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Magnifica Humanitas

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Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#801
post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVERY progressive needs to read this quote. It’s my biggest frustration with so many expressing progressive beliefs. I’ve lost count of the times a progressive expresses unwillingness to address problems at a smaller, local or personal level. Instead there is a demand to fix everything forever and at once at the highest levels, or do nothing at all.

The fact that you call them progressives hints at a more general frustration that I doubt has anything to do with the problem. There is nothing wrong with some people working on a regional or global fix while others work on a local one. The important thing is that they’re working for it.

I think there's more nuance to it. The big failing of progressive movements is that they seek, often from a position of disadvantage, to impose power over society too, but in the ways they feel are more just. The vast majority of progressives I know aren't very interested in listening to the other side, or implicitly believe that the other side is wrong and it's just a matter of making them see that.

But this ignores the humanity of people on the other side of the issue--people who may have legitimate moral and philosophical questions about very difficult and complex issues.

It does seem that acting locally, within the realm of actual human relationships rather than alienating impositions of authority, would likely result in much greater good in the long term.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel much much smaller version of it already happened. Many many customer facing processes in companies (from customer support to lost & found departments) almost all automated to a point if you are outside of the norm you are screwed. Time you are going to spent is higher than the value you are going to get most of the time. For the very same reason these companies are very anti-diversity. Because everything desig…

For many companies, even those breathlessly professing DEI, it boils down to “you can be any color you want as long as you operate exactly as our computers and processes expect you to. Any deviation will be harshly dealt with.”

This is why I keep spreading the word, at every opportunity, that people need to stop looking at their phones as their primary choice of personal entertainment devices. No. There's now a societal need to have a particular device that serves a particular purpose using particular software, all of which attached to a phone number. You need it for the same reason you need a Dress or Suit for an interview. Putting your real self in that device is a mistake, for the same reason that Not-Acting-Like-Yourself when you're demanded to be in a Dress or Suit is rule #1 of being an Adult.

Which means you need a 2nd phone. The Real Phone where you do shit you like, and the "Performative Person" Shit-Phone you use at work, install the bank and show the cops.

Society demands you operate in one particular way, and it's way easier to pretend you do and then not touching this pretense unless strictly necessary. Yes, it may seem unfair to have to spend 72 bucks on a second phone. But it was unfair to spend those same dollars on a Dress or Suit and no one came to my side despite all the complaining.

You may be even enlightened enough to realize the real phone doesn't even have to be a phone. Few already have, and their numbers grow.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#803
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ignore everything that happened in between 1903 and today, it might seem like we've never made any progress on this, but at least in the US wealth inequality was demonstrably not as much as an issue for some of the time in between. For a time in the 20th century, it was possible for someone solidly middle class in the US to be able to save up a bit of money and afford a down payment on a house within a decade…

> the US wealth inequality was demonstrably not as much as an issue for some of the time in between But now we're back to pre ww1 level of inequalities https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1415721490539/Wealth_line-chart...

Yeah, that's basically the point I was making. The fact that it was this way before and is again now might lead someone to think that there's nothing we can do about it, but clearly there was something we did about it, and now we've lost it again.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#804
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ignore everything that happened in between 1903 and today, it might seem like we've never made any progress on this, but at least in the US wealth inequality was demonstrably not as much as an issue for some of the time in between. For a time in the 20th century, it was possible for someone solidly middle class in the US to be able to save up a bit of money and afford a down payment on a house within a decade…

It was not only in the USA. Even in developing countries like Brasil, the post-war was an era of great material improvement for the worker class. Industrial employment was coveted, and blue collar work definitelly landed you in the middle class. The biggest difference between the US and other countries was the scale. Proportionally more workers benefited, and they benefited more in the US in the post war, as the US w…

Thanks for that context! I didn't want to speak beyond what I was familiar with, and I genuinely wasn't sure how widespread this was.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I think the action regulating CFCs is kinda what I'm talking about. As a consumer in the US, I don't ever remember having to sacrifice on my refrigerator or A/C - heck, I generally remember those appliances going down a lot in price from the 80s to the early 00s. So my argument is not that we can't regulate technologies, but that we only do so when it becomes "technologically convenient". I think the comparison o…

If you want an example of a sacrifice caused by regulation before technology had fully caught up, banning sperm whale oil in automatic car transmissions comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-pro...

Or phosphates in dish detergents. Some will remember when our dishwashers stopped working well for a few years.

Various consumer review sites were regularly doing pieces on newer detergents that maybe-kinda work.

We didn’t have an answer when the bans swept the country. It took a while for things to catch up. Then it was fine again.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in that case, my "how" has always been along anarchistic lines: establishing parallel forms of resource distribution, establishing habits and communities of mutual aid, and in doing so, delegitimizing and rendering obsolete the State, capitalism, and systems of hierarchy. Fun techcentric utopian speculation about this: Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway" and Ruthanna Emry's "A Half-Built Garden." Essentially, can we lev…

I really like the sound of that, but these proposals never acknowledge the monumental challenge of truly incentivizing people to help each other, beyond shallow niceties. I'm not entirely cynical, people generally are very open to be generous with one another and collaborate for a common good, but up to a point. Currently people spend the majority of their hours doing relatively hard work for the collective's benefit…

I really like this comment, you are outlining exactly the sort of things that our society has convinced us are ground state truths, that are actually just capitalist norms enforced by the State.

I really think you'd enjoy Peter Gelderloos' "Anarchy Works," because you can keep asking "but what about..." and the book will keep giving you examples from history to answer that exact "what about?"

To your points:

First, people don't do hard work for the collective benefit, they do it for the benefit of the owners of capital, who allow just enough leftover profit for people to keep themselves alive and for very little else.

