Society is not the government, or the nation
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Tuesday, July 14, 2026 15:10
VIEWED: 8615
PAGE 3 of 6
Quote:No, the point is that we should be THINKING AND TALKING. And all you're doing is trolling.
The point of the thread is for your to tell everyone what everyone should be doing. We all know that.
As far as my ideas go, I sketched them out here: http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=60173
Quote:Do you suppose it's possible for you to post some useful, insightful replies, instead of trolling and name-calling? Do you even know how to converse?
So go ahead - tell us what we're doing wrong and what we should be doing instead.
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Tell us of your perfect Society. Guide us since we can't be trusted to live how we want to. Save us from ourselves O' Great Snigglet!
Every time I talk about "society" you go apeshit. You back into a corner and howl and fling dung, as if you're being PERSONALLY attacked. The whole notion of "society" seems to offend you. But EVEN YOU thinks there has to be a society: a common sense of right and wrong. You yourself said
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as long as there are equitable laws in place and a fair system of applying them.
So, equitable laws along what lines? Do we all have the same rights to food, water, and shelter? Or what?
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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I saw an article about evolutionary theory and economics. You might notice that parts of society you dislike are the same parts of evolution that you don't like. Put another way: Neither biology nor society are intelligently designed. I know that the popular notion is that biology is designed by God and society is designed by Man, but then why is there an abundance of weird species and weirder societies if the Designers are Intelligent? If species and societies were intelligently designed once-upon-a-time in the golden past, why do defunct societies and dead species outnumber by far the living?
http://evonomics.com/updating-paul-krugman-evolution-groupie-econ/
"The idea that functional organization exists at lower levels of a biological hierarchy, such as individual organisms, but then ceases to exist at higher levels, such as social groups and ecosystems, was deeply antithetical to the Christian worldview, which assumed that a universe created by God must be harmonious from top to bottom. While Darwin was somewhat muted on this theme, his bulldog Thomas Huxley gave it full throated expression in his essay on Evolution and Ethics published in 1893. Huxley was emphatic that evolution doesn’t make everything nice and that ethical human society must be cultivated, in the same way that gardens must be cultivated to keep out the objectionable species."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Are you proving that there is no such thing as intelligent design? Because I believe your reply is the type of evidence that fundamentalist Christians can fling into the face of scientists and other doubters of the brilliance of fundamentalism.
Originally posted by G:Quote:Go fuck yourself you piece of shit.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
... And all you're doing is trolling.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by G:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
... And all you're doing is trolling.
That's funny. According to you I want to bomb civilians, I'm a fan of ISIL, and now I hate old people. Go fuck yourself you piece of shit.
Excuse me G but don't you mean comrade piece of shit?
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Quote:I popped that out for emphasis.
Originally posted by second:
I saw an article about evolutionary theory and economics. You might notice that parts of society you dislike are the same parts of evolution that you don't like. Put another way:
Neither biology nor society are intelligently designed.
Quote:
I know that the popular notion is that biology is designed by God and society is designed by Man, but then why is there an abundance of weird species and weirder societies if the Designers are Intelligent? If species and societies were intelligently designed once-upon-a-time in the golden past, why do defunct societies and dead species outnumber by far the living?
http://evonomics.com/updating-paul-krugman-evolution-groupie-econ/
"The idea that functional organization exists at lower levels of a biological hierarchy, such as individual organisms, but then ceases to exist at higher levels, such as social groups and ecosystems, was deeply antithetical to the Christian worldview, which assumed that a universe created by God must be harmonious from top to bottom. While Darwin was somewhat muted on this theme, his bulldog Thomas Huxley gave it full throated expression in his essay on Evolution and Ethics published in 1893. Huxley was emphatic that evolution doesn’t make everything nice and that ethical human society must be cultivated, in the same way that gardens must be cultivated to keep out the objectionable species."
Indeed.
Evolution, in the end, generates nothing so much as a series of (mostly) failures.
The failures often come about because of a failure to adapt to environmental changes (the Great Extinctions) but sometimes extinctions come about because because of some inherent and progressive developmental flaw, or that the successful organisms change the environment to something for which they're not suited. In other words, the flaw can be internal, not external.
My life is a graveyard, littered with the corpses of ideas I've had to give up.
I used to think ... as most children are taught evolution .... that evolution is a process of perfectability. And then I found out about all of those lovely species, of experimental forms of the kind we haven't seen since, that died out during the PT Extinction Event.
I used to think that societies evolved. That the stupid ideas got smothered or out-competed, and that societies just got better and better. And then I read Jared Diamond's book, which describes how societies extinguished themselves because they couldn't change their hidebound ideas and hidebound technologies to adapt to a new reality, and went the way of starvation, cannibalism, dissolution, complete loss ... wow, no perfectability there! (No intelligence, either. So much for humans being intelligent!)
In fact, there is a "gotcha" built into evolution ... the creatures (or societies) which use up energy and covert their environment to more and more of themselves the fastest, will be the most successful IN THE SHORT RUN. They may completely out-compete other, more conservative forms. It's just the energetics of the situation. But if you look at the species that are the most durable- those that have lasted the longest (the jellyfish, the nautilus, the shark) they are energetically very efficient: they've survived an extinction event or two!
So evolution does NOT lead to improvement- not in living creatures and not in societies. But our belief in evolution is the underpinning of our belief in capitalism, and our belief in "evolving" societies. It's too bad such a flawed idea was promoted so heavily by the capitalists (of course), who presented the idea of a Church-free, "natural" and almost-effortless environment leading to the best of all possible worlds, just letting people do what comes "naturally". (Of course, the philosophers of the day had very specific ideas about what was natural and what wasn't.)
