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Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

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Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#221

Post by RangerScience »

smsm42 wrote: post #152
RangerScience wrote: post #83

Perhaps it used to be the case that people had trouble imagining a utopia, but here's two solid utopias (or near enough) I've encountered in fiction: the entirety of Ian M Bank's "Culture"; and the second chapter of Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway". Also, there's the perennial example of Burning Man (and related festivals) - here's an example of people creating happiness that has little to do with the removal of scarcities…

> Also, there's the perennial example of Burning Man Which is a temporary outlet for a select very affluent few Westerners (non-affluent person wouldn't even be able to afford transportation and supplies, not mentioning $500 entrance fee) who drive there for a week (increasingly accompanied by air-conditioned tents and personal chefs), frolic in costumes or negligee, burn stuff down for fun and return to their regula…

> [Burning Man]

I completely disagree with your impression, but that all is beside my point.

The part of the Burning Man culture I'm pointing to is the one where people go co-create all this shit anyway, when they don't have to, when it doesn't solve any need, when it's not about a contrast with somewhere else.

Not everyone needs a problem to solve to get off their arse and make something amazing, and you can see that multiple times a year around the world if you look at these events.

Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#222

Post by Kye »

cultus wrote: post #116
stcredzero wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up his. He's a widely cited psychological researcher, and regarded as an authority by other researchers. His lectures like this one are based on specific research.

He is quite far outside of the psychological mainstream. Many of the ideas in his books qualify as pseudoscience. He has only become popular because he says what far right individuals want to hear. It is all banal well-trodden ideas dressed up.

I've only heard of him through his twisted ideas on trans people, but I suspected that only scratched the surface.

Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#223

Post by Someguywhatever »

tormeh wrote: post #150
Someguywhatever wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Banks culture is run by omniscient AI's, and not by humans, this removes the problem of human corruption, greed etc. I don't think any post scarcity society can exist that is run by humans.

I mean, we have enough food for everyone now. We are post scarcity right now with regards to food. Yet people starve. Usually due to war and conflict, not corruption, but still.

Yes there is enough food in location A but we would have to transport that food to where it is needed. That costs money, there is spoilage etc. Who pays that cost? Obviously only the people with the money to pay it can pay it. So lets say we make people in the west pay (involuntarily) to ship excess food to other places. If you make it voluntary then nobody would pay it, since it is essentially voluntary now and nobody pays it.

All that would happen is those other places would become dependent on the free food we send them, and certain of their domestic industries would be destroyed as they couldn't compete with the cost of free food being dumped into their economy.

Also here domestically excess food would no longer be produced as if you don't produce any excess you don't have to pay the cost of shipping it, or doing anything with it. Everything would become "just in time" or made immediately 1 to 1 with a specific request. So the post scarcity impression we have now would go away pretty fast.

So I don't think we actually are post scarcity with regards to almost anything currently. Efficiency is very high I would say, so high, and we're so productive that we occasionally end up with wasted resources caused by poorly estimating demand.

Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#224

Post by pdonis »

byproxy wrote: post #192
pdonis wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

David Friedman's The Machinery Of Freedom goes into detail about these kinds of scenarios. There is far too much there to summarize here. The one point I will make is that, when people imagine anarchy, they imagine the society we have now, and then just take away government and all its functions, such as police. Of course what you get when you imagine that is terrible. But it's terrible not because anarchy is terribl…

Wouldn't you say humanity started out in an anarchistic state? It seems that the "workable solutions" tended towards more and more governing until we ended up where we're at. Sure, there were imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions, but those powers were still a product of the same initial government-deficient base state. If we we were to start tabula rasa why wouldn't we end up as we a…

> Wouldn't you say humanity started out in an anarchistic state?

Back when all humans were hunter-gatherers, this was probably true, yes, given what we know.

> It seems that the "workable solutions" tended towards more and more governing until we ended up where we're at.

Only after the invention of agriculture. But the period since that invention (about 10,000 years ago) is somewhere between 10 percent and 1 percent of the time humans have existed. So for most of the time humans have existed, the "workable solution" was (most likely--see above) anarchy.

