The tragedy of the commons
Three possible solutions:
1. A Big Fat Dictator who shoots anyone who tries to put two cows on the commons.
2. Sell the commons, making it private so that folk take care of it. (We might call this the Selfish Git solution)
3. Develop a culture that treats the commons with respect.
Which will you choose?
Comments (213)
And doubtless they are right. But I still prefer the third option.
SO you folk might be able to help me out here.
Shooting folk just seems a tad antisocial, so that's why that's out.
There's some stuff that is damn hard to privatise. I mean, full credit to... carbon credits (pun unintended), but they don't seem to work all that well. And as for the Murray-Darling Basin Authority...
Well, ask the fish what they think.
Pass a law limiting the number of cows you can have and charge a fee for usage so that the land can be maintained?
How would that be different from selling hunting licenses and placing limits on how many deer you can kill like they do now?
So that's both the Big Fat Dictator solution and the Privatisation solution all mixed up. Not new.
Quoting Hanover
You tell me.
It's not different, and it works. There are plenty of fish to be caught and deer to hunt to this day. There are also open grazing states out west, and there are still plenty of cattle and meat at the butcher.
Way back when I prosecuted folks who had too many trout in the boat. $150 for each extra trout kept plenty in the river
Definitely 3 so long as it is voluntary. Unfortunately that might take a while.
Ah - so you want to be the Big Fat Dictator.
Doesn't help.
I hope this thread can do better than just attract Hangover and his Good Ol' Boy economics.
I was a county worker. We weren't a dictatorship, but a democracy. It was the community that decreed how the commons were divvied up.
Option 3 is better than a combination of options one and two.
Shun folk who put two cows on the Commons.
The state charged a nominal license fee to fish. The fine was for catching more than your limit. If you couldn't pay your fine, you could pick up cans off the side of the road.
The dishonest ones were the ones I dealt with who got caught by the fish and game wardens.
The third option seems to me to be the one spoken of by First Nations folk. Respect for the world in which we are embedded, rejection of excessive individualism, all that airy-fairy stuff economists hate.
But I don't think you are taking this seriously enough.
If you want to save the world and stuff, you gotta sing loud.
But I fear stuff is made more complex than that.
The tragedy of the commons comes to pass because each person is assumed to be maximising there own self-interest in a rational way.
The solution to the tragedy of the commons must lie outside of that assumption, and hence outside of economics.
Then you wait until the kind of president Hanover prefers defunds and dismantles the regulatory body and it all turns to shit.
Not I.
A regulatory body with teeth falls under the Big Fat Dictator solution. All well and good, but I want here to expose the morality of the very need for such a solution.
Sure, Let's work out how many cows the commons will support. Let's also consider that having more cows than you ought is unethical. And that's what is missing from the economic analysis.
Accepting the economic, amoral analysis has led to the situation we are in now, where those with more cows on the common are somehow considered virtuous.
This! Studying hunter/gatherer societies would probably be instructive; it seems they are ethically way ahead of us. The problems really started with the advent of agriculture, if what has been observed in contemporary hunter/ gatherer groups is any indication
So with agriculture begins, and there now remains, the general problem of ownership; it's not clear how that could be deliberately wound back. Globalism seems to greatly intensify the problem of ownership and responsibility (not to mention its contribution to global warming and the potential for pandemics with people and goods being shipped all over the place). If civilization collapses our current institutions of ownership will be null and void. Will anarchy reign or will new cooperative communities spring up and predominate? This may well depend in part at least on how people are educated from now on.
In general the tragedy of the commons goes hand in hand with the tragedy of loss of community.
Remind me. When did I do that before? I don’t remember it.
1. Destroy all cows and eat grass ourselves.
2. Destroy ourselves, and commonize all privately owned land.
3. Invent edible artificial turf.
4. Learn how to photosynthesize.
5. Steal everyone's cow and laugh like the wind. (Anti-gov, anti-tyrant)
6. Destroy the question.
7. Send prayer to the Lord and ask Him to make justice. Out of clay, if necessary.
Taking for granted a succesful attempt at invirtuating the masses.
(Maybe a cabal of virtue ethicists slowly insinuates a noble lie/truth about the dignity of responsible one-cow-manship through hollywood screenplays, and the next generation has been so steeped in the vibe, it comes naturally to them. Or maybe, a group of economic determinists figures out how to change conditions such that social conditions also change and onecowmanship is rewarded, ground up..)
But even taking that invirtuation as a hypothetical fait accompli:
One bad apple spoils the bunch.
But even if there's not a bad apple:
The awareness that one bad apple spoils the bunch, makes it overwhelmingly likely that someone, even someone otherwise virtuous, prememptively, defensively bad-apples. If rot is inevitable, one has to protect one's family, after all, and provide them with meat and milk.
But even if no one does that :
The awareness that others might think of things in terms of a general awareness of bad apples spoiling the bunch, means that they preemptively, defensively bad-apple before someone else does.
That seems like a hard thing to work around -
So : We need an extraterrestial existential threat, more palpable than eventual global warming, that makes everyone share a common goal. Just gotta wait for one to show up.
A truism. Doing anything more than you "ought" is immoral by definition. But this isn't a moral question. It's a political/legal one, so we impose laws to advance the state's interest. Whatever you're getting at, get at, which seems to be that you want our consciences to tell us that 3 trout per season is sustainable, but not 4. 10 trout is not gluttony, immoral, and a sin. It's just more than the population can sustain, so we regulate it. Maybe in other seasons 10 makes sense. Letting the democacy decide is how we decide, but you seem to think we must rework our moral compass to be truly just.
For older societies, it often isthe case that 10 trout in a certain season is a sin, in other seasons virtuous. When everything is tightly woven together (as in the bizzarre breadth of the laws of Leviticus) It'snot a hippy thought - it's why an arch-conservative like Burke champions tradition in quasi-evolutionary terms, as an inherent understanding of what works and what disrupts, that builds up over time without anyone necessarily knowing why. James Scott calls it 'metis'.
The regulatory state enters in when this tradition falls apart, either because we're too recently transplanted to know without knowing what practices work, or because a new economic model/ behavior has torn to pieces organic communities.
But all that said, I agree, because however lamentable our lack of 'metis' or millennia-won tradition, it's already happened, so we can't just hearken back.
It's what happens when the ends justify the means and/or profit is the sole motive.
Discourage such thinking by showing what can and does happen as a result, and there may be something more worthy of calling "the commons".
So...
3.
mmm.
Indeed.
Not at all. I'm a tyrant.
Quoting csalisbury
So, (1.) the Environmental Committee issues a dictat from time to time that declares the fish allowance this year, and (2.) the Hanoverian Hussars are deputed to kill the first-born of apostates.
In the happy Banno world of social responsibility, government is a simple matter of coordination, (1.) experts work out what is best and we all do it; (2.) the brutality of coercion, is only required because there are cheats.
Things could be better than they are though, and mainly by not letting the cheats make the rules and enforce them.
The real problem with the commons was not from the greed of the individual, who wants more than one's fair share of cows, it's a problem of too many individuals sharing the same resources. That's overpopulation. Overpopulation seems to be a natural tendency for any living species which is capable of dominating the others. Have you ever grown a culture on a petri dish? The thriving species will run rampant, rapidly overrunning and using up all the choice nutrients, then it dies because it hasn't the capacity to adapt: some might go into suspended animation (seeds or spores) waiting for another chance to dominate.
That's why the third option won't work. We haven't the capacity to adapt. I'd propose a fourth option, vegetarianism or something like that, and I think Plato suggested something like this in his Republic (which was supposed to be a communal society), saying that meat ought to be given up, as a relish. But again, I don't think we have the capacity to adapt. "Taste" might be the strongest of all instinctual motivators. We take oxygen for granted and don't need to taste it out, but food is not only fundamental to subsistence, it supports growth, loco-motion, and all the higher level activities like sensing and thinking. The variations between individual highly organized living beings, like the human, are probably closely related to taste.
