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What if our fundamentals are exactly backwards?
New to The Motte, looking for constructive, critical discussion.
Here's an example of what I mean by a "fundamental":
Every economic system that has seemed credible to most people since the dawn of civilization has revolved around the legal establishment and safeguarding of property through the concept of ownership.
But what is ownership? I have my own ideas, but I asked ChatGPT and was surprised that it pretty much hit the nail on the head: the definitional characteristic of ownership is the legal right to deprive others.
This has been such a consistently universal view that very few people question it. Even fewer have thought through a cogent alternative. Most people go slack-jawed at the suggestion that an alternative is possible.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership:
Anyone want to brainstorm a viable alternative to "ownership"?
/images/17459352527399495.webp
Circling back around because I do enjoy a little bit of what are essentially economic thought experiments. In your world where we do away with ownership what is the model of production for semi-complex goods? Presumably we'd still have like pencils and paper in the world you envision. Who is working in the pencil factory and why? Who is working with sanitation and ensuring human waste is properly processed, the hands on parts of the job in particular?
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:
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.
Speaking of work, what is/was your line of work? It may just be an engineers mindset but when I hear a critique of some fundamental part or tool I'm using I have two concerns.
Part 2 is pretty important because if no alternative is actually better than the tool itself then it makes step 1 pointless. If there is not an actual alternative to ownership then why should I care about your critique of it? It's like putting forward a critique of how much trouble it causes that humans must excrete waste. You can say tons of bad things about our need to excrete waste, it smells, we must do it at inopportune times and it's processing requires much effort. But as this practice cannot be eliminated we must make peace with it and the infrastructure and sewers must be built, damn the cost.
Ownership means people must be deprived of some things. It's not alone in that downside. The need to breathe oxygen and inability to survive at extreme levels of pressure deprive every human of a safe tour of the Titanic wreckage. As humans being deprived of things is just something we have to accept unless we can find a better alternative. We will probably never overcome deprivation on our ability to walk on the surface of the sun, whatever one might call the surface of a giant nuclear explosion.
I think a lot of the frustration you're seeing in response here is that the ball seems to be in your court on this topic but you refuse to acknowledge that and instead insist that the ball is in our court. You're proposing some pretty radical interpretations of society and then refusing to elaborate in anything but vagueness.
I'm perfectly willing to accept your definition of ownership for sake of conversation. It's just a word. If we come to somewhere I don't think you're using it in a consistent way or trying to garner strength from a connotation ownership has that isn't present in your definition I'll let it be known that we differ.
Sure, this is a pretty important thing. If you're proposing we collapse all of society and return to monkey or whatever I'd like to say straight up that I have no interest in giving up modern conveniences. I think society as a whole is pretty great and produces many wonders. If this is what you are proposing it would save us all a lot of time if you came out and said it. Then you could defend that position and maybe say something interesting. But it's pretty unsatisfying to have to guess at what you're even talking about.
I would greatly prefer you to list these. That I don't actually know what assumptions you're making is the problem here. You seem to think it's some kind of virtue that you're minimally engaging. It's not. It makes discussion practically impossible. The totality of what I know about your position is that you believe ownership to be unjust and that now that you also think work is bad.
Just read it. just seems like more unworkable fancy. His view on pre-industrial society is rose tinted and his proposal for an alternative, which I'll at least credit him with putting forth, is pure fantasy. I understand it's satisfying to say you don't like having to work for a living and this kind of thing can feel cathartic to imagine, ideally with friends while passing around a joint in your early twenties, but it's just nonsense. No, we are not going to be able to spontaneously organize society such that the waste gets handled joyously by small children by awarding them medals for doing a good job. No, we are not going to leave it up to people's whims to accomplish necessary jobs like providing us with food or maintaining our buildings and infrastructure. No, war will not be abolished because of this slick new idea where we all just chill out, war over resources is older than humanity, the monkeys and apes do it.
As it was once put
Beyond even the unfeasibility of his solutions I find something spiritually dismal about them. This yearning for a dead past and uninterest in further progress. I find it frankly pathetic. It is the attitude of a stoner with arrested development. A society of Bob Blacks would never explore the stars, wouldn't not have sent a contingent to the moon, would not have even ever come down from the trees. I welcome him and those who think like him to find their fellows and move into some still remaining stretch of wilderness and live life as they wish.
I'm retired, full-time research, theory, and writing since 2009, formerly 50/50 residential construction and corporate I.T. (consultant, Boeing, Group Health Cooperative, King County Metro (WA), Dynacraft, and others). Lifelong social scientist (philosophy, religion, education, economics, politics). I fly very, very high.
I agree, things like relative cost/benefit, outcomes, etc., are crucial. The problem is that we're in no position to determine any of that intelligently until we've actually studied an alternative experimentally. To do that requires a good job of understanding it theoretically. To do that requires being agreement capable in order to think it through constructively. How many comments on this post would you say indicate agreement capability? If brainstorming is hobbled by notions of "realism" and "viability" and "morality" -- which by definition all hail from a collective knowledge base that's conservatively biased against the most novel alternatives without actually understanding them, you're guaranteed to miss the good stuff. How can you understand an alternative if you bat the spoon away when someone says, "Here, just taste it" ??
