this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Me too, specially when I was younger I thought we could change the world for good if united. I saw cristal clear that the rich wanted to be richer at the expense of the poorer, but as I grew older and saw the reality and stupidity of the world (Like Trump, a massively rich guy being massively voted by the poorest and less educated people) I lost hope. I came to realize that education and stoicism and the best tools the human race has to progress to a healthy society. So that’s what I try to share now when I can.
Though I mostly agree with you, sometimes I feel human nature is just ugly.
Some very highly educated people have done some very terrible things throughout history.
(Sorry about submitting the half sentence, I meant to hit cancel and then decided to commit after that blunder.)
This is not true. Humans are created by the material conditions they find themselves in. "Human nature" when in an abundant environment is very different, we can see this among remaining hunter gatherer tribes like the Hadza (watch/read the whole thread).
Living in capitalism is what makes people the way you see them. Competition for resources with your fellow workers and an endless toil for the benefit of someone else enforced by the threat of homelessness and death if you don't take part.
Being an asshole under capitalism is as natural as coughing is in a smoke filled burning building. If you don't know anything different you can't see that to constantly cough is not the natural way of human beings. When you take people and put them in different material conditions you get a completely different outcome.
The biggest issue with our environment that drives these problems is that human brains can only reliably grok a few hundred other humans as being people. Beyond that, to a greater or lesser degree, anyone else just feels like an object (which is why we feel upset when people we know die but the statistics of how many people die each day globally don't have a similar effect.)
Some of us cope better than others but fundamentally any environment that requires humans to be reliant on interacting with over a few hundred other people will lead to people treating each other as objects.
It's why conservative people often feel it would be inconceivable to mistreat someone they personally know but will casually do profoundly cruel things to people they don't. If you view their actions towards people outside of their sphere of personhood through the lense of what is and isn't an appropriate way to treat an object rather than a person they often seem perfectly naturally.
I know the research you're talking about here but don't think it should be viewed as something that makes people incapable of empathy to those outside their core group. It makes it harder, but that hasn't stopped entire nations of people moving hard left towards extreme vocal empathy among one another as the working class. Unity, solidarity and love for one another is demonstrably possible among very large numbers it just requires the right set of prerequisites to achieve, these prerequisites are what socialists should be working towards ticking off in order to set the stage for a wider revolutionary movement.
Nah. Some people have the capacity to have a wider net than others. Some people have the capacity to intellectually overcome the limitations of how we naturally are. Some people put sufficient effort into fulfilling that potential. We all should each do our best to do so.
Doesn't change that even those of us who are especially good at it are still only good at it for a human. We are all terrible at it and it is fundamentally cruel to try to force everyone to live in a society that requires a level of empathic ability that is profoundly beyond what humans are evolved to be able to handle. It's like expecting everyone on Earth to be able to lift 5 tonnes or outcalculate a supercomputer in their head. It's a foolish and unreasonable thing to hang the success of society off people's ability to do.
The brain is not distinct from the body. This is very close to a Dualist argument which is a hack philosophy that proposes the mind and "spirit" of a person are distinct from the rest of that person. It comes from the belief that our human sentience is special or different.
If the intellect can do it, it is natural. The difference between one person's capability to do this and another is simply the background and material conditions these two find themselves in. The background being the historic education and upbringing of that person and the conditions being relevant because people (as you point out) will look to protect their own interests and that of their group first before they seek to protect the interests of others. I argue however that with the right education on class, a person becomes able to see the interests of their class as analogous with their own interests as a result of being a member of that class. This then results in them fighting for the interests of others as a result of recognising it is in their own interests as shared members of that class group. This is basically what we socialists call "class consciousness" compared to "false consciousness".
You're making the mistake of thinking the human brain has an infinite capacity to expand its intuitive empathy. It just doesn't. No more than your bixepf has an infinite capacity to increase it's strength. You can fulfil that potential more or less but you'll still never win an arm wrestling match with a gorilla or a robot. Humans have finite limits to their potential. Our current society and most of the proposed alternatives is structured in such a way as to only really work if humans generally have a far higher capacity for intuitive empathy than humans have.