Right. Punish people who don't do as they ought. How is this different than fining or taxing for a privilege which Hanover suggested. Shunning people equates to not allowing their cows in the commons or not doing business with them, both of which hurt them financially. You an Hanover seem closer in your thinking than you'd like to admit.
The problem seems more like there was too many dairy farmers and therefore too much competition for dairy farmers in one local area. Maybe the Dairy Farmer should give up Dairy farming and get a Pell Grant from the government to go back to college and learn a different trade, like computer programming.
Sounds like a true libertarian response. Let the people, not the government, treat cheaters how they should be treated.
I recently read that there is not actually much historical evidence that the "tragedy of the commons" was a thing. That community owned land in England was not in especially bad shape, and that plenty of societies around the world have had communally owned land at some point during their history, without this apparently leading to some calamity.
Now I am not an anthropologist or a historian, so I cannot vouch for this view.
However, we should probably consider the option that humans, as social animals, are actually quite capable of dealing with the "tragedy of the commons" via self-policing, if the society is reasonably egalitarian (so that no-one can afford to anger everyone).
I think in England we even now have community owned roads and squares, that are fairly well looked after, likewise public beaches.
So we're avoiding a dictator shooting things, we're avoiding just making it private, and we're avoiding simply depending on ideal people via their good will.
That's not to say that it's never been a problem. It certainly is, in certain social circumstances.
I think it counts as an argument for option 3, and without, I think, requiring any special "invirtuation of the masses", in csal's words (unless the social changes that accompany the introduction of some kind of democratic socialism count as invirtuation).
It’s also a bottom-up approach, so to speak, because it is freely chosen rather than enforced from above.
Your equating democracy as dictatorial is the problem. I understand you use the term dictator here as being any authority decreeing and enforcing rules, but I see a democracy in particular as a community expressing its will and therefore just, as best as it can be expressed. So I'm not the dictator, but a servant of the people, therefore protecting the commons as the common folk have said they wanted it protected.
As to what I think you wish to say, which is that ideally we'd live in a benevolent anarchy, where we'd need no laws and no enforcement because each person would internally know how many trout he could catch and would never violate his conscience, I roll my eyes. Sure, I want that too. Let's want that together and lament the sad state of humanity. In the meantime, let's send out the game wardens to search the buckets for extra fish.
Sure. I was talking about the "I'm just bored with practicality, let's engineer the world with creative ethics."
Prefer whatever you like (which is why you prefer it) but what kind of sense does it make to ignore what you say are sound observations about behavior (taking more than they ought)? If option 3 occurs, then there is no problem; sometimes it occurs. Fairly often it does not occur and individual people ignore common interests.
Hanover's support for democratically determined rules for grazing, fishing, or sex in pubic parks is nothing like establishing dictatorship. What happens most often is that the commons are privatized and then everyone is excluded except the new owner. I'd rather have a cop on the prairie, by the river, or in the park enforcing the rules our elected representatives imposed, than have no access to the prairie, the river, and the park at all.
The first time I waded into the Atlantic Ocean on Cape Cod, I was informed that I was on a "private ocean beach". "Private beach" just didn't compute. How could such a thing even be the case?
"On the sign it said "Private Property". On the back side it didn't say anything -- that side was made for you and me!" Woody Guthrie. This Land Is Your Land
Hunter/ gatherers typically shun those who display self-important attitudes, or try to claim more than their fair share. This is a spontaneous act of community, not something imposed from above by law.
And we have to admit that option 2 requires option 1, though there are those who may wish to limit option 1.
But this just divides the commons up. And what would count as a pass would be the preservation of the commons for us all to benefit from it flourishing -- so we do not use the natural resources afforded us to a point that we can no longer do so.
But that doesn't seem to be happening now. And yet our main solutions are solutions 1 and 2 when it comes to dealing with the commons.
So if that doesn't work, why keep doing it?
https://www.quora.com/What-does-internalizing-the-externality-mean
'Things could be better than they are' feels to me like a necessary horizon for any happy world of social responsibility. There are those idyllic moments of communal self-sustaining, where there is pleasure (meaning, beauty) in simply, as a group, keeping things going. But the kind of virtue that extends across days and months and years seems to require a for-the-sake-of-which. Something like an ethical vanishing point around which virtuous deeds/behaviors/character organize.
If true, that's a problem, because if the happy world succeeds in getting rid of the cheats, it loses the for-the-sake-of-which or toward-which (to speak in faux-heidegger) that sustains social responsibility. On a broader scale, 'getting rid of the cheats' seems to be an ethical goal that corresponds to a cyclically repeated stage of 'corruption' or 'decadence' and usually leads to new cheats. The most obvious recent example being Stalinism.
That said, the recognition of this need to overthrow seems baked into whatever political/economic thing we have now, where we (1) incorporate that need for revolution into a series of elections and (2) cede the non-revolutionary boring-governing stuff to career technocrats, i.e. the guys who determine how many fish.
But a technocratic kibosh on over-fishing is different from a Levitican or Deuteronomic kibosh on promiscuous thread-weaving because the former is self-consciously an attempt to maintain equilibrium, while the latter is shot-through with cosmic significance and is enmeshed in epically understood historical struggle.
( First, against pharaoh. then as part of a divinely sanctioned campaign to take Canaan. Then a struggle against Assyria, and Babylon. Then as the hope for restoration. Then as the hope for a messiah.....there's always a struggle and the laws are always reimparted with value in the face of that. What we know as Deuteronomy was, scholars say, a conscious attempt to bring a mythical past to bear on a troubled present. Deuteronomy was probably heavily rewritten by priests almost a millennia after its official date of composition. )
Well-secularized economic revisionists will point out that what these strange prescriptions and ordinances were doing really was maintaining equilibrium and imparting it with some mystical significance ideologically- and maybe. But that doesn't change the fact that explicitly, consciously, making the end-goal maintenance of equilibrium destroys the idea of an end-goal. If there is no goal, and we're still not happy, then why maintain equilibrium? The rational reconstruction eats itself. We can maintain equilibrium under false pretenses, only because the pretense is why we maintain equilibrium in the first place. as in: explain rationally to a date that all this romantic stuff you're doing is really just to perpetuate your genes. Even if that were true, it would end up in you not perpetuating your genes.
The mirage I'm trying to point at is a commons maintained for the sake of maintaining a commons. I like the idea but it seems otherworldly (or something that pokes into profane reality in heightened moments) but to actually do it seems, to me, to require some common goal and struggle, which will get people out of the game-theory mess I tried to sketch in my first response. The alien threat was tongue-in-cheek, but virtue has always been tied to real world threats, stormclouds on the horizon. Abstracting ethics from struggle seems a lot like what Derrida does when he extracts the formal structure from whatever he happens to be reading. Kant and all subsequent formal ethics are good t know, but ethics without situation is empty. Virtue is always directional.
This is the kind of thing figures like Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut made careers of. But they were also incredibly misanthropic outside of being congratulated on being number-threers. I don't know about Vonnegut, but Twain seemed to realize it - as in his Mysterious Stranger - but reconciled himself to not broaching it publically.
[sub]Tragedy of the commons » Solutions (Wikipedia)[/sub]
Choice 3 is the best solution in terms of having raised the awareness of the people concerned. They would know why their actions are good/bad, a knowledge that could be passed down to the next generation.
However given how humans are selfish in nature option 2 is more practical.
Option 1 involves threat-based enforcement which, quite unfortunately, works on some people who are simply too selfish to care.
Number three ends up being a very broad condemnation.
