If top of the society is immoral psychopaths with power, and most of the society is composed of people with good intentions, then there is not much hope for “beta uprising” until things go way beyond point of recovery, because powerful psychopaths will not let their power get taken away.
Not sure if this is just evolutionary biology, but this cycle of psychopaths at the top has been going on since when, at least ancient Egypt. And in all these thousands of years, the system that enables this cycle got way more reinforced than it got dismantled.
So is it maybe better idea to put benevolent people’s energy towards designing and preparing a new societal system that will have built-in mechanisms for preventing corruption and malevolence?
“prepare” as in get ready to implement for when the current messed up system is about to grind to a halt and collapse?
Well, it would be best to figure out how to go full Benevolent Theseus™ by replacing parts of currently failing system with the corruption-proof ones.
What are some resources related to this topic?
Recearch on societal dynamics, designing political systems, examples of similar revolutions that already happened, etc.
Post any links that you consider relevant
Evolve labor strikes from the dark ages with guerilla tactics.
In every company I’ve ever consulted for, there were bottlenecks where a handful of people in key roles not showing up to work would tank the entire operation.
Why the hell are we still striking with everyone walking out instead of everyone clocking in and getting paid and funneling money to keep key roles empty as the coffers burn while revenue drops and payroll still runs?
Why are strikes so often per-company (or worst per-store) instead of per-industry?
In the digital age organization is theoretically much easier than it has ever been.
And yet labor is still playing with the 1920s playbook while corporate is hiring specialized modern talent to combat it.
What about seizing the means of production?
Look at the actors strike, whining about studios using AI to replace them.
Why the hell aren’t the actor unions building their own AI platform for generative performances? It’d unquestionably be a better product working with talent than competitors ostracized by talent. Reminds me of when the MPAA fought against Napster instead of embracing the tides of change and as a result missed the boat on owning digital distribution platforms to Apple and others.
But no. People are scared of change and cling to the status quo even when that isn’t working very well for them.
Embrace change. Focus on progress. Evolve.
If the masses can do that faster and better than the boardroom (which really shouldn’t be that hard as those guys suck at embracing progress and abandoning status quo), then the masses are going to be holding the bag at the end of the changes coming.
If the masses can’t organize enough to stay ahead…
Well, we should probably all learn to enjoy eating cardboard and watching the world burn around us.
Get rid of extremists, both commies and nazis kind of extremists. Then make the Internet less connected so hive minds don’t show up. Bully anyone who is making a fool of themselves
solves nothing. you eliminate a negligible amount of carbon emissions. focusing on our individual impact is a waste of time when there are companies and their leaders doing orders of magnitude more damage.
Companies and their leaders are paid by individuals, lol. Going vegan definitely does help.
Even still, why did you only mention carbon emissions? The question was about making a better society. Did you forget that veganism is about animal rights?
I do! But I also value animals, and consuming their dead corpses is completely unnecessary and on top of that is wasteful, hurting humans in the process.
going vegan doesn’t help animals much either. we live in an overproductive society that wastes most of what it produces anyways - even if your personal choice marginally reduces demand, the abuse is ongoing. we need systemic solutions. we need to destroy the meat industry. veganism will never be popular enough to create systemic change on its own.
How do you plan to destroy the meat industry without anyone going vegan? You realize the meat industry is funded by non-vegans, right? And tax payers, of course, who also eat meat and won’t support policy that challenges their freedom.
Destroying the meat industry isn’t going to have the beneficial impact you think it will.
Most of the food we grow we can’t eat, most of the farmland we use exclusively to support livestock isn’t suitable for anything else. These animals are eating food that is otherwise biological waste that will simply decay and contribute to carbon emissions.
I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement, I am saying elimination isn’t improvement, it only creates more problems.
This sets aside the problems created by eliminating animal fat and protein from our collective diet, which causes a health and nutrition problem on top of a pretty significant caloric deficit that again, we don’t necessarily have the agricultural land to replace.
If being vegan is your jam then more power to you, but it isn’t the answer for society’s problems.
While animals can eat waste from crops grown for humans, that’s a minority of their feed. Almost all new corn and soy cropland is cut to meet growing animal agriculture demand.
How does eliminating animal fat and protein cause health and nutrition problems? Humans are perfectly capable of living on vegan diets at all stages of life.
I’m currently taking a class about this (kinda). The current system, which is, in the states, neoliberal capitalism (redundancy for clarity) encourages people to act immorally, or more accurately under a set of morals that justifies those actions. A different system can encourage a different set of actions to get success, and a different set of morals to justify those actions. This is a large part of politics. The other part is praxis, or getting that in place. I’m not going to share the set of theory I believe in, but rather common ways people try to impose their desired version of society.
