Collectivists Don't Believe Your Kids Belong To You

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ThaG

Sicc OG
Jun 30, 2005
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#62
I would argue that most humans don't base their decisions about mating on social status as measured by material possessions. I don't have numbers, that's just my observation.
It is not an universal feature of human societies - there have been times and places where social status has been defined by non-material things. But those have historically been the minority, and the current global civilization is not one of them.

There is a very good evolutionary reason for that - material possessions are directly linked to improved survival chances for you and your offspring, thus it is natural for so much of social status to be based on those.

Even still, what are you proposing. It sounds like you're suggesting some form of Autocracy/Communism. Is that right?
No. First, there is little point in making detailed proposals at this point in time because there is 10^{-N}, where N is a very large number, chance of any such idea being adopted. But in general the key principle behind a rational system of governance would be that decision-making should be in the hands of the most competent members of society on whatever issue has to be decided on at the moment. Currently we have a system that ensures that people that are universally incompetent in pretty much everything other than political gamesmanship are in charge, because it requires an enormous investment of time and resources on the part of those individuals to actually get to power, and since time and energy are finite, this means those people have typically not had the time to educate themselves sufficiently on a wide range of critically important for their job issues. Add to this the problem that the one academic discipline that is taken seriously by politicians, economics, is in its present form basically a pseudoscience completely detached from reality (the primary goal of all mainstream economists is to maximize economic growth in perpetuity, which, however, is a physical impossibility due to the most basic laws of physics that kids learn between 5th and 7th grade, or at least they used to learned them in those grades when and where I went to school), and it's no surprise we are where we are now.
 
May 7, 2013
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33°
www.hoescantstopme.biz
#68
You cannot expect simple reductionst solutions to complex systemic problems
Brotha, The title is Collectivists Don't Believe Your Kids Belong To You. I'm not saying you wrong for expressing everything you said, in fact it is an interesting conversation and you provide an interesting read. Since you already down that road though:

Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.

Nobel prize winner Friedrich A. von Hayek commented in 1944: said:
The various kinds of collectivism, communism, fascism, etc., differ among themselves in the nature of the goal toward which they want to direct the efforts of society. But they all differ from liberalism and individualism in wanting to organize the whole of society and all its resources for this unitary end and in refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individuals are supreme. In short, they are totalitarian.

No thank you.
 
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