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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)

#231

Post by otakucode »

hexomancer wrote: post #115
otakucode wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be helpful, if still dealing with a human brain, to forget things in order to remain sane. Simulated brains which have the ability to forget removed end up acting pretty much exactly like schizophrenics brains.

Do you have a source for that?

Sorry for long wait for reply, but I'd 'posted too fast' and couldn't reply yesterday and just got back to it. But yes, here is the study I was referring to: https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-32...

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

#232

Post by GW150914 »

pdonis wrote: post #226
bena wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You have a very naive view of other people. You have a very naïve view of government:

I don’t think he does, he’s just not sold on your alternative based on childlike assumptions such as They work together at being thugs (though even that tends to be limited). They don't work together in productive endeavors, which is what I said. You keep alluding to your perfect vision of anarchy, and when people point out how impossible it is in the world we already live in you either pivot to “government is bad,” or “that’s not what I mean by anarchy.”

So maybe it’s time you lay out in detail how you get from Earth 2018 to pdonis’ anarchy at some point in the future. Remember to avoid magic, changing human nature, and all of the criticisms levied so far. You don’t get to handwave away any parts, you don’t get to assume things like worldwide cooperation or “peace already broke out in the Middle East” and you have to account for all of the world’s tech, armaments, etc.

Convince us.

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

#233

Post by SOMMS »

RangerScience wrote: post #221
smsm42 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

The point still stands: soldering-iron wielding neo-hippies having an orgy in the desert for a week isn't a model for society. It's more of an indication of boredom in a society blessed with extreme abundance, yet lacking a clear sense of purpose.

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

#234

Post by pdonis »

GW150914 wrote: post #232
pdonis wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> You have a very naive view of other people. You have a very naïve view of government: I don’t think he does, he’s just not sold on your alternative based on childlike assumptions such as They work together at being thugs (though even that tends to be limited). They don't work together in productive endeavors, which is what I said. You keep alluding to your perfect vision of anarchy, and when people point out how im…

> I don’t think he does

You don't think "Government is the eoforcement of the social contract on a large scale" is a naïve view of government?

> your alternative based on childlike assumptions

So you think thugs actually do work together in productive endeavors? Isn't not doing that the definition of a "thug"? Thugs might make use of things that others have already produced, but they don't produce anything themselves; if they do, we don't call them thugs.

> maybe it’s time you lay out in detail how you get from Earth 2018 to pdonis’ anarchy at some point in the future

I have already said, in response to several other posters in this overall thread, that it's quite possible that we can't get there from here. But, as I said to those posters, that's a problem with us, not with anarchy.

> Convince us.

I can't convince you if you refuse to even try to imagine what an actual functioning anarchy--a society with no government, no entity with a monopoly on the use of force or the right to make rules that everyone must follow whether they want to or not, but which still is populated by citizens who understand the benefits of social cooperation and are willing to regulate their own behavior to achieve those benefits--would be like. I agree this task of imagination is a very hard one, because all of us have grown up in a society which has evolved for centuries, if not millennia, under the assumption that a society has to have a government, and in which over time governments accrete more and more functions and people come to think of them as having to be done by governments, even if they could be done better by private entities. That's why I have several times referenced David Friedman's The Machinery Of Freedom, which is a serious attempt to undertake this task of imagination in some detail. It's not something that can be done within the scope of a HN comment.

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

#235

Post by byproxy »

pdonis wrote: post #224
byproxy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, but when I say 'base state' I'm referring to the big-bang of humanity. Those world powers that were able to impose their will evolved out of the same 'base state' as those who had that will imposed upon them. That is to say, Western imperialist powers weren't extraterrestrials that came from other worlds to spread capitalism (although it may have seemed that way to the colonized).

I guess ultimately what I'm trying to say is that the anarchist experiment has been run (and, as you say, had been the norm for plenty of time), yet here we are. And if we were to run the experiment again, after a sufficient amount of time, I think here we'd be again.

