MillardJMelnyk
No bio...
User ID: 3663
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
Close. I'm trying to sharpen my thinking, period -- book or not, discussions or not. The only quest I'm on and the only agenda I have is to understand -- especially the issues that have accosted my sons and are going to accost my grandchildren. They're inheriting a world that was fucked up both before and during our watch. Understanding what's really going on is prerequisite to doing something about it. And I'm doing everything I can.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
he's making moral judgements about owning things like "A preemptive right to universally deprive is obviously psychopathic".
Sorry, my friend, psychopathy has nothing to do with morality, except to moralizers. I'm not making "judgments" either, unless you construe researched findings as "judgments" -- but that would be on you, not me. I'm speaking strictly psychologically, simply, and generically: pathology of the psyche. The fact that a strong (and futile) attempt has been made to isolate "psychopathy" to an extreme end of the scale (it's a spectrum, not an is/isn't) so that the rest of us can feel cozy that "we're not like them" means nothing in the long run. A preemptive right to universally deprive is psychopathic because the framing and the motivations are delusional. Happy to discuss.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
PS. Just in case, it occurred to me that you might wonder, if it's the case that, "if all someone is interested in doing is dismissing my ideas or me as the ideator, then their 'evidence' and reasons and justifications don't amount to much for me," why I'd take the kind of time with your comment that I did. Simple. I don't admire what you were trying to accomplish with it, but I really admire the way you tried to do it. I've never seen that kind cleverness and creativity invested in an ad hom before. Honestly, it's quite the piece of work. You've got talent. So, it fascinated me. Taking that kind of time and care with it is just my way of showing my admiration. Sincerely. 😊
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
I have encountered this argument often before
Well, cool. You get it. But seriously? "often before" ? I haven't.
This isn't just "property is theft". It's "property is a figment of paranoid minds". You've encountered that? Where, dude? Let me at it! 😁
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
lol, and now it's all about me? Why is it all about me? Because it's all about ego in the minds of people who get derailed by my "moral implications", "pejorative language", etc., and jettison the subject to focus on personal issues which, your comment being a good example, are projected onto me without the slightest intention of validating them with me.
Everything you said from, "This response is a useful demonstration of how you respond..." to "... while inviting others to come up with new definitions of old concepts," is inaccurate and misrepresentative -- as well as constituting a strawman you're not using to poke holes in what I said but derail focus from the topic onto my person and character. Blatant ad hom.
In contrast to your approach here -- characterize a person you've never met in vague, hypothetical terms instead of addressing the specifics you only allude to -- I'm happy to take criticism on specifics. And I will, of course, criticize the criticism where it falls short and misses the mark. But there has been very little of that here in the comments. Most of them have boiled down to reciting status quo dogmas (which I've explained for what they are), straw-manning (which I've addressed specifically), and illogical, fallacious claims about what I supposedly said but never said (which I've addressed specifically).
I'll give you mega points for slick presentation, though.
It's on you to present examples of what you're alleging so that we can talk about them. I don't see any evidence that you're interested in that so far, which is why I think you've chosen a broad, unspecific brush to paint/characterize me in an unfavorable light. But I invite you to get real.
I'd like to ask, specifically: do you think all "pejorative language" is illicit? Did you pay any attention to what my "pejorative language" was directed at? If so, did I direct it towards people or towards vile ideas, baseless and antagonistic claims, and general bullshittery? Please quote where I put someone down or impugned them personally. Or is it, in your mind, that if a person calls your idea stupid or silly or bullshit, they have called you stupid or silly or bullshit? Just wondering if that any of this has even occurred to you, because I've met oodles and oodles of people who simply cannot distinguish the two. They never like me very much. I take it as a compliment.
You have also provided additional insights into your mindset and character.
Would you allow me to infer your mindset and character from your comment? I could. I don't want to. I'd rather just ask, like I've been doing here.
Assuming you are honest and that posting here is not a hobby, then posting here is indicative of some kind of cause or other less-trivial, more serious purpose. This supports a bias towards motivated reasoning and engagement.
