A funny little thing called freedom...

[GreatArc]

(An Introductory Essay)

Hello all, and pleased to meet you.

For a long while, I have been engaged in thinking about the idea of rights and where do they come from? To my thinking, there are really only two ways to approach this question: either we are born with all the rights in the world, and the only ones we don't get to have are the ones we either decide to suspend collectively/consensually surrender to remain and function in a society, or we start with no rights whatsoever and the only rights we have are those which are 'given' to us.

It should be patently clear for anyone to see the problem with the latter; if we start with no rights, who has the right to give them to us in the first place? By what right do they claim this right to decide for everyone else which rights are afforded an individual, and who gave THEM the right to decide the right to decide the right of everyone else which rights.... and so on, to an infinite regression back to the point of absurdity. So we are left with the first option, that we start out with all the rights in the world except for those we decide are reasonable to surrender for society to function. All laws are proscriptive, ironically, in that they don't tell you what you have a right to do, they tell you what you DO NOT have the right to do. In short, you aren't given rights, you are given consequences.

We start with the basic uncontroversial stuff: I don't have the right to kill or harm you, the right for me to swing my arm ends at your nose, etc. We recognize that certain rights such as your right to experiment with radioactive waste in the next apartment over, cannot survive collision with my right not to have me and my family die of radiation sickness.

It gets more nuanced, such as a charter pilot does not have the right to decide he/she no longer consents to carry passengers on their plane at 20,000 feet and starts chucking them off his property. No, they have consented to surrender some of their rights when they entered into a contract to safely transport the people in their charge.

Then we get to the really nuanced stuff, such as governance. No one has the right to simply take your work, labour and resources without your permission, but this is done every single day through the instruments of law and taxation, and the social contract at large. After all, your consent and permission is not sought for every change in the law or tax dollar allocated, yet we are all expected (compelled, certainly) to follow the rule of law. Your participation in the enterprises of law and governance is simply non-negotiable, and the only tacit consent to abide by these strictures is that you remain within the territory in which these rules apply. Except for the most ardent anarchists or extreme libertarians, we generally recognize that we are not going to ever have a social system which makes allowances for personal consent to be governed by the whims and attitudes of the larger group.

For those of you not bored already, I have taken a bit of a longer, circuitous route to arrive at my point; that while we live externally as individuals in a greater society largely by a tyranny of the majority and negotiate our rights and freedoms with the other members of the group and societal well-being at large, there is another sense in which we live in a state of complete sovereignty--within our own bodies. For surely, minds are the products of brains, which are, in turn, a part of the body as a whole. Within these, the case cannot be made for us to be compelled to surrender ownership of ourselves (in body or mind) to another mammal, who is every bit your equal and in no way another mammal's master.

It follows that if our bodies and our minds belong to us, then from this autonomy surely we had ought to start with the right to do with, think, treat, and otherwise control our own bodies, except for where (if ever) those rights trespass overtly upon another person's rights. Furthermore, any reasonable person should be able to recognize that the burden of proof for making the argument about how a person uses their mind and body trespasses overtly upon the rights of others should rest with the person making the claim. Yet how backwards this is when it comes to particular aspects of life where the onus of responsibility becomes completely inverted in instances like medicine, sex, suicide, euthanasia, law enforcement and drug use in particular.

If I truly have bodily autonomy to do with as I wish with my own mind and body without encroaching upon the rights of others, what possible argument exists to justify another person interceding my right to explore it as I wish. If my mind and thoughts are a house and I wish to spend my evenings in the kitchen instead of the bedroom, and an outsider decides to claim I do not have the right to do that, to whom are we to listen? And if we disagree, what possible argument could they make that we have to satisfy their personal and arbitrary rules about our own minds and bodies before they grant us the right to use them as we please? To continue the analogy, what if there are parts of the house I can only reach to explore by using a 'ladder'? By what right to they prohibit my right to a ladder, or dictate the ways in which I may use my ladder if it has no discernible effect upon the rights of others? Drug prohibition is nothing more elegant than this; a complete end-around past the very question of 'what gives you the right to decide for everyone else?' directly to the fallacious bait and switch where they ask to be persuaded 'why should we ALLOW you to use your mind and body the way you see fit?' simply pre-supposing their personal moral metric has to be satisfied in the first place. The potential for harm (individual or societal) is often brought up, yet the fact that I can explore a far more extreme brain state (like death) by going down to the corner store and drinking a bottle of bleach has no apparent effect upon its legality, while a benign substance with little or no possibility to cause harm may justifiably be denied to me, because another person cannot see the value in consuming it. If I wish to explore areas of my own brain and psyche, only accessible to me through the help of a medication or substance, what gives anyone the right to violate the sovereign space of my private mind--the one thing which MUST be unowned and ungoverned by any society which dare call itself 'free'?

Whatever else this might be, this is not freedom.

To most of you who generously read this and got this far, I am likely preaching to the converted. But my point is that we should be mindful that if we truly want to change the relationship government and law enforcement have with bodily autonomy, particularly regarding the use of drugs, we have to be prepared to challenge people's notions about the nature of rights and prohibition itself, and reframe the debate, placing the onus back upon them to satisfy OUR questions. "By what right do you claim the power to decide for everyone else what they may do with their minds and bodies? And why should everyone else be forced to abide by the taboos and prohibitions of a total stranger when it in no way impedes the rights of others?". People have an instinctual disdain to admit to others or themselves when they are acting in a totalitarian or tyrannical way--almost no one wants to admit that they are a censor, a dictator, unfair, etc. They need to rationalize it in terms of rationalizations and appeals to slippery slope arguments ("I have no real problem with this particular freedom, but what if some vague fear I just pulled out of my ass is also permitted?"). This is why it is so important to drill down and engage and strip away at the distractions until you finally get them to consider and admit that they indeed are claiming the right to decide for everyone else, for which there is no rational or logical argument.

I have noticed that you have a Coalition for Entheogenic Liberties here at the Nexus. I must say, I am eager to listen to, argue with, convince, be convinced by, learn from and refine my own positions and arguments regarding prohibitions and freedoms with people who have put a lot of thought into these subjects and see what they have to say.

I thank any of you for reading this in its entirety, looking forward to exploring your experiences and making use of your wisdom and learning from your mistakes.

-G.A.

 

[DOMO]

There's no part of civilization - not knowledge of nutrition, the brain, mental health, economics, quantum mechanics or anything - that we know fully, or are utilizing in the most productive way.

If you realize that about laws then I think it's a given that more drugs need to be legalized.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

Welcome to the Nexus...seems like you've got a lot to say It's late and I'm overdue for bed, so I'll just sum up my thoughts briefly, rather than going line by line (a rarity, to be sure )

That said, I do believe you've missed a considerable section of structural analysis in your earnest appeal to logic/sanity.