That's the codependence talking. The ball is ALWAYS in your court unless you've given up your game to play someone else's. Let's just say it turns out I'm onto something here, and within the next ten years it will become common knowledge. Tomorrow I'm going to bike into town to food shop. Let's say I get hit and killed by a car, and you never hear from me again. Where is the "ball" then?
This points out a basic difference between us. I'm not "proposing we collapse all of society". That's ridiculous -- not because collapsing society is ridiculous, but because pretending that I or you or the two of us together could do fuckall to collapse it. It's like people think that these discussions have significant, possibly direct bearing on what happens in the world. It's a fantastic assumption. I don't participate in that.
I'm as realistic a person as you could find. Totally fact-based. If you show me facts that contradict what I think, I adjust what I think. I'm doing what I do not only because I know I can have an effect, but because I've already had an effect. We could argue whether I'm riding the wave or am part of the wave -- I'm not interested. What I know is that I could see where things are going 10 - 15 years ago, and now we're there. My only serious fault (even still) is that I always underestimate how fast and how far and how deeply/seriously. I knew in the spring of 2019 that something (which turned out to be COVID) was coming. I had no clue it would come in a mere year. I would never have guessed how destructive it would be and how deeply and far it would shift collective consciousness (sociological sense). So, my personal challenge is to push myself further into radicalness, because my history has consistently proven that I never go nearly far enough.
I'm not here to discuss radical ideas for the jollies. I can only do so much as the one-man-show I've been for 15 years. We're never going to figure this shit out by deferring it to people strongly incentized to make sure it never gets figured out. My experience after 15 years: 90% of people are agreement incapable; 99.9% range from merely open to supportive but don't actively engage and contribute (lurkers, more or less), and I can count on one hand the number of people I can bounce things off of or mull them over with, but none of them have committed to pushing the fucking stone over the fucking mountain. They just don't want or can't go as radical as it's going to need to get, yet. And here I see I've never been radical enough. What do you think I should do?
Also, "proposing we collapse society" is based on huge, factless assumptions. One, like I said, that we actually could collapse it. Two, that if society radically changed, it would be catastrophic. But most important and factless of all, that for society to avoid collapse, it would need to resemble what it currently is to some degree. That's absolutely false in all practical respects. No one knows that. No one has any evidence at all that indicates that. Societies have collapsed, of course, but give me just one example, just one, that collapsed as the result of a failed experiment in radical change. Read social science and history experts and their explanations for the collapse of a society -- Greek, Roman, any other -- and you'll see detailed description of how their collapses were inevitable due to the nature of their own structure, ethos, and design -- NOT because they radically departed from them.
As far as Black, I promote him in the interest of expanding minds, not endorsing his views/"solutions". I don't think he has any solutions. He's an anarchist, we've corresponded, I've tried to engage him, but he demurs. That's basically when I realized I've gone far beyond anarchism.
While working in corporate IT when you have a basically working system if someone came up and informs you that the silicon in all the electronics you use is susceptible to solar radiation that can occasionally make calculation incorrect and that you should consider alternatives to silicon what would you do? Maybe if you had the time to kill you could kick around the idea with them, the fellow may even be right about the silicon being susceptible to solar radiation, you vaguely remember that something like that can occasionally cause a bit to flip here or there. But really, how seriously are you going to take this warning? It's not really been a big problem before, you even had some redundancies set up so even if in a freak accident it mattered it'd probably be fine. There are some experimental alternatives to silicon materials, Germanium, Graphene, cubic Boron but it's not even clear if any of them solve the original problem and you manage tons of electronics. You realistically cannot even source a single Germanium chip, let alone replace your servers. You express skepticism and they accuse you of being negligent. That's kind of what it feels like to see you morally load this conversation by call capitalism psychopathy with a makeover. It just kind of comes off as silly and frivolous. Maybe there is an alternative and maybe we can talk about those alternatives but I live in downtown Chicago, I'm looking around at these sky scrapers and millions of people moving about keeping everything running and it may actually be easier to switch every electronic in the city to graphene then get this working without ownership as we know it.
I'm happy to talk about this, but don't call my a psychopath for being skeptical.
We've been offered many spoons, some we have later verified were filled with dog shit.
I think you're mistaken of the dynamics here. There are tons of courts. If discussing this with you is tedious I can go up or down a thread and participate in the forum's 800th discussion on whether Trump is good or bad, the 480th thread on whether lgbtq2s+ acceptance has not gone too far enough or even spicy new topics like the India/Pakistan conflict. This topic is of special interest to you because it's been a brain worm for you for years, it's of special interest to us because we do actually appreciate the opportunity to engage with new views. If the engagement is not forthcoming, if the ball stays in your court we can and will move on. As we were counting assumptions earlier the belief that your perspective will win out is is an assumption you're making and it's on you to convince us of that.
Depends what your standard is for collapse. I'd argue maoist china collapsed in a way. The Weimar republic probably counts. The soviet union might count. Usually a society is able to survive and change course after the implementation of bad ideas, see Trump tariffs.
I don't know if you've gone beyond anarchism, but I don't know much about your views.
If you're interested in continuing, I'm game. But not here. Too difficult to navigate and pick up from where we loft off. Plus, from the admins tone, I'm not long for the motte, anyway. I've enjoyed our conversation so far. millardjmelnyk@gmail.com
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