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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)

#251

Post by pdonis »

bena wrote: post #247
pdonis wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes it does. It is the very definition. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/anarchy Absolute freedom. You do understand I'm talking about two strangers. Of course, you can build trust between people over time. But no one comes into a situation with trust. And if we can't start on a basis of trust, then we can't start. Knowing there are repercussions for breaking that trust allows us to treat. You're the one…

> It is the very definition

You can't make reality be the way you want it to be by defining words. Nobody has absolute freedom in reality.

> Knowing there are repercussions for breaking that trust allows us to treat.

There are repercussions for breaking trust whether there is government or not.

If your claim is that governments do better at enabling trust relationships to develop than a society without government (I'll stop saying "anarchy" since you keep quibbling about the definition of that term) would, then please show your work. From where I sit, governments have possibly done better in some respects, but those benefits, on net, are more than outweighed by the ways in which governments allow people in positions of power to abuse trust without paying any price.

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

#252

Post by pdonis »

bena wrote: post #245
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.

I'm going to respond to all three of your comments here. Government is that. When you have something that is enforcing a social contract, that is government. Not every government requires a building, elected officials, etc. It is simply the means organizational policies are enforced. And your village is an organization. It has policies. Your system of ostracizing is the mechanism by which you punish citizens who don'…

> Your problem is that you don't agree with all of the rules we do have

Where did I say that?

At least as far as the major rules (don't murder, don't steal, don't cheat, etc.), I have no problem with those at all. I'm sure we could find disagreements over minor rules (for example, I don't think laws that impose penalties when no harm has been done, such as most traffic laws, should exist), but those aren't what I'm talking about in this discussion. What I'm talking about in this discussion is the fact that governments (a) don't actually uphold the rules that the vast majority of us agree on, and (b) impose lots of other rules that the majority of us don't even want, but get put in place because some special interest group grabs enough attention to get them on politicians' radar, even though the proposed rules don't even fix the "problem" that triggered them in the first place.

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

#253

Post by RangerScience »

SOMMS wrote: post #233
RangerScience wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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.

It could stand, if it wasn't so woefully off-base. But, as they say, haters gonna hate soooo whatevs dude, spill the haterade all over yourself.

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

#254

Post by byproxy »

pdonis wrote: post #241
byproxy wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. They were all humans, yes, and they all evolved ultimately from hunter-gatherers, yes. That doesn't change the fact that the "world powers" were societies that had had governments for centuries, if not millennia, and were only able to be imperialists because they could use the co…

So, kinda going back to what I initially said, an ideal anarchistic state would require the hindsight of government gone awry, which means that enforcing government at some point would be a necessary step towards ideal anarchy? I wonder how long the lessons of past mistakes would stick before they start being forgotten and start to be made once more. Maybe something like Roberto Unger's "religion of the future" (which also relies on automation to enable 'deep freedom') would have to spring up to soft-enforce a global set of values that would quell the rise of any oppressive government thinkers. Not sure, just spitballing.

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

#255

Post by sabarn01 »

pdonis wrote: post #238
sabarn01 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sa…

I just can't shake the notion that this is based upon Utopian concepts. The cost in terms of lives attempting to implement Utopian visions in the 20th century can be measured in the 10s of millions. Even if we could pay the upfront cost there is zero assurance that it would be stable or that it would produce better outcomes then what we have now.

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

#256

Post by int_19h »

bena wrote: post #134
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Anarchism has been pretty successfully demonized, misinterpreted and put into the "evil" bin with every other -ism except for capitalism. Kind of hard to organize when you're whole philosophy is allergic to hierarchical structures. When Noam Chomsky is your most famous public personality it's hard to build a broad and passionate following. I don't see it getting anything like mainstream traction ever, as it's a…

I don't think anarchists have really thought through their position or have noticed particular ironies within it. At its core, it's basically everyone doing themselves. I do my thing, you do your thing, it's all good. Until the thing I want to do interferes with your thing. And yes, we could come to some agreement. But there is going to be a certain segment of asshole that will just decide: Me strong, you weak, and j…

> I don't think anarchists have really thought through their position or have noticed particular ironies within it.

Anarchism is an ideology that has been formalized over 150 years ago, with numerous books and treatises on the subject. I'm not an anarchist, and not particularly sympathetic to them, but to claim that "they haven't really thought trough their position" is more than a tad condescending.

BTW, if you want a not-so-dry treatment of how an anarchist society might work, read Le Guin's "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia". It specifically answers your questions about conflicts. Maybe not the way you like - not even the way some anarchists in the story like - but it's an answer.

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

#257

Post by int_19h »

DannyB2 wrote: post #104

Just an opinion here. The article says a number of things about the Christian Heaven. But fails to recognize the premise is that people who go there are changed. On the inside. There is peace, on the outside, because there is peace in the heart, on the inside. There is contentment, because it is on the inside. There isn't a lust for power and control over other people's lives. Nor any shortage of resources. And the b…

> The problem with all other utopias is that they seem to imagine something that people create without a change on the inside.

Not at all. So much so that we even have a term for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Man_(utopian_concept)

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

#258

Post by int_19h »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #44
n4r9 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Utopia is about letting people live in a manner that they would want One of the lessons I learnt from Huxley's Brave New World is that this phrasing is very ambiguous and the meaning of utopia is more complicated, if the word is indeed meaningful. The people in BNW live in the manner that they desire, but not many would call it a utopia. Sure, those desires themselves are the result of genetic and environmental con…

Between Huxley ("Brave New World") and Orwell ("1984"), I think Huxley saw the future more accurately, although Orwell has amazing insights. I actually thought that "Wall-E" was a good, and particularly accessible, commentary on utopia. Without the need to strive, we might all just turn into human potatoes. I'm not far from that now, which is pretty frightening.

Orwell was writing about an authoritarian socialist society devolving into fascism.

Huxley is less clear, but on the whole it looks much closer to a capitalist society.

So one could argue that they represent different future paths - mutually exclusive, but which one is more likely than the other depends on where the wind blows at any given moment. Orwell had the advantage of seeing what Stalinist ideology is like first hand, as a member of POUM in Spain, so that's where his focus was. We live in a world that's dominated by capitalist countries, so Huxley's vision seems more likely to us. But it can all change.

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

#259

Post by dragonwriter »

Socialists believe in fun.

Socialists Orwell was familiar with 75 years ago may not have written much about fun (or, at least things Orwell found fun) in their utopian literature, but I suspect hat that's largely because recreation wasn't an area of society that they felt needed fixed, so it wasn't the focus of it utopian literature.

In any case, I'm not sure how much relevance the observation (much less the explanation offered for it) has now, even if it had some in 1943; more recent left-wing utopian fiction does address recreation (whether Orwell would find the utopias described therein to be fun is, I suppose, an open and unanswerable question), notably including Callenbach’s Ecotopia, which certainly is more relevant to the views of the modern American (or Western, more generally) left than the works referenced in Orwell’s work.

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

#260

Post by pdonis »

sabarn01 wrote: post #255
pdonis wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sa…

I just can't shake the notion that this is based upon Utopian concepts. The cost in terms of lives attempting to implement Utopian visions in the 20th century can be measured in the 10s of millions. Even if we could pay the upfront cost there is zero assurance that it would be stable or that it would produce better outcomes then what we have now.

> I just can't shake the notion that this is based upon Utopian concepts.

So is the idea that governments can solve all problems. And all of the Utopian visions you speak of that cost upwards of 100 million lives in the 20th century were visions of government solving all problems, not of abolishing government.

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