The invention of agriculture had two key effects: it allowed the human population to grow dramatically, and it caused the population density to grow dramatically since agriculture requires fixed dwellings and more concentration of people into towns and cities. These two changes drastically increased the need for mechanisms to regulate social cooperation, which became what we know as governments.

Since the conditions that created governments in the first place (large human population and high population densities) are still present, we might be stuck with government even with all its downsides. However, advancing technology might open up possibilities that were not there before.

> Sure, there were imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions, but those powers were still a product of the same initial government-deficient base state.

No, they weren't. While there were inter-tribal conflicts during humanity's hunter-gatherer period, those were nothing like "imperialist powers that forced their wills and ways upon other regions". Those powers were the product of governments, which were in turn, as above, the product of agriculture and the growth of towns and cities.

Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#225

Post by pdonis »

bena wrote: post #215
pdonis wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get biggest guns How are you going to get the guns? Remember we're imagining an anarchy, where you can't get guns by taking over the military (there isn't any) or the government (there isn't any). You would have to either make them yourself (a productive endeavor, which thugs don't do--see below) or trade for them (which means you would have to have something worth trading, which again requires productive endeavor)…

You have a very naive view of other people. You're the one basically imagining our society but with government and "governmental law enforcement" suddenly removed. Everyone will just behave because we don't have police, but for some reason we all have laws we all agree on. But you coincidentally don't remove "laws", because those are important to keep. But we all enforce the laws because of reasons... Assuming your o…

> You're the one basically imagining our society but with government and "governmental law enforcement" suddenly removed.

I don't know where you're getting that from. I have not only not imagined any such thing, I have explicitly said several times in this overall thread that that's not the way to imagine a functioning anarchy.

If your argument is that "we can't get there from here", I have already agreed, in response to another poster downthread (PeterisP), that this is a valid point. But that is not a criticism of anarchy; it's a criticism of us humans, who have painted ourselves into this corner where we can't trust governments to uphold our rights but can't get rid of them either.

Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#226

Post by pdonis »

bena wrote: post #215
pdonis wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get biggest guns How are you going to get the guns? Remember we're imagining an anarchy, where you can't get guns by taking over the military (there isn't any) or the government (there isn't any). You would have to either make them yourself (a productive endeavor, which thugs don't do--see below) or trade for them (which means you would have to have something worth trading, which again requires productive endeavor)…

You have a very naive view of other people. You're the one basically imagining our society but with government and "governmental law enforcement" suddenly removed. Everyone will just behave because we don't have police, but for some reason we all have laws we all agree on. But you coincidentally don't remove "laws", because those are important to keep. But we all enforce the laws because of reasons... Assuming your o…

> You have a very naive view of other people.

You have a very naïve view of government:

> Government is the enforcement of the social contract on a large scale.

Government is supposed to be this, yes. But that's not how it actually works out in practice.

Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#227

Post by pdonis »

bena wrote: post #216
PeterisP wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that this argument essentially relies on everyone being an anarchist. This is not the case for systems we have observed in reality - totalitarian regimes can function even if significant parts of population don't want to be in a totalitarian regime; democracies can function (perhaps poorly, but function) even if significant parts of population don't agree with core principles of democracy; oligarchies…

Not just anarchists, but also agree to follow a certain set of rules or laws that will be enforced by no one. Even the "ideal" he is putting forth isn't really anarchy. Because anarchy means absolute freedom and the minute you don't allow someone something, freedom isn't absolute. And the minute you get two people living as some sort of unit, you have compromise. Cooperation is good, systems of cooperation are better…

> anarchy means absolute freedom

No, it doesn't. It means the absence of government. Nobody has absolute freedom; even in the absence of government, everyone has to deal with other people in some ways.

> In a completely anarchistic system, I can't trust you and you can't trust me.

This is simply false. Do you trust your friends? If so, would you stop trusting them if there were no government?

There are plenty of ways for people in the absence of government to build trust relationships with each other.

> We need an impartial third party to manage our interactions so that if one of us decides to screw the other, that person is appropriately admonished.