That is fundamentally a flaw that must be overcome by a more thoughtful and purposeful design process than either "well this is just kinda how things ended up really" or "let's imagine if things were different, but not too different because that's hard!" (because our brains are also kinda bad at imagining things being seriously different to how they are.) Or if we decide for actual specific reasons that it isn't viable to even attempt to approach a human society that is shaped to humans rather than one which humans have to clumsily try to shape themselves to, we have to find ways to overcome the limitations of our biology. Often we do a good job of that externally, but for this it might only be possible through trans-humanist approaches. Which to be seems like it should be something we consider because we must, not because we think it is somehow more convenient than thinking purposefully about how we should share our lives together (though for the purposes of that, we may also be currently limited by how well our languages allow for those discussions to meaningfully occur. That's a fairly solvable issue as we are constantly evolving new ways for our languages to help us express ideas they previously didn't easily cover.)
As for the difference between the mind and the brain I'm not convinced by your argument at all. The mind is an emergent property of the brain but that does not make them one and the same any more than it makes Windows 98 an x86 PC.
Aigh....let's say you in fact can blame greed and capitalism alone.
Haven't we all agreed that extremes are unessential?? It's capitalism's fault, it's comunism fault....world isn't white and black it's grey.
It depends where you are and what it depends how you use it...fuck sake reality is way too complex for you to do these types of statement man.
If we are going to guess then mine is we need something more in the middle...
You make a statement about complexity but you're not actually saying anything. This is all wishy washy.
There is no middle between "the workers hold power" and "the bourgeoisie should hold power". There is no middle between "private property should exist" and "private property should not exist". There is no middle between "profit should be the driving force of development" and "the human development index should be the driving force of development".
Your wishy washy "we need a middle" is nonsense if you can not put into words what that fundamentally means in terms of actual functioning policy and societal design. Who holds power is THE essential question here. Capitalist society functions as a dictatorship-of-the-bourgeoisie. Socialists want the opposite, a dictatorship-of-the-proletariat. Flipping the power on its head and putting the workers in charge of the outcomes instead of the bourgeoisie.
If you can not fundamentally describe in absolute terminology what you think society needs to do in order to change the current situation then all you are doing in your opposition to people who do want change is supporting keeping it the way it currently is. That puts you on the side of the climate death cult driving us towards the inevitable end.
Oh yes I'm the one who simplified a complex problem... literally said it's more complex then that. That's it, is it simple enough for you to understand now?mm
Dude: "tErhe aRE nO MIdDLe tHeRM"
Is the most simplistic shit ever, just quoting slogans and not actually recognizing the complexity of everything.
You are very smart
Are you actually going to talk concrete policy or not? This feels very evasive.
Nothing I said above deserves a "very smart" label, it's all very basic 101 socialism stuff that you would get reading 1 or 2 books on socialism or marx. I don't really know why you feel the need to act this way.
So wait, you said shit nothing concrete (am I wrong?)
I said wow good job trying to reduce individual problems by generalising...it's not politics dude. You can't use generalization with people, with societies,etc .... doesn't matter ....
While you keep making general statments about a huge problem with hundreds of different issues, particular issues that can be approached differently no matter where you are.
Doesn't matter is the difference is geographic, cultural, whatever ..... It's not the same solucion for everything and everyone. Because each case deserves it's own special individual solucion?
Hey maybe you can generalize and it works,tell me how and we can talk. But don't say I didn't give any details when I'm only calling you out for that exactly. What kinda of one-sided argument is that?
At no point did I generalise. Capitalist society is a bourgeoise dictatorship. In socialist terms we don't mean an individual rules, what we mean is that it is a class dictatorship. The ruling class is the bourgeoisie. They hold all the power, by design, so that they can implement the policies that benefit their class rule. The bourgeoise-democracy provides the outcomes that the bourgeoisie want, because it was built that way from the ground up when they took power during the various revolutions that ended feudalism and brought about the beginnings of capitalism.
What socialists seek is revolutions led by the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie, installing a dictatorship of the proletariat and thus socialist society. This new proletarian led society will then provide the outcomes that are most beneficial to the proletariat instead.