If governments (or other large political actors) are tyrannical/authoritarian/etc, why should we expect them to cede the realm of cognitive liberty (perhaps the most fundamental "freedom" given its foundational role)? In fact, even outside of "drugs" we see this is not territory they are willing to cede (see: media/advertising, whether political or commercial). As an aside, you never really defined your usage of "freedom," which can be deployed in a pretty nebulous and slippery manner.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, imo, you missed the whole profit incentive to the war on [some people who use certain] drugs. It's not so simple as "get the authoritarians to admit they're authoritarians," imo. You are running up against material realities. Prohibition is not an accident, the CCA (and other private prison corps and their subsidiaries and supporting companies), the DEA, LEO in general and numerous other groups rely on it for both funding as well as raison d'etre.

More thoughts come to mind, but I'm exhausted so I'm gonna tap out for now and phone it in:

[YOUTUBE]

And, fwiw, imo:

Governments are illegitimate, consciousness is sovereign, agency is fractal.

 

[GreatArc]

Very interesting. Of all the things you said, I kind of zoned in on "agency is fractal" and trying to wrap my head around that a little bit. I think I've brushed up against that epiphany a little, but not enough to understand, but it makes a little sense and is kind of familiar.

If you had more to say, I'd be curious to know a little more about that.

-GA.

EDIT: Haha, I just saw my post and was laughing to myself about how many times I used the word 'little' in a few short sentences.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

Sure thing

Also, this is buried in my reply, but basically, by fractal agency, I mean that we are all part of this network of existence/life. We are not truly individuals in the sense that my decisions, even as small as whether I smile at you or flip you off when I see you on the street, have the potential to impact you. My choices influence your choices, influence Joe Shmo's choices, influence everybody else's choices. You have agency, but it is mirrored, bounded, duplicated, transposed (and otherwise adjectived) by the agency of those around you. No human life is truly individual, but dependent on and interactive with those around them...and even in the case of mountain men, derived from the ecosystems/landbase in which they are located. Hardly alone, imo.

Here are some of the thoughts I was too tired to really engage with last night. There are still a few things I didn't really dive into, just because this turned into a bit of a monster of a post (and I haven't proofread it) but it should provide ample food for thought/response:

It should be patently clear for anyone to see the problem with the latter; if we start with no rights, who has the right to give them to us in the first place? By what right do they claim this right to decide for everyone else which rights are afforded an individual, and who gave THEM the right to decide the right to decide the right of everyone else which rights.... and so on, to an infinite regression back to the point of absurdity.

This is fine as an appeal to sanity, but again, it doesn't match reality. Consider private (not personal) property. At some point, someone with sufficient weaponry to support it, roped off a section of the commons and said, "this is mine." Or stated another way, trace it back to the source and private property is theft. Yet despite this initial act of "theft" from the commons, dominant culture considers private property sacrosanct, and that initial theft is viewed as a holy conversion of sorts, from Commons to Capital. This is just as absurd as your point about rights, imo, yet it is a major undergirding of the world in which we find ourselves.

So we are left with the first option, that we start out with all the rights in the world except for those we decide are reasonable to surrender for society to function...We start with the basic uncontroversial stuff: I don't have the right to kill or harm you, the right for me to swing my arm ends at your nose, etc. We recognize that certain rights such as your right to experiment with radioactive waste in the next apartment over, cannot survive collision with my right not to have me and my family die of radiation sickness.

Again, a nice sentiment, but I'm not so sure it matches reality. As a brief aside, I don't believe the "surrendering" you present is truly a decision and I think you're also slightly blindered by your cultural position. Consider the Ilongot and their practice of headhunting. Here is a practice of outright murder in the face of tremendous grief that is understood/accepted within a cultural context, to say nothing of fists and noses.

And to take it back to industrial civilization. Your neighbor may catch flack if they're mucking about with radioactive materials, but the current system of power grants pretty unfettered power to corporations who poison the air, land, and water, while labeling those who oppose them terrorists and subjecting them to all sorts of surveillance and incarceration.

...while we live externally as individuals in a greater society largely by a tyranny of the majority and negotiate our rights and freedoms with the other members of the group and societal well-being at large, there is another sense in which we live in a state of complete sovereignty--within our own bodies. For surely, minds are the products of brains, which are, in turn, a part of the body as a whole. Within these, the case cannot be made for us to be compelled to surrender ownership of ourselves (in body or mind) to another mammal, who is every bit your equal and in no way another mammal's master.

Now this chunk has a ton of implicit assumptions. I don't think we live as individuals. We might experience reality from an individual locus...or we might experience our consciousness as individuals, but we do not live as individuals (your life is predicated on those around you). This is some of the fractal agency. You have agency, but it is mirrored, bounded, duplicated, transposed (and otherwise adjectived) by the agency of those around you. No human life is truly individual, but dependent on those around them...and even in the case of mountain men, derived from the ecosystems/landbase in which they are located. Hardly alone, imo.

Then there's this series of assertions..."minds are the products of brains, which are, in turn, a part of the body as a whole." We have no evidence, afaik, whether consciousness originates from the brain or is merely received in the brain (a question of production/origin, no?). Which is kind of an aside, but still something worth considering, imo.

And the assertion that a case cannot be made for us to sell ourselves to our equals...is that not a fundamental underpinning of wage labor/capitalism? This is another moment where I agree with your appeal to sanity, but feel it is at odds with the reality in which we find ourselves.

If I truly have bodily autonomy to do with as I wish with my own mind and body without encroaching upon the rights of others, what possible argument exists to justify another person interceding my right to explore it as I wish.

The obvious retort (and I mean that in the gentlest way possible, offering the response from the perspective of the "really existing" world) to this is that you don't, and the fact that you don't is evidenced through the social structures I've been pointing at throughout this thought exercise.

If my mind and thoughts are a house and I wish to spend my evenings in the kitchen instead of the bedroom, and an outsider decides to claim I do not have the right to do that, to whom are we to listen? And if we disagree, what possible argument could they make that we have to satisfy their personal and arbitrary rules about our own minds and bodies before they grant us the right to use them as we please? To continue the analogy, what if there are parts of the house I can only reach to explore by using a 'ladder'? By what right to they prohibit my right to a ladder, or dictate the ways in which I may use my ladder if it has no discernible effect upon the rights of others?

To reply to this analogy with another analogy. If you lived on a ranch and someone appeared and said, "I'm going to poison your well" and started walking to your well with a bottle of cyanide, I believe you'd be able to make a pretty solid claim for self-defense if you utilized physical force to stop them. However, on a social scale, again, corporations are allowed to poison us and escape consequences. This isn't an accident, this is a key mechanism of the way this system functions. The point being that things that may or may not happen in your house are just that, and are usually not the best barometers for what society is or is not constructed to permit.

Now, go to your mattress and find the "do not remove" tag that comes with legal consequences for removal. This is the response to the ladder analogy. By what right? By might makes right. They have the guns, the legal system, and the enforcers. They have the power. Again, I'm with you and your appeal to sanity, but it's just that, an appeal to sanity, and the world is anything but.

But my point is that we should be mindful that if we truly want to change the relationship government and law enforcement have with bodily autonomy, particularly regarding the use of drugs, we have to be prepared to challenge people's notions about the nature of rights and prohibition itself, and reframe the debate, placing the onus back upon them to satisfy OUR questions.

