I’m not talking about your friends specifically… people hoard, take more than they need out of some kind of fear. People steal, people do all sorts of things out of deep seeded insecurities that seem to directly oppose what a communist nation would demand.
But since some of your friends want to garden that refutes any kind of critique of communism as a system of government. Down vote cuz you think you saw a “communism bad” post or whatever.
People hoard because of artificial scarcity. There’s nothing wrong with being prepared, but dairy farmers are paid to pour out milk from over milked cows, to keep prices above a set threshold and take a writeoff, rather getting a writeoff to donate it to surrounding communities. Del Monte peach farmers were going to destroy over 400 cling peach trees in California, because Del Monte is closing, rather than find new buyers, grain is wasted, water is extracted for a pittance, bottled, sold back to communities, rather than communities investing more now to make sure clean drinking water is conserved and distributed for an affordable price for their community members, medicine is unresearched because the profit margin wouldn’t be high enough, etc ad nauseam.
I mean we could both list 100 reasons why our current capitalist system is actively harmful to humanity but that’s not what I’m trying to talk about.
I think people hoard for more reasons than just artificial scarcity. Not all of those reasons are rational either. I don’t believe that if we could provide food, water, and shelter to everyone that we would eliminate that fear.
Everyone might be satisfied now, but what about the future? Something could happen. We need to act now to secure our future! You don’t even need someone to actually be afraid, just a bad actor who stokes fears in others.
So you’re going to take the exceptions and make them the rule. No.
Everyone might be satisfied now, but what about the future? Something could happen. We need to act now to secure our future! You don’t even need someone to actually be afraid, just a bad actor who stokes fears in others.
That’s perfect honestly, thank you. I think hoarding is also driven by scarcity, but fear as well. And that even if we eliminated scarcity, some people would still feel compelled to hoarde.
We just have to agree to disagree here, at least that’s where I’m at. Maybe if we got rid of scarcity nobody would feel the need to hoarde, but I’m not so sure.
If humans can be conditioned to fear and greed, they can be re-conditioned to relative security and sharing. It would take reconditioning societies and economic models, first.
So you’re telling me a beaten child or dog isn’t conditioned to feeling fear.
What, exactly do you think PTSD, c-PTSD, dissociative disorder, personality disorders and any number of other diagnoses are? They’re certainly not innate.
Edit to add, do you still cry when your meals are delayed, or your stomach aches?
No. You’ve come to accept (you’ve been conditioned) and understand you will eat again, a discomfort will pass.
I have come to believe that there are two anti-social groups of humans that must be controlled for any system to function.
I think you can judge the viability of any governing and economic system by how they control these two anti-social groups.
Group 1, law breakers. Those that don’t follow the rules everyone else agrees to.
Group 2, commons spoilers. Those that can never be satisfied and take and take or waste and waste the resources of the society for personal gain.
Western capitalist society has answers for these two groups.
For group 1 we have a partial answer. If you have a low degree of power the state will beat, imprison, or kill those that break laws. If you have a high degree of power, you are likely able to break most laws with impugnity.
For group 2 we have a partial answer. Capitalism attempts to convert greed into productive ends for society. It’s ok if you can never be satisfied or if you are always trying to figure out some way to gain a little bit more, that’s the profit motive and a side effect is that it will produce more good for the system than bad.
I think both constraints in western capitalism are insufficient and a lot of the structural problems we face are due to these two groups being insufficiently addressed.
Could communism, the collective ownership of the means of production in a stateless society, work? I suspect it wouldn’t have the capacity to sufficiently constrain either group, while we fret about group 1 because a murderer can do a lot of damage to an individual, group 2 tends to be the people that actually destroy societal systems.
Now could collective ownership work with better controls, yes. In fact many human societies work this way, most family units work in this way (very rarely does a father charge their 8 year old for crackers from a pantry, within the household most things are collectively owned)
Smaller communities and intentional communities can function in a communal fashion, often using a mix of rules but more often social norms to prevent these groups from acting out against the societal structures.
Every system is at risk from these two groups, and what you do with them and how you control them determines the contours of your society and how well it will function.
In my ideal world you would provide enough to group 1 that they wouldn’t need to commit crimes to meet their basic needs and they would have fulfilling enough lives that losing access to society would be sufficient deterrent, although for those that truly want to do harm some kind of state violence is likely required, be that prison or reeducation. For group 2 it should be socially unacceptable but also the main role of government to prevent those people from ruining the commons. A billionaire is a much more dangerous threat to societal order than a shoplifter and the majority of the focus should be on preventing people from exploiting the system so that they get a massive pile of wealth and power they can use to corrupt society.
most of the negatives we associate with every negative adjective to label a person is just a construct, my dude. if you grew up in a reality without investment bankers and malibu beach houses and harvard college you wouldn’t think of that. someone with a heavy ego would just aspire to lead their tribe and probably be way nicer in doing it, and if they weren’t, they’d get dealt with.
i’d imagine 3/4 of all of human suffering and insanity would be lessened without the albatross of money and class.