False. Mere seriousness does not imply bias or motivated reasoning in the sense you seem to mean. Just so that you know, I am anti-ideological. I'm not motivated by an ideology. I'm motivated by wanting to understand what's really going on and love for what I'll find out, because I'm convinced after 70 years of life that nothing which isn't lovable actually exists.
This is consistent with your response to other people, suggesting a combative personality.
This is really quite good. You've done some good thinking as far as assembling an argument. Sadly, you've premised your psychoanalysis on ignorance, imagination, and surmise without having done the least little thing to ascertain facts.
Bottom line -- aside from facticity, accuracy, representativeness and the rest, there are two very basic and easily seen movements that people make when presented with a topic: either they move towards engagement or they move away from it towards dismissal. It's got nothing to do with whether we agree or disagree. In one way, it really doesn't matter what a person says, ultimately, if their sole intention is to successfully dismiss a topic. Ad hom and pretended psychoanalysis are just two of the more repugnant ways to justify dismissing what a person has said and/or dismissing them. Personally, if all someone is interested in doing is dismissing my ideas or me as the ideator, then their "evidence" and reasons and justifications don't amount to much for me. I know what I've done, I know how I got here, I know what I've got, I know how I've tested it and how it's fared. You literally know none of that except what I might have mentioned here (or elsewhere, if you went looking). So, little-to-none is as much merit as your opinions here warrant, being totally or practically factually baseless. But I'm not dismissing you (just in case you were poised to leap there.) I'm totally down to engage on specifics. Let's discuss.
You need to think it through more carefully. I have a nice little USB-powered fan that I use in the afternoons here in central Mexico. Am I depriving you of that fan? Do you right here and now consider yourself deprived? If you have something I don't want, have you deprived me by making clear you won't let me near it?
There are 3 very different things at play here: 1) actual deprivation; 2) potential deprivation; and 3) the actual right to deprive potentially everyone else in the world of your property. Conflate them at your peril, lol.
I've been talking exclusively about #3, and only #3.
Actual deprivation requires things: 1) a deprivable; 2) a desire to possess on the part of a non-owner; 3) the owners exercise of their deprivation right.
Not all a person owns is a deprivable. A desirable you own can only be deprivable if you have the wherewithal to actually deprive others of it. Otherwise, ownership is legal right that you're incapable of exercising, so it's practically impotent. Companies trying to enforce copyrights against fair use know exactly what I'm talking about.
Merely having the legal right to deprive doesn't actually deprive anyone. An owner has that right, but might offer their property for free public use. Lots of restaurants have created menu items specifically to offer to people who have no means to pay.
Rights are, by nature and definition, purely retroactive. They have no prevention potential. Unless you actively prevent or resist interlopers, your ownership/right to deprive does diddly to keep your property safe. The only meaningful effect your right has on anyone is on people who respect your right -- which, guess what, means they're not the ones you need to prevent/protect against. Rights are 100% justificatory. Their only practical use is to justify actions that an owners takes in protection of property. The actions taken are the only preventative. (Where's a cop when you need one, lol?)
Hopefully that helps.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
this system of "psychopathy with a makeover" that makes sense to "paranoid" people "who don't understand the concept of sharing" keeps leading to stable societies with people leading prosperous lives, when instability and poverty has been the norm for most lives anywhere,
So you're implying that these stable societies (stable for whom, exactly -- the precariat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat) aren't comprised of a majority of people who experience incessant instability and poverty? Or do you simply not consider people stuck in poverty to be people?
support a system that benefit more people in general
More than what? The USA benefits more people on average than which countries? Compared to which periods in history?
Trick questions, actually, because there's a fundamental flaw in your argument no matter how you'd answer them: better-than-worse does not substitute for as-good-as-better. Those are two mutually exclusive orientations. Yours is the former. No matter how much better than others an example might be, it says nothing about how good it realistically could be. When brought up as a barrier to improvement, better-than-worse is perverse. Confucius points this out in terms of intelligence: If you're always the smartest person in the room, you keep choosing the wrong room.
And that doesn't even touch on a much more important aspect which most people are functionally oblivious to. I'll pose it with a question: given all you know about this world, compared to what you'd really like the world to be, is this one the world you want?