These are all specific and absolute things. There is no generalisation here, I am being extremely specific, you just aren't familiar with the terms or what they mean. If you have questions I am very willing to answer. If you need more specificity about what these classes are I recommend: https://reddit.com/r/socialism/wiki/class. I wrote the first iteration of that page when I was a mod there. If you need more answers about what the institutional structure of socialism looks like I am happy to answer, you aren't asking any questions though and you aren't pointing out what you claim I am generalising on.
This is not very specific.
What does this look like? Is it 100% communist, 100% socialism or…. what? Maybe some sort of regulated market with very high tax rates like during the “golden age” of capitalism (post world war 2).
Personally, I think I’d enjoy a capitalist society with high tax rates and a strong safety net. Some sort of middle ground.
The immediate new society is political socialism as soon as you kick out the bougies and redesign the institutions to ensure proletarian outcomes. I think what you're asking is what it would economically look like, and that is a question that would differ depending on the national conditions. What I mean by that is that ultimately what is possible is determined by many factors, assuming that much of the world remains capitalist the newly socialist country would need to integrate into the global market in some way. This would likely mean taking over strategic national industries while leaving consumer sectors to private industry. You'd have a planned economy while maintaining enough for international investors to prevent isolation (like north korea). This would look something like Vietnam, Cuba or China's combination of private and state industry.
At a later date this would transition to something more and more socialist as and when the national conditions allow for it. Most likely as less and less of the world is capitalist.
That's just a capitalist society ruled by the bourgeoisie, with welfare tacked on. We're talking about what is necessary here to stop the world from boiling to death, that doesn't achieve that.
yeah, it’s true that some humans are really bad, but they’re nothing without (poorly educated) followers, and their followers are the one that give those humans the power to do evil things. Critical thinking is something that should be taught more often to avoid history from repeating.
I'm going to gently remind you that Drumpf's base is actually on avg. wealthier than the opposition's base. That's why you get those obnoxious trucks, flags and infinite merchandise (courtesy of Chinese workers).
No need to smear the common people, it's simply a fact that democracy is not a real tool for change.
Nono look at the 10 poorest states in America(with worse living conditions). They all voted majority Trump, some of the porest counties in the USA are literally voting 80% for trump
If you listen to Obama on that podcast recently (whom those people probably voted for too), paraphrasing: he says economic anxiety makes people prone to risk taking, emotional voting and feel racial resentment.
Yes but that's only true due to a suite of nefarious influences having to do with things like voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money and manufactured voter apathy.
We have to accept that democracy is too easy to 'manage' and has been since its inception. We need local democracy badly.
There are various versions of democracy. Some are far more effective at implementing the will of their constituents than others.
In my opinion the problem isn't democracy itself, but rather, has to do with the many various ways in which it's implemented.
The US version of democracy, for example, is very old, clunky and buggy as fuck because it was created by 18th century white men, some of whom were slave owners, and all of whom were terrified of the possibility that in creating a new (to them) form of governance they might accidentally create a new mechanism for tyranny.
Accordingly, they deliberately created a system that by design would be almost impossible to change short of massive civil unrest and that to this day is very unresponsive to real public sentiment.
The key is that they designed it that way not because they wanted an efficient democracy, but rather, because they wanted to protect themselves and their rights against the rise of a possible tyrant.
What they created was very stable, but again, it wasn't responsive, nor was it meant to be responsive, to public opinion.
Since then, political scientists have figured out much better ways to run democracies.
One of my favorites is the Irish Republic which, in the 1920s, instituted a suite of reforms to the US model in creating its government with the result that Ireland has gone from being the last third-world country in western Europe, to now being a thriving and economically developed western European nation with a highly-educated English-speaking population that isn't obliged to take orders from any of the world's great powers.
Ireland did this by having a high-functioning modern-style democracy.
Median income is BS though. If me and Elon musk make up the test then it would show we have a median income of billions. ..I don't have anywhere close to billions. So a bunch of poor people vote trump and ten billionaires vote trump so trump voters are better off on a average? That's a joke
They used exit polls, so I doubt the data includes that. It's likely that anomalies are cut out too if the data is processed this way - they also compare the median to the state median to make the comparison more meaningful, which is how we 'know' that his base is wealthier.
Apologies for using Nat Sliver as a source.