Looks like @Banno's (3.) to me.
I used to live in a mountain village in South France. Every year, every able-bodied person came together to clear and reopen a complex irrigation system that brought water from the river to all the gardens along the valley. Several miles of ditching. When it was all working, there was a rota so that the gardens upstream did not use all the water. And then there was the forest, also owned by the village - that was managed differently, with felling rights sold to produce an income. Tragic.
Sure. Thats why I posted again in response to the same quote by Banno:
Quoting Harry Hindu
In Richard Dawkin's book, The Selfish Gene, he explains how intelligent social beings with long memories can communicate their experiences with cheaters within their community so as to eventually shun them from the community.
The problem with these authoritarian socialists like Banno and unenlightened is that they think government is the answer to all ethical problems and that everyone in government is there for serving the public and not themselves. Govt. is made up of people and if Banno and unenlightened are worried about the greed of people in general and propose that greed is the reason you need govt. then why would you give certain people more power over others?
That seems generous to say the least. The American "Democracy" version looks more like this (from where I sit, within it): You can have as many cows as you can get your hands on, you can exterminate all other farmers or any interloper on the grazing land, even it it belongs to them, and when the land is rendered useless, claim another piece of land and exterminate whoever is there. And finally, when the cows' methane gas has caused severe global warming, you can declare yourself the winner.
I mean 3 can mean all kinds of things. It's kind of a negative space -- what counts as culture, after all? And how do you foster it? Is it possible to do so today? And if so, how?
For my part I am happy to point out that the supposedly pragmatic solutions are just not very pragmatic on the basis that they aren't working. By all means get them working -- maybe that's the best we can do. But we surely shouldn't defend what's not working on a pragmatic level if it's just not accomplishing the task of building sustainable economies.
I actually do agree with you. It was very unclear, but what I'm objecting to with 'number-threeism' is the selection of number three as more or less the endpoint of productive thought. A discussion like this thread can easily degenerate into 'choose your fighter' and proceed to everyone having a basically moral argument, with the selection of 'number-threeism' being nothing but self-identifying as 'good.' Other people can select other fighters to identify as 'no-nonsense' and 'realistic'. What the kids call virtue-signalling.
And then you have a terrible thing where the 'good' and the 'realistic' are separated, and people fight them out, identifying with what virtue they value most. Like you said, it's bogus because the 'realistic/pragmatic' options aren't really. And the 'good' option for the sake of choosing the good option often leads to misanthropy, where instead of devoting creative energy to solve the problems, you maintain your goodness by lamenting the badness of everyone else in a 'broad condemnation' as @frank put it.
My objections and complications weren't meant to nix number three, but to try to point out some of the really fundamental problems it would have to overcome--- the 'alien threat' is a joke, but also really does seem like the only option at first blush (it's really an old neoconservative argument about needing an Other to unify against). So I guess the trick would to be to reverse engineer things to see why the alien would work as a solution ( I think it would) and then break that down, and figure out what could have the same effect, without (a)waiting for a miraculous threat from the skies, like the god that heidegger said could save us or (b) fostering a 'noble lie' about an external enemy (e.g. islamofascism). Take the neocon insight and separate the wheat from the imperial chaff. I think the wheat is that concerted virtuous effort needs some kinf of ethical telos, and that's what's lacking if we talk about virtuously maintaining for the sake of maintaining.
Though don't we have external ends, now? I think wealth acquisition is a kind of external end, no? And, in our current environment at least, it's the insatiable desire for wealth meeting the finite resources required for that wealth that's ruining our commons. Or do you mean that the opposition, in eliminating said telos, doesn't offer anything and so just isn't compelling?
Or maybe I don't understand, and I should just stand by my first comment -- that I want to hear more.
This proposed solution also depends on your 'A Big Fat Dictator who shoots anyone who tries to put two cows on the', what is now, private property.
Using "Big Fat Dictator" to refer to government, doesn't somehow remove reliance on government in the privatization solution, as you need government to enforce exclusion from the space.
And if you assume government is there to enforce exclusion from the space for the benefit of a private individual, then by definition government can enforce some reasonable sharing scheme, including some while excluding others.
For, imagine you're the farmer and bought the privatized land, but someone comes and puts a cow on it? Will your whining and complaining and maybe some ranting about government help? No, what will help is phoning the government and asking the government to enforce exclusion to your property.
Privatization is not a structurally different scheme then any other scheme to manage use of a publicly owned asset, they all rely on the government's ability to force exclusion and select usage of the asset.
There is no intrinsically moral or structurally political difference, the relevant question is simply "what's a good deal for the public".
The proponents of privatization are generally not arguing against the power of government (which they need), but rather they are generally arguing that public assets should be sold below the true worth of the asset, either by fanciful accounting that undervalues the asset or then "just because".
Usually, the fanciful accounting excludes the future utility of the land to the public and includes fanciful interest and discount rate calculations to try to show the public gains more from the capital exchanged for the land than a renting scheme. However, since the difference between selling and renting is extremely low in any calculation, the net-present-value of future utility (government wants to make some project and suddenly it's convenient all that land is public) easily exceeds the sell-rent difference, it's almost never reasonable to sell public lands based on the same accounting methods companies use to value their own assets.
What makes matters worse, is that the main reason for a private company to sell land would be the management costs exceed the revenue from that land, but the main management cost for the public (policing and a court system to settle disputes, which can just as easily come up with private owners and between renters) will be the same if privatized or rented!
So, if we simply don't know what the land will be worth to the public in the future and supporting a police force and justice system is the same if things are rented or sold, then the economic optimum is a rolling rent scheme (and whether to one or several users doesn't really matter, just like if the rent was sold and the buyer then rented to several farmers the proponents of privatization wouldn't care). If you object "ah but farmers need long term foresight", well the rolling rent scheme can be long term, whatever is optimum. In most circumstances, it's almost impossible to argue against this in economic terms, and third-party un-biased economists brought into evaluate these cases typically demonstrate the above with lot's of numbers and conclude renting provides both revenue and future flexibility if a new public optimum usage of the land is found.
Hence why privatization proponents try to cast it in moral terms, that somehow it is a morally superior outcome to privatize in which case it's a moral imperative to privatize, and if assets need to be sold below their value that's fine. Of course it makes no sense (why would the public sell something below the value, isn't this economically irrational? how could "economics" seriously conclude such a thing), so they will flip-flop between these moral arguments for privatization and fanciful accounting.
The tragedy of the commons only occurs if there is no effective way for the government to enforce exclusion, in which case there is no effective way to privatize either, and "developing a culture that respects the commons" becomes the only option. For instance, if there is no effective way to exclude people from using a common space to dump small pieces of trash, aka littering, then developing a culture against littering is the only option.
But that's just the Big Fat Dictator.
...abd that's were we went wrong. It is a moral equation. That's the point of this thread - to point out that the solution is neither political big fat dictators nor economic privatisation, but showing respect fort the commons.
How about internalizing the externalities? We already do this in California, with our highest gas prices in the nation...?
No idea what that means. Is it a Californian thing?
What?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Internalizing_externalities
Clouds are lonely?
That's the crack in education, right there.
The public voted for Trump.
Not a good track record.
Because behaviour is malleable.
Doubtless the cop will have a submachine gun to keep the peace. It's an oddly American view, but it has leached out into the real world.
A good point. Made earlier by someone else. It shows how undemocratic such notions actually are.
So you're going to tell them their preferences, wants, desires?
As you know, the majority of the people did NOT vote for trump.
Yes, but how is that culture developed? Elinor Ostrom (a political economist) won a Nobel prize in 2009 for her findings on this:
Quoting Elinor Ostrom - Nobel Prize
Quoting Non-governmental solution - Wikipedia
Those "community-based rules and procedures" are an example of internalizing the externalities that Wallows mentioned. Their function is to ensure that those that benefit from the shared resource also bear the costs of their use that would otherwise be borne by others.