Government and law enforcement are inherently tyranical institutions/concepts. Imo, changing their relationships or engaging in reform is a Sisyphean task. Their very nature is to deprive you of autonomy and utilize force should you resist their deprivations. Consider the genesis of the modern police force. In the US it rose out of southern slave catching gangs and northern watchmen that were tasked with clearing "undesirables" (poor, vagrants, prostitutes, immigrants, etc) out of urban centers. I have no questions for these authoritarians, only a desire to see them abolished.

 

[GreatArc]

Thanks very much for putting in the time for a long reply. You write very clearly and are well thought-out and have a good ability to organize thoughts.

One thing I would like to add that might make my statement about "minds being the products of brains" (or replace with consciousness for most intents and purposes), is that I should have said that minds are functions of brains. While we do not know a lot about consciousness and the brain, it is not to say we know nothing at all. Usually when this point is raised in discussion, it has generally been in discussions with spiritual/religious people about the existence of a 'soul' or talking about supernatural intelligences such as God or gods. It is not regarded as controversial to say that minds are functions of brains in the sense that the 'software' of minds is never encountered or demonstrated without being run on some sort of biological 'hardware' like a brain or similar central nervous system.

Again, it's usually brought up as an objection to arguments that when we die, our minds are transported to some theme park (either a nice one or a nasty one). That is in direct opposition to what we know what happens to the mind when parts of the brain are damaged or removed, and what we know about the kind of brain activity we can expect to detect after death.

Anyhow. I take many of your points about the nature of freewill, independence, agency, etc. It seems like these are areas in which I never cease to hear good arguments and am persuaded further. It seems every time I start to get secure in freewill and independence in even the most vague and abstract terms, someone can shatter confidence in even that. Much like the problem of hard solipsism if you know much about that (i.e; impossible to prove you're not a brain in a vat or born 10 min ago with all your memories or generating everything and everyone else in the universe, etc).

I am curious to ask if you hold some anarchist or voluntarist views? (Voluntarist? Voluntarist?...someone who subscribes to extreme libertarian Voluntaryism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntaryism)?

Don't want to set a whole bunch of fires for you to put out, so you're not expected to defend/challenge/reply to everything I lay out if you aren't interested or don't want to devote your whole day to my little thread. Since drug prohibition is just a specific example of laws/rights granted (interchangeable), I want to lay out a couple quick points and ask your thoughts:

1.) I will agree that all claims to property are inherently theft, that the laws of all societies are totalitarian to varying degrees (depending upon the society) of course, in that we all live under laws and are compelled to participate in a society without our consent. We can leave one country for another, I suppose, but there is no place you can go and claim as your own sovereign land and declare yourself unbound by any laws whatsoever without consequence, not even Antarctica or the open sea. This is at the heart of the Social Contract, which recognizes that no individual in a society is given the opportunity to consent to 100% of the laws of the land, but that it is impossible to have a society in which that occurs.

2.) To say that there are tyrannical or totalitarian elements of making rules is not to say that it is a dictatorship in its entirety. We have some recourse (far more every century since the time of kings and pharaohs) to challenge and change our laws, particularly in the strongest democracies. That there is corruption, unreasonable laws, inequity, etc, does not render the entire enterprise of government useless.

3.) By any standard you wish to apply, we have more net rights and freedoms every century. We may think of a free man on the frontier living off the land, but we also forget about serfs and slaves, women, aboriginals in colonized nations, theocracies and monarchies of the past, people living without any rights and in places where conquering warlords were the ultimate arbiters of the rights of people. This is to say it is easy to lose sight of the fact that we have power and an instrument to change laws uniformed to most people in the past.

4.) I am encouraged by the fact that social attitudes can and have been changed across the board in all sorts of ways and that a libertarian or reason-based view has prevailed upon a whole host of issues about bodily autonomy, where society has recognized that government has no business prohibiting or consequencing those who would choose something for themselves. Here in Canada (I'm a snow Mexican), the libertarian argument has prevailed on marijuana legalization, which is coming in some form any time now, we have won the argument for people to choose for themselves about end-of-life decisions, support for the war upon drugs has never been lower--treating drug use as a personal choice and addicts as patients and not criminals is also gaining ground. Not looking through rose-coloured glasses here, we have our setbacks and it's not enough to throw us some 'scraps' of freedom, but in general I stand by my sentiment that we are making boogeymen out of legislators and law enforcement very often. I don't want to get into specifics, but I work in corrections and have friends and family in law enforcement and can tell you I don't know any who want to enforce drug laws, and that many simply choose not to for use and possession. We have a lot of discussions about how seriously we need to protect against the police state and champion arguments against unjust laws and prohibitions all the time. Hell, I'm a criminal the very moment I dry out a mushroom or ingest a legally procured Research Chemical.

The point is, that people don't want to be confronted by the ugly truth that they are dictators and tyrants taking away the rights of others, even the most radical ruler wants to think they are some benevolent leader, doling out adjudication most wisely, with the support and approbation of society behind them. The steps towards ending drug prohibition of any kind lies in being able to successfully strip away the rationalizations and delusions prohibitionists would employ, and have them really consider whether or not they have the right to decide for everyone else, and if they would hand that power over to another person in respect to some other domain that they might care about; would they live under the strictures of someone else's Blasphemy laws? Tobacco or alcohol prohibitions? Medical choices? Pornography? Should the government compel them not to invest candy bars? Declare meat-eating harmful, immoral and illegal? We can take the argument to them, and my point is that the first step is to reframe the debate away from arguments to decriminalize/legalize drugs, and instead ask to be convinced why we must abide by the personal prohibitions and taboos of a complete stranger about our own bodies in the first place.

Thanks for hanging in there if you've made it this far. I appreciate you engaging with me, this is precisely the kind of conversation I joined to have, and people like you are exactly the the of thinking, articulate people I hoped to connect with and meet.

(PS; I'm an awfully distracted writer, and replete with run-on sentences and tangents and typos, don't stand on ceremony with your proof-reading, I can work it out easily enough).

 

[SnozzleBerry]

Thanks for the reply and kind words. I will point out, for whatever it's worth, I didn't see any engagement with my numerous points about the real world structures vis a vis prohibition. You're not obligated to engage with the ideas of my choosing but it seems pretty crucial to the discussion you want to have. Just curious about the silence

It is not regarded as controversial to say that minds are functions of brains in the sense that the 'software' of minds is never encountered or demonstrated without being run on some sort of biological 'hardware' like a brain or similar central nervous system. Again, it's usually brought up as an objection to arguments that when we die, our minds are transported to some theme park (either a nice one or a nasty one). That is in direct opposition to what we know what happens to the mind when parts of the brain are damaged or removed, and what we know about the kind of brain activity we can expect to detect after death.

I think you are using "minds" in a slippery form here. We are speaking of consciousness, yes? Where do you set the bar for consciousness? A tree seeks water...slime molds take the shortest path through a maze to reach nutrients...does this not evidence, at the absolute least, some rudimentary awareness of the environment in which they exist? Some consciousness if you will? Where are the brains?

