@philokalia saidTrue, Libertarian Socialism is probably impossible in a world of pre-existing, aggressive nation States. But "socialism" as defined is more in keeping with our innate natures as show by our species' practices for the vast majority of its existence on Earth.You found out wrong; socialism is defined as "a social system in which the producers possess both political power and the means of producing and distributing goods."
Sure, I will let you define your own words.
But then I might have to change my statements to match your words.
[quote]A Libertarian Socialist doesn't believe in the State or capitali ...[text shortened]...
I do not think it makes sense to talk about premodern peoples with modern political terminology.
Still, I'm flexible; I can accept a capitalist system (I've lived and worked in one my entire life) provided it is somewhat compatible with the principles of egalitarianism and protection of Natural Rights that it is the duty of society to provide the People.
The US has a long way to go to meet that criteria, however.
I'll probably want to get into some Evolutionary Psychology research to support the idea that our brains still think like we're in small, hunter gatherer bands in the savanna but I've got other things to do for the rest of the night and tomorrow is busy. Hopefully I'll get some posts in later Tuesday.
@no1marauder saidI have always been someone who thinks that equality of opportunity is important.
True, Libertarian Socialism is probably impossible in a world of pre-existing, aggressive nation States. But "socialism" as defined is more in keeping with our innate natures as show by our species' practices for the vast majority of its existence on Earth.
Still, I'm flexible; I can accept a capitalist system (I've lived and worked in one my entire life) provided it ...[text shortened]... uty of society to provide the People.
The US has a long way to go to meet that criteria, however.
I have been thinking more about how labor itself can confer dignity on people, and would not mind some revolutionary programs to basically take people who are non-violent criminals and give them the option of living in remote locations and engaging in farming or other tasks for the duration of their sentence, with an option to inherit their position and simply carry on working in more unsueprvised conditions with greater incentives & benefits when they are finished. Since I think that much of the pain & sorrow in the urban community comes from lack of dignified labor, I think it could fix a lot of problems...
and lead to a situation where there is more equality of opportunity since the greatest barrier to equality of opportunity, IMO, are people who are born into families that do not integrate them into the normal economy.
I think... Korea's big advantage over the US is that there aren't really many pockets of crime & criminality, and that Korean men & women who fail academically still can make a living wage in 98% of circumstances.
Of course, some people really are given a poor hand and are destined to be low wage earners. That does exist. But nobody is destined to be a criminal, and even a low-wage earner is well socialized and has outlets.
@no1marauder saidHonestly, this is an interesting position, and I have never really discussed this all at length... but I did have one decent friend who was into primitive skills and would sometimes talk about how tribesmen are sort of the ultimate humans for their self-sufficiency and natural health.
It was a bad idea. Have you read Jared Diamond's famous article?
It's here: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race
I find it difficult to argue with these things because I have not looked at the world in this way.
My first idea of a reply to this sort of thing is just to post images of great architectural work and play you some Bach or something, all of which could not exist without the direction that we took. I also believe the world population would necessarily be much, much smaller in these circumstances, and life would have a certain poverty to it...
I understand how primitive people can have a rich social life, but I feel my social life is much richer because we can have this sort of discussion.
I am aware that Malinowski remarked in Argonauts of the Western Pacific that the natives he talked with had a lot of depth and were philosophical, and similar thing were said by Don Ricahrdson in Peace Child, so I do not believe that these people are dumb or even intellectually impoverished, but they are uninitiated, so to speak, and are thus naturally limited in their topics of socialization...
I just feel like my life is so much better than it would have been if I were an illiterate hunter-gatherer, and the same is true of all of my ancestors that I have traced back for the last few centuries.
@no1marauder saidMan first thinks about necessity, and since he is in competition with other groups, he is ready to sacrifice and to make compromises to assure the success of his own group.
Those groups are what Man existed as for the vast majority of his time on Earth. They are not anything unusual but what we evolved to. More importantly, our brains still think along those terms which is why we resist hierarchy, which can only be maintained by force. The most hierarchical systems have crumbled to dust over the last few centuries. Locke foresaw the end of h ...[text shortened]... rrow terms 400 years ago.
The future will not be kind to supporters of autocratic systems, Philo.
Man thinks about social fitness, because the fitness of his society protects him from dangers.
And liberty comes after that.
If this is an autocratic set of ideas, then so be it.
@no1marauder saidI think natural obedience is situational.
People are naturally resistant to authority; the first word from a child after being told they must do something is often "Why?". In our Natural State, that of small hunter gathering bands, there was no source of ultimate authority; decisions were arrived by consensus. And if one strongly objected to a decision it was fairly easy to just leave and join the band next door ...[text shortened]... e naturally obedient though surely there are social pressures to conform (ones we created mind you).