And, finally:
Quoting Ostram's law
Definitely wealth acquisition is an external end - its just not a moral one. It's relentlessly amoral, in fact, even avowedly so - Hayek says markets are amoral, in principle, and quietly laments that fact while maintaining its just the way it is.
But I'm not championing external ends as ... ends in themselves. I'm saying they're necessary and the political (and personal!) struggle is finding shared ends to work toward.
I also want to hear more....I just want to hear realistic, pragmatic approaches and suggestions.I think we're on the same page, I'm just being a little bit of a bloviating diva about it.
Sure. Universities are full of cracks, not to mention quacks.
If the common folk pass a law through the democratic process, then obviously the common folk do show respect for the commons. The reason they allow only 4 trout per line is because they think everyone should get a fair shake at catching trout. Fairness seems like a moral question to question to me to some extent.
You're stuck calling an agreement among the townsfolk as to how the commons should be fairly divided a dictatorial act. I don't follow that. Politics, in a democracy, is people collaborating and coming to a agreed upon solution.
OK, so we keep a few cheats on to serve as bad examples...
Actually, a fairytale about how putting too many cows on the commons leads to disaster is the usual approach.
4. Find an economic model that supports the commons.
I wonder what happens after the tragedy of the commons? Life goes on so the tragedy can't be the final word. Let's say the land gets ruined by overgrazing and now nobody can raise cows and make money. So now what happens? Does the land no longer have any use? Does nature never recover? Is there no technology that comes along and introduces grass that can support more cows?
Your thought experiment seems to treat the world as some steady-state entity. This used to be the way to estimate the carrying capacity of Earth. But then it was realized that humans alter that equation, creating higher yield crops, making deserts bloom, and so on. So now the carrying capacity is estimated to be around 10 billion. But some say we could increase that by building huge arcologies, genetic engineering and advanced nanotech and replicators.
One of the great virtues of the Westminster system was a professional body called the Civil Service. In the fairytail these folk gave up worldly things in pursuit of the good of the nation. They gave independent and courageous advice to whomever was in government, while standing outside of the political process.
A similar thing was dreamed of in Classical China.
It usually gets subdivided by a real estate developer.
Set aside for drovers to move cattle on hoof, these "long paddocks" are now vital resources for biodiversity and the movement of species in the face of climate change.
So, of course, the thinking at present is that they be sold off unless they can be shown to earn a profit.
Does this say anything more than:
4. Find a fourth option.
Luckily it's out of our hands; it's hard to believe there has ever been a human community without its share, however small, of cheats. It's just a matter of natural variation.
Quoting Banno
Fairytale indeed, if you believe this guy.
OK! I, for whatever reason, didn't pick up on the emphasis on morality.
Reread your posts, and they're interesting, but I don't have more to say right now. The brain-box is tired at the end of my work-week :D.
Quoting csalisbury
Cool.
I wouldn't say you're being a diva, bloviating or otherwise. I wouldn't want to hear more if I thought you that ;).
And I think we're basically on the same page. At the very least close enough that discussion would be fruitful.
I guess I'd like to dig more into this notion of realism and pragmatism -- though I don't want to take too much away from the thread either, so I'll try and stay focused on the notion of the commons. I've been taking the environment as a kind of example of the commons, though maybe that's too broad. What do you think?
I was using fairytail in a more Tolkien sense: a tale that grows in the telling, showing what you ought do.
But, yes.
Is the sustainability of the paddock fixed to a certain number of cows?
But https://terrastendo.net/2013/03/26/livestock-and-climate-why-allan-savory-is-not-a-saviour/
It can better be settled by the collaborative decision of the group (as I suggest) than by each person's conscience (as you suggest).
Or. do you now imply a whole new theory, asserting the question of the good for the commons is empirical and within the purview of the scientist dictator?
You do understand that, I trust.
Perhaps not all of them then? Or perhaps not any? Make do with kangaroo and emu meat instead?
What to do about the carrying capacity of the paddock can be determined by science, likely by the Democracy (at least through trial and error), but how to go about that cannot be determined by resorting to one's conscience as far as I can see. It's one thing to say you want for it all to be fair and another to arrive at an actual figure that represents fairness.
Anyway, I look at the world and don't see a tragedy of the commons. I see a world with more food and access to resources than ever before. Those cultures, of what of them that are left, even in their still unspoiled environments, who hunt and gather ethically, making certain to leave to nature what is owed nature, live and die with the amount of rainfall in every season, and some even survive into their 40s.
The point being that privatization and democratic rule have led to great prosperity, so much so that you can sit in your living room and tell me I'm an odd little fish on this invention of the internet that didn't spring forth through the magic of a rising social conscience, but through privatization, the incentives inherent in capitalism, and through the extraction from the land of its many great resources, a good amount of which has fallen into the hands of the few, although very clearly the more capable few.
You are left with the unfortunate truth that this system you have declared unethical works, with only your doomsday predictions of collapse as your justification for hastening its collapse today.
This is just such a tired old trope. Among most hunter-gatherer groups those making it past the age of 5 live to an average 65 years, the same life expectancy of modern Glasgow. What drags the average life expectancy down is a high infant mortality rate (lots of people dying at 4 is going to make the average age at death much lower).
So if you want to elbow in the whole of the capitalist infrastructure as a cause of greater life expectancy to better fit your world view, then be my guest. But to anyone looking objectively at it, one thing and one thing alone is responsible for the change in life expectancy and that's better neonatal medical care.
To support your position, you'd have to show how the entire capitalist infrastructure was, in it's entirety, a necessary factor in improving neonatal care and that such improvements could not possibly have been brought about any other way.
Cite this.
Life Expectancy in Hunter-Gatherers
Longevity Among Hunter- Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination
Thanks. That saved me a job.
Several decades is significant.
Also, that massive numbers are dying prior to age 5 is kind of important too.
From Wiki:
"Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years.[37] They further estimate that 70% of deaths are due to diseases of some kind, 20% of deaths come from violence or accidents and 10% are due to degenerative diseases." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer.
"life expectancy at age 15 is 48 years for Aborigines, 52 and 51 for settled Ache and !Kung, yet 31 and 36 for peas-ant and transitional Agta.Survival to age 45 varies between 19 and 54 percent, and those aged 45 live an average of 12–24 additional years."
"In the united states as of 2002 the mode age of mortality was 85. In most cases about 30% of of adult deaths occur at ages above the modal age of mortality."
https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expectancy-in-hunter-gatherers-and-other-groups/
This shows:
1. The average life expectancy in hunter gatherer societies is about four decades less than in industrial societies if child mortality is included.
2. The average life expectancy in hunter gatherer societies is several decades less than in industrial societies if child mortality is excluded.
3. Industrial nations are continuing to distance themselves in both categories as time moves forward.
4. If you live in a hunter gatherer society, your chances of dying before age 15 are extremely high.
So, as to my post where I proclaimed life industrialized nations would result in a profoundly longer life span, how does anything here disprove that?
Several decades to life expectancies at birth, i.e. a reduction in child mortality rates (among other things, of course).
The sentence immediately before that reads: "The modal age of mortality in hunter-gatherers can range from 68 in the Hiwi to 78 in the Tsimane."
The prisoners dilemma can be a starting point.
And contrary to the prevailing sentiment ethics isn't a universal language game.
The figure you used was 40s which is incorrect and you then went on to say...
Quoting Hanover
... which the figures do not show since every other aspect of hunter-gather lifestyle (aside from neonatal care) seems entirely consistent with a reasonably long and healthy life.