And yes, consciousness generally seems to rely on some sort of hardware (at least for transmission/receiption), but that too only tells us so much and I believe you are too certain in your assertions. A radio is not the source of the signal it broadcasts, and yet you perceive the noises to come "from the radio" even though they are, in reality, being beamed in from elsewhere. If you took the radio apart you would not find the source of the transmission, just a bunch of wiring and components. You would still be left fundamentally clueless about the source and nature of the signal/transmission. Is it not plausible that the brain may be similar? Consider Max Planck's quote, "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness."

I am curious to ask if you hold some anarchist or voluntarist views? (Voluntarist? Voluntarist?...someone who subscribes to extreme libertarian Voluntaryism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntaryism)?

I'm a "little a" anarchist with a deep ecological perspective and a tolerance for some of the insurrectionary bent. I'm uninterested in American libertarianism and AnCaps and have gotten into at least a couple [heated] debates with self-proclaimed AnCaps here before. At the moment, that particular debate is not one I'm interested in having

1.) I will agree that all claims to property are inherently theft, that the laws of all societies are totalitarian to varying degrees (depending upon the society) of course, in that we all live under laws and are compelled to participate in a society without our consent. We can leave one country for another, I suppose, but there is no place you can go and claim as your own sovereign land and declare yourself unbound by any laws whatsoever without consequence, not even Antarctica or the open sea. This is at the heart of the Social Contract, which recognizes that no individual in a society is given the opportunity to consent to 100% of the laws of the land, but that it is impossible to have a society in which that occurs.

Agreed. This is a fundamental principle of why resistance to dominant culture is necessary. There is no escape, and even if there were, where could you go on Earth where you'd be safe from the environmental havoc wrought by industrial civ?

2.) To say that there are tyrannical or totalitarian elements of making rules is not to say that it is a dictatorship in its entirety. We have some recourse (far more every century since the time of kings and pharaohs) to challenge and change our laws, particularly in the strongest democracies. That there is corruption, unreasonable laws, inequity, etc, does not render the entire enterprise of government useless.

I would strongly challenge everything after the first sentence here. "We" depends on the "we" being discussed, and "some recourse" is an incredibly nebulous statement. I don't know whether "we" have greater recourse to change "our" laws (not really ours, are they?) or just the illusion. On its face, I understand what you are driving at, but I would point out that a poor farmer in ancient Egypt may have had less recourse to change the law than some walmart employee in modern times (although that employee is still up against tremendous odds) but so many of the other life aspects are different that I question to what extent "recourse" matters. If the farmer, though poor, can live his life on his land (ostensibly taxed) with something approaching daily autonomy, is the position really worse off than the perpetually surveilled and overworked walmart employee? Seems a hard case to make in the abstract.

I have never said government is useless, quite the contrary. States are the bloodiest institutions in human history. I think they are incredibly useful for dominating, waging war, and accumulating resources, none of which strike me as particularly meritorious. Within the context of capitalism, everything in government is for sale (notably, regulatory agencies) so even the ostensible goods it COULD do in the context of industrial civ are eventually neutralized by lobbies/special interests.

3.) By any standard you wish to apply, we have more net rights and freedoms every century. We may think of a free man on the frontier living off the land, but we also forget about serfs and slaves, women, aboriginals in colonized nations, theocracies and monarchies of the past, people living without any rights and in places where conquering warlords were the ultimate arbiters of the rights of people. This is to say it is easy to lose sight of the fact that we have power and an instrument to change laws uniformed to most people in the past.

I think you've set up a false equivalency here. First you say we have more net rights and freedoms every century (an assertion I'd question if you consider the full timescale of homo sapiens sapiens) but to make the assertion you say the "free man on the frontier" is negated by the oppressed. To actually compare, you would need to consider the "free" and "oppressed" between any time period you are considering. We still have tremendous amounts of explicit slavery in the world, legacies and institutions of colonialism, etc. Actually, pretty much everything you mentioned still exists, it's just a question of where. And a scant 150-200 years ago, wage labor was called wage slavery. So again, the lack of a clear definition of what you mean when you say "free" is becoming an issue.

And again, the technology today is fundamentally different. I'd point back to my earlier example...if you can eek it out on the periphery of a society that has a less-enticing label (e.g. monarchy) is that really worse than being compelled to be a wage slave in a modern democracy as far as the rights/participation you have in society? For me, I think both are poor positions, but I wouldn't be so quick to say one has it better, full stop. This can get incredibly complex, for example, if you posit that the modern person has it better because modern medicine yields better health. But then if you consider the ecological destruction required to build, stock, and run a hospital, I would posit the potential for making the person who receives treatment "better" relies on the potential for poisoning the people who live by the water sources where they engage in mountaintop removal to acquire coal to run power plant that the hospital utilizes (to say nothing of all the mining/manufacturing of hospital equipment). So for me, not better, just different.

4.) I am encouraged by the fact that social attitudes can and have been changed across the board in all sorts of ways and that a libertarian or reason-based view has prevailed upon a whole host of issues about bodily autonomy, where society has recognized that government has no business prohibiting or consequencing those who would choose something for themselves. Here in Canada (I'm a snow Mexican), the libertarian argument has prevailed on marijuana legalization, which is coming in some form any time now, we have won the argument for people to choose for themselves about end-of-life decisions, support for the war upon drugs has never been lower--treating drug use as a personal choice and addicts as patients and not criminals is also gaining ground.

I'm personally not enthused about the commercialization of cannabis. I'd be more excited to see the incarcerated folks released before their (generally whiter-skinned) counterparts in the legal realm start raking in obscene profits. I think many of the examples you present are wins in the individualist liberal sense...that is, they give people more rights to participate as fuller citizens in this nightmare of industrial civilization. For me, that's not the end goal, even if the material benefits they reap from participation are beneficial and ultimately desirable. I think the end game/intention must be kept in mind.

Not looking through rose-coloured glasses here, we have our setbacks and it's not enough to throw us some 'scraps' of freedom, but in general I stand by my sentiment that we are making boogeymen out of legislators and law enforcement very often. I don't want to get into specifics, but I work in corrections and have friends and family in law enforcement and can tell you I don't know any who want to enforce drug laws, and that many simply choose not to for use and possession. We have a lot of discussions about how seriously we need to protect against the police state and champion arguments against unjust laws and prohibitions all the time. Hell, I'm a criminal the very moment I dry out a mushroom or ingest a legally procured Research Chemical.

Like I said before, in the US, the modern police force rose out of southern slave catching gangs and northern watchmen that were tasked with clearing "undesirables" (poor, vagrants, prostitutes, immigrants, etc) out of urban centers. The fundamental purpose of policing and prisons is social control, now followed closely by profit. The question is not one about "good" or "bad" actors.

The structure of modern policing is inherently problematic and oppressive. The social ills policing is supposed to protect us from are largely manufactured by the enforced inequalities of the societies in which police operate. And frankly, you don't get a choice about which laws you enforce, when you put on the uniform you are an agent of the state who is "just following orders" so personal desires not to prosecute drug offenses is moot. They (and you) can always hang up the uniform, but otherwise, I don't really care about the personal beliefs, as the enforcement arm of the state is just that and I (and you) know where they stand when the chips are down.

The point is, that people don't want to be confronted by the ugly truth that they are dictators and tyrants taking away the rights of others, even the most radical ruler wants to think they are some benevolent leader, doling out adjudication most wisely, with the support and approbation of society behind them.

