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Resilience requires helping each other out

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Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #62
DoreenMichele wrote: post #19

Before we reliably had money, we had barter and "mutual aid." Now, some people think you just pay for stuff with money and if someone is "nice" to you, you don't "owe" them anything. A lot of people no longer seem to understand the implicit social contract behind such interactions and it can go bad places. From religion to community development work to politics, there have been myriad attempts to educate people that…

>> Before we reliably had money, we had barter As far as i know there’s no evidence for this. No historical economy which worked primarily on barter has been discovered. As i understand it, Adam Smith suggested this was the case and it’s now given as rote learning in economics but that historians have never found conclusive proof that this is the case. The wiki entry for barter has this: “No ethnographic studies have…

On the one hand, the proposition is kind of obvious and self-evident - "I'll trade you ${thing you want} for ${thing I want}" is the next step from "I'll beat you up and take ${thing I want} from you", and then basic money is just doing the trade in two steps. On the other hand, single-step trading - that is, barter - gets infeasible as the primary trading model very quickly. Not because of specialization (the "I want to trade shoes for food, but everyone already has enough shoes" problem), but because of fairness - everyone's memory and the "shared knowledge" established through gossip can scale only so far, and past that point, you need some other means to ensure exchange of goods and services stays balanced over time (and that your group can agree fair balance is being maintained).

Basically, either your proto-society develops ways to track balance of trade[0], or it'll grow a freeloader problem, which will keep it down and possibly even destroy the group. That point comes early enough that it's entirely likely the early societies that didn't develop money didn't grow large enough, and didn't survive long enough, to enter historical record.

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[0] - Trading via a medium of exchange - that is, some form of money - is just one way to achieve it, but it has the useful property of being self-balancing, thus not requiring shared global state. That is, you don't have to keep official logs of every trade made by everyone in your group to keep things fair and balanced (or even define, update and defend what "fair" and "balanced" means, which is something everyone has slightly different view of) - you can just establish a common medium of exchange, give people freedom to individually negotiate the exchange rates, and you have a self-balancing system.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#72

Post by licebmi__at__ »

high_5 wrote: post #68
licebmi__at__ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feminist concerns aside, I don’t think mutual aid has really succeeded in a hard hierarchical society like these who are explicitly patriarchal, even if it appears like it does to external observers.

You mean like Japan or China? Or Koreas? No success there, nope /s But they drank all the Western kool-aid they could, though and it slowly shows.

I don’t say they don’t work. I’m saying that the concept of mutual aid as described by Kropotkin, has not succeeded there. Please refrain to engage in sarcasm if your reading and context understanding is that poor.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

ajross wrote: post #48
DoreenMichele wrote: post #19

Before we reliably had money, we had barter and "mutual aid." Now, some people think you just pay for stuff with money and if someone is "nice" to you, you don't "owe" them anything. A lot of people no longer seem to understand the implicit social contract behind such interactions and it can go bad places. From religion to community development work to politics, there have been myriad attempts to educate people that…

> Before we reliably had money [...] Now [...] A lot of people no longer seem to understand the implicit social contract behind Nah. Being a jerk isn't a modern invention. By every objective measure, misbehavior/criminality/violence et. al. have been getting inexorably better over the past centuries. If you have to make a pronouncement like this, it's more "In a world of excess and luxury, being pissed off about mino…

> Maybe it invented Karens.

It didn't, and for some reason this made me think about the biblical Parable of the Unjust Judge / Parable of the Persistent Woman[0]. The lesson usually taken from that story is about the value of persistence against unjust (but mostly indifferent) opposition. However, I can't help but imagine that, for everyone else witnessing the widow's repeated pleas to the judge, this was a Karen experience.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Unjust_Judge

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#74

Post by karatinversion »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
CraigJPerry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Before we reliably had money, we had barter As far as i know there’s no evidence for this. No historical economy which worked primarily on barter has been discovered. As i understand it, Adam Smith suggested this was the case and it’s now given as rote learning in economics but that historians have never found conclusive proof that this is the case. The wiki entry for barter has this: “No ethnographic studies have…

On the one hand, the proposition is kind of obvious and self-evident - "I'll trade you ${thing you want} for ${thing I want}" is the next step from "I'll beat you up and take ${thing I want} from you", and then basic money is just doing the trade in two steps. On the other hand, single-step trading - that is, barter - gets infeasible as the primary trading model very quickly . Not because of specialization (the "I wa…

