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No, I've looked into it, but every one quickly seemed kinda creepy and cultish. I've had enough cult in my life, thank you very much, lol. I considered going down to Chiapas and checking out the Zapatistas, but the whole lookie-loo gringo thing gave me pause, and the whole militant/militaristic aspect of the scene kinda puts me off.
People have tried alternatives, no argument. To presume that my thinking/ideas can be reduced to "nothing new" that hasn't "already been tried" is silly at this stage. No one on this thread knows that. It's been hard to find the kind of open, interested, curious discussion (here and elsewhere) that would inform and thereby qualify people to pass that judgment.
False on two levels.
Level 1: Being incapable of the same level/degree/intensity of love and mutualism they participate in on small scales does not ipso facto mean they're completely incapable of any degree of love and mutualism at larger scales. It's not an on/off switch, it's a spectrum. And there are easy ways to compensate. Black/white thinking.
Level 2 (two parts): a) The tacit implication is that we have crucial needs that can't be met at small levels; and b) those needs require love and mutualism in ways and to degrees that we aren't capable of and can't compensate for. Have you thought that through? Which needs do we have that our small circle can't provide? Can we change that? If not, what needs are those and do they require the kind/level/degree of mutualism and love evident within our small circle? If they do require it, can we compensate? Etc.
I find that people simply don't take the time and effort to think questions like that through -- but the definitely make claims and pronouncements as if they had and is if they "know".
The best way I know to work through things like that is to take an credible, significant example and start thinking through how we would (instead of how we can't) do it. I'm game.
Keep in mind, though, that when we work examples through and end up stumped, it does not in any way mean there is no way, no how, merely because we got stumped this time. It's amazing to see that so many people are certain it means exactly that. Weird.
I've heard this song too many times to believe it without some solid hard hitting evidence. I've met so many people that think they could have made it work because they are better intentionned than Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin. It's never true. You and I are not better people than the Bolsheviks in any meaningful sense. And I have to be skeptical of any doctrine that doesn't take this into account.
But that's just not true. And I speak from experience. There is a very specific moment you can pinpoint in any commune style community where the general intuitive understanding of each other's needs can no longer maintain the commons and it stops feeling like a tribe/family and becomes impersonal enough administrative enforcement becomes a requirement. And then you just made the State again.
I have seen Dunbar's number with my own eyes. I choose to trust them rather than conjecture. It's not a spectrum.
Look if you want to do the primitivist thing and destroy industrial society, be my guest. I even have some sympathy for it. But let us not pretend that this is a desirable or realistic proposition for most humans.
I don't think it's weird at all. It's impossible to prove non trivial impossibility empirically. So the best way of reacting to negative feedback is to lower the expected possibility of something until it eventually rounds down to zero.
It was very understandable and perhaps even necessary to be a socialist in the 19th century. The awesome power of the industrial revolution changed the world to such a degree that anything seemed possible.
We have since had dozens of very serious attempts at realizing this vision, in a large variety of starting conditions, with a large continuum of tools and ideological specifics. And all that it has ultimately managed is a lot of death and a bunch of state capitalism.
A rational actor would adjust their priors based on this information.
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My kid needs heart medication each month or she’ll die, nobody I know can make it. Similarly, she needed open heart surgery as a baby and I don’t know any pediatric heart surgeons. We had to fly over a thousand miles away just to find one, since there aren’t any in my state. Which reminds me, I don’t know anybody with a plane that can fly that far, nor anybody who can make a plane that can.
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