Please don't take this as insulting, but I hope you can see the irony here after the statement you just made about your ties to law enforcement, yea? Like I said, I don't want to be insulting, so I'll leave it at that, unless you want to go into it more.

The steps towards ending drug prohibition of any kind lies in being able to successfully strip away the rationalizations and delusions prohibitionists would employ, and have them really consider whether or not they have the right to decide for everyone else, and if they would hand that power over to another person in respect to some other domain that they might care about...We can take the argument to them, and my point is that the first step is to reframe the debate away from arguments to decriminalize/legalize drugs, and instead ask to be convinced why we must abide by the personal prohibitions and taboos of a complete stranger about our own bodies in the first place.

I disagree wholeheartedly with these assertions. None of this takes into account any of the real-world realities I pointed out about prohibition, governance, and profit-motives. I'd ask you to re-read the points I made in the previous posts with regards to this (as I noted at the beginning of this post, I haven't seen any engagement with those points) and I would seriously urge you to watch the presentation that I linked earlier, as I deal with a number of these issues explicitly. I'll even re-link it here because I think it's relevant to this point of the discussion, which appears to be the most significant point as you just spent another big post coming back to it

[YOUTUBE]

 

[GreatArc]

Will do, I began watching it last night, but the need for sleep prevailed. I'll re-read your responses and try and ask if I've understood them, and if so, which I agree with and which I see it differently. Will reply soon.

Also, no need to pull punches or worry about insulting me. I am not insulted by people challenging my ideas or pointing out where they feel I've gotten in wrong or I'm being dishonest. Debate and discussion are the very best way to either see if your arguments survive criticism, or if they are undermined by a better argument, and thus I don't have to hold a flawed position any longer than necessary.

And even if I was offended, so what? No one has to try and predict what may or may not offend me, nor do they have any expectation to privilege my sensibilities over their own thoughts and words. I'm grateful for anyone willing to engage with me when they don't have to.

More to come.

 

[dragonrider]

I think that what we tend to call 'rights', are just a precipitation of very old social instincts, of wich Mutual respect is the most important one. Human society evolved out of animal society's. So jean jaques rouseau's and snozzleberry's statement that the notion of ownership was more or less 'invented' by someone who one day decided to fence of some land, is probably not completely accurate. Most social animals do have some kind of territory, and have rules for when to share stuff and when not. 'Freeloaders' are generally not accepted in any kind of animal society, unless, sometimes, when they are injured and not in any way able to contribute.

The idea of people having rights is actually a very natural idea. When you live toghether with other people, and you don't want to have to fight over every little thing, especially when resources are scarce, then, to come to some sort of agreement with others, wich doesn't even have to be written down, is almost innevitable. If you don't want to fight over resources, you need to have a Mutual understanding that you don't want to fight. An such a Mutual understanding automatically leads to a sort of "treat others like you would want them to treat you" kind of code.

If you have such a Mutual understanding, it's also very logical to have rules: each person is better of in a non-violent community. But one violent individual, or simply someone who cheats, could undermine the peace. So to have a system in place that 'punishes' people who undermine peace, is very logical. Almost innevitable.

Animal society's have such systems, just like we have them.
Most of our notions of 'justice' are not invented by us. They are simply reformulations of basic concepts that already existed before the human species was there. They are based on social instincts.

Unfortunately, as long as the utility of the use of force exceeds it's downsides, it can be rational for people to, in some sense back or support it.

There are people who believe that power doesn't realy mean anything, that power isn't real power, unless you can abuse it as well. Many people think like this. They believe that every now and then, innocent people need to be scapegoated as an example for the rest of society. So that everybody knows who's in charge and who's not.

As long as people believe that there's some kind of cultural war going on within society, there will be injustice, because this believe will justify feelings of fear. As long as that's the case, rational arguments will do very little.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

Human society evolved out of animal society's. So jean jaques rouseau's and snozzleberry's statement that the notion of ownership was more or less 'invented' by someone who one day decided to fence of some land, is probably not completely accurate.

Please note, I explicitly stated "private property" as distinct from personal property when making this statement.

Private property should be distinguished from personal property. The latter is based upon use while the former is based upon trade. The premise of personal property is that each of us has what they need. The premise of private property is that each of us has something that someone else needs or wants. In a society based on private property rights, those who are able to accrue more of what others need or want have greater power. By extension, they wield greater control over what others perceive as needs and desires, usually in the interest of increasing profit to themselves.

From wikipedia:

In political/economic theory, notably socialist, Marxist, and most anarchist philosophies, the distinction between private and personal property is extremely important. Which items of property constitute which is open to debate. In some philosophies, such as capitalism, private and personal property are considered to be exactly equivalent.

Personal property includes "items intended for personal use"[3] (e.g., clothes, homes, and vehicles,[3] and sometimes money).[4] It must be gained in a socially fair manner, and the owner has a distributive right to exclude others.

Private property is a social relationship between the owner and persons deprived (not a relationship between person and thing), e.g., artifacts, factories, mines, dams, infrastructure, natural vegetation, mountains, deserts, seas, etc. Marxism holds that a process of class conflict and revolutionary struggle could result in victory for the proletariat and the establishment of a communist society in which private property and ownership is abolished over time and the means of production and subsistence belong to the community. (Private property and ownership, in this context, means ownership of the means of production, not personal possessions).

To many socialists, the term private property refers to capital or the means of production, while personal property refers to consumer and non-capital goods and services.

If you don't want to fight over resources, you need to have a Mutual understanding that you don't want to fight. An such a Mutual understanding automatically leads to a sort of "treat others like you would want them to treat you" kind of code.

If you have such a Mutual understanding, it's also very logical to have rules: each person is better of in a non-violent community.

The assertions made about "mutual understandings" don't really hold water within a capitalist framework, as the operating principle is not "do unto others..." but rather "money over everything." We don't have the opportunity to "come to agreement" as you put it, as we are all conscripted into capitalism and held there by force. You get no option to come to an agreement, you get no option to opt out. Either you participate or suffer the consequences.

Also, there's no such thing as non-violence. Existence is violence. Life is predicated on death. Don't believe me? Try living without killing things (or having things killed) to sustain you. And that's just the most basic/fundamental example.

 

[tseuq]

My 2 cents:
The phrase "private" is derived from the latin "privare", what means "separate; robbed (de-priv-ed)" and is initally understood as "separated/robbed from the community". I read that this idea/concept was born when early humanoids (nomads) began to settle and start with agriculture. This would go along with this statement:

From wikipedia:

Private property and ownership, in this context, means ownership of the means of production, not personal possessions

It seems to be a functional concept (in the game: survival of the fittest), when we still see ourselves dealing with it today.

Existence is violence. Life is predicated on death. Don't believe me? Try living without killing things (or having things killed) to sustain you.

Yes! and I think your example is "limping" or we have to define what "killing things" means. Theoretically: Eat fruits & veggies and the plant lives on, cut just the top of bambuu/wood, use rock to build your home and use hemp, whool, cotton or any other sustainable material (f.e I read of a fungie which can be used for clothing and it gets though as leather) for clothes.

tseuq

 

[dragonrider]

I'm a vegetarian, so i take trying to live without killing very seriously. But yes, a society without violence could not exist. But there are degrees of violence.
As violence is a dirty and costly thing (in terms of general quality of life, chances of survival, etc.), most people want as less of it, as reasonably possible.