Most people have become so tacitly cynical, it simply doesn't occur to them that what they want even matters anymore.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
So kill them? That's what you mean, right?
LMAO! No dude. That occurred to you, not me. I see nothing in what I said that could be reasonably construed that way. On the contrary, I clearly said, "In other words, we need to stop approaching problems inhumanly, i.e., psychopathically." And given that you didn't attribute a less psychopathic "solution" to me, I've got to take it as the only one that occurred to you. So, why are you asking me?
Because people have tried this, and it didn't become "clear" what remained to be done except continue killing until you run out of people to steal from, limp on in totalitarian misery and eventually give up.
Yes, they tried that. But that is not this, not remotely. Agreed. It's psychotic.
I said nothing about communism. Again, that occurred to you. We're agreed on communism. It shares the same fatal flaw as do all the -isms.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
Rationing doesn't solve the Economic Calculation Problem.
No one here mentioned rationing.
You'd need to explain how the Economic Calculation Problem has any relevance in a situation where we'd adopted an alternative to preemptive principled deprivation for me to make sense of how it relates here. The Economic Calculation Problem is a systemic problem precisely because ownership is defined as preemptive principled deprivation, and it's only a problem to the degree that efficiency is the objective, which implies that scarcity is assumed. The relevance of efficiency in a system is inversely proportional to the presence of abundance, e.g., a billionaire burning a Benny just cuz they can. It's why American car manufacturers got away with such crude engineering that resulted in such atrocious gas mileage for such a long time: gas was cheap.
No one here has a magic wand, lol.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
If I have the legal right to deprive access to a thing, then I am that things overlord. I have great power and authority over that thing. By your own definition we are overlords over our property, why would we not assume that perspective?
OK. I don't take that perspective because lording itself disgusts me, regardless of who does it, and people who lord it over anything/anyone disgust me. I'm not aware that I said anything which could be construed as telling you not to assume that perspective. Why are you attracted to that perspecive?
You are conflating talking about sharing with sharing. No explaination as to why sharing is not complicated. Why is it not complicated?
Well, no. Read it that way if you prefer. I'm talking about talking about sharing in the context of actually sharing. Talking about it is part of doing it. Apparently, you've found sharing to be complicated? I haven't. "Why is it not complicated?" strikes me as an odd question. My son at 2-y-o would ask me, "What's that, daddy?" all the time. I'd tell him, and then he'd stump me. I distinctly remember once, driving, he pointed to a dog and asked, "What's that, daddy?"
"That's a dog, buddy."
"Why?"
Got me every time lol.
Im not in it with you, so how could we be in it together? Im not seeking the best outcome for everyone - I want the best outcome for me and people I know and like. If I am forced to share with you I will take advantage of you as much as I can. What is your plan for sharing with people like me?
Good to know. How would I share with you or someone like you? As best I could without letting your egocentrism negatively affect the people I love and care about. Negatively impact me or mine to any serious degree, and I'll just shut you down.
You and I understand sex in radically different ways. You, apparently, consider it transactional. I don't. But as far as that goes, here's where I am on sex and "consent": consent favors rapists, which is obvious if you've ever followed a rape case through the courts. It's a far cry from permission. Just try it on: what if the razor's edge was shifted to whether you obtained explicit, revokable permission to have sex with someone? When it comes to "consensual" sex, who would that raise of the bar harm? When it comes to rape, who would it favor? I see no downside, only upside. So, why isn't permission the bar we set? And why does no one even talk about this?
Well, you've galloped way off beyond the post. A big part of what I do is uncover and explicitly examine assumptions*, which is where the real "devil" is (not in the details, lol.) I came asking for brainstorming on alternatives to ownership as preemptive principled deprivation. I've gotten mostly nothing on that, and your response is one example. But sure, we can talk about what a world without legal mechanism to justify deprivation. I'd love to. Are you willing to make your assumptions explicit and put them on the table for scrutiny? I am. To be clear on what I mean by "assumptions", here are the assumptions I see in your comment:
- That there is a "your world" at all.
