Why Hicks should live to rue Britannia 4527

David Moss

Ultimately, though I'm most unlikely to live to see it, yes.

Correct, and in any event, acquiring stuff for has little extrinsic purpose -- pleasure is to be found in intercourse with others -- community and in exploration of the self -- discovery.

There would be little work to to do, as technology has rendered the bulk of it irrelevant. Humans might need to put in a couple of hourse here or there overseeing some system, but that would be it.

Exactly ... that stuff is a result of squabbling over scarce resources.

Correct, and also because people have found ways to achieve a sense of self that is not dependent on manipulating the desires of others, but in understanding themselves and their own intrinsic needs and how they relate to others.

Who wouldn't? More to the point, who wouldn't *feel* rich in such a world? Would anyone trade that for anything available for cash in *this* world? Would anyone swap place with Bill Gates if that were on offer instead? Perhaps, but not many.

You have my pity.

Someone might just say "shut the f*** up you privateshead" and biff the shouter in the head. I know I would.

It's a learned response like all others.

I had a knife drawn on me in a taxi. He actually stabbed me. (Long story not for this post). But here I am. I stayed calm. You never know.

And that's why you need planning and coordination and confidence in the state. Cuba does a much better job with a fraction of the resources of the US. Why is that? (For the record, I'm not an acolyte of the Stalinist Castro regime -- they too are incompetent authoritarian bureaucrats, but facts are facts. All else being equal, central planning and coordination is better than every man for himself).

That's not human nature, that's just how systems work.

But your claim was that the whole discipline is based on human nature, which you've buttumed is foundational to having mental states, while important parts of psychology aren't even interested in mental states and even those that are don't buttume it's part of anything so swingeing as human nature.

I think it would be possible, given years of longitudinal research and freedom from all ethical constraint, to devise a model that was reasonably predictive of human behaviour in an artificial setting -- but why would that be useful?

Or to suggest that they are the consequence of some other cause, or set of causes operating in some way you and others can't describe. Occam's razor -- don't invent stuff that you don't need to claim. Stick with the minimum.

We're getting pretty general here aren't we? Let's get back to what's specific to humans. I'm not planning freedom for all the animals, nice as that would be.

Then they aren't fundametal as claimed earlier, are they? They are expressions of something else. And so, if ways can be found of expressing that something else that don't involve acquiring power over others ...

Hence overcoming scarcity ...

That's why I'm not proposing communist society as tomorrow's goal ...

You don't read?

Remove constraints where people are fearful and yes, there will be trouble.

And it's a matter of politics ...

But again, look to the sources of that. What, about the current social order, predisposes that end?

It was only complementary above. Please decide.

Not if it's basic it can't be. It's an end in itself.

How could they, and thus, why should they, if it's "basic"?

Well, the gratification of desire in ways you don't like. That's a different thing. Why post here if not to gratify yourself in some way or another?

Basically they attempted system that was evidently totally unviable, even as they started it, because that seemed to them the least worst option. They were wrong of course, because they had no idea of just how bad this least worst option could turn out. They were recklessly optimistic.

If you've studied organisational behaviour you'll know that both continuous and discontinuous changes to systems are necessary at varous times. One is neither better nor worse than the other. A judgement about what is optimal is required in each case. In some cases *both* may be necessary.

How could it be? You have a given black box "human nature is predictive" view, so who cares about culture or process then?

And thus not a mattter of "nature".

All society to date has been marked by scarcity and thus anomie ...

Well you have to offer some account you accept if you want others to take it seriously in argument. You've said that human nature is an impediment to communism, and now you say you don't want to specify how it predicts how people will respond, where it comes from and whether it really is immutable or if people can exercise free will in the service of some other objective.

And we've seen in the number of dissolution plantings about that some people think survival on Earth a minor matter, compared to the delights of heaven where, presumably in their view, they'll have no power at all, but total freedom.

And maybe 99-100. This is what's on offer now. It's "how we do things around here".

He's just doing what he thinks beckons. It's a cultural inference, of the same order as the dissolution planters.

If and when that day comes, it will be because mbuttes of people -- literally millions, will have demanded it and fought politically for a different course, and look out anyone who tries to get in the way of that. To date, all movements for communism have been movements by minorities in circumstances of chaos where the working mbuttes were largely innocent bystanders.

It's the other way around. The attempt to exercise control of productive resources creates coalitions of interest which can be called "clbuttes" if they are sufficiently stable and homogenous. If that clbutt contains pretty much everyone, and each stakeholder is duly recognised and taken care of by the arrnagements, then "clbutt rule" is moot.

That's not relevant here.

No, scarcity, and the desire not ot be a victim of it, made that result likely.

That wasn't an endorsement, merely an observation. I disagree however, that killing is never necessary. Sometimes violence, up to and including the rest of another human, is necessary -- just not nearly as often as is generally supposed, and generally not when the current rulers say it is.

and you can teach him to drink ...

Fran