They absolutely show a statistically significant increase in life span in industrialized countries, even more overwhelming when childhood deaths are included. You keep using the term "neonatal," but 15 years of age not a newborn. And, I don't know why you discard the fact that children are dying very young in hunter gatherer societies. I do hold that having your children reach adulthood is an incredibly important thing. Actually, I can think of fewer things worse than burying your child, but apparently you guys think that's hardly worth mentioning when comparing life of the hunter gatherer to others.
I'm still waiting for you to intrinsically link the whole of the capitalist infrastructure to preventing childhood deaths. It's got nothing to do with how awful it is that such societies still experience this tragedy, it's to do with your incredibly political claim that the elimination of such tragic circumstances is somehow inextricably linked to privatisation and capitalism.
It's a small number of very specific factors which cause this problem (mostly medical), not an entire socio-economic structure.
But this is the first you've asked that. Quoting Isaac
I think it has to do with all sorts of things, including medical, all of which are evident in wealthier nations. Capitalism creates wealth and prosperity.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Hanover
OK, since your immediate response to me was to ask for a citation, I'll play along in the same spirit. Cite me the evidence that it is more than just medical. Cite me the evidence that capitalism creates wealth and prosperity, and then complete your argument (relative to the thread) that no other system is equally capable of creating wealth and prosperity. All with citations.
That is a statement about you, not about reality. I think others have pointed that out.
It's important that folk who are responding to you by citing evidence realise that.
Odd.
It's an odd argument... The democratic process protects the commons and we all benefit, yet there is a problem with the common.
Odd.
I think it''s also the medications keeping people "alive" well past their "use by' dates.
Sure. You kinda missed the thrust of the thread, though, which was more about the need for an ought to be inserted somewhere in the calculation.
Of course. That's why we ought have democratic rule and ought not have a dictatorship.
Yeah that would be great wouldn't it.
Yeah, that too.
The problem with @Hanover's argument is that basically, better surgery and the discovery of antibiotics have had a hugely disproportionate part to play in our increased lifespans and yet this tired old crap gets trotted out every time someone wants to support some generally capitalist policy, that the whole agri-industrial complex has somehow been, in equal part, responsible for these improvements.
Quoting Hanover
According the the WHO "Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today." They're not saying "Antibiotic resistance is basically fine because privatisation, the free-market, property ownership and modern technology all play just as important a role in global health, food security, and development, so no need to worry". Lose antibiotics and modern surgery and we're right back to 19thC death rates, the rest of the economic system has nothing to do with it.
Fortunately what we do, including the US, is to take the money and the skills developed due to our superior economic structure and offer assistance to those less advanced nations and we clean their teeth, purify their water, and vaccinate their citizens, not to mention feed them and provide for them in times of drought. It's called caring for the commons..
Irrelevant? No. I'm countering the opinion that it has any necessary connection to capitalism. To make that claim you'd have to demonstrate that it was not possible any other way. All three of those factors (though 1 and 3 would be impossible without 2) were discovered by amateur or government sponsored scientists. The uptake of penicillin was actually slowed by a reluctant pharmaceutical market. So how exactly did capitalism play a crucial role in their development?
Quoting Hanover
Sigh! Hunter-gatherers work a shorter working week doing all that than the average westener. The San for example average about 14 hours.
Quoting Hanover
1. Hunter-gatherer tribes have better dental health than modern Americans.
2. The water is perfectly safe to drink in the wild, it is contaminated by the consequences of development (agriculture, urbanisation and industrialisation)
3. 9 out of the ten most virulent communicable diseases are caused by agriculture. There are no diseases in hunter-gatherer tribes which are treatable with vaccination programmes.
Your prejudice is clouding your assessment of how much evidence you need to support your position. How much reading on anthropology have you done prior to concluding that native tribes are all backward savages barely scraping a disease-ridden living from the mud?
1. They have terrible dental health. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/362.summary
2. I guess they had to find water first, but once they did, and they didn't die from the malaria ridden waters, maybe they could go about living their healthy lives, assuming they weren't burying their neonatal corpses, which is defined as any death under 15 years of age.
3. HIV began in the hunter gatherer community. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26316-perfect-storm-turned-hiv-from-local-to-global-killer/
There is now effective treatment for that.
I didn't call hunter gatherers savages, scraping by in the mud. I simply don't accept the prejudice generally ascribed to modern society by those in academia. It's not anti-intellectualism, as I expect you'll next start arguing, but more just a refusal to accept the nonsense that health improves the farther I get away from modern hospitals.
Today my coworker's spouse fell and broke her jaw. How might she fare in the Congo, having to chew her food sideways for the rest of her life?
Try reading the actual article next time rather than than just googling until you find something that matches your prejudice. The study found decay at a "prevalence of dental disease comparable to that of modern, industrial societies with diets high in refined sugars" in one group and only in the men (the women were much better than modern society). The study was startling entirely because "This is the first time we’ve seen such bad oral health in a pre-agricultural population", the findings were put down to a unique diet high in starchy nuts and considered an oddity.
Quoting Hanover
Your comment referred to vaccinating their children. What diseases prevalent in hunter-gatherer societies do vaccinations prevent? Or is that just more prejudicial assumption?
And I'm still waiting for any evidence whatsoever that capitalism was necessary for any of these marvellous medical advances that our society has made.
Quoting Wallows
Not at all sure what to make of this. Do you wish to expand on it?
I'll right away point out that rationality in economics can reach psychotic levels. I studied it. Just think about the requirement imposed by some Aryan brotherhood as to prevent any of the prisoners from ratting another out...
Quoting Banno
Well, there isn't much to say is there? Ethics in economics has always been the inconvenient outlier in any rational based strategy.
@fdrake may help out here as I'm going to be shutting down soon.
:lol:
Oh, yeah. That's something of what I had in mind - the economists puzzlement with the commons strikes me, and I hope you, as mad; an obsession with the fetish of the "rational" to the exclusion of all reason. As soon as one take an ethical view - that is, looks at the problem without insisting that greed is the only motive for action - the answer is obvious.
Let's not get into talk about such literal wicked game theory scenarios of Mutually Assured Destruction, a suicide pact deemed too 'rational' by our great leaders to not implement.
Shit gets depressing, hard and fast.
It's the bastard child of Skinnerian behaviorism in my view.
Doubtless some great economist will come along and reify self interest to be inclusive of cooperative behavior, which is an ongoing task in the field today. But fundamental changes would have to take place in the field before that ever happens.
So the argument has degenerated into whether indigenous folk have better teeth.
The take home in this thread is no great revelation; it's just that I noticed how clearly the supposed tragedy of the commons displays the tragedy of some ways of thinking about economics.
It reinforced a prejudice that grew in me after reading Small is Beautiful as a child. Economics is a logic, a language that allows us to set out what will happen given certain assumptions, certain deeds, on the part of the players. It has long become a fetish; worshiped for powers attributed to the "free market" to make all things clean and pure. The Commons displays how the assumption that Greed is All leads to tragedy; A tragedy avoided simply by taking an ethical stance.
That has little to do with the teeth of the natives.
This at least acknowledges the straw man you've been fighting all along attempting to attribute to me. There's nothing free market libertarian in my position. I argued for for democratic regulation. I gave full nod to the commoners to protect their commons.
Edit: Thinking on that, what the fuck is a flying fuck?
The usual approach is to make cooperative behaviour drop out of greed, by claiming that it's the best way to get what you want.
But of course that entirely misses the point.
But I was so vying for your affection.Quoting Banno
Not sure, but it sounds like a playful question designed to detract from the obnoxiousness of your post above.
A few cheats, for sure. That's what happened to Martin Shkreli. I'm not going to defend him, because he's a 24k piece of shit, but! he defended himself, occasionally, along these lines: 'I'm just a scapegoat for Big Pharm which does what I did every day, but even worse.- and he's right. He was tv-ready loatheable, and his public dressing-down drew off heat from everyone else.