- That in "your world" we've done away with ownership.
- That you and I mean the same thing by "ownership".
- That in a world where ownership has been abolished, there will still be factories and factory workers.
- That in a world where ownership has been abolished, there will still be work as we currently understand it. (You should read Bob Black's awesome little book, The Abolition of Work to stretch your mind a bit, if you haven't already read it.)
Nice touch bringing up sanitation/waste handling. Yeah, it's hard to imagine people who would love doing that enough so that they never "work" a day in their lives, lol. That's a question, maybe even a problem, but it's certainly not a show-stopper. Nor does it justify jumping ship, let alone sinking it. 😁
Your move. You're welcome to list the assumptions I'm making. I'll address them. Or other.
and what isn't coming from ChatGPT seems to be mostly snarky, condescending, and belligerent.
Amadan, I asked for examples. Please provide them. Otherwise, you're operating on undisclosed, private definitions of "belligerent" and "condescending" and "snarky". Not fair.
Well, no, ownership =/= belonging, and much of what you've said rests on that conflation.
Besides, your entire comment misses the point. The point here is to explore alternatives. Some people here are adamant that no alternatives exist. Well, on what honest, serious, studied basis does that belief rest? Most people have never once even considered the possibility. Most aren't even aware that they could consider the possibility or that there are any possibilities worth considering. The very prospect strikes them as strange. And yet, without more than a cursory glance at the issue, having never seriously thought it through in any depth, they launch into proving impossibility, nonviability, etc. It's pretty wild.
There you go, I have articulated a positive vision of property and ownership. Now your turn. I'm as tired of everyone else on this forum of how you keep dancing around what you actually believe should happen, rather than just acting negative about a concept that most people actually see the benefits of.
Well, pointing out the important flaws in the criticisms tossed at me -- most of which were based on misreads and lack of clear thinking -- is not the same as "dancing around what you actually believe should happen". I've presented a fatal problem with ownership, which in some ways you've echoed in the analogy of ideal family. Countering with, "Well, don't raise problems until you've got a solution!" is just silly. Not saying that's what you're doing (although it could be), but that's been a ball I've fielded over and over. Besides, where is it written that I own anyone a solution at all? Why not look at the problem together and talk about how to solve it together? Why frame this as an argument at all? I didn't frame it as an argument.
What I really think should happen (it's not a "belief") is that we should look at the fact that we've predicated ownership as preemptive principled deprivation. Look at it. Talk about it. Consider it. Explore it. Look for alternatives. Don't just start arguing and defending the status quo right off the bat. But if you conflate ownership with attachment ("It's mine!", belonging) or even mere physical possession, we can't even discuss whether preemptive principled deprivation is, in fact, a problem like I say it is. First, we need to fix the conflation and make necessary distinctions. Ultimately, though, there's no real discussion to be had with someone who enters it with their mind already made up. I'd be glad to talk to you about this stuff if you're mind is open. I don't see much openness in what you've said so far, though.
Actually, my approach turns out to be very conducive to brainstorming alternatives, because there is no such discussion possible with people entrapped and entangled by dogmatic ideas that have never been intelligently assessed, let alone established, when they're committed, regardless, to defending them just because the ideas have "always been" there and they're the only things they know. The same kind of thing happens when I discuss authority. I manage to glean good stuff amidst the ordinance buzzing and blowing up all around my head, and in the process I do make connections. It's worth it.
To your question on family, first, we need to make distinctions that are pretty cut and dry, but almost no one makes them. Ownership is not possession or belonging or any other form of attachment. Belonging does not constitute ownership -- in fact, it's not even relevant. Ownership is a legal right and a legal status as one holding that right. If I satisfy the legal requirements to acquire the right to own something, then it's legally mine and I'm its owner. It's got no necessary or meaningful connection to any other form of attachment. "You belong to me" can mean anything from "You're mine to love, protect, and cherish," to, "No one else can have you," but "I own you," is on an whole different level of its own. And none of those constitutes legal ownership.