This goal can be realised pretty easily: the rule is that you treat others like you would want them to treat you, unless they don't treat you that way. If they don't, you punish them. Society's without punishment are generally not stable, because the people who undermine this code of non-violence, can do so without any repercussion. And they would even benefit from such an arrangement.

So yes, any type of society will have to deal with violence in some way. But you can limit the amount of violence. The less violence there is, the better i would say.

Civil rights are a good instrument for this, in highly organised society's. You do need independant institutions though, to safeguard these rights.

The better this is done, the less violent a society will be. So Denmark is definately a better place to live, than the USA or afghanistan.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

This goal can be realised pretty easily: the rule is that you treat others like you would want them to treat you, unless they don't treat you that way. If they don't, you punish them. Society's without punishment are generally not stable, because the people who undermine this code of non-violence, can do so without any repercussion. And they would even benefit from such an arrangement.

I believe your repeated reiterations of the "golden rule" completely miss the reality of the capitalist societies we live in. The very nature of the social fabric is not predicated on "treat others as you want to be treated," but maximize profits. Certain capitalist societies (such as Denmark) do this in ways that are perceived as "more humane" than others, but capitalism is violent at its heart; it relies on enforced inequalities.

From there, your definitions of violence remain pretty narrow. Every time you turn on the light switch, it is underpinned by violence. Every time you drive your car, every time you interface with your electronics, every time you utilize the spoils of industrial civilization, you are utilizing the spoils of ecocide and capitalism. How many ecosystems were destroyed, how many animals killed, how many wage-slaves exploited in the production of those items? Again, this is a huge error in your assertion that "treat others like you want to be treated" is a currently workable/realistic construct.

Treat others like you want to be treated means ending extractive energy processes (mining, fracking, mountaintop removal, tar sands processing, etc.); it means ending the practices of dumping waste into the environment; it means ending war; it means ending predatory financial practices (see: capitalism). None of these are in the interest of any state institution.

As to societies without punishment, I don't think such a thing has ever existed. Whether it's social ostracization/isolation at one end of the spectrum or punishment by death or incarceration at the other end of the spectrum, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a single example of a society bereft of any "punishment" mechanism. That said, to argue for "non-violence" (which again, isn't a thing, as far as I'm concerned, even if you're an uber vegan) and something like incarceration or other common, state-sanctioned punishments is a pretty big contradiction in conceptualizations, imo.

However, that contradiction is frequently deployed in day-to-day life. During the 2001 FTAA summit in Quebec City, one newspaper famously reported that violence erupted when protesters began throwing tear gas canisters back at the lines of riot police. When the authorities are perceived to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, “violence” is often used to denote illegitimate use of force—anything that interrupts or escapes their control. This makes the term something of a floating signifier, since it is also understood to mean “harm or threat that violates consent.”

I would be wary of advocating non-violence while advocating state-sanctioned punishments, as it falls into the above trap, imo.

 

[dragonrider]

My definitions of 'violence' may indeed be narrow, but maybe your definition of capitalism is a bit narrow as well.
But i think this discussion is too interesting to lose ourselves in semantic issues.

The fundamental idea of modern capitalism (or at least to how some people define capitalism), was formulated by the 18th century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (who also coined the term 'the invisible hand'), who wrote in 'the wealth of nations' that, if you'd want to prevent famine, you'd rather let a bunch of people farm their own land and grow their own crops, than to coerce people into producing food. So in short, smiths' basic idea was that self-interest is a better motivator than coercion.

Ofcourse this idea of the 'homo-economicus' is seriously flawed in many ways. But let's for the sake of argument assume that capitalism relies on the notion of this homo-economicus.

I think that the mistake people make when they believe that capitalism means 'profit over everything else', is that this may be true from a subjective point of view, but if you look at society or mankind as a whole, then it is NOT rational.
Sure, someone can say:"i'm a good capitalist (maybe an american would even call it good patriotism) because i put my own profit over anything else".
But would WE, the rest of us, also be the rational homo-economicus that capitalism assumes us to be, if we would allow someone to get away with that?

For a society as a whole, it is definately not rational at all, to let a very small group of people have everything, and to leave some leftovers to the rest of the people.

But why couldn't a society allow the pursuit of self-interest to exist, but only up to the point where it starts to affect others? Why couldn't we simply say that one persons freedom must not go at the expense of another persons freedom. In other words: to allow each person the same amount of freedom?
That would be much more in line with Adam Smiths way of thinking.

So what i mean is: debating things like freedom makes sense. It allows for improvements to be made, wich i believe is possible and does occasionally happen.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

I'm more than familiar with the concepts you're presenting and I've critiqued them in numerous posts elsewhere on the forum. The "invisible hand" is one of the most incorrectly-cited concepts in economics despite the frequency with which it gets bandied about (look how quick you were to point to it ). In fact, Smith only mentions invisible hand once in the entirety of Wealth of Nations:

Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can ... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention ... By pursuing his own interests, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

Thus upon equal or nearly equal profits, every wholesale merchant naturally prefers the home–trade to the foreign trade of consumption, and the foreign trade of consumption to the carrying trade. In the home–trade his capital is never so long out of his sight as it frequently is in the foreign trade of consumption. He can know better the character and situation of the persons whom he trusts, and if he should happen to be deceived, he knows better the laws of the country from which he must seek redress. In the carrying trade, the capital of the merchant is, as it were, divided between two foreign countries, and no part of it is ever necessarily brought home, or placed under his own immediate view and command

Except, in the actual experienced reality of modern global capitalism, this is not at all what we see!! You couldn't even begin to make a coherent, evidence-based argument for that point. This is why when I state "capitalism" it should be understood as shorthand for "really-existing capitalism" which is the system we experience, not the theoretical possibilities, as those are little more than mental masturbations.

So then, when you get into the assertion that:

Sure, someone can say:"i'm a good capitalist (maybe an american would even call it good patriotism) because i put my own profit over anything else".
But would WE, the rest of us, also be the rational homo-economicus that capitalism assumes us to be, if we would allow someone to get away with that?

You assume that WE, the rest of the people somehow get a say in allowing someone to put money over everything else. Again, the ecocide of industrial capitalism indicates that we don't get to disallow this. The utilization of police and private military forces to crush opposition to corporate interests (i.e. pursuit of maximal profits) and steamroll public interests (i.e. ecological integrity, access to fundamental necessities of life, etc.) evidences that your claim doesn't hold water, imo.

And to reiterate, this is not a question of "are we rational?" This is a matter of "the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and is effectively bought and paid for by corporate interests". The US congress recently eliminated the clean streams act. The only reason for doing so is that they saw it as an impediment to the coal-mining industry. The act was aimed at preventing coal mining debris from being dumped into nearby streams. Even if that effects industry, it is CLEARLY not in the public interest to dump coal debris into water sources, nor is it remotely rational. This is just a minute taste of the effects of really-existing capitalism.

