Please. Read what socialism means. It isn't communism: individuals own private property. So can citizens in Mondragon. And, although Mondragon does have fixed rations for wages, it does not do the same for ownership.
But in a sense, you are right. Almost all states practice some form of socialism, with collective ownership of certain services or industries, and profit sharing. We all own the police, fire departments, and libraries, for instance, and we all profit from them.
Communist states have no private property. Socialist states have a mix of private property and state property. A pure capitalist economy would have no state property. You'd buy your police, fire, education, and all other goods and services in the free market. And when I say, 'property,' I really mean the means of production. Even in the old USSR, people could own some forms of private property.
But what ticked off the owning class world wide was that the rich could not monopolize the means of production. That meant that citizens did not have to play the rich man's game, they could (in theory) provide for themselves without giving a cut of everything they did to some wealthy financier. And that meant everyone could be equal (again, in theory: it didn't quite work out that way) and the owning class do not want that. It isn't how much they have, it is how much more they have than we do. They want to be top dogs, they don't want everyone to have equal opportunities, they want to be able to hand their kids the top spot on the totem pole, so their kids can shit on your kids and laugh.
So the question is, what is the correct split between public and private ownership of the means of production? As I said, communism failed. Because the owning class fought back so hard, the violent sociopaths in the nascent movement rose to the top. It took too much violence and callousness to throw off the yoke of the owning class, and so essentially, another owning class took over Russia. The USSR was communist for two years right after the revolution, after that, it was an oligarchy.
Another problem was (and is) the lack of price signals in a command economy. In Chile in late sixties, Salvador Allende was poised to fix that. He had a prototype analog computer and communications system built that let citizens participate in direct democracy, and essentially vote on how much of what gets made.
Can't have THAT actually work. So we killed him, overthrew his government, and installed a brutal military dictator.
The other problem is one of motivation. In studies I have seen, privatizing factories in competitive industries makes them more efficient (this may be related to the lack of price signals in a command economy, or it may be that workers do not feel like contributing 100% to a corrupt system, or it may really be that people need the spur of competition to work their hardest.) However, privatizing natural monopolies like water, sewer and electric companies does the opposite, it makes them worse. In a natural monopoly, there can be no competition. The second guy to build a sewer system in a city gets exactly 0% of the business.
I'm not a communist. I think everyone is entitled to the fruits of their labor. If you work harder, or are smarter, you should be able to go farther. But not THAT much farther. And, if everyone is entitled to the fruits of their labor, the fat cat financiers and other leaches on the backs of productive members of society should get the same as any bum on the street who won't work: food, clean water, shelter, medical care, and an opportunity to get off their fat lazy asses and contribute if they want anything more than that.
What's wrong with DailyKos? Do they, you know, actually lie, or do they just say things you don't want to hear? If you think they lie, provide a documented example.
Give me a break. Sweden. Denmark. England. France. There's four, and I've barely started on Europe. Socialism isn't communism, and neither one is fascism.
I would say, genetically speaking, the desire to be part of something larger is advantageous. Being in a tight knit social group, one is much more likely to survive and breed than an isolated individual. I don't think there is anything metaphysical about this desire, necessarily. Even someone who felt naturally at one with the universe would still feel the common human desire to be a respected member of a group, to be part of something meaningful.
Rather, the feeling of being separate from the universe leads to the problem of evil. A single, unitary thing can't be out of balance, it can't be evil or good. Only when we see the universe and ourselves as a disconnected collection of individual pieces do we suffer from the problem of evil. We see things as being out of balance, and we invent a byzantine system of ideas to compensate for the idea that we are separate.
Karma. God. The Soul. Reincarnation. An Afterlife. All these concepts are an attempt by the human mind to restore the balance that has been lost by seeing things in pieces.
Of course, it is all well and good to remember this while conversing with a like minded individual. It is much harder to remember when some asshole cuts you off in traffic.
Well, in my opinion, Lao was simply saying the map is not the territory. Anything we say about reality is just that: a map. We map reality to concepts, and that is the first flaw. The second flaw happens as we map concepts to language for transmission to another consciousness.
The third flaw, which is the one you talk about, happens when the other person maps language back to concepts. But even if they get it right, they are still left with concepts, not direct experience of the present moment, which is the only truth, and the reality those concepts seek to map.
Damn. Wait a second...
Teach me to start replying before finishing reading, why don't you? You sum it up perfectly in your final paragraphs.
You can say something like 'reality is non-dualistic' to someone who hasn't seen this, and they will most likely completely misinterpret it, "Ah, So reality is unitary! I get it! It's all one thing!" Well, yes and no...