This guy introduced A MILLION COWS plus he had a bad attitude (draws attention away from the well-pr-trained people who do far worse.)
Anti-pharm demographics went wild and reveled in his downfall, then quieted down to the occasional facebook meme.
'A few cheats' sustains an order, temporarily. Hence the insatiable, ever-growing, hunger for scandal, which appeases the need to see justice served. Scraps for that appetite. But it won't lead us to maintain the commons. That guy had way too many cows and he got his just desserts. So let us continue, keeping an eye out for the next guy with too many cows. And so on. Meanwhile the commons goes to pot and eagle-eyes real eatate men wait for a prime price to buy.
In classical China, if we're talking about the same thing/era, the independent council was made of people recruited to serve an authoritarian state. They did give up worldly things, but only through a intricate system of morality involving respect for elders, the mandate of heaven, and so forth. a universal morality of strict obedience (obedience over everything) leading to recruitment from the provinces, to be brought to the center.
An ever starker example can be drawn from the Ottoman Empire and the 'Devshirme'. The Ottoman Empire, during this period, wouldn't populate their higher-courts with insiders, but with children kidnapped. These kidnapped kids would be objective in relation to court politics, due not only to their lack of connection to dynasties, but also to the sheer trauma of capture. The emotional 'snipping ' (and, irc also physical snipping)- of capture.Thus they were able to serve the Ottoman state objectively. this still happens , but in subtler ways.
I think we're largely in agreement that the missing ingredient is a moral/ethical one ---but, for the same reason I tried to show you can't self-consciously call a guiding ideology a guiding ideology without ruining it, you can't simply say we need a moral/ethical 'ought' because we need a moral/ethical ought. Which makes me feel like - we have to 'build' one. And I don't think that's even it, because it's too top down. We have to suss out the moral/ethical order that's already there, waiting to precipitate.
Both the Ottoman and Chinese models rely on emotional 'snips' which let people decide soberly, from a macro-perspective. And the most 'snipped' people of all are post-hayekian neoliberals who can crunch the economic numbers without guilt. And that doesn't work. Because they leave the most important thing out.
Actually, it has everything to do with the teeth of natives. The point of the commons is about the ethics of managing shared resources. The choices are either regulated individual competition (whether those regulations are democratically or dictatorially arrived at is irrelevant), or ethically driven egalitarianism.
Hunter-gatherers lived on one massive common and their social structure was ethically egalitarian. Whether that system 'worked' (or whether we could take some bits of it and apply them to our modern society) is absolutely the crux of the matter.
In the 'it never worked' corner are exactly the kind of colonial myths that @Hanover keeps bringing up. Without competition we'll stagnate. Dispelling them is pretty much foundational to any argument that claims egalitarian ethics can work.
A post in "The Power of Truth"
Drawing attention again to the conundrum of personal choice as against social requirement.
re #3:
You'll have to recruit a dictator or totalitarian structure to create and enforce this sort of cultural uniformity.
I saw that last post was two years ago, figured out how I got here, went back where I was, deleted this. I'm new. :sweat:
edit, oh I just noticed that's in the op
In other words, don't let the commons be used for extractive private profit. Tell the free marketers to go pay fair market value to graze their range maggots on private land.
It all boils down to the much-discussed and highly-regarded notion of cooperation. Given a common pasture (resource), people who use it could do so productively and for a long time if only they work together - don't overgraze (limit consumption) among other things. However, even though we've defined ourselves as social animals and have attributed our success to being such, our cooperative behavior can't hold a candle to that of other social creatures like bees and ants.
Perhaps we need to put the notion of social existence under the microscope. Social existence is simply a group of individuals of the same species banding together in order that it gain a survival advantage over other species whether themselves social or solitary. In other words, social existence is designed to work against external threats and although this may require cooperation between individuals of a social group, the cooperative "spirit" that evolved in us is probably just that much as required to fend off external dangers and no more. What this means is the level of cooperation necessary to forestall/mitigate/end the tragedy of commons never evolved in us. That the protagonists in this tragic tale are all human doesn't help - we instinctively treat each other as allies and, implicit in that, is the assumption that no harm will come from doing what comes naturally to us, taking our cattle to graze for example. I guess what I'm getting at is that we're failing to notice internal threats to our social structure. The fact that such "threats" are subtle and not like the direct frontal assault of pride of lions, something our proto-social ancestors probably faced on a daily basis, makes it almost impossible to detect such threats and the risks involved.
Thus the tragedy of the commons is simply an indication that humans are somewhere in between a completely solitary existence (tigers, leopards) and a full-fledged social way of life (bees, ants)
I feel like it must've taken some sophistry to shrug the basic dig against industrialization, being that people were freer under feudalism.
...and you'd be the centralized authority, in control of the commons, ensuring that people don't do what's in their own self interest, but limit their needs and wants to what's good for the environment, would you? I'm so glad you are impervious to corruption, because otherwise such power could drive a fool mad!
Ants and bees don't "cooperate" in the way that humans do. Ants have no concept of the entirety they're a part of. They simply do some task. An insect colony is more akin to a machine driven by a machine learning algorithm than a society.
Quoting TheMadFool
I think you're giving humans very little credit here. We're very good at spotting internal threats - for example people who don't play by the rules. But we're evolved to live in bands of a few dozen individuals, so we're less capable at seeing and reacting to systemic issues caused by the hugely complicated economic systems we have created.
Quoting counterpunch
Isn't that why we have elections?
— counterpunch
Quoting Echarmion
Have you never noticed how the right represent peoples interests whereas the left assume, the people exist to represent their interests? Democratic communism is an oxymoron. People would vote for the freedom of self interest every time! A command economy necessarily implies totalitarian government - prone to corruption - and is inclined to genocide. Do bees and ants have democracy? No. It's a dictatorship. Drones exists to serve the queen, and are disposable. Is that a model you would emulate for human beings?
I have not, but then I'm not caught up in some ideological straightjacket.
Quoting counterpunch
It is indeed, because communism would imply there is no "ruling" at all.
Quoting counterpunch
There are some things that make sense having under a "command economy". Vaccine production during a pandemic, for example. Or war materiel during a war. Basically, whenever you don't care about arbitrage effects and just want to put maximum effort towards one goal.
I'd say that is why the USSR managed to get the first man into orbit, despite being significantly weaker economically than the US. But to be honest I don't actually know enough about the history of the space race to be sure.
In a functioning democracy, those that only assume to represent the people's interests will have the disastrous surprise defeat in the elections. And those can be also on the right. One might think this might improve things, but many times it doesn't, especially if the winners are populists, again who can be either on the right or the left. Populists are great in portraying every problem of having emerged because of the evil corrupt rulers. And usually that's all they have, apart of being incapable of reaching any kind of consensus in the democratic process and not having actual solutions to the problems. If they are also authoritarians, what a great mess it will be.
But this is a bit off the subject.
I think this thread became current because of @Banno in another thread saying:
Quoting Banno
I asked him why it's so. I might have not noticed his answer...
Laika was the first dog in space and Yuri Gagarin was, in point of fact, the first person in space. The Soviet Union also achieved its goal of educating its entire populace. They had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, which has carried over into the Russian Federation today.
I think that the "command economy" that @counterpunch is referring to is the Collectivization that was put into place in opposition to Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy. I'm not sure what the history of the Soviet Union has to do with any of this, though.
Well think about it. Every time Labour/Dems lose an election, it's the fault of the electorate. They're stupid, racist or greedy, and that's why the left didn't win. It's not that the left failed to represent the interests of voters. It's the voters who are at fault, every time.
Quoting Echarmion
Then how do you prevent the individual adding cows to the common grazing land until it's a desert?