Alright, i guess I’ll take a few steps back here with you to try and understand where you’re coming from.
Greed, love, fear, etc, are emotions innate to every human and animals even. You can call them whatever you want, the underlying emotion or feeling still remains. Are you trying to say that we only know what fear is because we’ve constructed a way to describe it? That without language or “constructs” we wouldn’t have fear? Like we wouldn’t be afraid of things? Or just that we’d call it something else? Fear existed before investment banking. Anger exists without beach houses.
“Someone with a heavy ego would just aspire to lead their tribe and probably be way nicer in doing it.”
I’d be curious to see how you came to that conclusion. Because it seems to me that ego maniacs would murder, cheat, steal, sabotage, lie, you get the idea. They want to rape your wife and daughters and kill you and your sons. Look at the vikings, the colonization of the world. Do you think these horrible things would not exist if we didn’t have money? Do you think they did not exist before we invented money and investment banks and beach houses?
A gun is just a construct, and so is death when you shoot someone in the head with it.
(Btw I’m not arguing for capitalism here. Just providing a critique.)
Incentives shape behaviour and for the most part determine outcomes, and I think what a lot of MLs assume is everyone is as intelligent and measured as they are, when they’re statistically a minority. MLs assume society will function exactly the way they imagine it should because they project their own intelligence and motivations onto everyone, and primarily talk about communism with other MLs who are predominantly on the smart half of the bell curve. It’s a well known thing in psychology called the “curse of knowledge” and cognitive egocentrism. A person with a deep body of knowledge (an expert) projects their own expertise onto others, and smart people do the same thing with intelligence.
The majority of humans alive are barely more intelligent than apes, except they do a good job of acting like they’re way way more intelligent… You need guard rails and checks against a highly motivated, charismatic idiot with no empathy from using the entire structure you’ve built for their own gain. What incentive do they have not to? Especially if they can say all the right words and slogans to appear like they’re just like you, only to gain power and abuse it where nobody can remove them.
The unfortunate part is communist power structures and committees get captured by bad actors the same way capitalists capture regulatory bodies and law makers. It’s humans capturing human made institutions and I don’t think it really matters the ideology behind what they say is happening. What’s important is their actions.
We’re also unfortunately still hardwired to be tribal. We think in terms of family, tribe (friends), community (acquaintances), town/city, province, nation .etc where as each circle grows it gets more nebulous and detached from our identity and who we are. Everyone’s a communist for their family, some for their friends and communities. However most people reach a point where they go “yeah, fuck those guys.” Where the majority of people reach the cognitive limit of what they care about. So your example of a tribe leader works really well as maybe a mayor or something at most, but falls apart when that good tribe leader is competing with bad actors who want the central committee spot far far more, and are willing to do viscious shit to keep the good guy out of that spot. At the same time the good tribe leader has good intentions, but feels like they have a stronger direct impact at a lower level while being shut out of higher office.
It’s like how democracies eventually end up selecting for candidates who get elected, not candidates who will do a good job. Those are vastly different skill sets.
That there isn’t a good solution that’s permanent. I guess I have the Buddhist view of things, that all things end. It seems like having some way of organizing ourselves that survives cyclical growth and collapse is best. We expect our society to live in a perpetual spring/summer of growth and warmth, when historically societies had long wave form seasons of growth, stasis, and death that repeats endlessly.
The closest thing I know of historically is a theocracy since there’s a hard limitation on the scope of government (“it is forbidden to do X! It is written in our fancy holy texts”!) and society is self regulating and self policing. It’s why they can last thousands of years despite being so rigid and stiflng (that’s actually the primary feature for their long term stability not a bug)
And in case it isn’t obvious I’m not advocating for a theocracy either lol… It’s just the longest lived example that keeps being repeated worldwide.
I guess I’m arguing for a realistic view that incorporates the reality of humanity. Capitalism seems great and like it works well during its growth stage but eventually eats itself and fucks everyone except like a group of 300 global capitalists. Communism seemed to follow a similar lifecycle of “looks great at first… Oh shit.” As things get captured and corrupt.