And you think government, as it actually is instead of as it might be in somebody's idealized model, is such an impartial third party? Surely you jest.

Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#228

Post by pdonis »

GW150914 wrote: post #180
pdonis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in an anarchistic society there is no mechanism to stop those who collectivize to monopolize the fruits of the commons Sure there is: citizens with guns. In an anarchy, there is no centralized power, so thugs have no advantage in that respect over armed law-abiding citizens. And thugs have a big disadvantage: they do not cooperate in productive endeavors, so they don't accumulate wealth. > ostracism is no response…

Note to self, get biggest guns, most people with guns, dominate society, set up theocracy with me as godhead, assemble harem, make sure sure court jesters are committed ideologues who thought reinventing feudalism was smart. I mean, really? Thugs don’t work together? That’s basically the history of humanity in the absence of a state, it’s what knighthood and aristocracies were. Thugs, working together to the bare cha…

> Unless you’re just entertaining a fantasy with no basis in reality and our lives, I’m thinking of anarchy at some time in the future

See my responses to bena and PeterisP downthread.

Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#229

Post by pdonis »

bena wrote: post #215
pdonis wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get biggest guns How are you going to get the guns? Remember we're imagining an anarchy, where you can't get guns by taking over the military (there isn't any) or the government (there isn't any). You would have to either make them yourself (a productive endeavor, which thugs don't do--see below) or trade for them (which means you would have to have something worth trading, which again requires productive endeavor)…

You have a very naive view of other people. You're the one basically imagining our society but with government and "governmental law enforcement" suddenly removed. Everyone will just behave because we don't have police, but for some reason we all have laws we all agree on. But you coincidentally don't remove "laws", because those are important to keep. But we all enforce the laws because of reasons... Assuming your o…

> Those Icelandic villages are small-scale governments.

No, they aren't. They are arrangements of mutual cooperation that are voluntary on the part of all parties. Nobody has the authority to force anyone else to participate. Nobody has the authority to make laws that everyone must obey on pain of punishment. Nobody has the authority to "not allow" someone else to do something.

Re: Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

#230

Post by pdonis »

stcredzero wrote: post #204
pdonis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At its core, it's basically everyone doing themselves. No, it isn't. Anarchists can cooperate; in fact, rational anarchists will certainly cooperate with each other, to reap the benefits of specialization and trade and comparative advantage. What anarchists object to is being forced to cooperate when, if left to themselves, they would choose not to. > there is going to be a certain segment of asshole that will just…

You enforce the social contract socially: by refusing to deal with people who do not respect it. In an anarchy, everyone has that option; and therefore people who do not respect the social contract quickly find themselves ostracized and powerless. What if people don't want your particular kind of social contract? What one sees of anarchists on the street in 2018, is that they not only ostracize, they do much worse. T…

> What if people don't want your particular kind of social contract?

That's what having many different communities, each of which can choose its own particular social contract, is for.

> What one sees of anarchists on the street in 2018, is that they not only ostracize, they do much worse.

I'm not sure I would call such people "anarchists" in the sense that, for example, David Friedman is an "anarchist" (at least in books like The Machinery Of Freedom). If "anarchist" just means somebody who claims they should be able to do whatever they want, then that's not the kind of anarchist I'm talking about. I'm talking about someone who understands that, even in the absence of government, there are still huge benefits to be gained from social cooperation, and that people therefore have strong incentives to regulate their own actions to facilitate social cooperation. The only real difference is that, in the absence of government, all such cooperation is voluntary; nobody can be forced to cooperate with someone else if they don't want to. Which, note carefully, means that just taking someone's stuff without their consent, the vandalism and violence you describe, is not voluntary social cooperation. And citizens of a functioning anarchy will resist it, with force if necessary.

I've already said, in response to other posters, that a functioning anarchy of this sort would be very, very difficult to get to from our current state. But that's not a criticism of anarchy; it's a criticism of our current state, and of us humans for letting ourselves get into this state, where we have all kinds of problems with governments violating our rights but we can't just stop having them because nobody really understands how to do voluntary social cooperation without a government.

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