Quoting Echarmion
Private companies developed vaccines to combat the pandemic. The government merely created the market by pre-purchasing supplies. That aside, all economies are mixed to a greater or lesser extent. I'm not a free market fundamentalist - but capitalist economy is necessary to personal and political freedom.
He said that to me in 'Who owns the land?' Here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/538599
He offered no supporting argument, and then mocked my real world example of life under communism where everyone steals what no-one owns; undermining production, and thereby creating the motive to steal what no-one owns.
Communism doesn't work, and my reason for arguing this point so strongly is that, in order to secure a sustainable future we have make capitalism sustainable. That's why we need limitless clean energy from magma - so that we can internalise the externalities of capitalism without internalising them to the domestic economy. It's the difference between stop flying to save the world - and invent a hydrogen powered jet engine, and fly as much as you like!
When Hilary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump, she did bemoan that she had done so because of a "basket of deplorables", thereby creating a slur for the white working poor. The Democratic Party, because of that they tend to apathetic voters or, for whatever reason, enticed by the Populist rhetoric of the Right, does kind have a problem harboring classist attitudes towards so-called "white trash". Finding the film, Gummo, to be fairly relatable, myself, I have found for such attitudes to make a working relationship with them to be fairly untenable.
Being said Populist rhetoric is Populist rhetoric and the American Right also treats the working class in a fairly condescending manner. It is definitely preferable to me to listen to the patronizing emotional appeals on MSNBC than it is to be made subject to a pathology of fear via the feigned moral outrage of Fox News. Because both parties express a certain degree of implicit disdain towards people like me, I don't even watch the news at all.
Rather than gripe about the popularity of NASCAR, if the Democratic Party really wants to reach out to the working class, then they have to offer them meaningful participation within the democratic process and a set of political initiatives that don't merely appear to be to our benefit.
We are not disenfranchised because of that we are somehow "anti-social". We just simply aren't offered a place in politics where we are treated with respect and can put forth the kind of policies and programs that would actually improve our quality of life.
I recently read a book entitled 'Despised - why the modern left loathes the working class' by Paul Embery. He wants the left to get back to representing the interests of working class people - rather than telling the working class what they ought to value. I think he's right.
I'm like you - politically homeless. I'm not naturally right wing at all, but I'd vote for the right a thousand times before I'd vote for these condescending left wing idealists, who have never done a days work in their lives. And that's before I factor in the left's communist proscription for sustainability.
Example, I was listening to the radio today, and James O'Brien was on, (lefty idealist tosspot) and he said that 'every right minded and decent person was against Donald Trump' - which is to say, he thinks the majority of Americans in 2016, were immoral and/or insane. It's typical of the left. If you're not with us, there's something wrong with you.
Never seen Gummo - read the wiki. Very weird.
You're standing in it. See this thread.
I don't quite have the qualms with "idealism" that you do, despite that it can occasionally be invoked in a fairly patronizing manner.
Gummo is paradoxically one of the better media representations of people form similar living situations to me. It's actually kind of an exploitation film, but it's rather funny and, I think, ultimately oddly humanizing. It's definitely a landmark work of experimental independent cinema, and, so, will only be appreciated by some by that account.
As much as I do feel so inclined to put better up with the Democratic Party, I will say that what is occasionally levelled against them as per their tacit disdain for the working poor is just simply to the point. From activist campaigns to dancehalls, upper-middle class left-wing Liberals do tend to treat the poor as if they were somehow beneath them.
Lol. Of course. Got it.
The UK Labour Party are far more influenced by communism than the Dems. We didn't have a 'reds under the bed' McCarthyite purge against communism in the 1950's; though I suspect Keir Starmer would purge the far left of the Labour Party now if he could.
Instead, he was forced to leap to his knees for BLM, and endorse gender self identification to secure the far left vote ahead of his election as party leader, and that kind of politically correct nonsense goes down like a lead balloon in the Labour heartlands in the north. It's too broad a church for Labour to get elected, so ordinary working people are left unrepresented.
To my mind, the whole capitalist/communist dichotomy is over. Communism has failed, and we need a new democratic opposition. The new political spectrum I envisaged would range from ideological traditionalists, to scientific rationalists; and allow people to express a conscientious position with regard to protection of national interests, in relation to the global challenge of sustainability. Of course, bringing this about is another matter entirely. It took Labour 100 years to get into power, and we - the scientific rationalists, don't have 100 years to waste.
There is an 'on-topic' point to all this; that goes back to Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, because arguably, magma energy is a freely available resource, the right are obligated to exploit to exhaustion, like they would the common grazing land. And if they do so, the climate and ecological crisis can be solved without undermining capitalism.
I am in favor of the singular they, even to the point of saying that its being taken up so as to garnish votes was built that way by design. We wanted for the social liberal establishment to use our cause so as to put it to its full effect.
There is a kind of poverty to such praxis, though, in that the form of solidarity established with the miners during the strikes in the 1980s seems to have been much more effective. It's very easy for any politician to now pass for progressive by merely invoking any socially liberal policy whatsoever.
I couldn't say either way of your projected political camps as I am relatively unsure as to what they are.
What I mean about the American Right is that it just offends me more. The Dems just want to milk the waterworks whereas the Right wants for me to get pissed. I already can't stand being an Anarchist because I am pissed. I have no faith nor trust whatsoever in any person who wants to exploit the very rage that their general conduct has instilled within me. People think that there's some sort of revelry in revolution when there's just anger. It's just kind of a suicidal impulse. I'm just an angry young man with an impatient life. The Left, and, here, referring to the far-Left, just kind of exploits that too, though.
For me, I'd like to see a coalition of a set of parties to have fallen out of revolution in the libertarian Left and Anarchist movement, the peace movement, the left-wing Liberals who are with it enough to get what qualms we have with the Democratic Party, whatever Libertarians are up to the cause, and who among the so-called "radical Center" is willing to co-operate so that we can meaningfully substantiate human rights come together as a kind of anti-authoritarian coalition. Saying it and doing it are two different things, though. I kind of doubt that I could get any political movement off of the ground.
What I mean about the American Right is that I already dislike the Left, the Anarchist movement, left-Wing Liberals, and the Democratic Party to the point of abject indifference. I am glad not to be capable of fathoming what kind of scum most of those people are.
Being said, the Right in the U.K. is probably not quite like the Right here. Personally, in so far I'm not about to Ghandi the Central Intelligence Agency, a role that I would happily take, but am willing to admit that I am neither fit for nor will fall into place, I'd just as soon be done with politics altogether.
You haven't read this thread, have you.
Fine.
He offered no supporting argument,
— counterpunch
Quoting Banno
I didn't write that. You've misattributed the quote.
It might help if you'd read the thread! lol
I am the sandwich the picnic is short of!
Eh, you don't see what I mean, I think, though, perhaps, I am too concerned with remaining where I can drop out.
Personally, I have kind of social problem that has been created out of some of the habits of certain people's lifestyles. There are all kinds of other critiques to make against the Left, but, in this regard, what I know of this is that it is the Right who is behind that they exist in the first place. I've been to enough bars to be fairly keen on these things.
When my problem is with a certain degree of what you might call "chauvinism", it seems doubtful to me that anything will be better at its source.
This sort of thing only sort of seems to be quite so much of the case in the U.K., and, so, I'm not quite sure that you would understand.
Being said, there's no reason for me to posture when I have become a-political, and, so, I apologize for some of my previous statement.
I really just kind of want to be let to live my life outside of politics. If you read some of my other posts, you'll figure out why this is an entirely sensible thing for me to do.
Consider the hypothetical situation to where a certain massively multiplayer role-playing game has both become a cult phenomenon and resulted in any number of social plights. When the creators of such a game have done so in such a manner that does seem as if it would result in such plights, why should I expect for them to be preferable company to its users?