One thing we all fall victim to is the view that “if not A, then B as an alternative” when the answer might be “there is no long term answer” which is uncomfortable to sit with and goes against the grain of our worldview that with enough human enginuity (and especially fossil fuels burned!) we can move literal mountains and do whatever we think of.
I think the answer is literally the Buddhist third way. Constant growth and evolution. If you put everything into strict written laws now the goal is finding loopholes. If nothing is written down you don’t have rules and anything goes. Both extremes lead to bullshit behaviour through different pathways. It’s kind of what democracy is supposed to provide as an ideal. The constant tension between the establishment and the left who try to incorporate disenfranchised groups and to bend the establishment into new shapes is it doesn’t ossify. Except even that gets captured by capital.
I agree that communism will not solve everything and is not perfect but I would argue that capitalism play more into human bad traits like greed and communism and socislism try to surpress it . I don’t believe we need to fully implement communism stateless and moneyless society but i think we need to get the closest to that ideal
Yes I think we can both agree there! I think the third way in Buddhism would also want a balance between the two and not an extreme. My personal ideal would be something like ⅔ communism/socialism and ⅓ capitalism.
My own view is things that are natural monopolies (telecom, rail, power, natural gas, pipelines, water/sewer, food distribution ala sysco, grocery stores) should be crown corporations. It aligns incentives well with long term network health and growth to meet demand. Any profit generated is returned to the public and the crown corp has an incentive to maintain its assets instead of letting them rot by starving them of funds to return more money to shareholders. Anything that naturally ends up as a duolopoly really would be a monopoly if anti-trust laws didn’t exist. The second company purely exists to protect the primary monopoly from anti-trust action…
It’s why a tank of gas and a 45" TV cost roughly the same right now. Anything we can’t do without is overpriced and maximally profited from because we literally can’t be without it. Luxury goods can be default capitalism + regulations. It’s why non-essentials are all racing to the bottom on cost for consumer goods.
I feel like actual communism would be in direct opposition to human ego, and as such near impossible to be fully implemented.
I have several friends who are desperate to help me garden.
I’m not talking about your friends specifically… people hoard, take more than they need out of some kind of fear. People steal, people do all sorts of things out of deep seeded insecurities that seem to directly oppose what a communist nation would demand.
But since some of your friends want to garden that refutes any kind of critique of communism as a system of government. Down vote cuz you think you saw a “communism bad” post or whatever.
People hoard because of artificial scarcity. There’s nothing wrong with being prepared, but dairy farmers are paid to pour out milk from over milked cows, to keep prices above a set threshold and take a writeoff, rather getting a writeoff to donate it to surrounding communities. Del Monte peach farmers were going to destroy over 400 cling peach trees in California, because Del Monte is closing, rather than find new buyers, grain is wasted, water is extracted for a pittance, bottled, sold back to communities, rather than communities investing more now to make sure clean drinking water is conserved and distributed for an affordable price for their community members, medicine is unresearched because the profit margin wouldn’t be high enough, etc ad nauseam.
I mean we could both list 100 reasons why our current capitalist system is actively harmful to humanity but that’s not what I’m trying to talk about.
I think people hoard for more reasons than just artificial scarcity. Not all of those reasons are rational either. I don’t believe that if we could provide food, water, and shelter to everyone that we would eliminate that fear.
Everyone might be satisfied now, but what about the future? Something could happen. We need to act now to secure our future! You don’t even need someone to actually be afraid, just a bad actor who stokes fears in others.
So you’re going to take the exceptions and make them the rule. No.
This is how it is, now.
Was literally just trying to give you a basic example to help you understand an idea but I can see now that was a complete waste of time.
That’s only because the last 5% of human existence there has been this system which rewards greed.
Why on Earth? Communism is the logical conclusion and subsequent beginning of human history.
Do you think people don’t have egos or fears that cause them to horde things Cowbee? Or are you just here to shadow box comments again.
Nothing about logical conclusions. No 100 page dissertations about the beginnings of human history.
All i was saying is that peoples’ egos and fears seem to be in direct opposition to a fully communist type of government.
I don’t think people hoarde what they do not need to. Hoarding is driven by scarcity.
That’s perfect honestly, thank you. I think hoarding is also driven by scarcity, but fear as well. And that even if we eliminated scarcity, some people would still feel compelled to hoarde.
We just have to agree to disagree here, at least that’s where I’m at. Maybe if we got rid of scarcity nobody would feel the need to hoarde, but I’m not so sure.
If humans can be conditioned to fear and greed, they can be re-conditioned to relative security and sharing. It would take reconditioning societies and economic models, first.
We weren’t conditioned to feel fear tho. A baby hears a loud crack of thunder and starts crying, why? Nobody taught the baby to be afraid of thunder.