As to your question of why couldn't we just allow the pursuit of self-interest up to a point, there's literally mountains of evidence that the poorest, most vulnerable members of society end up bearing the brunt of such constructs (see LULUs for the tiniest taste of how this actually plays out in the real world). I've addressed so-called "conscious capitalism" elsewhere on the site, so excuse me, but I'm going to quote myself:

For me, theory loses validity when the circumstances it requires cannot manifest in the real world. Imo, capitalism cannot exist independently of so-called "crony capitalism" because of how it is structured. Regulating agencies or other protective barriers against capitalism 'degrading' into *crony* capitalism are nonsensical to me as, according to capitalist logic, they will inevitably wind up being 'for sale'. Therefore, (just as with trickle-down theories of economics) while someone may be able to write entire dissertations on why such theory is valid, in the real world, such theories are not viable as we have repeatedly observed their failure (due to simple mechanics that are, imo, readily apparent).

And frankly, the reason you can't have what you call "self-interest up to a point" is because once people accrue significant wealth/resources, they are able to throw their weight around (e.g. buying regulatory agencies, the incestuous relationship between government and industry, etc.) to insure that their self-interested actions can continue to manifest unchecked. This is the driving force behind the boom and bust cycles of modern economies as well as the neverending "corruption" scandals. This isn't theoretical, this is actively playing out in the real world every day.

 

[dragonrider]

What's very relevant here though, is that you seem to agree with me that the arguments that have been used to advertise trickle-down economics, or to shove other economic policies down our throat, are not consistent with reality.

That is an important fact. The idea of the homo-economicus has been the cornerstone of all kinds of policies, and it is an essential part of various political ideologies.

If the way in wich policies based on this concept are being implemented, consistently tends to be inconsistent with the very concept itself, then i would say that should be a powerfull argument against these policies.

About your objection against self-interest up to a point: wouldn't you say that once people have aquired so much wealth or power that it alters their bargaining position significantly, they would already have gone way beyond that 'point of balance'? I mean, would it be rational for people to accept others to become this powerfull?

You are right that 'the system' is very much rigged in favor of some people. But it is important to realise that these people do not own the system, nor are they in control of it. It's not that they aren't ambitious enough. It's just that the whole economic system is way too complex for anybody to fully control.
So it cán be changed and improved.

The fact that politicians have done very little about the power of wall-street or sillicon valey, is not that they are all in the pockets of these bankers and businesmen, though some of them are.
One of the problems is that the power of wall-street or sillicon valey can be weaponised in various ways. You can use the financial system to impose economic sanctions on a country, company or any group of people, for instance. So to tackle bankers is a bit like giving up the atomic bomb.

I think that if many americans would have to choose between 1-punishing corrupt bankers and giving up the atomic bomb, or 2-not punishing crooked bankers, but keeping the atomic bomb, they'd unfortunately choose to keep the weapon.
But that may change over time.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

What's very relevant here though, is that you seem to agree with me that the arguments that have been used to advertise trickle-down economics, or to shove other economic policies down our throat, are not consistent with reality.

Agreed, they're simply the hot air/empty claims that get spouted while the people with actual access to power/resources hold the rest of us at gunpoint via police/militaries. Just look at the "market discipline" the US has enforced on Latin/South America over the past 40+ years.

About your objection against self-interest up to a point: wouldn't you say that once people have aquired so much wealth or power that it alters their bargaining position significantly, they would already have gone way beyond that 'point of balance'? I mean, would it be rational for people to accept others to become this powerfull?

I have to admit, I have no clue where your presumption of agency (people "accepting" such power) comes from. Perhaps if we were imagining some point in history well before enow, I could understand engaging with such terms, although even then, I think the assertion is tenuous at best, but we're well past that. No one is in a position to disallow as the accumulation has already taken place (see again: really-existing capitalism).

As a semi-aside, the radical/labor press of the 1920's literally and explicitly called for the heads of the "captains of industry." They didn't accept others becoming as powerful as they had and were continuing to become, but there's a reason the US has a long and extremely bloody history associated with the labor movement. It was the result of people trying to refuse the acceptance you appear to be speaking of. We know how that history has played out to-date and, to me, it evidences that "acceptance" is not the issue. Especially when we examine the complicity of people acting against their own self interest in allowing others to accrue obscene wealth/power.

The way you get people to buy-in to a system that exploits them and doesn't truly benefit them or humans at large (e.g. capitalism) is to provide some sort of promise of wealth/personal benefit. This disputed Steinbeck quote illustrates the point quite nicely, I think:

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Now remember, even securing what you seem to consider to be "reasonable self interest" in the US was predicated on slavery and genocide. This is an inescapable and undeniable reality of capitalism. In fact, slavery and genocide were the mechanisms through which the starting capital for US (and plenty of other states) was secured. So you have to ask, "Reasonable self interest for whom?" And, if my reasonable self interest is predicated on wiping you out, how reasonable is that in the first place?

Now, back to incentivizing people to participating in systems that exploit/don't benefit them, we see the same thing with how race (whiteness and blackness) was historically constructed in the US. There, the question is, if you’re part of the ruling class in Virginia or New England, how do you convince a bunch of people, many of whom aren’t there voluntarily in the first place, to go along with your scheme to exploit them, when you’re way outnumbered by them and you’re right next to an entire continent full of people with a totally different social organization and labor system?

If you think about incentives and punishments - carrots and sticks - there are two carrots you can offer. One is land; European concepts of private land ownership joined with sketchy treaties, military conquests, and outright theft and squatting means that there is an enormous amount of land to offer to settlers. The colonial state offers cheap or free land to settlers who at home in Europe never could have dreamed of such space and resources, and uses that to buy their loyalty and complicity. And since a majority of indentured servants who are working towards that dream die before they finish their term of servitude, you get a lot of free labor out of them, too, without even having to pay up.

And the second carrot is a sense of superiority over black people, what W.E.B. Dubois called a “public and psychological wage,” a relative sense of social equality with their other “white” peers - unthinkable in aristocratic Europe - that provided some compensation for their economic exploitation.

So there is pretty considerable evidence that people will, in fact, contribute to systems that are not truly in their own self interest if they can be incentivized "just enough" and boy does that produce some fantastical horrors and atrocities, some of them essentially self-inflicted.

You are right that 'the system' is very much rigged in favor of some people. But it is important to realise that these people do not own the system, nor are they in control of it. It's not that they aren't ambitious enough. It's just that the whole economic system is way too complex for anybody to fully control.
So it cán be changed and improved.

This is a pretty tenuous assertion, imo, especially with regards to the actual effects/harm the financial system has/can have on the world. Not because people, in fact, have "full control," but rather because they have "enough control" combined with the incentive to prioritize profits. For a singular, minuscule example, look at the absurd mortgages and credit default swaps that played the starring role in the 2008 financial meltdown. A litany of bad actors, combined with a system that ultimately incentivized those bad actions for certain people generated enormous payouts for a minute population (followed by extreme corporate-welfare from the State, again realized/received by a tiny population that included numerous bad actors) while the vast majority of the populace was repeatedly shafted. And that's hardly an isolated event...

