscribe to critics of capitalism based on looking back to some supposedly more free eras. The materialistic evolution of history is also a social evolution - there is no turning back to escape the problems, because the problems would show up again for the next generations as they advanced again. Even if we could go back, which we can't short of civilizational collapse. Neither the romantics nor the corporativists (or the fascists more generally) had a real alternative for capitalism's problems because (among other problems these had) they looked backwards. If capitalism's constrictions on our species are to be overcome it must be with "new" ideas. Marx was indeed far ahead of the other socialists of his time, the anarchists (who also looked backwards, romantic excrescences) or the cooperative movements (cousins to the corporativists). But while Marx warned against those and provided an explanation of capitalism and its problems, a warning that history moved and society had to move with it not against it, and a suggestion on how to move past capitalism, he did not provide any framework for post-capitalist society that avoids falling back into capitalism. That was to be completed.

And so the temptation remains to look backwards. To romanticize, to think of the noble savage as an only if. Don't fall for it, it's a dead end. Gone. The future is a different country. Not that of the past, not these of the present. Unfortunately what passes for "progressivism" is just empty talk about the present country. Promised tweaks here and there that don't even materialize.

alright so uh. you're reading into something that i'm not saying, some of it reasonably offensive. i made no appeal to the noble savage thing (which i know you know what it would imply about my position), i simply said that pre-agrarian life was less taxing, according to most of modern research.
i'm not asking us to go back to pre-agrarian life. my argument is not the same thing.

i'm just saying life back then wasn't 8-10 hours of hard labour a day, regardless of what you're saying here. i'm following what modern anthropologists have observed in societies without widespread agriculture (and dude, i know you're able to distinguish between before and after the shift). hobbes was extremely wrong. locke was also wrong, but for other reasons.
the more demanding parts of pre-agrarian lifestyles are much less taxing on our bodies and brains than post-agrarian life if we follow the capitalist work model (for most people; bourgois non-work is not that taxing). our workload was simply less than what has been standardized after agriculture.

the whole point was not to return to monke but to outline exactly how work gives us a sense of value (as a near universal thing) contrary to how this basic fact is wrongfully interpreted under capitalism

it wasn't anymore complicated than that

other people were invoking "our brains evolved to go happy when work" and i'm like... yes but actually no. that's not how the psychology works. if the other people are going to appeal to nature to bulk up a damaging work ethic, i'm just gonna go and say well actually.