Even if we could somehow recondition every member of society perfectly, that innate fear would always remain. That’s where we are differing it seems
So you’re telling me a beaten child or dog isn’t conditioned to feeling fear.
What, exactly do you think PTSD, c-PTSD, dissociative disorder, personality disorders and any number of other diagnoses are? They’re certainly not innate.
Edit to add, do you still cry when your meals are delayed, or your stomach aches?
No. You’ve come to accept (you’ve been conditioned) and understand you will eat again, a discomfort will pass.
We can see already that people do not tend to hoard that which isn’t scarce, and further even if someone tried, we do not need to allow it.
I have come to believe that there are two anti-social groups of humans that must be controlled for any system to function.
I think you can judge the viability of any governing and economic system by how they control these two anti-social groups.
Group 1, law breakers. Those that don’t follow the rules everyone else agrees to.
Group 2, commons spoilers. Those that can never be satisfied and take and take or waste and waste the resources of the society for personal gain.
Western capitalist society has answers for these two groups.
For group 1 we have a partial answer. If you have a low degree of power the state will beat, imprison, or kill those that break laws. If you have a high degree of power, you are likely able to break most laws with impugnity.
For group 2 we have a partial answer. Capitalism attempts to convert greed into productive ends for society. It’s ok if you can never be satisfied or if you are always trying to figure out some way to gain a little bit more, that’s the profit motive and a side effect is that it will produce more good for the system than bad.
I think both constraints in western capitalism are insufficient and a lot of the structural problems we face are due to these two groups being insufficiently addressed.
Could communism, the collective ownership of the means of production in a stateless society, work? I suspect it wouldn’t have the capacity to sufficiently constrain either group, while we fret about group 1 because a murderer can do a lot of damage to an individual, group 2 tends to be the people that actually destroy societal systems.
Now could collective ownership work with better controls, yes. In fact many human societies work this way, most family units work in this way (very rarely does a father charge their 8 year old for crackers from a pantry, within the household most things are collectively owned)
Smaller communities and intentional communities can function in a communal fashion, often using a mix of rules but more often social norms to prevent these groups from acting out against the societal structures.
Every system is at risk from these two groups, and what you do with them and how you control them determines the contours of your society and how well it will function.
In my ideal world you would provide enough to group 1 that they wouldn’t need to commit crimes to meet their basic needs and they would have fulfilling enough lives that losing access to society would be sufficient deterrent, although for those that truly want to do harm some kind of state violence is likely required, be that prison or reeducation. For group 2 it should be socially unacceptable but also the main role of government to prevent those people from ruining the commons. A billionaire is a much more dangerous threat to societal order than a shoplifter and the majority of the focus should be on preventing people from exploiting the system so that they get a massive pile of wealth and power they can use to corrupt society.
most of the negatives we associate with every negative adjective to label a person is just a construct, my dude. if you grew up in a reality without investment bankers and malibu beach houses and harvard college you wouldn’t think of that. someone with a heavy ego would just aspire to lead their tribe and probably be way nicer in doing it, and if they weren’t, they’d get dealt with.
i’d imagine 3/4 of all of human suffering and insanity would be lessened without the albatross of money and class.
Alright, i guess I’ll take a few steps back here with you to try and understand where you’re coming from.
Greed, love, fear, etc, are emotions innate to every human and animals even. You can call them whatever you want, the underlying emotion or feeling still remains. Are you trying to say that we only know what fear is because we’ve constructed a way to describe it? That without language or “constructs” we wouldn’t have fear? Like we wouldn’t be afraid of things? Or just that we’d call it something else? Fear existed before investment banking. Anger exists without beach houses.
“Someone with a heavy ego would just aspire to lead their tribe and probably be way nicer in doing it.”
I’d be curious to see how you came to that conclusion. Because it seems to me that ego maniacs would murder, cheat, steal, sabotage, lie, you get the idea. They want to rape your wife and daughters and kill you and your sons. Look at the vikings, the colonization of the world. Do you think these horrible things would not exist if we didn’t have money? Do you think they did not exist before we invented money and investment banks and beach houses?
A gun is just a construct, and so is death when you shoot someone in the head with it.
(Btw I’m not arguing for capitalism here. Just providing a critique.)
Incentives shape behaviour and for the most part determine outcomes, and I think what a lot of MLs assume is everyone is as intelligent and measured as they are, when they’re statistically a minority. MLs assume society will function exactly the way they imagine it should because they project their own intelligence and motivations onto everyone, and primarily talk about communism with other MLs who are predominantly on the smart half of the bell curve. It’s a well known thing in psychology called the “curse of knowledge” and cognitive egocentrism. A person with a deep body of knowledge (an expert) projects their own expertise onto others, and smart people do the same thing with intelligence.