I admire the hell out of Bucky and Fresco, love those guys, but they missed the true nature of the problem. My lesson on this was in the 80s, working in the "Information Systems" department for the largest HMO in the Puget Sound area. This was during the period where CIOs first started to emerge in corporations. I'd gotten into IT in large part so that I could spend my time solving information problems ("data processing" back then). I was soooo worn out dealing with the narcissistic drama of company politics, I just wanted no more to do with people, lol. After a short while, I realized that none of the information problems were the problem. They were relatively easy. The real problems were people problems. My department would get tasked to build systems whose very existence boiled down to workarounds to compensate for departments that refused to communicate with each other and share their data. It was so bad that the key guy in accounting showed me the Excel spreadsheet he managed by hand to bring together all the information needed for the company's financials. The HMO employed around 9,000 staff, had over 450,000 enrollees, and a budget of over half a billion at the time. The whole company was dependent on this one spreadsheet maintained by one guy on his PC because its systems wouldn't talk to each other. The systems wouldn't talk because the system owners were so territorial, it wasn't possible to get them to talk so that we could figure out a way to put Humpty back together. The problem lay in the people and their mentalities, not in the information systems. Likewise "resource management". You can't fix mental brokenness by new ways of manipulating the stuff that we fight over because we're broken and never learned to behave as mature adults.
There is a fundamental perverseness in predicating our relationships to desirables on a carte blanche "right" to deprive them from every single person on the face of Earth -- especially at the point when immediate, credible potential for the desirables to benefit them exists, but there's no immediate, credible threat from any of them. Prioritizing potential future "security" at the cost of concrete present harm is perverse. Doing so without any facts or evidence that it's remotely relevant or necessary is psychotic. I'm quite sure, at this point, that its a basic form of paranoia that's been amped to the extreme. If I own a factory that produces beneficial goods for my community and an asshole organizes a bunch of thugs and starts raiding my warehouse, it makes all kinds of sense to hire security and repel them. "Ownership" doesn't even factor into it. But if I then start treating my own customers as potential thugs and thieves, I've crossed a line. Or let's say I've lived my whole life in a town, and for generations our family has run the town shop and never locked the door, there's never been a theft, not once -- because people know they can come to us when they're in need and we'll give them what they need whether they can pay for it or not. But then I start locking the door and putting iron grates over all the windows. Why? Whatever the reason, it's paranoid. It's psychotic in the sense that I have broken not only from reality, but I've broken from normal, healthy concern for my alignment to reality. I've prioritized abstract potential for harm to override all question whether any real potential exists. I don't care -- I'm going to take steps to ensure that no harm will befall me whether there's any basis for it in fact or not. And if my paranoia continues, it's likely to spread, as paranoia is wont to do. Eventually it will be a town where everyone locks their doors and sees potential thieves in everyone else. Then actual thefts will start and continue, "proving" that the paranoia was in fact prescience -- "See? I KNEW it!" -- because now there's no more trust and support for anyone when they fall on hard times, so stealing is their only recourse.
Ownership takes that fear of potential theft, generalizes it, and petrifies it into a principle with no regard to the actualities at play. Actually, in utter disregard of all actualities that might be at play. It renders everyone into a potential thief -- and there isn't even an "until proven otherwise", because the ownership perspective has no interest in that question. Its purpose is to make the question of what's actually going on irrelevant. We establish ownership to gain a sense of security without any need to deal with reality. It completely disregards facts and burdens reality with its evidentially, factually baseless preemptive defensiveness by endowing "owners" with the carte blanche to deprive and be held harmless for enforcing their deprivation. Whether it makes sense or not is completely immaterial.
Harry Frankfurt established bullshit as a valid phenomenon worthy of academic study. He differentiates bullshit from lying in that a liar knows the truth and tries to hide/misrepresent it, while a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all—only about the effect of their words. Bullshitters disregard truth, whereas liars regard it and distort it. So, Frankfurt concludes, "... bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
In this way of looking at it, it's obvious that ownership, as we've long conceived it, is bullshit.
Hierarchies are not necessary results of attachment to desirables.
Re the boys and the stick, you've touched on the core problem: adults who still think and behave like children. Those boys can learn constructive ways to deal with that situation. Failing that, they end up as adults obsessed with this toxic, noxious thing they call "power" and this delusion of the merit and benefits of "riches".
