"Don't worry so much about the future, we've got problems now" is often one of the major reasons we have so many problems now- our forefathers said that earlier, partially because their forefathers said that earlier, and so on.
You also haven't addressed why everyone should care in the precise way you want them to. Why not ensure this utopia for all living things or just Europeans?
This is getting into very subjective value vs risk assessments, but I would say we should be concerned more about the present where immediate life & death is involved. As it is, thousands die of starvation or exposure every day, and most people throughout the world are forced to meaninglessly waste most of their time away (time being one quantifiable measure of life -- we only have so much before life ends). If you encounter a man freezing to death on a park bench and you just happened to be taking a blanket to goodwill, you don't stop and ponder the environmental and societal impact of helping this man live through the night. You just do it. Anything less is downright sociopathic.
But lets address the meat of the issue anyway just to be thorough. Don't the largest rates of population growth & crowding generally occur in the most impoverished areas? And this phenomenon can be linked back to economical motivators.
1. Lack of education, as discussed previously. Poor areas just can't afford it, and those in power have every reason not to offer stability & higher learning to their cheap labor forces.
2. Children are seen as an economic investment in poor countries. They eventually grow into free labor, and if lucky even bargaining chips for forming ties with wealthier families.
And why should people care? Seriously? You can't expect others to care about you if you can't be bothered to care about others. That's it... unless you're rich I suppose, and then everyone is required to care about you :/
But you're doing so in a very narrow and short-sighted fashion. You're not looking at the whole picture, you're just saying "People are hungry, and we waste food, ergo we can fix this."
No I am saying "People are hungry and this is
why we waste food, ergo we cannot fix this until that issue is addressed."
There's also the issue of dicks. Sooner or later, someone's going to realize they can ignore crossings completely because everyone else will move for them. Yes, they'll eventually get into a car wreck, but they'll take someone else with them and be disruptive until then (Incidentally, this problem gets considerably worse when new cars and medical attention are relevant to his wellbeing, and therefore guaranteed).
Or the community will get fed up enough and simply take the keys to his car as a matter of self-defense.
But seriously, yes, dicks will always be an issue, but the context of your argument is extremely twisted. I'm criticizing the system because it encourages dickery, and you have done nothing to deny this, even going so far as to ask why people should even care... and then you turn around and warn me that "people are dicks" and that this is a problem for a set of proposals aimed mainly at discouraging people from being dicks? Please take a minute to absorb how convoluted this is.
You are grossly mistaken about a number of things.
For one, many things are far, far too complex to be managed simply by being able to talk to someone on a cell phone. You seem to be under the impression that mass communications will solve everything, but the fact remains that most people are not qualified to do most things, and putting them in touch with each other does little to solve this. Even assuming everyone in charge is qualified (which there is zero guarantee of without some sort of central coercive authority), there's no guarantee they'll agree, remember/care enough to communicate, or otherwise organize themselves in any semblance of an efficient manner. In the worst case, two people could simply run around reversing each others' decisions.
Why do most people have to be qualified for most things? Why would it be so hard for people to organize around those who are quailfied? You imply that central coercive authority guarantees that everyone in charge is qualified. How the hell is this? If it were the case, wouldn't we have a lot less problems? And now you're implying that people should be forced into action when they don't care or agree with one another. Didn't you just express the opposite sentiment further up in your post?
And in case you thought having access to information would make everyone qualified and in agreement, I ask you to look at Wikipedia. Tons of information available to inform the ignorant masses. While many use it as such, it's also rife with edit wars and arguments and general complaints about information being added or removed or bias or wrong. People don't agree with it just because it's up there, and if they don't agree with it, they're not likely to follow it.
Wikipedia is an anarchy success story. Tons of information donated freely by people who had absolutely no obligation to do so. Studies have shown it to be very very very close to the accuracy of any other source of information, and anything doubtful will be marked as such and/or be provided with sources. The background disagreements are part of what make it so successful, because everyone is constantly keeping everyone else in check on their honesty and legitimacy and it's made possible in large part by everyone having an equal voice.
People use it to inform themselves as much as they feel they need to. A person gets curious or needs to know something. They look it up. End of story. As it should be.
But really, books would have proven this point. Written explanations for how mathematics or engineering or medicine work have been available for millenia. Shouldn't libraries have made it so people could just up and become an engineer at any point? Shouldn't mail or telephone have made it so everyone can keep in touch and organize? If average citizens couldn't just go to the library, chat on the phone, and then go off and build a hydroelectric dam because it was the best thing to do at the time, I don't see why it would be the case now.
Libraries through most of history have been very centralized and controlled. They gathered and protected information, but didn't begin spreading it widely until very recently.