If you apply this hypothetical as a metaphor for certain sets of society, I think that you can figure out what I am attempting to explain.
Though I, personally, am liberal-minded and of an optimistic interpretation of egalitarianism, it is not exclusively out of partisanship that I have an aversion to the American Right. They're just simply more dangerous to me. I would like to stay out of danger and of politics in general. That is all that I wanted to clarify.
I'd take whatever I have to say however, but none of it to too much of heart. My life situation merely demands that I be let to drop out, which I do plan on doing, hopefully the sooner of sometime tomorrow rather than the later of sometime later.
Anyways, carry on or whatever. I wasn't levelling a dig at you or anything. I'll talk to you or anyone else whenever, I guess.
Quoting thewonder
That's so weird. I just now learned that Kentaro Miura died. (Beserk/Final Fantasy/Dark Souls.) Great artist. He was only 54. That sad news aside, the problem is this:
Quoting thewonder
There are no creators. The game is inherent to the human condition. The users are the creators, and you'll only do yourself in trying to unmake the game. You'd be better off trying to make it work, than trying to tear it all down, as if to clear space for your utopian idealism. Of course, you won't listen - and that's not a criticism. It's just part of the game.
Well, both sides have their scapegoats. Inherently there's nothing more substantial to blaming "liberal elites" or "indoctrinated students" either.
You have a point though, when you say this:
Quoting counterpunch
There is no longer a unified left in the western democracies, but there is a subset which has become increasingly divorced from the traditional left electorate. In terms of the voting structure, we see the same pattern in every western European country as well as the US: The left wing electorate is increasingly well educated and has higher incomes, while an increasing amount of low status voters abstains completely or switches over to social nativist movements (UKIP, FN, Trump).
There is, however, still a sizeable "workers left", it just hasn't fully crystallized into new parties (or retaken control of the old ones).
Quoting counterpunch
I'm not an anarchist, really, so I'm not sure myself. That said, there is some sociological evidence that humans are perfectly capable of making proper use of communal resources without oversight. Band or tribal societies have very limited central authority, yet they seem to get by with limited resources. Traditions and rituals develop around the communal resources that dampen any short-sighted temptation. In general, humans have limited foresight, but it's not that limited.
Quoting counterpunch
And supplying massive amounts of cash in advance, basically eliminating any entrepreneurial risk. But of course the private companies had the actual equipment and know-how.
Quoting counterpunch
Capitalism is a problematic term, since people tend to define it according to their preferred economic policy. I'll say that I think private property and a market economy are necessary components for a just and free economic system. What we should do, rather than look at labels, is to decide what our goals are in a specific area. Healthcare and education, for example, are in my opinion fields that should have equality of outcome. So competition is less useful here.
Quoting counterpunch
The lesson I take from the failure of communism, above all else, is that centralising too much power in few hands is dangerous, and doing so without accountability is disastrous.
My problem with a pro capitalist approach is that capitalism can run into the same problem when it turns into neo-feudalism, a process arguably already underway.
So I think the focus should be on the democracy part. Democracy creates accountability. Make sure power (and this includes wealth) does not concentrate too much. Make sure those with a stake in the outcome have a say. Not necessarily an equal say - if you build a company from the ground up, it's reasonable that your view should be very important. But if you eventually end up with thousands of workers, it's probably not reasonable to claim that these thousands do not get at least an equal voice.
Build on what works, discard that what didn't. No need to reinvent the wheel, really. There are good ideas out there already, and some that have been tried successfully. Unfortunately politics has a very short memory, and we tend to forget that the debates did not start yesterday.
I see young people being set up to be enslaved by communism; via political correctness and environmentalism. The "woke" are sleepwalking into a trap, and I'm pointing out that trap. This isn't about partisan politics for me. This is about a sustainable future, that I assure you, cannot be achieved by undermining capitalism. Capitalism can be made sustainable by harnessing magma energy, by drilling close to magma chambers, beneath volcanoes - and converting heat energy to electrical power, hydrogen fuel, desalinating water to irrigate land, recycling, fish farming etc, there can be a prosperous sustainable future - and freedom. I don't care whether its a red future or a blue future, but I do care there's a future - and that cant be achieved by the have less and pay more, tax this, stop that, wind and solar, low energy, neo communist approach of the left.
:lol:
I don't know if there's a red future or a blue future, but I do know there's a future.
Sigh, and and back to the evangelism. I think it has been pointed out numerous times to you that, if your plan can really work within capitalism, all you need to do is start a business.
Quoting counterpunch
You do realise that, since the 1980s, we've been in a period of deregulation and tax cuts in the west, right?
:Knob:
I need around £10bn start up capital.
Quoting Echarmion
And where are the left? Occupied with deconstructing whiteness, maleness and straightness!
It's unfortunate, then, that there isn't a system that would spread wealth to everyone so you could collect this sum from people, rather than having to appeal to either states or the largest corporations and banks.
Quoting counterpunch
But you just criticized the left for wanting to tax and regulate. So are you in favor of higher taxes and regulation or not?
I consider the tragedy of the commons as a quintessential feature of human social organization - we couldn't have developed society, big and small, in a regulatory vacuum. What I mean is social existence necessarily involves a system of rules that members of a group/tribe/society must, in a sense, promise to adhere to if they value living together as an extended family which society is.
The pinnacle of society is to be found in insects like bees and ants and every single entomologist studying them has written volumes upon volumes on how strict/iron-clad their social structures are - there are rules and no ant or bee is ever found to break them. The point to note is the existence of rules and to some extent how they're adhered to 100%. There is no ant or bee version of the tragedy of the commons and that should be a big hint as to how we can tackle the problem. I suppose politics enters the scene at this point.
There is. It's called capitalism. And I suppose I could do a kick starter campaign. If I can get 65p from everyone in the world, that's £10bn - and in return I'd give them limitless clean energy, desalination and irrigation, hydrogen fuel, carbon capture and sequestration. Bargain, right?
Quoting Echarmion
No, I didn't. You criticised de-regulation and tax cuts, and I said - "And where were the left? Pre-occupied with political correctness!" I'm saying, if you oppose de-regulation and tax cuts, the left are not there for you. What I was talking about is green taxes - as an approach to sustainability. These are taxes levied on consumers - to reduce demand, and it's the wrong approach.
I didn't know that about Kentaro Miura. That's so sad.
I'm not sure that you see what I mean by the metaphor. I would like to be an artist, poet, and philosopher. I already don't where to go from the Anarchist movement because of that left-wing Liberals are in too close of proximity to a certain set of parties that I would just as soon avoid. There have been kind of a lot of problems created in my life because of the way that people are about their political position or their drug habits. Why should I expect for a set of parties, particularly in the arts, in both closer proximity to the arts and the drug trade to treat me any better?
I'd just be jumping out of the flash pan and into the fryer.
There's also that I originally came to be on the periphery of society because of sets of attitudes towards class, and not just class in terms of monetary wealth, but all kinds of different forms of classes. It seems like I'll have an easier go with things with a set of peripheral idealists that kind of more or less anyone else.
I will also say that, though occasionally inclined to use jargon, I do try to be fairly clear.
It's all whatever, though. I'm sure that you came to your conclusions through some experience of your own as well.
I do understand, I think - you're talking about politics from the POV of an anarchist, and saying that they caused all these problems; why on earth should I vote for any of them?
Quoting thewonder
It's very difficult for me to address that directly, because I'm not American. We get a lot of US television over here, but still - not being immersed in a culture, it's very difficult to understand the nuances that impinge upon the situation of an individual - whom, I've also only spoken to briefly.
Sure thing, I guess.
It's doing it again.
She's not the heroine. She's the twit who let the monster out. She's getting her just desserts!