One way is through the current system, even if you want to completely change it. This is what the class I am talking about. You identify who has power, why they act the way they do, and how you can get them to enact your policies, or at least gain power yourself. This method falls under a lot of criticism, as it stands to reason that a system built by those in power cannot overthrow them. You can’t use the master’s tools against him.
The other way is revolution, but that has its own problems. It is hard to convince people to completely change everything, and when it does happen, it often happens in the best way possible for those who have power. It also isn’t any more moral than the other options, but that is the nature of changing an immoral system. Welcome to politics.
Disclaimer: I’m by no means an expert, as I am just getting into political theory, both in my own studies and formal education.
Morality is shaped by your material conditions, that is, the society, culture, religion, thinkers etc. that comprise the place you were born and taught, calling the bourgeoisie immoral psychopaths doesn’t really do anything. The way to deal with this is to toss morality aside and see the relations of power for what they are, exploitation of a class by another, as have happened for basically the entirety of human history.
This claims for a solution then, ending the exploitation which necessitates ending the division of classes by preventing that a ruling class comes to existence. This is basically the premise to communism.
The problem with waiting for the current system do collapse is that Capitalism has shown to be much more resilient than expected. The contradictions of capital are intensifying still to this day and more and more people are noticing it, but it is to be expected that the capitalists will do anything they can to keep the machine working.
Trying to change the system from within doesn’t really work, like you said, the ruling class is not gonna let their power get taken way. One example of this is what happened on Chile with elected socialist president Salvador Allende 50 years ago.
A change this big in society doesn’t happen peacefully, it will need a full out revolution that will lead to “injuries”. It is unfortunate and me and, I think, everyone would like it to not be this way, but it is.
Here are some resources for anyone that wants to start learning:
I can respect that y’all kind of hate my kind here and I’m going to use this comment to share only the most unobjectionable works that even the most anticommunist liberal should find completely and utterly appealing
Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a book about how we have all of the tools at our disposal right now to automate at least 50% of the work that we have to do to stay alive, and thus get rid of that work as a tool of coercion and exertion of power.
How Capitalism Ends is about how the power got to the concentrations it has today, where we can expect it to go by extrapolating that tendency, why there was no other way it could have gone, and what we can do now to start building the next thing.
These are two very good and easy starts to starting to think about this problem. I’m happy to field questions about the works or anything else related.
Uh, the Clintons weren’t the smartest amongst us. Smarter than some sure, and that’s a pretty low bar these days, but I lived through that era. We were not governed by our smartest, by any stretch.
Yup, but it’s a question of whom society recognizes as smart. Bill and Hill met at Yale. They sold us a bill of good with free trade. They thought they could get away with Hillary crafting a national healthcare system, almost in secret, and that everyone would accept it b/s she’s brilliant. Obama, Columbia/Harvard/Univ of Chicago, bailed out bankers, not home owners. That was a disaster.
And GIEC/IPCC is a consensus body that is consistently behind the curve on the science.
Imagine if we’d just listened to scientists directly. We could have gotten started on tackling climate change before the Rio conference in 1992 even took place.
This is called “technocracy”, and while it’s cool on paper, it leads to a disconnect between the people in charge and the actual problems of the people.
Stupid people will treat that as hostility and shut off their reasoning. That’s unfortunately how humans work - question their beliefs, and they will believe even harder and attack you for even hinting that their beliefs are wrong.
Sects are the obvious example of that behavior, but on smaller scales, we are all a bit like that.
The stupid already treat random shit as hostility, and they already shut off their reasoning (otherwise they wouldn’t be stupid). So there’s no change in that.
I believe that you’re right, when you say that we [humans in general] are all a bit like that. Even then, we’re fairly flexible - we only behave like morons when we get away with it.
Read the rest of the comment chain. As I already said, you don’t need to decide which sort of behaviour is stupidity or not; you just stop trying to decide what’s “intentional”.
In no moment I said or even implied that I shall be “the one to judge”. So stop making shit up.
And no, I am not fascist. Again, stop making shit up.
Also, you’re being a great example of what I’m talking about, because odds are that you’re full of “good intentions” behind your little witch hunt, but you’re effectively contributing with fascists by giving them a reasonable cover and desensitising people towards the word. Just like the boy who cried wolf contributed with the wolves.
the[n] kindly explain to me who are these ‘stupid’ you are referring to in your original comment?
