Weird conclusion. The best managers/masters tend to be predictable. Institutions by their nature have norms that enforce this. It's not even close to the same thing.
Servants Without Masters
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: Servants Without Masters
#22save this.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#23I feel like this is seriously under-appreciated. I never figured to frame this into servant/master terms, but the depersonalization of human relations in the West (especially USA) is something that bothers me for a long time now. And it's not only not seeing a human behind a servant/master role, it is deliberate tendency to replace humans with institutions, up to the point of refusing to recognize personal qualities behind a institutional label, even in cases where the quality in question is obviously personal. I mean, it's considered normal to refuse to see, say, judge, as a person with personal qualities and human flaws, who personally makes a decision about another human's life. American society is educated to treat judge as a judge, period. And contrary to what one may think, this is not something special to judges due to their "special" role in society, but a general tendency to de-personalize and outsource to a institution anything of consequence in society. You should not do anything outside of your profession, please hire a specialist. You should not try and fix your kitchen sink, a plumber will do it better. You should not try to protect yourself, there is the police to take care of you. You should not try to decide if anything is right or wrong, there's a judge to do that. You should not have an opinion, there are journalists or maybe politicians to do it for you, you just chose your side and mind your business.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#24People prefer the rule of law to the rule of a man
Re: Servants Without Masters
#25> It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me. >And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of soci…
Is it really that case?
Having maid is pretty common in bay area. They come in once or twice a week to clean your house, and do laundry. There are many people I know had someone come and cook meals for them on weekdays.
I moved from bay area to Ohio for a business. I bought a used Jeep from a dealership out of town. The salesman that sold me the car lives where my hotel is. He would pick up/drop off my car from my business for oil change/regular maintenance. After a couple of times, I told him I will do myself as I started feel different.
Instead of a personal cook, now you use doordash to get food from restaurant. The cook at the restaurant or person delivering food can use the same service. Similarly when we had servants in India, we would eat the same food, and work in the same farms. Living situation were more segregated just like able to afford in Palo Alto vs East Palo Alto.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#26> this is really a case of Nietzschean slave morality run amok. Individualism isn’t about freedom so much as it is envy of the powerful and dominant. We therefore have a strong instinct to pull down anyone who’s in a position of personal authority, but this instinct doesn’t care about domination that doesn’t appear to be done by a human-shaped agent.
This is also known as the crab mentality. If you try to pull just one crab out of a pot, the others will grab on mercilessly, until the first crab's legs are ripped off.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#27> It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me. >And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of soci…
Income inequality within a country isn’t necessary for people to be able to afford a maid —however, it comes with s proviso, that the served and the server come from different economies. So you can have maids in Singapore or Hong Kong, but predominantly these maids are from lesser economies like The Philippines or Indonesia. And before someone says that is income inequality then you have to consider all of globalization (née international trade) “income inequality” which would be absurd because then everything is income inequality and it defines nothing in particular.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#28I mostly agree with this description of the current western institutions, but I don't agree with the conclusion he came to as to why we accept these institutions. The same way he points out that a human master can disregard their incentives in the interest of their subordinates, they can just as well disregard the interests of their subordinates and even their own incentives for some kind of personal enjoyment. I don…
Yes. Using a system takes partially out of the equation, which is more fair, especially in cases where huge numbers of the involved.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#29> It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me. >And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of soci…
Is it really that case? Having maid is pretty common in bay area. They come in once or twice a week to clean your house, and do laundry. There are many people I know had someone come and cook meals for them on weekdays. I moved from bay area to Ohio for a business. I bought a used Jeep from a dealership out of town. The salesman that sold me the car lives where my hotel is. He would pick up/drop off my car from my bu…
> Having maid is pretty common in Bay Area
I did say it requires grotesque levels of income inequality.
In all seriousness, a maid service coming in once a month is not the same thing as having live in servants.
Re: Servants Without Masters
#30I feel Ike the feeling of being served on our society has everything to do with economic equality. There are professions that pay more or less, and people with professions that pay more are able to afford services that people with lesser paying professions can provide. Using words like "profession" and "service" tend to imply that these are normal, usual things that happen in "free" societies, a.k.a. capitalistic societies. If I'm not mistaken, this is essentially the exploitation of the working class that Marx was talking about.
If everyone earned the same living, then there would be very little serving happening, because everyone's time is effectively worth the same amount, and thus it wouldn't make sense to give away all your money to people to perform services for you that you could have done yourself if you didn't have a job.
The reason that people serve other people in our society is that we're unequal, and there are socio-economic reasons for that. I believe it has more to do with economic inequality than Nietzchean slave morality.