I raised six sons as a single dad. I know all about these things, lol. Teachable moment, no? Sharing, handling disappointment, managing emotions, coping, tolerating lack, recognizing and appreciating benefits/detriments to others, not just our own, etc. And something that few adults seem to know how to do: recognize that behind the article or situation we've equated with what we want lies a desire that might well be satisfied another way or with something else that we can acquire or realize. I call it "faith". But in a nutshell: growing up, maturing. That's not really a problem. Billions of parents help their children toward it, some better and some worse than others.
The real problem is when grown adults persist in infantilism. Infantilism isn't mere immaturity -- it's the demand that others compensate for one's own commitment to persist in immaturity. The immaturity is a problem, of course -- but the commitment to persist in it and the demand that others compensate are the far greater problems. Infantilism expresses in codependence: the conviction of our own incapability/incapacity with no intention of changing it coupled with our demand that others do for us. Codependence isn't yet recognized as the crux of pretty much every major incalcitrant problem that adults have with each other, even though you won't find a major problem where codependence isn't right down at the root and removing it would not solve the problem. Mediators and arbiters and diplomats can tell you all about it. They rarely have a problem figuring out solutions to the issues. The problem is always the infantilism of the adversaries whose codependence frames the problems in ways that are resistant to solution -- which is why they ended up needing authorities and peacemakers in the first place. And here's a related angle: after almost 50 years of research, participation, and study on cultism, I'm very confident that we can say that the only people who get entrapped in cults are codependent people. Kids born and raised in cults are groomed from birth into codependence and cult loyalty. "Civilization" itself, stripped of its BS, amounts to a grand cult of codependence. "Leaders" are every bit as codependent as "followers" -- in some crucial ways, more so. And yet, people in general staunchly insist that the real problems lie "out there" in the mechanics of how we're going to deal with resources and property. Naw. First we gotta deal with that massive, paranoid elephant in the room.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
Kinda sorta but not. They didn't bring preemptive principled deprivation into question. A preemptive right to universally deprive is obviously psychopathic: carte blanche to prevent others from the benefit of your property even when it would be easy to allow them to benefit, even when preventing them is extremely destructive, even when inflicting suffering on them is your whole point, even if the suffering is heinous. Sorry, your comment doesn't even touch on the right to deprive. It's all about how deprivation is necessary and unavoidable.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
Only if you've stopped stealing from other people.
LOL, Strawman City here, looks like -- and in Strawman City, everything you say is true by definition. Great! The only problem is that nothing that happens in Strawman City affects anyone but you, cuz you're the only one there. Sorry, just too many baseless assumptions and leaps of illogic for me to engage much. No, physical possession is not theft. No, physical possession does not entail deprivation. No, "paranoid", "not sharing", and "psychopathy" have zip-all to do with morality. No, I'm not engaging in a hobby. Before trying to construct a polemical trap, make sure you've got facts to work with. But speaking of ironies and hypocrisies, what about the fact that you know squat about me but pretend to know?
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
It's "more complicated" if you unconsciously assume the perspective of an overlord responsible to make sure it works. If you're just one of the guys talking how you're going to divvy it up, naw -- not complicated at all. Plus, you're all in it together seeking the best outcome for everyone involved, so the entire proposition is radically different. I'd love to hear alternatives to principled preemptive deprivation, too.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
So what is your solution to the paranoid who don't understand the concept of sharing?
Well, first off, we'd need to recognize we're talking about people, not symptoms of problems to be solved. In other words, we need to stop approaching problems inhumanly, i.e., psychopathically. Second, 5-year-olds can learn to share, no biggie. Third, we need to stop idolizing the most paranoid, twisted, mind-fucked of all: the "rich and powerful" -- from town bosses to the pinnacle of the elitist parasite class. This stage is called "clear the smoke". Once we've done that, it's going to be a lot clearer what actually remains to be done and what we need to do. But, I suspect, once we've got the ball rolling, it's gonna do what it's gonna do. The only thing we absolutely need so as to be sure it will be good is unflinching honesty.
