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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28509 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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For the second - there is no found cure yet for people not giving a shit for the common good under socialism.

How about even more beatings?

Pretending that this is a serious suggestion:

It's not the quantity of the beatings, but their accuracy. You need to

  1. correctly identify asocials, and catch them in the act and
  2. beat them appropriately and publicly.

And this is difficult because

  1. It takes a lot of attention and fine-toothed combing to separate social citizens from asocial ones who have learned to pretend to be social where necessary. They will obfuscate their asocial activities, limit them to settings in which they aren't observed closely, and always keep a plausible excuse handy. After a few months and years of beatings, only the stupidest will be asocial where they can be caught.
  2. If the beatings are too piddly, people will not take them seriously. If the beatings are excessive, people will hate the goons dishing them out rather than the poor asocial who just got his teeth knocked out for taking one minute too long on the loo, which weakens the entire institution. If the beatings happen in secret so that nobody can judge whether they were appropriate, you end up with some kafkaeske nightmare state like the soviet union or Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Either way, you raise up class of violent state-sanctioned thugs who beat people up for not loving the state enough. It's not a winning recipe in the long-term.

It takes a lot of attention and fine-toothed combing to separate social citizens from asocial ones who have learned to pretend to be social where necessary. They will obfuscate their asocial activities, limit them to settings in which they aren't observed closely, and always keep a plausible excuse handy. After a few months and years of beatings, only the stupidest will be asocial where they can be caught.

This might be a problem after a while. It's not a problem right now. There's low-hanging fruit.

Right. Nobody said that all this is easy!

One of the most common jokes in the soviet bloc was - we pretend that we work, they pretend that they pay us. And neither GULAG or their equivalents in eastern europe were productive. And they beat up people.

A couple of things:

  1. The “we pretend that we work, they pretend that they pay us” Soviet joke specifically originates from the post-Stalin era of thaw and stagnation and for a good reason, as the GULAG no longer existed

  2. Marx was already convinced that revolutionary terror is necessary and described it as such

  3. As you stated, the commies noticed that beating up selfish people for their acts of selfishness will successfully de-normalize selfishness socially; in a similar manner, beating people up for not caring about the common good will compel them to care about it or else – it’ll work just as much; however, this assumes that the goons and their commanders will never lose their stomachs for beating people up all the time

I think @Botond173 is referencing the sarcastic quip about how "the beatings will continue until morale improves".

The Juche (kim whatever) guy said it straight face. And in a way the stick works ok up to a point. You can squeeze more productivity. But you rarely can squeeze passion, innovation, and creativity this way - so probably you are doomed to stagnation.

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