[/quote][quote=“albill, post:141, topic:70758”]
I don’t really care about the “basis” of money. I care that I can use the money I receive for my work to purchase goods and services that I want or need to survive and for my family to do well in a predictable fashion, year after year.
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I don’t have any problem with what you are saying, here.
[quote=“albill, post:141, topic:70758”]
People don’t “get antsy” because you say money is a technology. They “get antsy” because you pretend it doesn’t matter and people can just go make their own reality and things will all work out great, installed base and culture be damned.[/quote]
A fair way to put this might be that you are very much invested in something, which another person may not be invested in. That’s easily understandable to me.
But how do you get that “installed base and culture be damned”? Isn’t that the same as any other hegemony feeling threatened by actual choice and diversity? The reasoning suggests that if all people everywhere don’t agree to live as you do, that you can no longer do so yourself? It sounds like the “War on Christmas” arguments I put up with last week all over again! Threatening the dominance of way of life is not, in itself, threatening those traditions. People could use the same logic to defend any totalitarian scheme. If you don’t love Stalin, you don’t love civilisation!
Because it is the system we are raised in and there are no comprehensive alternatives in place that work.
If you want to live a non-marginal life, you can’t opt out of money.
I like having nice things. I like being able to purchase the food I want to eat or having a stable roof over my head, which means I can’t be squatting and waiting for the owner, with the backing of the legal system and the police, to throw me out of “his” place. I want predictability, not living like a refugee. I think these are pretty common desires.
That is the best thing I’ve ever read from you. Live your own life how you wish – as long as it doesn’t harm others. Children are a special case because it is so much easier to harm them.
(I talked to him briefly the other day and he totally, completely, and without hesitation got me–as in pulled one over :). He received a tip o’ the hat)
Universal or not, though, it keep perpetuating itself, just like the chipmunks unless we make a concerted effort to eradicate it, and we all agree on that effort. It’s not like currency was imposed on us by some authority, it grew organically out of social developments. It seems like a real survivor, I’m not sure if chipmunks would do better. The only think organisms have going for them over ideas in terms of survival is that ideas depend on human survival. But in the world today depending on human survival is a very successful survival strategy because humans are just so powerful (e.g. hot peppers developed heat as a mechanism to avoid being eaten but currently survive in great numbers because humans want to eat hot things).
See, this just sounds like an abuse of the term “real.” If they are going to kill you, then they are very real. Presumably a hurricane is real. When you say:
I feel like you are the one who is making these distinctions difficult. Most people react very differently when a loved one is murdered than when a loved one dies of cancer, but that’s just one of those social things that you say we don’t have to buy into. If I just accept other people and their actions as part of the natural world, there is no reason to think of those people coming to kill me as different from that hurricane. I mean, if a hurricane is going to kill me or the Catholic Church is going to kill me, why should I draw such a distinction? I should do different things to try to deal with one than with the other, but the idea that I would say one is less real seems completely bizarre to me. They both have a volume, a mass, and a velocity, and both are coming my way. I don’t know what could be more real.
I guess you would say that it isn’t the church coming my way, but it is people and those people are choosing to do what they are doing. But to me that is like blaming the cow that was picked up by the hurricane and crushed me instead of blaming the hurricane. If it weren’t the cow/human, it could have been a tree/another human. And if the idea of killing in the name of catholicism were not sufficient to move people in my direction then it wouldn’t have, but that just the same as how the system of winds and water might not have grown into a hurricane. We know it did because the hurricane is coming, and we know that killing-in-the-name-of-catholicism was sufficiently strong to get people moving because it is moving the people right now.
If everyone actually examined their ideas and why they did things then maybe more people would say, “Wow, killing people for the sake of X is not a good idea.” But we don’t even know that is true. To quote Screwtape:
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
A person who engages their reason may conclude that killing in the name of the religion is the right things to do or the wrong thing to do.