Yes, in some situations we tend to ask why.
In other situations, we accept authority and follow along like sheep.
Think of the burning apartment block. Fireman barging in and telling you exactly what to do.
@no1marauder saidThere is a natural hierarchy among individuals. It's called strength.
You are not talking about our Natural State, but the very unnatural state we find ourselves forced into because of the development of an autocratic State.
In hunter gatherer bands (which comprise how the majority of Man lived for all but the last 10,000 or less years of the species' existence), a baby or child was in a subservient state, but not an adult - there were ...[text shortened]... n certain places, is the inevitable fate of Man. But Anthropology convincingly refutes that premise.
@no1marauder saidThis is not merely a semantic quibble. The point I'm trying to make is that the whole idea that there was once an idyllic state of nature in which men lived in peace and total freedom, a peaceful state which was shattered by the imposition of tyranny (i.e., government), is a fiction. A fiction shared by several authors, including Locke and Rousseau ("Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains" ). This was a fiction they employed in order to get their social contract theories off the ground. But they got the cause and the effect backwards, so to speak. The concepts of freedom and obedience make no sense in the absence of highly organized groups or societies. Man in a state of nature (a historical fiction, there never was such an idyllic state, but we'll suppose so, for the sake argument) -- man in such a state knew neither freedom nor obedience. The strong took whatever they could and held it as long as they could. The weaker ones took whatever was left when the stronger was done with it, until the strong one slept, then they bashed his head in with a club, and the next strongest took over. As Hobbes said, life in that state (a state of savagery), was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Life in that state was Lord of the Flies. No idyll at all.
I don't want to waste time on semantics but if you are claiming dogs and other social mammals act solely on "instinct" you are egregiously wrong.
I see little difference between how dogs learn their social behavior and how our species does though both are biologically programmed in ways that encourage group cohesion and mutual cooperation.
The difference between man as a social animal and all other social animals is that man's biological programming does not by itself lead to any specific social order -- it merely predisposes individuals to a social form but without specifying what form it takes (whether egalitarian, authoritarian, or some other). Whereas, in all other species, biological programming specifies both the form and the content (e.g., in bees, biology determines which individual becomes the queen and which ones become drones). Humans are not like that: there is no 'queen gene' for humans.* Who becomes queen, or whether there is any queen at all rather than a democracy, is not biologically fixed (i.e., not "natural" ); it is a social arrangement, artificial through and through.
* What determines which bee becomes a queen is not actually genetic; its just how much food is fed to the larva.
https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/food-quantity-not-quality-determines-who-becomes-queen-bee/
Clearly, this would not suffice to make a human baby into a monarch.
@no1marauder saidI think our natural tendency is toward ‘cooperation’ rather than ‘obedience’ but I don’t believe it’s natural to cooperate with any group or social entity that does serve our perceived needs.
People are naturally resistant to authority; the first word from a child after being told they must do something is often "Why?". In our Natural State, that of small hunter gathering bands, there was no source of ultimate authority; decisions were arrived by consensus. And if one strongly objected to a decision it was fairly easy to just leave and join the band next door ...[text shortened]... e naturally obedient though surely there are social pressures to conform (ones we created mind you).
I also think that there is a limit to the size of any group that we can organically attach ourselves to or cooperate with. We will always develop our own sub groups within larger social entities and ultimately it’s just as natural to rebel as it is to cooperate.
It is notable that the need to cooperate can be amplified and manipulated by a perceived threat, either internal or external, real or imagined.
At a street level we’re talking about basic social skills but the more distant the interaction becomes the weaker the urge to cooperate becomes. Huge political and social entities are not our natural environment and our natural instincts for cooperation require carrots and sticks before they can be utilised by such an entity.
@moonbus saidAnthropology has convincingly destroyed the entire idea of a Hobbesian situation in prehistoric times where the strong simply took from the weak.
This is not merely a semantic quibble. The point I'm trying to make is that the whole idea that there was once an idyllic state of nature in which men lived in peace and total freedom, a peaceful state which was shattered by the imposition of tyranny (i.e., government), is a fiction. A fiction shared by several authors, including Locke and Rousseau ("Man is born free but ever ...[text shortened]... mines-who-becomes-queen-bee/
Clearly, this would not suffice to make a human baby into a monarch.
That you keep repeating such discredited nonsense does you no favors.
@kevcvs57 saidI think it appears to be an inclination toward cooperation as the natural state of man largely because we have grown up in such developed economies with high level of security.