That’s the same as “I just made shit up about you, but I demand you to spoonfeed me because I’m entitled.” Sorry but the world does not revolve around your belly, and I’m not wasting my time with you, go be a self-demonstrating example elsewhere.
For other posters who might be reading this: what I’m considering “stupidity” and “the stupid” is already hinted by this, this and this. I can bring up some more formal definition if someone really wants, but the point is that it should not matter - take off “intentions” from the equation when handling people, stop giving people a free pass to cause harm because “oh no, that person is stupid, not malicious”.
No, I don’t let you off your self-constructed hook so easily.
From your other comments I can thus read:
the intellectually disabled are not considered to be among the stupid (I wonder whether that includes people on the spectrum as that would luckily leave me out of your ideas of sanitizing society
stupid seems to have to do with people’s behaviour being harmful towards others. Why of all available terms
That’s not sufficient information to start persecuting other people. And I don’t care if you cook up the definition of who is stupid all by yourself or if it’s you plus a select group of pseudo-enlightened friends. The underlying idea is ‘remove people who show unwanted behaviour’ - and I think that approach to running a society has a name.
Who decides what is stupid and what isn’t? There better be a good, clear, obvious, and universal objective method of identifying stupidity if you’re going to treat it as malicious.
I think it does matter what you define as being stupid, yes. Let’s say that I want to call being transgender, not having enough money to buy food, and being an immigrant all stupid. I should treat those things as malice because they’re stupid, right?
I mean, people do treat those things as malicious already. So if anything returning the same treatment would be fair-play.
But more to the point, I don’t think that’s analogous to what the above posters was trying to say? A person “being” transgender/poor/an immigrant isn’t the same as say, a person denying climate change.
And that’s how I read the above commenter. There are two reasons for people to hold a climate-change-denying view, ignorance and malice. Ignorance can be met with education. But if a person begins holding onto their ignorance, their actions are fundamentally indistinguishable from malice.
I assumed it was a comment about the tactics we decide to employ when dealing with people. And at a certain point, if a person is stupid or if they’re malicious… Well it sorta does not matter.
Okay, sure, what about vaccines then? Hypothetically, I think the idea that we shoot ourselves full of mercury and viruses is extremely stupid. Malicious too, by your model. And also, I don’t think climate change is real, so now I think you’re stupid and you think I’m stupid and it’s he said she said and if we both think the other is being malicious we have a brawl. The thing that fixes this is a definition of “stupid” that we both agree on that is clear, useful, and objective. What is that definition?
Yeah I still think you are talking about something else?
Okay, sure, what about vaccines then? Hypothetically, I think the idea that we shoot ourselves full of mercury and viruses is extremely stupid. Malicious too, by your model. And also, I don’t think climate change is real, so now I think you’re stupid and you think I’m stupid and it’s he said she said and if we both think the other is being malicious we have a brawl.
In reality though some people are right and some people are wrong. The person who talks about vaccines as just “shooting ourselves full of mercury and viruses” is either stupid or malicious. What they think of me doesn’t matter, because this conversation is about how I should treat this hypothetical person.
And that was the point I made. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if they are stupid or malicious, I should treat them the same way. Because their intent doesn’t really matter, their actions do.
The thing that fixes this is a definition of “stupid” that we both agree on that is clear, useful, and objective. What is that definition?
That is not how language or communication works…
People who are thought of as stupid, rarely agree that they are stupid. Same goes for malicious, to be honest.
I think that @darq@kbin.social got better the connotation of “stupid” from my comment. But just to be sure:
I’m defining “stupidity” here as behaviour coming from people who are able to reason, and thus can be held responsible for their actions. The intellectually disabled ones (plus children) are excluded by this definition.
That’s part of the deal: you don’t need to. Once stupidity and malice are taken as morally equivalent, it becomes morally irrelevant to decide if someone’s actions are motivated by one or another.
My point is that people give a free pass to actions harming the others, as long as they’re seen as “unintentional”; for example, the “powerful psychopaths” OP talks about often rely on it. And yet nobody knows someone else’s intentions, we know at most what others do and what they say.
So for example. Your business relies on blood diamonds? You’re financing terrorism and should be treated as such, regardless of your intentions. Your corporation employs slave work? You shall be treated as a slaver, committing crimes against humankind.
You do need to take into account if someone is able to be held responsible for one’s own actions. But we already do this anyway, so no change.
I tend to agree with him and I think that the society where he lived is a great example of what happens when we let stupidity go rampant: Nazi Germany was a stupidocracy.