A lot of that hard work isn't for the good of society, it's bullshit work that maintains artificial scarcity and the systems of capital, like the entire beast of health insurance in the USA, military procurement, landlord administration, advertising, corporate compliance rituals, or predatory lending.

Second, capitalism doesn't turn selfishness into selflessness, it rewards and selects FOR selfishness, and punishes and selects AGAINST selflessness. Why publish FOSS under MIT, the most selfless choice, when a major tech company will then just take the library, make money off it, and give you nothing in return? Why contribute to FOSS deployed by a big tech company when that contributes directly to a big tech company's bottom line for nothing in return to you?

Capitalism doesn't create incentives through rewards, it redirects people's inherent incentives towards less socially useful or rewarding projects that instead serve the needs of capital and the state. I read a lot about motivation to understand it in myself better, and one thing that keeps coming up as core to motivation and happiness is finding it inherent to a given activity, achieved through improving at and mastering that activity, and then being recognized for that improvement and mastery. Then, potentially, introducing novelty by finding something else to improve at and maybe master. Basically, humans love work, especially when it's useful or they can become good at it. Capitalism creates structures around this to try to redirect that labor to things that are useful first and foremost to capital.

Third, yes, a free market paradoxically requires regulation to maintain or it tends towards wealth accumulation, monopoly, and then as exploitative a labor relationship it can get away with - slavery, if it can manage. The free market is thus impossible because under capitalism, capital is power, and capitalism is a system designed for the accumulation of capital. More capital means you can chip away at the rules, which means more capital, which means less rules for you, and so on, until you get situations like today, where billionaires can diddle our kids and there's quite literally nothing we can do about it: the State's monopoly on violence is serving them, protecting them from us.

Fourth, people aren't considerate to each other because of the state monopoly on violence, they are considerate in spite of it, and despite the incredible violence the State and forces of Capital subject them to. Daily interactions are anarchist: you don't shove people out of the way on the street because it's illegal (depending on how you do it, it might not even be illegal), you don't do it because it's rude, it's antisocial, it will make people hate you, and because do it enough and you might yourself get slugged. Multiply this to basically every interaction, and then consider that the State isn't preventing the Big Crimes anyway like rape or murder, and itself facilitates the most widespread form of theft: wage theft and theft of profit. It doesn't stop or punish pollution, billionaire child rape, eviction, exploitative loans, or corporate fraud.

The State's monopoly on violence doesn't prevent domination, it enforces authorized dominion.

Will people work when there's no cash to gain? Well as you said, if their basic needs are met, why wouldn't they? If they don't have to dedicate at minimum 40 hours of their week to generating profit for some billionaire, what else might they spend their time on, and for what reason? Would they even need to work 40 hours a week if they aren't upholding systems of capital? Is their exhaustion inherent to the human social experience or an artifact of the artificially scarce society we've created? They already don't shove people out of the way on the street, there's probably some kind of social instinct there, right? What about you, in what ways would you contribute to the world around you if the world around you was already ensuring your basic needs are met? Would you look for ways to ensure the sustainability of those basic needs? Seek to improve comfort and delights? Seek to defend against exploitative forces?

Some other books you might like: "Anarchy in Action" https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/colin-ward-anarchy-i...

"To Change Everything" https://crimethinc.com/tce

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#807

I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power. For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the…

> In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option. One should not forget the reason that these technologies have become so ch…

Kind of terrifying that "we may" turn the tide on CO2 is an acceptable level of optimism.

If we don't, we all die. it isn't something to leave up to mindless market mechanics.

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVERY progressive needs to read this quote. It’s my biggest frustration with so many expressing progressive beliefs. I’ve lost count of the times a progressive expresses unwillingness to address problems at a smaller, local or personal level. Instead there is a demand to fix everything forever and at once at the highest levels, or do nothing at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism The world would likely be a better place if people of all political stripes could internalize this concept.

But how do you judge the consequences? Either you have an infinite regress, or you end up declaring by fiat that some things are good and others are bad, just because. Which is...deontology--what "consequentialism" was supposed to be opposed to and an improvement on.

The concept that I think the world would be a better place if people of all political stripes could internalize is that nobody knows for sure what is good. We all have to make moral and ethical choices with incomplete knowledge. So when people make choices that you disagree with, the default presumption, at least, should not be that they're evil, but that they have different information than you do. That information can include different judgments about what is good and what is not. There is no single moral or ethical system that has all the right answers--including "consequentialism".

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#809
post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option. One should not forget the reason that these technologies have become so ch…

Kind of terrifying that "we may" turn the tide on CO2 is an acceptable level of optimism. If we don't, we all die. it isn't something to leave up to mindless market mechanics.

[deleted]

Re: Magnifica Humanitas

#810

There are a lot of great aspects of the pope's writing. The most important one probably being that a spiritual leader understands that there is a large technological and societal change on the horizon. I still quite often experience the well described phenomenon of talking to "normal people" (my family in Europe for example) that seem to think that AI is gonna be roughly as important as the electric car and is not go…

In Christian theology/philosophy, humanity is generally not defined by our intelligence, consciousness, or the ability to act a certain way. Most theologians through out history and different theological traditions all root human value in the concept of imago dei (that humans are divine images of God, and which God has became one, thus further bringing humans into union with God). Thus, machines becoming smarter or more conscious than us has no relevance to the ontological category of humanity, just as someone's IQ or productivity or age has no relevance to whether they should be considered fully human. Lastly, coming from a Christian point of view, I would also slightly push back on the strong separation between practical and spiritual problems. Humans are intrinsically both body and mind, flesh and spirit, so anything practical affects us spiritually, and anything spiritual affect us practically. The Bible has a whole book recording the job loss of some guy (along with many other suffering), and the theological/spiritual implication of such matter.
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