It's like describing color to a blind man.
"Well, red is warm-"
"You mean I can burn myself on red things?"
"Well, some red things, but that's not the point, sigh..."
The previous century of psychological research actually backs up recent economic research
I've got no idea what you mean by the original intent behind 'intellectual property.'
How does the fact that people are basically good, and not selfish, overturn the whole concept of democracy?
Okay, this last one is just hilarious. Religious teachings world wide have always said the same thing this economic research says.
Wow, my post must have caused you a brain aneurysm or something, because I can practically see your frothing spittle flying out my monitor. These ideas, backed up by science, just completely shatter your selfish world view, don't they?
In my theory, the universe at it's most basic level is awareness. The brain forms human consciousness by limiting awareness down to only that which matters for survival. It doesn't build up consciousness from nothing, but rather, limits it down to what's useful.
Subjectively, though, we aren't one consciousness. In fact, the defining characteristic of my consciousness is that only I have privileged access to its informational content.
You've got a very Buddhist outlook on life, one that's very similar to my own. I'd say you are right, it's more correct to say we are the film, rather than we are in it or watching it. That view expresses the unitary nature of reality better than the way I put it.
When you break a hologram, each piece does not contain all the information of the original. It contains the whole image, but blurrier and less detailed. Just saying...
Like you, I believe the rest of the universe is not something 'outside' me. I am not a separate and self creating entity, nothing is. Everything exists because the conditions to support it existing, exist.
But this is all just interesting theory, some words on a screen. As the Tao Teh Ching says, the Tao we can talk about is not the true Tao.
Your film analogy falls down because, in this way of looking at things, we are in the film, not watching it. Our consciousness is part of the film, another track on the film, like a sound track. As far as I can tell, there isn't anyone watching the film. But in each frame, the consciousness track has all kinds of echoes and reflections of previous frames. Those echoes and reflections are the things that make time appear to move.
What does a dictatorship have to do with socialism? Straw man much? Hell, North Korea isn't even communist, let alone socialist, it's just one crazy dude running things. Socialism and communism are defined by being democracies: if it isn't a democracy, it doesn't matter what your economic system is, you don't have socialism or communism. You have, more than likely, some form of fascism or dictatorship.
I can see that you've run out of argument, though, and are resorting to logical fallacies and appeal to emotion, so, we're done here. We can discuss this again when you calm down and go back to arguing intelligently like you were before.
Is time a basic measure of reality, or only an illusion? I mean, time only looks basic from inside. The actual moments that make up a timeline may form backwards, all at once, or randomly, yet from the inside we would still perceive them as happening in a linear fashion, because there are references to the past in each present moment.
These guys seem to prove you absolutely wrong. From subsistence farming to 256 companies, 92,000 employees, and $16 billion in annual revenue in around 50 years.
You've hit on exactly why the sociopath genes are conserved: in moderation, they create leaders and survivor types. Genetically, you can't have a spectrum of behaviors like that without having a few individuals who get the right combination of genes to make them monsters.
How so? I never said everyone: a small percentage of people are sociopaths, and if we let them dictate the rules, then everyone has to play the selfishness game.
I do have an example. The Mondragon Cooperative in the Basque region of Spain. It went from subsistence farming to an industrial powerhouse in about fifty years. All businesses, government services, and housing are cooperative.
You don't need competition to prevent shoddiness and poor performance, I don't compete with my family, and yet I still do my best for them. And 'the best job' isn't something that only one person can do. In fact, to determine who is the best, you need to use some kind of arbitrary measure for determining the best, and you need everyone to agree to that measure.
I like cleaning toilets. In fact, I have an excellent system for cleaning bathrooms in general, and I enjoy the sense of satisfaction that comes from busting a job out in the most efficient manner possible.
Business do not cheat 'sometimes.' The phrase you are looking for is 'whenever the rewards for cheating outweigh the risks.' Corporations are sociopathic by nature, they have no morals.
Places that avoid competition avoid the specific kind of competition I'm talking about: some must lose in order for one to win. If no one has to lose, it isn't competition.
I'm not arguing for complete equality of outcome: first off, that isn't fair. People who are superior deserve more, and more power, than those who aren't. In social networks, those who have power don't have it because they took it, they have it because it was freely given by others.
In some societies, no one tells anyone else what to do (mostly isolated tribes in resource rich areas like the rainforest). They have no need of privacy because no one dominates others. You wouldn't have to second guess everything you did in such a society, because no one would try to dominate you.
