@samuraikid @wjmaggos @Someguy
I don't disagree. It's an apocalyptic, conjectural, messianic, and dualist secular religion at the least.
Classical liberals like Mr. Maggos hope for something else, which is basically society as anarchy. It's very similar to what @p argues for, and fails for the same reason: it does not acknowledge the need for civilization.
However, it's a very sociable and pleasant view and SOME of it is healthy.
@amerika @samuraikid @Someguy @p
what do you mean by civilization? I don't want anarchy, but I think you mean cultural anarchy. pluralism? yes, I think that can work. maybe to pull in earlier comments in the thread, I don't see slippery slopes everywhere. or that it's useful to think of people or groups as left or right when I see a continual mix of ideas. we can have decent societies for a very long time by having very different people win and lose power.
on the spectrum, where are we now?
@wjmaggos @samuraikid @Someguy @p
> what do you mean by civilization?
A functional social order that is not in a state of decay.
> pluralism? yes, I think that can work.
I do not think "agree to not agree" allows you to have culture. That's sort of the point: to make choices.
> we can have decent societies for a very long time by having very different people win and lose power.
Couldn't disagree more. One hand builds and the other erases.
> I do not think "agree to not agree" allows you to have culture. That's sort of the point: to make choices.
There's a line, though. You don't seem worried about stagnation.
The Lady watched some camera crew bother a 14th-or-something wasabi farmer threaten to go full Killdozer (or the local equivalent: waving a sword around and shouting about his family business) against the local city council when some factory started dumping something in the water supply. She says that the guy's father and his father and his father (etc.) were buried by the house, in a row by the footpath, so this dude walked past the graves of his predecessors every day on the way to the field. This sort of thing naturally inspires some work ethic. You do not need enforcement or to hang anyone from a helicopter to make that kind of cultural depth to happen. You leave people to their own business and they will do things like that.
@p @samuraikid @wjmaggos @Someguy
> You don't seem worried about stagnation.
I'm not. I think it's a spook. Stagnation is most commonly what happens when you get meritocracy in place.
If you reward good behavior, you will always have people rising.
I like the cultural depth, but in addition to growing wasabi you want people who will improve what they do if they can see a way.
> I'm not. I think it's a spook. Stagnation is most commonly what happens when you get meritocracy in place.
You've got an idiosyncratic definition of "meritocracy". If I ask a lefty what it is, they'll describe basically the opposite of what you describe. I'm using the conventional definition: whoever is good at something ends up doing it, ideally, once you account for inefficiencies in your system.
> If you reward good behavior, you will always have people rising.
This is what I think the conventional meaning of "meritocracy" is.
> I like the cultural depth, but in addition to growing wasabi you want people who will improve what they do if they can see a way.
Well, sure, but my point is that people will engage in building and maintaining culture without any sort of external enforcement.
@p @samuraikid @wjmaggos @Someguy
Some people will engage in building and maintaining culture. They will be eaten by those with no interest in it.
You can try the authoritarian method, but then you become hidebound. Hierarchy works better than centralization, and anarchy ends up creating centralization in order to restrain its failings.
> Some people will engage in building and maintaining culture. They will be eaten by those with no interest in it.
If that were true, then it would constitute proof that culture has no value. I don't think it's true, but if you're right, then culture is maladaptive and you probably ought to abandon it.
> Hierarchy works better than centralization, and anarchy ends up creating centralization in order to restrain its failings.
Hierarchy *is* meritocracy. It is also not mutually exclusive with anarchy. Hierarchy is a naturally occurring phenomenon.
@p @samuraikid @wjmaggos @Someguy
Proof that culture has no value? More likely proof that without guidance people self-destruct.
> Proof that culture has no value? More likely proof that without guidance people self-destruct.
I'm so glad that
came down and invented culture for us, people don't just build cultures, they have to come from the sky.Wasabi Chad didn't need this culture imposed on him: his father passed it down.
Gen-X had comic book geeks and we've got anime-memorizers. Humanity regularly churns out people that obsessively memorize culture. You have people that are really emotionally invested in whether Han shot first or not. People will ruin a party over that kind of thing. Why? The normal impulse is to just dismiss it, that guy's never getting laid, that guy's got his head up his ass, who cares about hobbits, etc. It's a facile explanation, so what's going on there, why are people like this? Why did this guy spend an hour rambling at me about D&D? What would he be doing a thousand years ago? I mean, think about it.
I fee like I'm stating the obvious, but it's a cultural preservation and propagation instinct. We didn't have books for most of the history of human evolution, we had old men that propagated culture by memorizing songs and poems and getting upset when people told the story wrong. People create and preserve culture by instinct, this is a human thing. You don't need someone enforcing that. You don't need to create a system of to provide guidance, you have it practically hard-wired.
yello--planet_dada.mp4
@p @samuraikid @wjmaggos @Someguy
That's the point: SOME people have a cultural preservation instinct.
These are the ones who build societies.
Those societies then breed lots of useless people who consume everything.
Deal with that or you end up third world.
> Deal with that or you end up third world.
You are not going to cure the endless cycle of human civilization.
Same thing with people proclaiming the end of their civilization: you have those at every stage of civilization. The Romans escape their boot and you probably had a bunch of guys going "This is the end times, we're completely finished, we're totally fucked, this is the end of the Roman civilization." I'm not going to stop people from telling me that I'm completely fucked and my country's completely fucked and the world is fucked and we're all dead any minute now. I'll believe it's the end of the world when I see it.
The Vandals - And now we dance.mp3
@p @samuraikid @wjmaggos @Someguy
So why haven't you moved to Italy?
It turns out the Romans claiming decline were right.
Italy now exists in the shadows of the powers around it.
Life is not about individualism. That would be pathological narcissism, wouldn't you say?
We depend on civilization.
The civilization cycle can be beat, and even Plato showed us how.
> So why haven't you moved to Italy?
It's really easy to point out a collapse that already occurred.
> It turns out the Romans claiming decline were right.
The ones claiming decline were right *during* the decline. You have people claiming that during the ascent (though perhaps "escape their boot" was an obscure way to say "start building and expanding an empire"). It's this Nostradamus shit, you find something occurring and it's really easy to find a guy that was saying it was about to happen, and even easier if he's vague enough. For every one of those, you will find a dozen guys that were saying "any minute now" a hundred years earlier. I'll believe it's the end of the world when I see it.