It’s a fascinating read. I very much recommend the chapter covering the Black Plague. Seems rather relevant nowadays.
Employers lost no time pressuring the authorities to curb the rising cost of labor. Less than a year after the arrival of the Black Death in England, in June 1349, the crown passed the Ordinance of Laborers:
Since a great part of the population, and especially workers and employees (“servants”), has now died in this pestilence many people, observing the needs of masters and the shortage of employees, are refusing to work unless they are paid an excessive salary. . . . We have ordained that every man or woman in our realm of England, whether free or unfree, who is physically fit and below the age of sixty, not living by trade and exercising a particular craft, and not having private means of land of their own upon which they need to work, and not working for someone else, shall, if offered employment consonant with their status, be obliged to accept the employment offered, and they should be paid only the fees, liveries, payments or salaries which were usually paid in the part of the country where they are working in the twentieth year of our reign [1346] or in some other appropriate year five or six years ago. . . . No one should pay or promise wages, liveries, payments or salaries greater than those defined above under pain of paying twice whatever he paid or promised to anyone who feels himself harmed by it. . . . Artisans and labourers ought not to receive for their labour and craft more money than they could have expected to receive in the said twentieth year or other appropriate year, in the place where they happen to be working; and if anyone takes more, let him be committed to gaol.
The actual effect of these ordinances appears to have been modest. Just two years later, another decree, the Statute of Labourers of 1351, complained that said employees, having no regard to the said ordinance but rather to their own ease and exceptional greed, withdraw themselves to work for great men and others, unless they are paid livery and wages double or treble what they were accustomed to receive in the said twentieth year and earlier, to the great damage of the great men and the impoverishing of all the Commons and sought to remedy this failure with ever more detailed restrictions and penalties. Within a generation, however, these measures had failed.
I believe that the massive scale of corruption that exists within the capitalist system necessitates rebuilding from the ground up. Part of the solution is going to be intentional communities (I hope anyway) where we’re building communities with the intention of solving some of these large scale problems (scarcity, pollution, racial injustice, etc) in the community. There’s a collection of already existing communities on ic.org where you can find resources on how to build a community or where to find them. There’s every flavor of community whether you’re looking for a commune, a spiritual community, an eco-friendly community, permaculture, etc.
I think the best anyone can do is try to make life as good as possible in their mini sphere of influence, their personal bubble of friends and relationships. If everyone did that, society would be better. I’m not sure what to do about psychopaths in power. Maybe deal with the psychopaths in your personal world or aim to reduce your own personal behavior that’s harmful to others?
That’s like cutting off the top layer of the skin cancer without addressing the underlying causes.
It’s a fun “fuck the man” statement that’s worse than worthless because it makes solutions seem like they need to be radical without actually proposing a real solution.
It’s been done before. How did that work out for Russia? Or China? Or anywhere else that the rich died at the hands of the poor?
What happened was that corruption was always the underlying cancer and it never actually went away, it just changed around what organ it infected as one was cut out and replaced by another.
Want to see billionaires lose all their wealth? Create a labor backed “proof of work” currency system they can’t buy into and stop considering their money to have value. No blades required. Just pay taxes on estimated profits so you play by the rules. What happens to a billionaire when the dollar value of a gallon of milk goes through the roof but the labor value for it remains constant?
Corruption loves to live among middlemen. And we live in an age where most middlemen can be cut out of transactions. And within the decade that’s going to be even easier.
What do you think is going to happen when open sourced AI lawyers can generate legal paperwork for cents on a dollar? How much does that benefit Walmart, who already have teams of lawyers on retainer? How does that help the people who work at Walmart? Or the local grocer they are trying to put out of business with unfair competition practices?
Transactional costs are about to go to shit. And with that in mind, I would encourage anyone here to read the economic paper from a century ago “the nature of the firm” positioning the entire existence of the mega corporation as worthwhile based on the existence of high transactional costs.
Corporations and billionaires are already screwed beyond measure. It’s just no one’s realized it yet because the Jenga tower still has pieces left so everyone points at the monolith and exclaims how it’s going to still be around for as long as it’s been standing.
Violent revolution is pointless and just going to set back the conditions for their own demise that the capitalist prisoner’s dilemma of competition is about to deliver.
Don’t sharpen a guillotine. Become better friends with your neighbors and network online with labor in the same sector to prepare for what’s ahead.
The chips are falling into place. I just hope people at large aren’t so caught up in their own BS that they pass up the opportunity that’s going to present, as I’m not sure there will ever be another like it.