I think the point is that historical societies are full of unbalanced social relationships, or "freeloader problems". Slaves and serfs worked for their masters. Parents provide for infant children, and adult children for elderly parents. Kings and lords receive tribute and service to the extent that they are due, and sometimes demand more. Priests take in offerings and perform rituals - often any barter here is directly with the god ("Poseidon, bring our ship safely to harbour and I will sacrifice an ox for you") rather than the priest.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#75

Post by unFou »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
CraigJPerry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Before we reliably had money, we had barter As far as i know there’s no evidence for this. No historical economy which worked primarily on barter has been discovered. As i understand it, Adam Smith suggested this was the case and it’s now given as rote learning in economics but that historians have never found conclusive proof that this is the case. The wiki entry for barter has this: “No ethnographic studies have…

On the one hand, the proposition is kind of obvious and self-evident - "I'll trade you ${thing you want} for ${thing I want}" is the next step from "I'll beat you up and take ${thing I want} from you", and then basic money is just doing the trade in two steps. On the other hand, single-step trading - that is, barter - gets infeasible as the primary trading model very quickly . Not because of specialization (the "I wa…

Not sure that there aren't alternate pathways from "I'll take what I want" and "I'll trade you specifically this for that".

I remember reading on acoup that in agrarian societies, often they relied on favours and communal sharing in times of bounty. So say if I butchered a hog today, all my neighbours might get some. Not in exchange for something directly, but in the expectation that when I fall on hard times or they get a windfall, they'll do the same for me.

There's probably some potential for freeloading here, but these sorts of communities are likely often right on the edge of survival. If someone develops a reputation for being miserly, that might well result in them starving (or freezing) because they're rejected by their neighbours. So there's an incentive to at least appear generous and pay your fair share.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#76

Post by em-bee »

nologic01 wrote: post #70
its_ethan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a milquetoast motivation speaker write this? "Everyone just needs to realize that we all have to be nice to each other and we all succeed" rarely even works in a kindergarten classroom of 15 students, there's not really even a system for scaling that up to a city of a million people. Imo it's naive to think that this is ever achievable given how powerful the human nature to find an in-group is.

> given how powerful the human nature to find an in-group is this is true as a general behavior, but its practical relevance is highly variable and culture dependend. For the longest span of our existence tribes routinely attacked eachother, decapitating for fun, enslaving for profit, and it was deemed ok. by and large we dont do that anymore, though this is the instictual behavior being tapped to support, e.g., orga…

education, factual information and candid discussions between people is what will help us ensure in and out-groups are confined to sports and games and do not put our collective welfare at risk

exactly that. but also, finding an in-group really just means that we want to have a social environment where we are recognized and supported. there need not be any out-group. the goal here is to develop relationships such that neighbors and the local community become that group (or one of them), which again, as the article suggests, can be achieved by helping each other out.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#77

Post by thumbuddy »

toolz wrote: post #16
thumbuddy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows but what is evident is it's just an angry Republican who is struggling to see beyond duality...

You've just committed the same offense you're rebuking someone for. It's not evident that person is republican, it's only evident that they blame the democrats for a problem.

Somewhere between right and wrong there is a field. I will meet you there.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#78

Post by gsatic »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69
DoreenMichele wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is a complex topic and one that disproportionately impacts some demographics. It is related to the phenomenon of unpaid internships where getting your foot in the door requires you to be able to work for free for a substantial period of time. This has been criticized as a form of gatekeeping because young adults from already prosperous families can comfortably do this and people from the lower classes cannot.…

> Upper class society seems to still honor those implicit social contracts, but only if you are already part of the in crowd and your disfavor could come back to bite them. And this is exactly how "barter and >" worked "Before we reliably had money"; this is exactly "the implicit social contract behind such interactions" that you refer to. Upper class society is a small group , pretty close to the point of everyone i…

Scale needs to have some purpose. We are not ants or weeds.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#79

Post by toolz »

thumbuddy wrote: post #77
toolz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just committed the same offense you're rebuking someone for. It's not evident that person is republican, it's only evident that they blame the democrats for a problem.

Somewhere between right and wrong there is a field. I will meet you there.

I agree that gray area is optimal, but I don't think you can afford yourself that kind of charity while not providing it to someone else in the very same comment.

Do unto others how you want others to do unto you. If you want to judge strictly, you shouldn't ask to be judged with leniency.

Re: Resilience requires helping each other out

#80

Post by JohnFen »

How people acted in the US during the pandemic made me aware of how broken a society we've become. I had always thought that despite our differences, we at least come together to help each other and overcome crises when they happen.

Our behavior with the pandemic showed how untrue that is. Nothing shook my faith and trust in my fellow citizens more than that.

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