The majority of humans alive are barely more intelligent than apes, except they do a good job of acting like they’re way way more intelligent… You need guard rails and checks against a highly motivated, charismatic idiot with no empathy from using the entire structure you’ve built for their own gain. What incentive do they have not to? Especially if they can say all the right words and slogans to appear like they’re just like you, only to gain power and abuse it where nobody can remove them.
The unfortunate part is communist power structures and committees get captured by bad actors the same way capitalists capture regulatory bodies and law makers. It’s humans capturing human made institutions and I don’t think it really matters the ideology behind what they say is happening. What’s important is their actions.
We’re also unfortunately still hardwired to be tribal. We think in terms of family, tribe (friends), community (acquaintances), town/city, province, nation .etc where as each circle grows it gets more nebulous and detached from our identity and who we are. Everyone’s a communist for their family, some for their friends and communities. However most people reach a point where they go “yeah, fuck those guys.” Where the majority of people reach the cognitive limit of what they care about. So your example of a tribe leader works really well as maybe a mayor or something at most, but falls apart when that good tribe leader is competing with bad actors who want the central committee spot far far more, and are willing to do viscious shit to keep the good guy out of that spot. At the same time the good tribe leader has good intentions, but feels like they have a stronger direct impact at a lower level while being shut out of higher office.
It’s like how democracies eventually end up selecting for candidates who get elected, not candidates who will do a good job. Those are vastly different skill sets.
So you don’t advocate for capitalism and neither for communism what are you advocating for?
That there isn’t a good solution that’s permanent. I guess I have the Buddhist view of things, that all things end. It seems like having some way of organizing ourselves that survives cyclical growth and collapse is best. We expect our society to live in a perpetual spring/summer of growth and warmth, when historically societies had long wave form seasons of growth, stasis, and death that repeats endlessly.
The closest thing I know of historically is a theocracy since there’s a hard limitation on the scope of government (“it is forbidden to do X! It is written in our fancy holy texts”!) and society is self regulating and self policing. It’s why they can last thousands of years despite being so rigid and stiflng (that’s actually the primary feature for their long term stability not a bug)
And in case it isn’t obvious I’m not advocating for a theocracy either lol… It’s just the longest lived example that keeps being repeated worldwide.
I guess I’m arguing for a realistic view that incorporates the reality of humanity. Capitalism seems great and like it works well during its growth stage but eventually eats itself and fucks everyone except like a group of 300 global capitalists. Communism seemed to follow a similar lifecycle of “looks great at first… Oh shit.” As things get captured and corrupt.
One thing we all fall victim to is the view that “if not A, then B as an alternative” when the answer might be “there is no long term answer” which is uncomfortable to sit with and goes against the grain of our worldview that with enough human enginuity (and especially fossil fuels burned!) we can move literal mountains and do whatever we think of.
I think the answer is literally the Buddhist third way. Constant growth and evolution. If you put everything into strict written laws now the goal is finding loopholes. If nothing is written down you don’t have rules and anything goes. Both extremes lead to bullshit behaviour through different pathways. It’s kind of what democracy is supposed to provide as an ideal. The constant tension between the establishment and the left who try to incorporate disenfranchised groups and to bend the establishment into new shapes is it doesn’t ossify. Except even that gets captured by capital.
I agree that communism will not solve everything and is not perfect but I would argue that capitalism play more into human bad traits like greed and communism and socislism try to surpress it . I don’t believe we need to fully implement communism stateless and moneyless society but i think we need to get the closest to that ideal
Yes I think we can both agree there! I think the third way in Buddhism would also want a balance between the two and not an extreme. My personal ideal would be something like ⅔ communism/socialism and ⅓ capitalism.
My own view is things that are natural monopolies (telecom, rail, power, natural gas, pipelines, water/sewer, food distribution ala sysco, grocery stores) should be crown corporations. It aligns incentives well with long term network health and growth to meet demand. Any profit generated is returned to the public and the crown corp has an incentive to maintain its assets instead of letting them rot by starving them of funds to return more money to shareholders. Anything that naturally ends up as a duolopoly really would be a monopoly if anti-trust laws didn’t exist. The second company purely exists to protect the primary monopoly from anti-trust action…
It’s why a tank of gas and a 45" TV cost roughly the same right now. Anything we can’t do without is overpriced and maximally profited from because we literally can’t be without it. Luxury goods can be default capitalism + regulations. It’s why non-essentials are all racing to the bottom on cost for consumer goods.