Take good care of yourself and always claim the rest you need - don’t let anyone call you lazy, disabled or mentally ill for working during as many hours of the day as you want. Being productive is not a virtue.
After you have spent enough time resting: support your local mutual aid circle, or (help) create one. Use your talents and skills to help and support others in your community as much as you can afford. Try and work without participation from the existing authorities (not always possible, but at least don’t seek their support unless you have to), basically create your own self-government infrastructure within the crumbling ruins of the old society - like a new tree growing in a hollow stump.
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Organize labor.
Evolve labor strikes from the dark ages with guerilla tactics.
In every company I’ve ever consulted for, there were bottlenecks where a handful of people in key roles not showing up to work would tank the entire operation.
Why the hell are we still striking with everyone walking out instead of everyone clocking in and getting paid and funneling money to keep key roles empty as the coffers burn while revenue drops and payroll still runs?
Why are strikes so often per-company (or worst per-store) instead of per-industry?
In the digital age organization is theoretically much easier than it has ever been.
And yet labor is still playing with the 1920s playbook while corporate is hiring specialized modern talent to combat it.
What about seizing the means of production?
Look at the actors strike, whining about studios using AI to replace them.
Why the hell aren’t the actor unions building their own AI platform for generative performances? It’d unquestionably be a better product working with talent than competitors ostracized by talent. Reminds me of when the MPAA fought against Napster instead of embracing the tides of change and as a result missed the boat on owning digital distribution platforms to Apple and others.
But no. People are scared of change and cling to the status quo even when that isn’t working very well for them.
Embrace change. Focus on progress. Evolve.
If the masses can do that faster and better than the boardroom (which really shouldn’t be that hard as those guys suck at embracing progress and abandoning status quo), then the masses are going to be holding the bag at the end of the changes coming.
If the masses can’t organize enough to stay ahead…
Well, we should probably all learn to enjoy eating cardboard and watching the world burn around us.
Get rid of extremists, both commies and nazis kind of extremists. Then make the Internet less connected so hive minds don’t show up. Bully anyone who is making a fool of themselves
That seems rather extreme to me.
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That’s an awesome comment
Go vegan!
solves nothing. you eliminate a negligible amount of carbon emissions. focusing on our individual impact is a waste of time when there are companies and their leaders doing orders of magnitude more damage.
Companies and their leaders are paid by individuals, lol. Going vegan definitely does help.
Even still, why did you only mention carbon emissions? The question was about making a better society. Did you forget that veganism is about animal rights?
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I do! But I also value animals, and consuming their dead corpses is completely unnecessary and on top of that is wasteful, hurting humans in the process.
going vegan doesn’t help animals much either. we live in an overproductive society that wastes most of what it produces anyways - even if your personal choice marginally reduces demand, the abuse is ongoing. we need systemic solutions. we need to destroy the meat industry. veganism will never be popular enough to create systemic change on its own.
How do you plan to destroy the meat industry without anyone going vegan? You realize the meat industry is funded by non-vegans, right? And tax payers, of course, who also eat meat and won’t support policy that challenges their freedom.
Destroying the meat industry isn’t going to have the beneficial impact you think it will.
Most of the food we grow we can’t eat, most of the farmland we use exclusively to support livestock isn’t suitable for anything else. These animals are eating food that is otherwise biological waste that will simply decay and contribute to carbon emissions.
I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement, I am saying elimination isn’t improvement, it only creates more problems.
This sets aside the problems created by eliminating animal fat and protein from our collective diet, which causes a health and nutrition problem on top of a pretty significant caloric deficit that again, we don’t necessarily have the agricultural land to replace.
If being vegan is your jam then more power to you, but it isn’t the answer for society’s problems.
While animals can eat waste from crops grown for humans, that’s a minority of their feed. Almost all new corn and soy cropland is cut to meet growing animal agriculture demand.
How does eliminating animal fat and protein cause health and nutrition problems? Humans are perfectly capable of living on vegan diets at all stages of life.
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I’m currently taking a class about this (kinda). The current system, which is, in the states, neoliberal capitalism (redundancy for clarity) encourages people to act immorally, or more accurately under a set of morals that justifies those actions. A different system can encourage a different set of actions to get success, and a different set of morals to justify those actions. This is a large part of politics. The other part is praxis, or getting that in place. I’m not going to share the set of theory I believe in, but rather common ways people try to impose their desired version of society.
One way is through the current system, even if you want to completely change it. This is what the class I am talking about. You identify who has power, why they act the way they do, and how you can get them to enact your policies, or at least gain power yourself. This method falls under a lot of criticism, as it stands to reason that a system built by those in power cannot overthrow them. You can’t use the master’s tools against him.