We shouldn't model our societies and our
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There's an underpinning of 'it's human nature' in the topic when people look into possibilities.
But, like the peaceable baboons, the courtly dolphins, and the tyrannical chimps, there are groups within intelligent species that reliably, consistently don't behave according to the general species behaviors.
So evolution of society (and organisms) is also to some extent stochastic - random starting conditions can determine the outcome to be contrary to all expectation.
When we think 'what is possible' in our future society, we needn't limit ourselves to what we assume based on our personal experience.
There have been, and are, societies all around the globe that don't work the way we think people 'naturally' behave. Societies where imperfect children have been thrown off a cliff and left to die. So much for maternal instinct. Societies where families don't live together - males and females live separately. So much for the nuclear family. Societies where there were no priests. And there goes religion. Societies where there were no rulers. And there go the kings, too. Societies where people don't get to keep what they hunt and gather, it gets all shared equally. There goes the 'reason' for the work ethic. And so on.
What we don't know about how people can arrange their interactions could fill whole libraries.
'What we want' isn't entirely relevant. 'What we can reliably survive' over thousands of years is probably more to the point.
I think we'll need to actually teach ourselves new ways of responding productively, and reasonably (with reason).
I'll use my example of two villages near a river. They're equal in all respects and remain equal in this story. At first they both start out small. The forest is nearby - game and firewood are abundant and close at hand. The river has plenty of fish. But people - being biological creatures living in abundance - do what biological creatures do: they multiply. Yes, they can develop technology that gets them a little ahead, for a while - they can develop stronger bows, learn to grind and cook previously inedible plants, or farm some simple crops, for example. But population catches up to the technology, and then they end up getting further behind, again. The forest gets cut down, and getting firewood becomes a more arduous task. Game is found further and further away. The fish they catch get smaller and smaller, then, they're no longer available.
They prepare for war. Unknowingly. The demographic transition works in the reverse direction. As conditions get meaner, more children are born.
The villages end up looking at EACH OTHER as the problem.* My share would be double, they think, if it wasn't for 'those people'. And there is conflict.
That I believe is 'human nature' and I haven't come to that conclusion without a lot of consideration. We see our problems and solutions as related to PEOPLE. That there is something that THEY'RE doing, or having; and that we can solve our problem by attacking THEM.
But in fact the problem of those particular villages is that their birthrates outstripped the resources. They could solve their problems into the infinite future, without war, without want, without strife or hostility, if they both agreed to limit their populations. That is their actual problem. And that is the only permanent solution.
So, just as an aside, someone once remarked that wild animals always live on the edge of starvation. And I haven't thought of an exception to that statement. During times of abundance the population increases to the level of available resources. (But even then, excess individuals will be born. Even during the good times they'll be individuals edged out.) And when the good times retreat, the problem becomes inescapable and extremely obvious.
We people seem to be like wild animals. We've used our technology to dodge one limit after another, at least temporari
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Cool!
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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Quote:Take a hint: If you're bitter about SIGNYM's reply, then click on SIGNYM's name and use the function "SEND ME A MESSAGE" to send a message. Unlike the bigger society we live in, this website was intelligently designed so that these angry "retaliation in kind" exchanges can go directly to its target. That way everybody else is spared the nuclear fallout from these little wars.
Originally posted by G:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Are you proving that there is no such thing as intelligent design? Because I believe your reply is the type of evidence that fundamentalist Christians can fling into the face of scientists and other doubters of the brilliance of fundamentalism.
Twabba who? My reply was intelligently designed (crudeness and all) for the person is was aimed at. I do try and go for accuracy.
Well, damn it all, I could have used the "SEND ME A MESSAGE" function for this message, but I can't stop myself. I'm acting like I am programmed to retaliate publicly. It takes more self-control to overcome my primitive urges. I believe that nearly all humanity has a surplus of primitive urges and a shortage of self-control. The shortages tend to defeat all rational or intelligent designs for societies and we are left with the mess all around us.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Well, to consider societies that don't behave the way we assume "human nature" would lead, it seems to me that most of these variants consist of small groups. There is the "monkeysphere" that FREM brought up ... humans have the capacity to remember and interact individually with about 100-120 people, after that it all kinds of blurs together, people start "lumping" and "categorizing" others for convenience; and more importantly lose direct contact with large numbers of people altogether.
A group of multi-skilled individuals might be able to construct an economy at about the middle-age level, with perhaps some advances like penicillin (from mold) and more effective preparation of a wider variety of "simples", but 100 people won't bring an economy up to the level that people would like.
Hence, one is necessarily forced to work with larger groups ... groups in which people have no direct contact or communication with each other, where lack of direct contact can be used to hide sociopathy and parasitism.
That's what I see developing in larger social groupings over and over ... those individuals who have no compunction against theft will energetically take over a society. And its as if our societies don't have a robust "immunity defense" against those who steal and hide. We understand the asshole, we understand the bully, but we don't even seem to be able to detect the "priesthood" or "bankster" or "con man", who (over time) take over the mores and ethics of the society to protect themselves.
To me, that's the essential feature and problem of even thinking about developing a rational human society: POWER CONCENTRATES, and there seems to be nothing in human interactions which preclude that on an ongoing basis. The only way that stops is revolution, when the parasitism/ internal predation becomes unsupportable. It would be nice not to have to have a cataclysm every few hundred years or so.
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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"I believe that nearly all humanity has a surplus of primitive urges and a shortage of self-control. The shortages tend to defeat all rational or intelligent designs for societies and we are left with the mess all around us."
That's pretty much the 'human nature' argument. We're all too full of chaotic primitive urges. No way could we form societies where millions of people live in a single city without mayhem and murder every day on every corner!
Human nature is far more tractable than you give it credit for. Especially when people have a reason to buy in to the system.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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