There are many kinds of attachment. It's normal and natural to develop attachments to things, places, ideas, etc. Children are much less than 2-y-o when they first start attaching to objects, even before they can say, "Mine!" And for the most part, early attachment isn't so much to the thing itself, but to the activity they were engaged in with the thing. Without the thing they can't do the activity. Direct attachment to objects comes a bit later, and you can see it in their eyes and in the fact that they'll hug the thing. Not all forms of attachment are the same, and none of them constitute ownership -- because ownership is a legal right and a legal status that has little to nothing to do with attachment or lack of it.
So, nothing stops us from characterizing attachment as "ownership", but that's just a way of talking about it which, strictly speaking, misrepresents the attachment.
Again, I'll caution you like I've mentioned a few times elsewhere, you can't base confident claims on statistically negligible data samples. 10 - 15K years of authoritarian supremacism and the practice of "ownership" does not define a species that's been extant for at least 300 - 400K years (and now some are suggesting far longer than that,) nor a genus that consensus says has been around for a few million. I'm not sure what, "Scoping in the entire homo genus to talk about problems unique to the last few thousand years seems bonkers," means, and I'm not sure what I've said implies that, whatever it means, but I am sure that you can't cast claims across millions of years of evolution that you've gleaned from looking at just the last few thousand. I bring that up in response to the argument form that we've "always" done it that way (ignoring that thousands of years don't constitute "always") so there's no way, no how that we could diverge radically from what we've "always done". And that's not even to touch on the fact that all but a minuscule few of human beings have lived those few thousand years in distress, fear, oppression, and severe lack. Generational trauma is now recognized by many. What kind of millennial trauma has resulted from the evils of civilization? So, besides being an extremely small sample, it's also heavily tainted. We've got no clue what wild, free, mobile humanity was like. We did a couple hundred years ago, but "nomadic peoples" were viewed with disdain and bias as "uncivilized", so despite what was done to observe them externally, little was done to understand them. For the most part, Euro-Americans were only interested in what they could extort and, eventually, how to get rid of them.
There is no burden of proof here, because I've made no argument. Just food for thought, a super-brief orientation to my perspective, and an invitation to explore. You're treating that as an argument, though. It's not.
I was a Christian for 22 years and have deeply studied the thinking both during that time and in the 30+ years since. No supremacist, authoritarian religion -- Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Mormonism, and plenty besides -- has any hope of improving things, because supremacism and authoritarianism are inherent to the deprivational approach, and those operations would cease to exist as religions if supremacism and authoritarianism were eliminated from them.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
I'm more interested in seeing how people deal with it (or avoid dealing with it, as the case may be). But let's try a collaboration. When I look for alternatives, I go for the jugular and think of as opposite as I can imagine. What's the opposite of deprivation?
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
That piece of work is now 10 years old. I've changed much since then. Much more depth and far more confidence (which some take as belligerence!) You can imagine what it's taken for a guy who used to doubt his own intentions because others didn't fully validate them to tackle these things single-handed aside from some friendly "I get ya bro!" support. In the early days I was afraid I was headed towards losing my sanity, but when everything you see and understand diverges from the mainstream, and the mainstream has no sensible explanations, ya just gotta follow that little bouncy bunny tail of truth that no one you know of has ever refuted. So, yeah, I've still got oodles of work ahead of me. Working on my book, now: Law Itself Is the Violation. Side project: Truth and the Dishonesties of Belief. Lots more where they came from. I only wish I had the stamina and energy I did 20 years ago...
You're right on to see I'm coming from a place of love -- but it's not what you might think. It's not a moral or religious impetus, but my growing, evidenced conviction that the psychology of trust, love, mutualism, communality, cooperation, etc., are fundamental to our wiring, the result of millions of years of Homo evolutionary survival, and that virtually all the ideas we've had about "human nature" have been sourced from abused, traumatized, stress-damaged, cultified human nature, not human nature as it is prior to being compromised. If the only specimens you ever examine have lived lifetimes in sewage-fouled waters, you're gonna come to the conclusion that the whole species stinks, even that it's part of their "nature". Big mistake.