The other way is revolution, but that has its own problems. It is hard to convince people to completely change everything, and when it does happen, it often happens in the best way possible for those who have power. It also isn’t any more moral than the other options, but that is the nature of changing an immoral system. Welcome to politics.
Disclaimer: I’m by no means an expert, as I am just getting into political theory, both in my own studies and formal education.
Morality is shaped by your material conditions, that is, the society, culture, religion, thinkers etc. that comprise the place you were born and taught, calling the bourgeoisie immoral psychopaths doesn’t really do anything. The way to deal with this is to toss morality aside and see the relations of power for what they are, exploitation of a class by another, as have happened for basically the entirety of human history.
This claims for a solution then, ending the exploitation which necessitates ending the division of classes by preventing that a ruling class comes to existence. This is basically the premise to communism.
The problem with waiting for the current system do collapse is that Capitalism has shown to be much more resilient than expected. The contradictions of capital are intensifying still to this day and more and more people are noticing it, but it is to be expected that the capitalists will do anything they can to keep the machine working.
Trying to change the system from within doesn’t really work, like you said, the ruling class is not gonna let their power get taken way. One example of this is what happened on Chile with elected socialist president Salvador Allende 50 years ago.
A change this big in society doesn’t happen peacefully, it will need a full out revolution that will lead to “injuries”. It is unfortunate and me and, I think, everyone would like it to not be this way, but it is.
Here are some resources for anyone that wants to start learning:
In English:
Socialism for Absolute Beginners by Second Thought
Why Social Democracy Isn’t Good Enough by Second Thought
Will Life Be Better Under Socialism? by Hakim
“Socialism always fails” is a stupid argument by Hakim
How Capitalism sells poverty as modesty & why equality isn’t a practical goal. by Yugopinik
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/
In Portuguese (subbed in english):
Comunismo: princípios básicos e guia de leitura / Communism: basic principles and reading guide by História Pública
I can respect that y’all kind of hate my kind here and I’m going to use this comment to share only the most unobjectionable works that even the most anticommunist liberal should find completely and utterly appealing
Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a book about how we have all of the tools at our disposal right now to automate at least 50% of the work that we have to do to stay alive, and thus get rid of that work as a tool of coercion and exertion of power.
How Capitalism Ends is about how the power got to the concentrations it has today, where we can expect it to go by extrapolating that tendency, why there was no other way it could have gone, and what we can do now to start building the next thing.
These are two very good and easy starts to starting to think about this problem. I’m happy to field questions about the works or anything else related.
Have y’ll tried letting the smart people make decisions?
Yup. Look at how the best-and-brightest theory worked out in the mid 20th century–e.g., the Clintons. Technocracy doesn’t work.
Uh, the Clintons weren’t the smartest amongst us. Smarter than some sure, and that’s a pretty low bar these days, but I lived through that era. We were not governed by our smartest, by any stretch.
Yup, but it’s a question of whom society recognizes as smart. Bill and Hill met at Yale. They sold us a bill of good with free trade. They thought they could get away with Hillary crafting a national healthcare system, almost in secret, and that everyone would accept it b/s she’s brilliant. Obama, Columbia/Harvard/Univ of Chicago, bailed out bankers, not home owners. That was a disaster.
The term, best and brightest, came into common use in describing to the Kennedy adminstration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest They really bungled Vietnam.
I don’t know that we’ve ever been governed by the best and brightest. Sometimes I think we’re governed by the most venal and greedy.
It’s objectively not, though?
If it were, well, that’s been explored in Idiocracy.
The point isn’t that we should give the reins to the “smartest”, but the actual smartest, for a change.
Agreed. The GiEC did an amazing job all these years. Too bad no one is listening to them.
And GIEC/IPCC is a consensus body that is consistently behind the curve on the science.
Imagine if we’d just listened to scientists directly. We could have gotten started on tackling climate change before the Rio conference in 1992 even took place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
This is called “technocracy”, and while it’s cool on paper, it leads to a disconnect between the people in charge and the actual problems of the people.
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Stop caring about intentions. Stop giving the stupid a free pass. Treat stupidity as a type of malice, and act accordingly.
I believe that this alone should be enough to address the sykos on power. Easier said than done.
Stupid people will treat that as hostility and shut off their reasoning. That’s unfortunately how humans work - question their beliefs, and they will believe even harder and attack you for even hinting that their beliefs are wrong.
Sects are the obvious example of that behavior, but on smaller scales, we are all a bit like that.