While I understand from your post that you believe competition produces good results, I have no idea why you believe that. Is it just 'common knowledge,' or do you have any sort of argument to back up your belief?
You know, the problem you ascribe to competition inside companies is one of the prblems that exist with competition between companies: duplication of effort, and consumption of extra resources. Competition also destroys intrinsic motivations: if you are doing something to beat others, you aren't doing it because you love it. In fact, even if you did love it, over time, you won't anymore, you'll only love winning.
Your example doesn't really show that competition produces excellence, if anything, it outlines the motivations competitors have for cheating.
Of course people care about their own goals. But most people's goals are not 'others must lose so I can win.' Recent economic research shows that people seem to be more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity than selfish gain.
Enemies aren't the best push to work harder. Friends that you don't want to let down are a better, more reliable motivator, IMHO.
And cooperation would make Microsoft more competitive? This is a clear example of how competition doesn't produce excellence, cooperation does. If competition really DID produce excellence, then all companies would be organized with multiply redundant, competing internal departments. Obviously, that's not the case: internally, companies function cooperatively, and those that foster too much internal competition ultimately fail.
We're not all evil, but the belief that 'we're all evil' is itself a primary motivation to act in a selfish fashion.
I would say instead that the belief that "we're all evil" is a primary *rationalization* to justify selfish behavior. The motivation is already there in a person who tends to act selfishly.
If you have some time, you should read "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright. He spends a lot of time talking about how the combination of kin selection and the non-zero-sum result of cumulative altruistic behavior can outcompete selfish behavior and result in the sort of societies we see in humans, wolf packs, and ant colonies.
Yes, read that, good book.
Yes, in people with a tendency to act selfishly, 'everyone is evil' is a rationalization. However, people can not safely act cooperatively if most people around them are acting selfishly. So it can be a motivation as well. If the society in which a person lives rewards selfishness and competition, and does not promote cooperation by punishing free riders, then people will have a legitimate motivation to act selfishly. After all, who wants to be the chump who willingly lets himself get scammed? Who wants to cooperate with assholes? Who wants to benefit society when society says, 'every man for himself?'
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I like echidnas too but they're not food!
I take it you've never had echidna enchiladas. Once you pick out the spines, they're delicious.
But they shouldn't be too watery. Enchiladas are a casserole, not a soup.
Please. Read what socialism means. It isn't communism: individuals own private property. So can citizens in Mondragon. And, although Mondragon does have fixed rations for wages, it does not do the same for ownership.
But in a sense, you are right. Almost all states practice some form of socialism, with collective ownership of certain services or industries, and profit sharing. We all own the police, fire departments, and libraries, for instance, and we all profit from them.
Communist states have no private property. Socialist states have a mix of private property and state property. A pure capitalist economy would have no state property. You'd buy your police, fire, education, and all other goods and services in the free market. And when I say, 'property,' I really mean the means of production. Even in the old USSR, people could own some forms of private property.
But what ticked off the owning class world wide was that the rich could not monopolize the means of production. That meant that citizens did not have to play the rich man's game, they could (in theory) provide for themselves without giving a cut of everything they did to some wealthy financier. And that meant everyone could be equal (again, in theory: it didn't quite work out that way) and the owning class do not want that. It isn't how much they have, it is how much more they have than we do. They want to be top dogs, they don't want everyone to have equal opportunities, they want to be able to hand their kids the top spot on the totem pole, so their kids can shit on your kids and laugh.
So the question is, what is the correct split between public and private ownership of the means of production? As I said, communism failed. Because the owning class fought back so hard, the violent sociopaths in the nascent movement rose to the top. It took too much violence and callousness to throw off the yoke of the owning class, and so essentially, another owning class took over Russia. The USSR was communist for two years right after the revolution, after that, it was an oligarchy.
Another problem was (and is) the lack of price signals in a command economy. In Chile in late sixties, Salvador Allende was poised to fix that. He had a prototype analog computer and communications system built that let citizens participate in direct democracy, and essentially vote on how much of what gets made.
Can't have THAT actually work. So we killed him, overthrew his government, and installed a brutal military dictator.
The other problem is one of motivation. In studies I have seen, privatizing factories in competitive industries makes them more efficient (this may be related to the lack of price signals in a command economy, or it may be that workers do not feel like contributing 100% to a corrupt system, or it may really be that people need the spur of competition to work their hardest.) However, privatizing natural monopolies like water, sewer and electric companies does the opposite, it makes them worse. In a natural monopoly, there can be no competition. The second guy to build a sewer system in a city gets exactly 0% of the business.