I think our natural tendency is toward ‘cooperation’ rather than ‘obedience’ but I don’t believe it’s natural to cooperate with any group or social entity that does serve our perceived needs.
If we had grown up in other circumstances, we might be more inclined to obedience, and even think of obedience as just another way to cooperate... as opposed to them being some sort of dichotomy.
@no1marauder saidI think you have made a good argument that people within the same kin group or broad collection of cultures would cooperate in such a way.
Anthropology has convincingly destroyed the entire idea of a Hobbesian situation in prehistoric times where the strong simply took from the weak.
That you keep repeating such discredited nonsense does you no favors.
However, I do not think it holds true across regions, and certainly not across eras.
Tribes regularly fight, and sometimes even exterminated one another.
@philokalia saidRubbish.
I think it appears to be an inclination toward cooperation as the natural state of man largely because we have grown up in such developed economies with high level of security.
If we had grown up in other circumstances, we might be more inclined to obedience, and even think of obedience as just another way to cooperate... as opposed to them being some sort of dichotomy.
I don't know how you could even write such a thing given the evidence I have presented. Cooperation was probably far more important in the Natural State and existed long before any "developed economies" were on the Earth (at least as you mean it).
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@philokalia saidActually, hunter gatherer bands are mostly made up of nonrelated individuals:
I think you have made a good argument that people within the same kin group or broad collection of cultures would cooperate in such a way.
However, I do not think it holds true across regions, and certainly not across eras.
Tribes regularly fight, and sometimes even exterminated one another.
"First, bands are mainly composed of individuals either distantly related by kinship and/or marriage or unrelated altogether. In our sample of 32 societies, primary kin generally make up less than 10% of a residential band. "
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/population_structure/kin-co-residence-hill-2011.html
Secondly, intergroup cooperation is the rule, not the exception and recent scientific research supports the idea that such cooperation was a key to human evolution:
"High intergroup interaction rates in ancestral humans may have promoted the evolution of cumulative culture.
Introduction
It has been hypothesized that cumulative culture and extensive non-kin cooperation allowed Homo sapiens to replace other hominin species in the Pleistocene and facilitated the biological dominance of our species in the Holocene [1]. In order to understand the emergence of these features we must examine aspects of social behavior in our ancestors that may have favored their evolution. Observations of modern hunter-gatherers offer the opportunity to examine features of that lifestyle that may be associated with important evolved human traits. Within-band interactions such as non-kin food sharing [2], cooperative food acquisition, and provisioning of multiple goods and services [3] are well documented for recent hunter-gatherers [4], [5] and part of a cooperative breeding life history that may be critical for explaining human success. But, between-band interactions may also be important for understanding the unique nature of our species. Inter-band social networks are hypothesized to explain evolved brain expansion [6], [7], extensive non-kin cooperation [8], [9], [10] and the emergence of cumulative culture [11], [12], [13].
Early ethnographers suggested that hunter-gatherer societies were primarily kin based [14], [15], and hence between-group interactions might be primarily associated with genetic kinship. More recently however, large interaction networks in our species are hypothesized to derive from pair bonding in ancestral hunter-gatherer societies, with recognition of affines producing a unique metaband (ie. tribal) social structure, not found in any other primate [16], [17]. Finally, cultural institutions such as ritualized partnerships and complex marriage rules have been hypothesized as features designed to promote between-band interaction in foragers [18], [19], [20]. In this paper we examine the effects of all three of these on interband interactions. "
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4105570/
The incest taboo was probably a major factor in leading to intergroup cooperation; if you need to marry off a son or daughter, you're going to have to find a mate outside the family and preferably outside the immediate group. That pretty much forces you to have peaceful relations between other bands and those type of social connections only increase and spread outward over time.
People fight sometimes, but an attempt to actually "exterminate" another group must have been exceedingly rare or non-existent in the Natural State as it would serve absolutely no evolutionary purpose; there would be virtually nothing of consequence to be gained to risk one's life for. There is little evidence for war before agricultural settlements; only one such "massacre" site has been found. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/10000-year-old-massacre-suggests-hunter-gatherers-went-war
And as the article says:
" Many anthropologists believe that prehistoric hunter-gatherers didn’t engage in the kind of systematic warfare on display at Nataruk, because they didn’t have land or stores of food to fight over. "
@no1marauder saidYou've chosen the example that best fits your desires and have ignored the other examples of primitive tribes.
Rubbish.
I don't know how you could even write such a thing given the evidence I have presented. Cooperation was probably far more important in the Natural State and existed long before any "developed economies" were on the Earth (at least as you mean it).
That is why this is not very persuasive to me and others, I imagine.