The stupid already treat random shit as hostility, and they already shut off their reasoning (otherwise they wouldn’t be stupid). So there’s no change in that.
I believe that you’re right, when you say that we [humans in general] are all a bit like that. Even then, we’re fairly flexible - we only behave like morons when we get away with it.
How on earth would you decide who is stupid? And why are you the one to judge everybody’s intelligence? Fuck off fascist
Read the rest of the comment chain. As I already said, you don’t need to decide which sort of behaviour is stupidity or not; you just stop trying to decide what’s “intentional”.
In no moment I said or even implied that I shall be “the one to judge”. So stop making shit up.
And no, I am not fascist. Again, stop making shit up.
Also, you’re being a great example of what I’m talking about, because odds are that you’re full of “good intentions” behind your little witch hunt, but you’re effectively contributing with fascists by giving them a reasonable cover and desensitising people towards the word. Just like the boy who cried wolf contributed with the wolves.
‘Stop giving the stupid a free pass’ - the kindly explain to me who are these ‘stupid’ you are referring to in your original comment?
That’s the same as “I just made shit up about you, but I demand you to spoonfeed me because I’m entitled.” Sorry but the world does not revolve around your belly, and I’m not wasting my time with you, go be a self-demonstrating example elsewhere.
For other posters who might be reading this: what I’m considering “stupidity” and “the stupid” is already hinted by this, this and this. I can bring up some more formal definition if someone really wants, but the point is that it should not matter - take off “intentions” from the equation when handling people, stop giving people a free pass to cause harm because “oh no, that person is stupid, not malicious”.
No, I don’t let you off your self-constructed hook so easily.
From your other comments I can thus read:
That’s not sufficient information to start persecuting other people. And I don’t care if you cook up the definition of who is stupid all by yourself or if it’s you plus a select group of pseudo-enlightened friends. The underlying idea is ‘remove people who show unwanted behaviour’ - and I think that approach to running a society has a name.
Who decides what is stupid and what isn’t? There better be a good, clear, obvious, and universal objective method of identifying stupidity if you’re going to treat it as malicious.
At some point, does it matter?
Give people the resources to educate themselves. Give them the benefit of the doubt, once. But after that? Screw 'em. Move on without 'em.
I think it does matter what you define as being stupid, yes. Let’s say that I want to call being transgender, not having enough money to buy food, and being an immigrant all stupid. I should treat those things as malice because they’re stupid, right?
I mean, people do treat those things as malicious already. So if anything returning the same treatment would be fair-play.
But more to the point, I don’t think that’s analogous to what the above posters was trying to say? A person “being” transgender/poor/an immigrant isn’t the same as say, a person denying climate change.
And that’s how I read the above commenter. There are two reasons for people to hold a climate-change-denying view, ignorance and malice. Ignorance can be met with education. But if a person begins holding onto their ignorance, their actions are fundamentally indistinguishable from malice.
I assumed it was a comment about the tactics we decide to employ when dealing with people. And at a certain point, if a person is stupid or if they’re malicious… Well it sorta does not matter.
Okay, sure, what about vaccines then? Hypothetically, I think the idea that we shoot ourselves full of mercury and viruses is extremely stupid. Malicious too, by your model. And also, I don’t think climate change is real, so now I think you’re stupid and you think I’m stupid and it’s he said she said and if we both think the other is being malicious we have a brawl. The thing that fixes this is a definition of “stupid” that we both agree on that is clear, useful, and objective. What is that definition?
Yeah I still think you are talking about something else?
In reality though some people are right and some people are wrong. The person who talks about vaccines as just “shooting ourselves full of mercury and viruses” is either stupid or malicious. What they think of me doesn’t matter, because this conversation is about how I should treat this hypothetical person.
And that was the point I made. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if they are stupid or malicious, I should treat them the same way. Because their intent doesn’t really matter, their actions do.
That is not how language or communication works…
People who are thought of as stupid, rarely agree that they are stupid. Same goes for malicious, to be honest.
Exactly. So we can’t just “Treat stupidity as a type of malice”, because nobody can agree on what is and isn’t stupidity.
Yeah, let’s execute the intellectually disabled. Super progressive.
I think that @darq@kbin.social got better the connotation of “stupid” from my comment. But just to be sure:
I’m defining “stupidity” here as behaviour coming from people who are able to reason, and thus can be held responsible for their actions. The intellectually disabled ones (plus children) are excluded by this definition.
What? Quite obviously not what I said.