The fact that politicians have done very little about the power of wall-street or sillicon valey, is not that they are all in the pockets of these bankers and businesmen, though some of them are.

There's actually a panoply of evidence to dispute this, most fundamentally that election spending is the best predictor of victory, but I've run through this elsewhere on the site and don't really have time to go into it now. That article presents good starting place for evidence in that vein, and again, it's hardly an isolated analysis.

One of the problems is that the power of wall-street or sillicon valey can be weaponised in various ways. You can use the financial system to impose economic sanctions on a country, company or any group of people, for instance. So to tackle bankers is a bit like giving up the atomic bomb.

I think that if many americans would have to choose between 1-punishing corrupt bankers and giving up the atomic bomb, or 2-not punishing crooked bankers, but keeping the atomic bomb, they'd unfortunately choose to keep the weapon.
But that may change over time.

I agree wholeheartedly

 

[dragonrider]

The thing is: i think that the whole concept of 'fairnes' is a very powerfull meme, imprinted in us, biologically. And the argument of the rational, self-interested homo-economicus has been etched into our modern collective counsciousness.

It's a model used by most economists, as well as politicians.

So what i mean is: it is a very powerfull argument.
I have the impression that america has become a pretty polarised country, over the last couple of years. But IF people would ever be willing to come to some kind of agreement, and to reach out to 'the other side', the 'freedom up to a point' model is probably the best chance to ever come to some reasonable kind of deal. And this is because it basically says 'do not offer anybody a deal, that you would never be willing to accept yourself'.

This is such a common-sense aproach, that it would be very hard to disagree with for any party. And you can hardly violate the rule without outing yourself as someone unwilling to be reasonable. If you say "i want to take more than i would ever allow anybody else to have", you immediately discredit yourself as a reasonable negotioting partner.

So i mean, yes, at THIS moment, people aren't willing to make a fair deal, because of how polarised society has become. But if that where to change, the reasonable stance could convince people on the other side of the argument to also be reasonable. The best chance you'll ever get, to get sworn enemies to sign a peace treaty, is to show both sides that what the other side wants, isn't actually that unreasonable.

So that's why i think the model of Adam Smith can be used as an argument against ruthless capitalism. Because most of the people who embrace capitalism, already agree with the basic concepts. And you could use that, to show these people, that they are being unreasonable ACCORDING TO THEIR OWN DEEPLY HELD BELIEFS.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

The thing is: i think that the whole concept of 'fairnes' is a very powerfull meme, imprinted in us, biologically. And the argument of the rational, self-interested homo-economicus has been etched into our modern collective counsciousness.

I think that the "argument of the rational, self-interested homo-economicus" is a myth that has been perpetuated in order to maintain a particular balance of power; one that is incidentally, incredibly "unfair." It's not for nothing that it is, as you, yourself say, a

model used by most economists, as well as politicians.

History demonstrates the actions/intentions of these categories of actors quite clearly. I also find it interesting, having presented a number of historical contexts/examples that demonstrate exactly how these memes and myths have actually operated in the real world, that you are still focusing on the conceptual, abstracted from reality.

I have the impression that america has become a pretty polarised country, over the last couple of years. But IF people would ever be willing to come to some kind of agreement, and to reach out to 'the other side', the 'freedom up to a point' model is probably the best chance to ever come to some reasonable kind of deal. And this is because it basically says 'do not offer anybody a deal, that you would never be willing to accept yourself'.

Please see my above critique. The divide(s) that exist are not mere neighborly conflicts. This is not a case of "you scuffed my sneakers and won't apologize" these are cases of "you are killing the environment"..."you are incarcerating black and brown males at insanely disproportionate rates to generate a slave-labor force that is then used to create products for consumer markets as well as the military industrial complex"..."you are arguing that social safety nets are entitlements and poor people should die while giving out billions in corporate welfare via subsidies and bailouts"...and that's just to name a few of the divides.

When someone like Richard Spencer argues for a "Eurpoean ethno-state" you don't debate that person, you punch them in the face in self defense. These are not abstract concepts to be discussed. These philosophies have serious and malicious consequences that result in harm and generally target already vulnerable populations.

Would it be nice if people were willing to only offer deals they would accept themselves? Absolutely! But that doesn't match reality. Again, consider extractive energy and industrial manufacturing processes. Who would ever volunteer to live by a polluted water source or in the middle of a perpetual poison cloud? If we had the sort of arrangement you are proposing, industrial civilization would end, which would be great in many ways, but that's not going to be a voluntary process, not by a long shot.

This is such a common-sense aproach, that it would be very hard to disagree with for any party. And you can hardly violate the rule without outing yourself as someone unwilling to be reasonable. If you say "i want to take more than i would ever allow anybody else to have", you immediately discredit yourself as a reasonable negotioting partner.

You keep claiming it's common sense, and I would lump that into the same "appeal to sanity" that I was talking about earlier in this thread. That said, when you say "it would be very hard to disagree with for any party," you are fundamentally mistaken. Again, look at industrial processes, right now politicians from both parties are currently engaged in defending exactly the kind of actions you are claiming to be irrational. The reason they are defending such "irrational" approaches is precisely because they are adhering to the logic of really-existing capitalism, money over everything. The whole abstracted conceptual argument you appear to be making keeps falling flat on its face when it runs into this reality.

So that's why i think the model of Adam Smith can be used as an argument against ruthless capitalism. Because most of the people who embrace capitalism, already agree with the basic concepts. And you could use that, to show these people, that they are being unreasonable ACCORDING TO THEIR OWN DEEPLY HELD BELIEFS.

There is only really-existing-capitalism. The magical "do no harm" capitalism doesn't exist. The people you are talking about don't care about intellectual or ideological consistency, they care about money and power. Their actions demonstrate it. I've pointed to numerous examples, you keep claiming that abstractions somehow outweigh the reality of how these systems function. When you then take it to the extreme of painting these things as mere disagreements, it further obscures the direness of the situation.

Consider climate change. In the US, countless numbers of politicians claim to believe it's not real, or a hoax, or not man made, or not significant. They claim there is a debate among scientists, they claim all sorts of nonsense. None of these stances are in their own self-interest, until you examine the amounts of money and other benefits they are receiving from extractive energy corps to maintain those positions. There is no treaty to sign with them to help them see they are being unreasonable, and if there was, I'm certain the only way you could get any traction would be if you could pay them more than they are making by endorsing the industry that wants to maximize profits in the short term by ignoring climate change, even though doing so means that their long term profits will be essentially nonexistent. There's no rationality there, there's only money, and that's the harsh reality of capitalism.

 

[dragonrider]

You call my aproach abstract or theoretical. I would say that all common sense essentially IS abstract and theoretical. Or starts out with being that. And i believe that eventually common sense will prevail.

I don't believe that we will be living in a perfect world one day. But i do believe in progress, every now and then.
When i was a kid, there was this wall runnin through berlin. And people trying to cross it where being shot. Nowadays, berlin has become an almost perfectly normal european city.

All insanity is temporary. If there's a discrepancy between what people belief and the way the world realy is (including what it is like on an abstract level), it's not the truth that eventually will have to adjust.