You're also completely ignoring the effects of coercive authority. Information becomes intellectual property, enforcing one example of artificial scarcity and unnecessary trade. Most people don't have all the time in the world to pursue their personal interests and potential because they're too busy desperately selling themselves. All the materials, space, and permissions required for undertaking projects like an electric dam are controlled by a greedy minority. Organizations of free association have never been given much opportunity to prove their worth. So instead of people deciding "We want energy. Let's figure the best way to make this happen." What we have is "There are people around here who will give me their wealth if I make them energy. You. I will give you just enough to feed your family if you build this for me, but keep in mind if at any point you displease me I will fuck you over and find someone else. Oh wait you over there, you say you don't have a family and can do it for less? Awesome. Ok I want you to cut as many corners as you can cover up here. We do the shittiest job we can get away with and then demand as much as people are willing to give in return. I'll give you as small a cut as I can get away with and keep the rest for myself because it's MY damn project and if you don't like it, you can either leave or RUN for your life because I can also pay people to beat the shit out of you."
No, they're not. Well, they might be if we stop inventing things, but if you're over 30 and have multiple surviving offspring, you're doing quite well as far as animals go. If you've never really had to go hungry, thirsty, or cold, you're doing ridiculously well. If you're guaranteed to live to 60, have various electronic entertainments available, are carried where you want to go by a car, and can visit a trained specialist for most things that go wrong with anything, you're doing well even by human standards, which are ridiculously above any semblance of natural order.
Yeah?... and the number of people who can answer yes to all the above is growing. That was my point.
To imply that you then won't find yet more things vital to your wellbeing, like treatment for cancer or replacement eyes, is simply ridiculous. If there was any such thing as "enough" we'd have hit it with agriculture.
Perhaps we'll keep discovering more and more obstacles to survival and quality of life (short of luxury), but these obstacles will be of increasingly more rare and specialized circumstances. For example, once we've mastered growing replacement organs, the next step may be in eliminating increasingly rare circumstances where patients may reject those organs. Agriculture was one broad sweeping issue that we tackled quite wonderfully in the 20th century, and progress in that incredibly general problem is what has allowed us to switch focus to more specialized problems. I'm sure agriculture can still be pushed further, but we're already at a point where corporations often pay farmers bonuses for producing at less than capacity in order to control prices.
I think the only economic model humanity needs is as follows
1. If you have more than you need, share.
2. If you don't have what you need, find some one who can share.
3. If no one is able to share, set about producing it.
4. If you can't do it alone, get help.
Furthermore, this seems to confirm that the system you're advocating is "Capitalism, but everyone's nice to each other and there's no central government."
Not only does this run full-force into the eternally-stated Communism problem of "But why would they bother to work?", it runs into the issue of who's going to be enforcing this system with no central authority. Earlier you admitted that if we started fresh, and everyone was trading goods and services, the most ambitious would snowball into control of everything. This seems to imply that you know Capitalism is natural. But, in spite of this, you want to let people manage themselves, but on the notion that they follow the above plan. Well, why? Who's going to make them do it? Supposing a group of people doesn't mind if the king gets a slightly nicer hut, and it snowballs from there? Supposing one self-governing group decides it'd be awesome if they started manipulating prices to gain control of other self-governing groups, who lack the organization and knowledge to realize what's happening and put a stop to it?
The "Why would they bother to work" problem is a cynicism born of living our entire lives in a world where people are forced to do absolutely everything, and they have to be forced because most of it doesn't benefit them. We're raised in this environment where greed conquers everything and everyone else is begrudgingly servile, and it's no wonder that people have no faith in humanity to believe that we can create a better environment which can raise better people.
Also, I don't know what I proposed that has any similarity to capitalism. I said share, not trade. I said find help, not hire help.
And I do admit that the way humanity has progressed was quite natural. Population outgrew the natural availability of local resources, which led to the development of agriculture, which led to the concept of property and centralization of resources, which led to the elevation of greed and the use of hoarding to generate artificial scarcity and control, which prompted this way of life to go viral and begin assimilating everything around it to meet the demands of people whose access to resources was strained by the hoarding of their leaders.
If we compare the estimated first appearances of homo sapiens to the development of agriculture with the most generous numbers possible, civilization as we know it only makes up about 5% of human history at most... and it's already threatening to collapse on itself. We were much more stable before. We have pushed our ability to increase our quality of life to a ridiculous extreme, but the same systems that generated this ability now limit our use of it. We compete more ferociously and more unnecessarily than ever before and the tools of our competition become more and more destructive. It can only go on for so long.