That’s part of the deal: you don’t need to. Once stupidity and malice are taken as morally equivalent, it becomes morally irrelevant to decide if someone’s actions are motivated by one or another.
My point is that people give a free pass to actions harming the others, as long as they’re seen as “unintentional”; for example, the “powerful psychopaths” OP talks about often rely on it. And yet nobody knows someone else’s intentions, we know at most what others do and what they say.
So for example. Your business relies on blood diamonds? You’re financing terrorism and should be treated as such, regardless of your intentions. Your corporation employs slave work? You shall be treated as a slaver, committing crimes against humankind.
You do need to take into account if someone is able to be held responsible for one’s own actions. But we already do this anyway, so no change.
Bonhoeffer says stupidity is a social thing. I mostly agree. Things didn’t turn out well for Bonhoeffer. Shoveling against the tide is exhausting.
I tend to agree with him and I think that the society where he lived is a great example of what happens when we let stupidity go rampant: Nazi Germany was a stupidocracy.
According to Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, the answer is revolutionary violence.
It’s a fascinating read. I very much recommend the chapter covering the Black Plague. Seems rather relevant nowadays.
NoBoDy WanTs tO WoRk!!! lol.
I believe that the massive scale of corruption that exists within the capitalist system necessitates rebuilding from the ground up. Part of the solution is going to be intentional communities (I hope anyway) where we’re building communities with the intention of solving some of these large scale problems (scarcity, pollution, racial injustice, etc) in the community. There’s a collection of already existing communities on ic.org where you can find resources on how to build a community or where to find them. There’s every flavor of community whether you’re looking for a commune, a spiritual community, an eco-friendly community, permaculture, etc.
guns, more guns.
but from the left ✊
(☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
how about bigger guns?
I think the best anyone can do is try to make life as good as possible in their mini sphere of influence, their personal bubble of friends and relationships. If everyone did that, society would be better. I’m not sure what to do about psychopaths in power. Maybe deal with the psychopaths in your personal world or aim to reduce your own personal behavior that’s harmful to others?
Guillotine all the billionaires and redistribute all their wealth. That’s an important first step
I gotta admit…
That’s like cutting off the top layer of the skin cancer without addressing the underlying causes.
It’s a fun “fuck the man” statement that’s worse than worthless because it makes solutions seem like they need to be radical without actually proposing a real solution.
It’s been done before. How did that work out for Russia? Or China? Or anywhere else that the rich died at the hands of the poor?
What happened was that corruption was always the underlying cancer and it never actually went away, it just changed around what organ it infected as one was cut out and replaced by another.
Want to see billionaires lose all their wealth? Create a labor backed “proof of work” currency system they can’t buy into and stop considering their money to have value. No blades required. Just pay taxes on estimated profits so you play by the rules. What happens to a billionaire when the dollar value of a gallon of milk goes through the roof but the labor value for it remains constant?
Corruption loves to live among middlemen. And we live in an age where most middlemen can be cut out of transactions. And within the decade that’s going to be even easier.
What do you think is going to happen when open sourced AI lawyers can generate legal paperwork for cents on a dollar? How much does that benefit Walmart, who already have teams of lawyers on retainer? How does that help the people who work at Walmart? Or the local grocer they are trying to put out of business with unfair competition practices?
Transactional costs are about to go to shit. And with that in mind, I would encourage anyone here to read the economic paper from a century ago “the nature of the firm” positioning the entire existence of the mega corporation as worthwhile based on the existence of high transactional costs.
Corporations and billionaires are already screwed beyond measure. It’s just no one’s realized it yet because the Jenga tower still has pieces left so everyone points at the monolith and exclaims how it’s going to still be around for as long as it’s been standing.
Violent revolution is pointless and just going to set back the conditions for their own demise that the capitalist prisoner’s dilemma of competition is about to deliver.
Don’t sharpen a guillotine. Become better friends with your neighbors and network online with labor in the same sector to prepare for what’s ahead.
The chips are falling into place. I just hope people at large aren’t so caught up in their own BS that they pass up the opportunity that’s going to present, as I’m not sure there will ever be another like it.
Take good care of yourself and always claim the rest you need - don’t let anyone call you lazy, disabled or mentally ill for working during as many hours of the day as you want. Being productive is not a virtue.
After you have spent enough time resting: support your local mutual aid circle, or (help) create one. Use your talents and skills to help and support others in your community as much as you can afford. Try and work without participation from the existing authorities (not always possible, but at least don’t seek their support unless you have to), basically create your own self-government infrastructure within the crumbling ruins of the old society - like a new tree growing in a hollow stump.