In fact, I don't promote "universal love" itself. And true, there are important variations in different people's experiences and expressions of love -- but it's about as significant, I'd say, as the fact that there are many flavors of ice cream -- not so different that we'd make the mistake of saying that the strawberry kind isn't ice cream merely because we grew up eating the chocolate kind. Our psychological similarities outweigh our significant differences by far.
I promote unapologetic, blunt, uncompromising honesty. Because of how we're wired, the only way to avoid love is to lie, deceive, delude and self-delude. Simply by committing to unflinching honesty, especially the kind and to the degree that scares us, creates feedback loops that inexorably tend towards recognition, familiarity, understanding, rapport, sympathy, empathy, and finally, love. There is only one response, ultimately, to seeing another person as they truly are in all the clarity of their preciousness, and that's to love them -- not really any different than beholding a masterpiece of art that really gets to us, resulting in a lifelong attachment to it and appreciation of it in the deepest sense of that word. As a result, I see both lies and bullshit (ala Harry Frankfurt) as the prime enemies of humanity, and I have a special interest and passion in obliterating them.
How does universal love replace our existing system? Emergently, stigmergically, through interpersonal attachment, person-to-person, along with enough intelligence to realize that human affairs that reach beyond the scope of our personal limits of awareness, attention, and empathy must be facilitated in ways that support and enable and align with the patterns of our ground-level, heart-to-heart humanness. What we have right now are antagonistic, adversarial systems designed to exploit our humanness. Short answer: honesty will blow the purple haze away and, seeing what's actually there and how it actually works, our humanness will ensure we separate wheat from chaff and find ways to properly, beneficially share the wheat.
You're right on about rejecting capitalism. I've actually come to reject -isms per se, because they're abstractions -- as are laws and moral codes and religious norms/commands, along with every other rules-based construct. We simply do not live on that abstract level -- not authentically, at least -- and imposing those abstractions on us is life-threatening, especially emotionally and motivationally. Huge psychological damage across the board and, in turn, relational damage.
Thanks for expressing your appreciation! I rarely get that. I'd love to engage further!
Interesting on that comic! I've dug for an explanation of where it all went wrong and came up empty, until several months ago -- an eventual result, as I can see now, of reading Graeber/Wengrow's book The Dawn of Everything a couple of years ago. What if the authoritarian supremacism which is foundational to everything we've ever called "civilization" turns out to be the simple, rather mundane result of a kind of severe cabin fever induced by taking wild, free humans built to roam and explore and imprisoning them in relatively cramped, stationary, bounded spaces under the "rule" of despots and their laws? I know it was making me crazy, at least. That's why I left the States for a little cabin on a hillside in central Mexico. I saw a video of Roald Dahl today, talking about writing. He writes in a little hut out back. Says he hasn't swept the floor for probably the last five years, and that was only because critters got in and pooped everywhere, LOL! Goes in, settles in, and 4-5 hours later emerges again, having been lost to the world. Yeah, Roald and me da same -- except I do sweep more than just every five years. 😁
MillardJMelnyk
5d ago
I'm not condescending to anyone, not intentionally at least. Nor belligerent. If someone talks like they know when they couldn't possibly know -- like making things up as they go along and presenting them as fact, aka bullshit, I'm frank about calling it out for what it is. Please give me a couple of specific examples that you consider to be such. I can't stop what I don't know I'm doing -- or meet expectations based on mistaken impressions of what I'm doing. I'm direct, explicit, and honest. Does that come across as condescending and belligerent to you?
MillardJMelnyk
5d ago
Yes, but don't make the silly error of thinking that one or many failures establish "impossibility". The very things we pride ourselves on now, especially science and tech wise, were at some time considered by the majority or even universally as "impossible", and most of them as "ridiculous". Besides, have you every tried to relate to a Puritan? Alternatives to ownership will never work if implemented by supremacists. The first requirement is peerness -- the commitment to deal with each other on level standing, the simplest, most basic form of fairness and mutual respect I can think of.
Included, but way beyond mere sharing. Sharing at a minimum.
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