What you are advocating, literally, is Utopia- a place where everyone lives in peace and harmony and freedom, simply because that's how things work. Unfortunately, that's not how things work. It would be great if birth defects didn't exist, but they do. It would be great if people weren't often greedy and stupid, but they are. It would be great if we could all just stop being dicks to each other for no benefit, but we can't. If you can find a specific solution to those problems, great- but even then, there's likely to be unpleasant side effects. If you figure once everything's nice because everyone is nice, everyone will be nice... well, aside from the difficulty of getting it to that point, it's just not going to hold on its own.
Incidentally, Realmfighter is not a complete troll. "People are dicks" is a very real, very ancient, very well-known problem, and it goes far, far deeper than living amongst dicks.
This is the one part of any discussion about anarchy (which usually happens much much earlier) that perplexes me the most. The logic I'm hearing is "People are innately dicks. This is a problem. Therefore we must live in a society that is designed to empower the worst dicks among us, and we shall all be bound to them. It is the only way. Suggesting that we consider anything else is extremely dangerous and highly offensive!"
This reasoning makes absolutely no sense to me!Is it really so bizarre to even suggest that we should try to do better? Am I really not allowed to express unhappiness with the way things work? Do alternate proposals really have to explain down to every quantum mechanically minutest detail how every element of everything should work in order for any attempt to spark an alternate line of thought to be tolerated?
I also don't understand how the argument that some people may still try to assert themselves as authority in the absence of authority is a valid argument against abolishing authority. First because it subtly implies that authority is truly undesirable. Second because the logic ends up looking like this.
A and B are opposites. We currently live with B. The desired goal is A. However, A has a chance of turning into B. Therefore we should just forget the whole thing and resign ourselves to B forever.
Firefighters produce nothing. They don't even do anything most of the time. Yet, they're fairly essential. Going to a bank and saying HMMMM YOU GUYS DON'T HAVE A PRODUCT YET MAKE MONEY I GUESS YOU'RE JUST LEECHES isn't any more valid than going to a firefighter's station and doing the same. Reality is far too complex to take one glance at something and declare it meaningless.
But this isn't what I'm doing, and you should be aware of that after all the discussion we've already been through. If one accepts the worth of the financial system and all the principles behind it, then work pertaining strictly to the operation of that financial system does have worth. However I do not accept the worth of that financial system or the principles on which it operates, therefore any work which pertains to nothing but the operation of that financial system is inherently worthless. It's a giant number game which serves no purpose but as an excuse for social control.
And yet, you seem to be claiming this wouldn't happen with everyone, as though there's some degenerate class of Rich Guys controlling everything, and ousting them from power would solve everything.
Yes and no. The most important thing is to eliminate the concept of property which elevates that degenerate class to positions of power.
Also, we've once again run into the issue that most of those efficiency improvements came about through competition- it was profitable for SOMEONE to do so, so they did so. If we shifted down to everyone getting everything, that improvement disappears
This makes no sense to me. If everyone reaps the benefits of an increase in the production of goods, they have less incentive to pursue it than if someone else threatens them to do it and then steals all the benefits for themselves?
Sure, a handful of people could still try to make it more efficient because they want to, but where would they get the funding? They're certainly not going to top our current surgical techniques off a bloated fruit-picker's salary, that's for sure.
Of course nothing works if you evaluate ideas which assume the eradication of a financial system from within the framework of a financial system. Geez...
Overall, you seem to:
1. Be blaming everything on the rich. Somewhat understandable, but you have this odd notion that once they're gone, nobody else will act like that.
Not if we don't fix the root of the problem which rewards people for acting like that.
2. Have an extraordinarily sunny view of human psychology. You claim to not be advocating Communism, but either most of the same problems are applicable, or you're just advocating Capitalism again, in which case most of those same problems are applicable. If you don't need to work to eat, why work? If you need to work to eat, what's to stop food from becoming too expensive for some people?
I identified the common feature of communism and capitalism which gives rise to both of their problems (the centralization of resources and authority) and propose the abolition of that feature. I'm pretty sure that's as far as a person can get from proposing either system.
Combined, your ideas are more anti-bourgeois pig than Mutualistic or whatever. Incidentally, Communism was also essentially a backlash to the excesses of Capitalism, but as we've seen it didn't really work out, for a number of reasons. Ultimately, ideas thought up in retaliation to other ideas almost invariably result in a different set of problems, because they're no better thought out than the original plan- "avoid that stuff" is a great way to run into different stuff.
Ok. Communism didn't work out. So you're saying that capitalism is working out? Everything associated with it is acceptable? What exactly do you mean by "work out." If two drug addicts get in a fight, is everything automatically working out for the winner, just because he won the fight? He's still destroying himself...
Yup... that is indeed one of the longest forum posts I've ever written...
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Topic: Socialism & Communism (Read 34685 times)