And that goes back to what I think is the biggest issue here:
That lack of self-discipline is troublesome to you, but even if I am with you on that, if we really want to talk about individuals and their agency, the fact that most people seem to buy into many social structures without really questioning them is because of the values of those people. When confronted with an angry bear, you can freeze, run, climb a tree, or do something else. What you can’t do is carefully analyze your options, because the bear is going to make your choice for you. We only live so long, so more or less urgency exists in every decision we make. We could spend the rest of our lives deciding whether or not currency is a benefit to us personally and what we are going to do about it, or we could just work for money and spend the money on things we want/need. What if someone does exactly the kind of rigourous thought you advocate and determines that they are not very interested in that kind of rigourous thought and they just want to get on with their lives - how do they get that time back?
While currency and some religions have shown themselves to be very good at self-perpetuating, rigourous examination of participation in society includes a mechanism for self-destruction. It’s the chipmunk with a defective gene that makes it sterile. Sure, at any given time there will be some of those around, but each one is a dead end. Either radical rethinking produces a new self-perpetuating idea that can really catch on (in which case that instance of radical rethinking itself is annihilated) or it never really engages anyone beyond the rethinker, either way the rethinking ends in one generation, a perpetual cycle of rethinking for the sake of rigour is just not going to continue to exist.
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
Why does so much of your model of “society” involve discussion of people/things coming to kill individuals? That doesn’t sound much like what I would call society, at all. By “society” I mean such as people organizing goals, practices, managing resources, etc. Your post here is interesting, in some ways, but it doesn’t deal with any form of structured collective activity at all.
Many people seem to deem people killing each other for arbitrary reasons as being distinctly anti-social.
Sure, killing is real, but using it as a benchmark of social activity seems arbitrary - not to mention impractical.
Like I have pointed out numerous times, and nobody has chosen to engage with, is that activating people’s survival anxieties is an old tactic in psychological warfare. This doesn’t mean that whatever people choose to make you feel insecure about necessarily translates situationally to being an actual survival concern.
Safety is always relative, since I think most people understand that death is inevitable. With discussions of terrorism, many people acknowledge that acting upon any and every threat indiscriminately, without proper assessment of goals and risks is impractical. It is political suicide because it gives potential adversaries complete leverage over you. The way to “win” is to be pro-active and not react by assuming the credibility of manufactured risks. And by acknowledging that avoiding all such risks would effectively prevent one from being able to formulate any goals. So, part of growing up might mean accepting that there might be goals, values, conditions which might be more significant than one’s pre-programmed drive for survival. Survival is great, but survival at any cost seems obviously unrealistic, counter-productive, and a recipe for social disaster. Treating everything as an emergency serves mostly to cloud anything beyond short-term planning.
I propose that you can live as you do, not participating with money as you say because of the system in place where everybody “buys in” to money.
Not that you couldn’t live any other way if you chose to do so, but that others people wastefulness is beneficial to you, that wastefulness exists because of the current societal structures in place everybody “buys into”.
Reality isn’t what you make of things but what you can make happen. Money is a technology, sure, I’ll buy that, its power isn’t in the power of people buying into it, but of people being coerced to conform to it.
Break society’s rules? Get punished. Doesn’t feel like a punishment? Too bad, it feels like I punished you anyway.
If society crumbles tomorrow, we’ll start fighting for the food and shelter that grows on trees, you can of course decide to opt out, but would you then be doing so in order to opt out of society or would you stay and bash someones head in for food and shelter because its the right way to live?
Well, that depends upon how I do live. But it also sounds close to saying that anything which has a real affect upon one must be equally legitimate as a system. I am not so naive as to assume that people using money doesn’t affect me. But my understanding is ecological, knowing that everything affects everything else - that doesn’t make it special.
This presupposes that benefiting me is somehow better than being more efficient in the first place. I think it would be rather naive and self-centered of me to assume that the efficacy of a system would be measured in how it might affect me personally. Also, you are again assuming that monolithic culture of suggesting that “everybody” does things a certain way.