Though, I'm curious as to how you think advancing technology would navigate around the issues of humans generally coalescing into a government-ruled state.

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

#236

Post by smsm42 »

panarky wrote: post #161
smsm42 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Proof by example is a logical fallacy. I know that x, which is a member of group X, has the property P. Therefore, membership in X causes property P. I can play this game too. Haiti, Ethiopia, Liberia, India, Honduras and Somalia have market economies, and they are poor. Therefore, market economies make nations poor. There's really not much to learn from this kind of argument.

> Therefore, market economies make nations poor.

No, because there's USA, Germany, France, etc. Which has much bigger market economies and not poor. But all major socialist economies has been a disaster (no, China is not a socialist economy and hasn't been for a while, neither is Sweden, Denmark etc.), and socialist societies has been even worse disaster in non-economic sense (see gulags, Pol Pot killing fields, Cultural Revolution, North Korea, etc.).

> Proof by example is a logical fallacy.

Some people call learning from example empirical research and scientific method. Others ignore all the examples and keep claiming the real perpetual motion engine just hasn't been tried yet.

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

#237

Post by SOMMS »

jchrisa wrote: post #171
smsm42 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If we use social media to make the privilege networks more transparent, maybe we can avoid the Tyranny of Structurelessness results you describe.

But then there's the small matter that social media doesn't actually make anything better...it just makes a bunch of things worse.

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

#238

Post by pdonis »

sabarn01 wrote: post #209
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…

> No, we don't. We have a few failed states like Somalia today, but they are few; almost all societies on the planet today have governments. You wouldn't call all the human societies that existed prior to the modern nation state version of this experiment If the colonies count we have enumerable examples and in all cases at a certain point of density people took it upon themselves to form governments and delegate pun…

> All forms of the anarchist argument ignore the fact that governments grew out of necessity and need.

The fact that governments grew out of a need to regulate social cooperation does not mean that governments are the only, or even the best, method of meeting that need. We have learned a lot in the past 10,000 years about the downsides of using governments to fill this need; that experience means we are not in the same position as the people 10,000 years ago who first formed governments. Governments exist today mostly out of inertia; that's how we've always done it. Maybe it's time to re-examine that belief.

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

#239

Post by GW150914 »

pdonis wrote: post #234
GW150914 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have a very naive view of other people. You have a very naïve view of government: I don’t think he does, he’s just not sold on your alternative based on childlike assumptions such as They work together at being thugs (though even that tends to be limited). They don't work together in productive endeavors, which is what I said. You keep alluding to your perfect vision of anarchy, and when people point out how im…

> I don’t think he does You don't think "Government is the eoforcement of the social contract on a large scale" is a naïve view of government? > your alternative based on childlike assumptions So you think thugs actually do work together in productive endeavors? Isn't not doing that the definition of a "thug"? Thugs might make use of things that others have already produced, but they don't produce anything themselves…

This is the core disconnect between you, and everyone you’re talking to here.

I have already said, in response to several other posters in this overall thread, that it's quite possible that we can't get there from here. But, as I said to those posters, that's a problem with us, not with anarchy.

That’s... sort of the “religious” view. The practical view is that a system for humans which humans can’t use, is a flawed system. Your stance is that the system is perfect, humans are flawed. Well sure, but the flawed and human nature of people is the basis for anything that pretends to be a government or way life. Talking to you about this is sort of like arguing with someone who thinks that people are ignorant savages who don’t understand how inefficient walking is, when we should just flap our arms and fly. When it’s pointed out that humans simply can’t do that, they just shrug and say that’s a problem with our wings, flying is still the way to go and walking is for suckers.

People don’t want governments because we think they’re perfect, we don’t reject anarchy because we think it doesn’t have appealing elements. What we’re doing is being realistic rather than engaging in ideological masturbation. You’ll usually find that only similarly ideologically committed people have the patience for that crap.

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