I'm not a communist. I think everyone is entitled to the fruits of their labor. If you work harder, or are smarter, you should be able to go farther. But not THAT much farther. And, if everyone is entitled to the fruits of their labor, the fat cat financiers and other leaches on the backs of productive members of society should get the same as any bum on the street who won't work: food, clean water, shelter, medical care, and an opportunity to get off their fat lazy asses and contribute if they want anything more than that.
What's wrong with DailyKos? Do they, you know, actually lie, or do they just say things you don't want to hear? If you think they lie, provide a documented example.
Give me a break. Sweden. Denmark. England. France. There's four, and I've barely started on Europe. Socialism isn't communism, and neither one is fascism.
I would say, genetically speaking, the desire to be part of something larger is advantageous. Being in a tight knit social group, one is much more likely to survive and breed than an isolated individual. I don't think there is anything metaphysical about this desire, necessarily. Even someone who felt naturally at one with the universe would still feel the common human desire to be a respected member of a group, to be part of something meaningful.
Rather, the feeling of being separate from the universe leads to the problem of evil. A single, unitary thing can't be out of balance, it can't be evil or good. Only when we see the universe and ourselves as a disconnected collection of individual pieces do we suffer from the problem of evil. We see things as being out of balance, and we invent a byzantine system of ideas to compensate for the idea that we are separate.
Karma. God. The Soul. Reincarnation. An Afterlife. All these concepts are an attempt by the human mind to restore the balance that has been lost by seeing things in pieces.
Of course, it is all well and good to remember this while conversing with a like minded individual. It is much harder to remember when some asshole cuts you off in traffic.
Well, in my opinion, Lao was simply saying the map is not the territory. Anything we say about reality is just that: a map. We map reality to concepts, and that is the first flaw. The second flaw happens as we map concepts to language for transmission to another consciousness.
The third flaw, which is the one you talk about, happens when the other person maps language back to concepts. But even if they get it right, they are still left with concepts, not direct experience of the present moment, which is the only truth, and the reality those concepts seek to map.
Damn. Wait a second...
Teach me to start replying before finishing reading, why don't you? You sum it up perfectly in your final paragraphs.
You can say something like 'reality is non-dualistic' to someone who hasn't seen this, and they will most likely completely misinterpret it, "Ah, So reality is unitary! I get it! It's all one thing!" Well, yes and no...
It's like describing color to a blind man.
"Well, red is warm-"
"You mean I can burn myself on red things?"
"Well, some red things, but that's not the point, sigh..."
The previous century of psychological research actually backs up recent economic research
I've got no idea what you mean by the original intent behind 'intellectual property.'
How does the fact that people are basically good, and not selfish, overturn the whole concept of democracy?
Okay, this last one is just hilarious. Religious teachings world wide have always said the same thing this economic research says.
Wow, my post must have caused you a brain aneurysm or something, because I can practically see your frothing spittle flying out my monitor. These ideas, backed up by science, just completely shatter your selfish world view, don't they?
In my theory, the universe at it's most basic level is awareness. The brain forms human consciousness by limiting awareness down to only that which matters for survival. It doesn't build up consciousness from nothing, but rather, limits it down to what's useful.
Subjectively, though, we aren't one consciousness. In fact, the defining characteristic of my consciousness is that only I have privileged access to its informational content.
You've got a very Buddhist outlook on life, one that's very similar to my own. I'd say you are right, it's more correct to say we are the film, rather than we are in it or watching it. That view expresses the unitary nature of reality better than the way I put it.
When you break a hologram, each piece does not contain all the information of the original. It contains the whole image, but blurrier and less detailed. Just saying...
Like you, I believe the rest of the universe is not something 'outside' me. I am not a separate and self creating entity, nothing is. Everything exists because the conditions to support it existing, exist.
But this is all just interesting theory, some words on a screen. As the Tao Teh Ching says, the Tao we can talk about is not the true Tao.
Your film analogy falls down because, in this way of looking at things, we are in the film, not watching it. Our consciousness is part of the film, another track on the film, like a sound track. As far as I can tell, there isn't anyone watching the film. But in each frame, the consciousness track has all kinds of echoes and reflections of previous frames. Those echoes and reflections are the things that make time appear to move.
What does a dictatorship have to do with socialism? Straw man much? Hell, North Korea isn't even communist, let alone socialist, it's just one crazy dude running things. Socialism and communism are defined by being democracies: if it isn't a democracy, it doesn't matter what your economic system is, you don't have socialism or communism. You have, more than likely, some form of fascism or dictatorship.