Another way to frame this is that if a system was effective, it wouldn’t need coercion, a captive audience. The ability to make things happen is the general definition of “power”. But feeling a need to make something happen can also be mere compulsion, the fallacy of assuming that a thing is necessary because one wants it. Want is defined not by reality, but absence.
So? None of this addresses the built-in contradictions of many societies. What if you are a member of a society that insists that one’s goals in life are a matter of individual choice? For such a pervasive system, why are there not laws explicitly requiring people to use money or have property? Never mind the fact that without some systematic rigor, most societies don’t even agree as to what their rules are.
This makes no sense to me. You are still insisting for whatever reason that society is a singular monolithic construct, which a person could paradoxically opt-out of despite having no “outside”. It is insanely naive and simplistic to insist that there is only one possible way to manage resources. You are literally saying that there can only be One Way to do it, with no evidence whatsoever. If you do not use this one half-assed, contradictory System, then nothing else you do can be considered “society”. I am not convinced.
It sounds mostly like what you suggest is reacting to a fear of scarcity - in a culture which deliberate creates scarcity, despite having enough food for everyone right now. A “right way” for handling resources could possibly involve knowing what they actually are, instead of playing primitive games with them so that some people can feel special about themselves. That’s the funny thing about “society”, it is by definition not all about you.
Well, I was specifically arguing with something you said and that I quoted:
That stands out as a very bizarre things to say, and calls your whole idea of what is real into question. The point is that a social structure that you choose not to participate in can physically impact your life in any number of ways, killing being only an extreme example, and it was your example. But more than that, I think it was a necessary example to maintain the position you are maintaining because it’s always at the end of a slippery slope:
A: How can you live without money?
B: I scavenge for food.
A: But what if there are laws in place to stop you from scavenging?
B: I don’t recognize those laws.
A: Okay, but those laws carry coercive force behind them, you may be arrested or imprisoned, if caught in the wrong place you might even be killed.
B: Just because it might kill me, I don’t have to regard it as real.
You have to backstop the slide somewhere. Other people can have an effect on you, and so what other people think is true and what other people think matters can have an effect on you, even if you don’t buy into what they think. Normally, this effect stops far short of someone killing someone else - a disagreement is more likely to lead to a missed opportunity to collaborate than it is to lead to violence - but if someone is trying to argue that other people’s structures aren’t “real” then the fact that other people can kill or imprison them is the final word in making it real.
Also, that “final word” is employed every day in society, so I find the idea that society isn’t in large part about using violence to enforce society’s norms very disingenuous. When you say:
That is obviously nonsense. In fact, in specific Catholics getting together to kill people who aren’t Catholic because they aren’t Catholic has been a structured collective activity at various times and in various places. I simply cannot believe that someone would deny the truth of that (okay, I can, but only by denying facts, not because they disagree that we can use the term “structured collective activity” in that way).
And so we come to the second answer to your question:
Because in my observation that is largely what society is a about. A government decides it can become wealthier by kicking peasants off of their land and growing cash crops. The crop values fall so the grain ends up in silos, going unsold. The silos are guarded by men with guns while the grain rots inside. Some former farmers end up trying to survive by eating rats that are eating the grain. That’s society. It’s horrifying, and it’s totally, totally real. And without, “Well, I don’t mind if they kill me,” you can’t say that men with guns telling people what to do isn’t real.
If that is your honesty opinion of what is real then I think I, at least, have done exactly what you seem to want people to do. I have radically reconsidered real, examined your interpretation of it, and found it to be far more foolish than the idea of real that people commonly espouse. I have criteria for what I consider real, and social structures fit them very nicely (just like chipmunks do). Like I said above, if you get someone else to use reason then you have no idea what the result will be.
Well said. But here is a hypothesis–what if some people don’t internalize horrifying the same as you and I? Could that be the crux of this conversation?