I can see that you've run out of argument, though, and are resorting to logical fallacies and appeal to emotion, so, we're done here. We can discuss this again when you calm down and go back to arguing intelligently like you were before.
Is time a basic measure of reality, or only an illusion? I mean, time only looks basic from inside. The actual moments that make up a timeline may form backwards, all at once, or randomly, yet from the inside we would still perceive them as happening in a linear fashion, because there are references to the past in each present moment.
You should have been here to welcome us .0000000001 seconds ago. Your membership in the Committee to Welcome Our New Overlords has been revoked.
These guys seem to prove you absolutely wrong. From subsistence farming to 256 companies, 92,000 employees, and $16 billion in annual revenue in around 50 years.
Socialism: it just works.
You've hit on exactly why the sociopath genes are conserved: in moderation, they create leaders and survivor types. Genetically, you can't have a spectrum of behaviors like that without having a few individuals who get the right combination of genes to make them monsters.
How so? I never said everyone: a small percentage of people are sociopaths, and if we let them dictate the rules, then everyone has to play the selfishness game.
The world isn't a zero sum game. Everyone can win.
I do have an example. The Mondragon Cooperative in the Basque region of Spain. It went from subsistence farming to an industrial powerhouse in about fifty years. All businesses, government services, and housing are cooperative.
You don't need competition to prevent shoddiness and poor performance, I don't compete with my family, and yet I still do my best for them. And 'the best job' isn't something that only one person can do. In fact, to determine who is the best, you need to use some kind of arbitrary measure for determining the best, and you need everyone to agree to that measure.
I like cleaning toilets. In fact, I have an excellent system for cleaning bathrooms in general, and I enjoy the sense of satisfaction that comes from busting a job out in the most efficient manner possible.
Business do not cheat 'sometimes.' The phrase you are looking for is 'whenever the rewards for cheating outweigh the risks.' Corporations are sociopathic by nature, they have no morals.
Places that avoid competition avoid the specific kind of competition I'm talking about: some must lose in order for one to win. If no one has to lose, it isn't competition.
I'm not arguing for complete equality of outcome: first off, that isn't fair. People who are superior deserve more, and more power, than those who aren't. In social networks, those who have power don't have it because they took it, they have it because it was freely given by others.
In some societies, no one tells anyone else what to do (mostly isolated tribes in resource rich areas like the rainforest). They have no need of privacy because no one dominates others. You wouldn't have to second guess everything you did in such a society, because no one would try to dominate you.
While I understand from your post that you believe competition produces good results, I have no idea why you believe that. Is it just 'common knowledge,' or do you have any sort of argument to back up your belief?
Examples?
You know, the problem you ascribe to competition inside companies is one of the prblems that exist with competition between companies: duplication of effort, and consumption of extra resources. Competition also destroys intrinsic motivations: if you are doing something to beat others, you aren't doing it because you love it. In fact, even if you did love it, over time, you won't anymore, you'll only love winning.
Your example doesn't really show that competition produces excellence, if anything, it outlines the motivations competitors have for cheating.
Of course people care about their own goals. But most people's goals are not 'others must lose so I can win.' Recent economic research shows that people seem to be more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity than selfish gain.
Enemies aren't the best push to work harder. Friends that you don't want to let down are a better, more reliable motivator, IMHO.
And cooperation would make Microsoft more competitive? This is a clear example of how competition doesn't produce excellence, cooperation does. If competition really DID produce excellence, then all companies would be organized with multiply redundant, competing internal departments. Obviously, that's not the case: internally, companies function cooperatively, and those that foster too much internal competition ultimately fail.
We're not all evil, but the belief that 'we're all evil' is itself a primary motivation to act in a selfish fashion.
I would say instead that the belief that "we're all evil" is a primary *rationalization* to justify selfish behavior. The motivation is already there in a person who tends to act selfishly.
If you have some time, you should read "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright. He spends a lot of time talking about how the combination of kin selection and the non-zero-sum result of cumulative altruistic behavior can outcompete selfish behavior and result in the sort of societies we see in humans, wolf packs, and ant colonies.
Yes, read that, good book.
Yes, in people with a tendency to act selfishly, 'everyone is evil' is a rationalization. However, people can not safely act cooperatively if most people around them are acting selfishly. So it can be a motivation as well. If the society in which a person lives rewards selfishness and competition, and does not promote cooperation by punishing free riders, then people will have a legitimate motivation to act selfishly. After all, who wants to be the chump who willingly lets himself get scammed? Who wants to cooperate with assholes? Who wants to benefit society when society says, 'every man for himself?'