What are America's interests?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 2, 2026 17:48
VIEWED: 19030
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We need to be in a survivable physiological state. So meeting physiological needs is the base of everything that comes after. We need (in order of how quickly we'll die), air, protection from extreme temperatures, water and food. And we also need an intact corpus - no bullet holes, battered brains or bodies, large cuts, etc. But I think we need more. Infants and young children need comfort and stimulation - without it they grow up as stunted, non-functional adults. Everyone needs a normal set of sensory experiences and physical activities, otherwise brains don't wire-up properly. We need to learn a language before adolescence, or it can't be learned at all. So I would put care, sensory stimulation, activity and language at the bottom of the hierarchy as well, since we need to have them to survive to adulthood and be functional in our physical and social world. I think without them, we wouldn't survive.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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I have a problem with safety/ love/ belonging.
First of all, to survive as a species, all we need to do is keep one replacement child per adult alive long enough to have a replacement child of its own. The requirements to do that are pretty minimal, and I don't think they even necessarily have to be friendly, enjoyable, or even occasionally comfortable - just survivable.
When you look at societies today that aren't part of a cash society, they exist in every kind of environment. And their environment is unrelated to their social/ material culture, from scattered small family groups to large cohesive villages. And neither of those are related to how they see themselves, strangers, or their place in the world - and therefor, what they expect from each other, and how they treat each other.
So I'm going to provisionally place (safety/ love/ belonging) aside as a hierarchy of needs and put them provisionally into a hierarchy of expectations as experienced by a male of a particular culture, time, and place.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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One thing that all adults have in common, is that they have their origins in an intact society that provided for their survival and development, from infancy into a functional adult that could have and care for offspring of its own.
So in the hierarchy of needs I would add - a functioning adult society and a place in it for offspring.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Yes.
But I guess first of all, we have to recognize that there is an entity called "society" which
has a lifespan of its own
longer than the lifespan of its individual members
and that the "people" within it are like cells in the body, and have just as much chance of detecting the larger organism and understanding its behavior as the individual cells of a liver have of understanding the entire organism
Society and "people" are co-dependent, but not the same. And the behavior of "society" is not just the AVERAGE of the individuals within it, just as the behavior of a body is not just the average of the individual cells within it.
A body has ...
energy flows
division of labor
an inherited consensus among the cells as to "who does what" (very much unlike our view of individualism) ... which is information passed from generation to generation
The various labors include
defenders of the organization which attack both internal (cancer) and external (infection) threats
food energy processors and distributors
reproducers, not only of the organisms various class of cells (differentiated stem cells) but also colonizers ("babies") which carry the organism into different (elsewhere or future) environments
Now, occasionally, the body jumps off a cliff and takes all the individual cells with it (like the ecocide of Easter Island)
But to nail the analogy down, there are MANY self-created environments (societies, bodies) which can reproduce in some fashion. HOWEVER, they are not always suited for survival: Just as people engage in unhealthy behavior, so do societies not always tend to the survival of their individual members (cells) leading to their own destruction.
Okay, I know this is stretching an analogy but bear with me:
The most frequent occurrence of societal failure, as least as recorded in history, is the failure of the society to attend to the well-being of its critical but various individual members: the elite fail to attend to the wellbeing of farmers, manufacturers, and merchants and instead direct all energy to its elite members who are not only incapable of surviving on their own but who do not contribute to the rest of the body.
Think cancer.
But "cancer" isn't the ONLY demise of a body, it can become overwhelmed with infection, fail to colonize, starve, commit suicide, fail to adapt to new circumstances, and fail to reproduce its cells accurately ("age"). (Just trying to see what I can learn from this analogy...) ALSO, there are a multitude of conditions under which "the body" survives and endures: just because "the body" is alive doesn't mean that it is functioning optimally and that all cells are getting what they need, just that it means that it can continue for the time being.
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
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I'll think about the analogy later ...
... but to continue the thought that society isn't just the aggregate behavior of (free-living, independent) individuals ...
I think that's congruent with the observation that the form of society and its precepts are completely independent from the circumstances of the natural world around it. ie jungle-dwelling hunter-gatherers don't always live in small, peaceful, mobile, isolated family groups; or in large, warring, stationary, organized villages. They can be one, or the other, or any combination in between. So how people organize, and what they tell themselves about why they do things the way they do them, is stochastic (happens by random chance) and self-reinforced. And the only thing a society needs to be is survivable over some generations. And that considering how lax the short-term requirements are, almost any kind of society can exist for a while.
Also, that generally, in the absence of foresight, societies inhabit their environment like other animals, increasing numbers until at some point they exceed the resources available. At which time a certain portion will be at risk of death. IN GENERAL societies - like other animals - don't 'think' long-term, and so they face an inevitable choice - adapt, or die. And since, over the long term, very few societies show adaptability, or hindsight, (Guns, Germs and Steel; Collapse) nearly all societies face inevitable collapse.
If I were to say anything about human needs, it's that they can only be met by cooperation.
(If I were to say something about human nature, it's that we tell ourselves stories so as to be able to exist in cohesive groups. And that we frame our thinking as a problem of the 'other' that we need to defeat, and our stories around 'beings' - spirits for example. And due to that, our ability to solve our problems by identifying and fixing impersonal problems of how we organize ourselves in our environment is limited.
Then there's the mystery of the 'demographic transition'. perhaps its due to an evolutionary history where the need to acquire more resources is geared to inter-tribal competition, where those with the stronger tribe win. So birth rate goes UP with declining resources, and DOWN with increasing resources. Also, the tendency to form hierarchies with an increase of resources - may be a byproduct of the potential for positive feedback in that situation. In any case, humans do respond to hierarchies, living in them as if they were a part of the natural environment. And societies, geared to maintaining a set of rules generation to generation, would naturally transmit those hierarchies however stochastically formed, and whether or not those hierarchies are survivable long-term.)
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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First, what "weird indents"?
I was doing 'carriage return" to make a non-enumerated list. Is that weird? Or are you just clueless?
Secondly, if "America's" interests are American's interests, and Americans are people, then I'm just trying to expand the scope as large as possible ... What are people's interests? just for the sake of completeness. It's called "brainstorming" ... yanno, just tossing ideas out there, and hoping that some ideas spark more ideas from others.
Feel free to add your own.
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
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Well, except for calling my thoughts on the topic a "deflection" ... which is what G ALWAYS calls my posts, no matter what I say .... it appears that G doesn't have any thoughts on THIS topic, either!
G: You're STILL following me from thread to thread in "attack" mode! Here I am, noodling about a fairly important topic, and looking at it from the broadest possible scope, and you have nothing ON TOPIC to say???
It seems YOUR posts are a "deflection"!
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The idea of framing "society" as an organism isn't new, but what IS new is the detail of our understanding of how "organisms" survive and colonize. so I'm gping to have to think how far the analogy goes, and where it breaks down- WITHOUT G'S HELP - since G never has anything germane to say on topic.
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
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As for 'g' - I hear his nasal online voice in my head saying: 'but thinking is harrrrrrrrrrd ... it's too haaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrd ... and trolling is fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun ... '
When I think of organisms, I think about very specific things. An enzyme. A mitochondrion. Lungs. And so on. Nothing useful to your train of thought. You'll have to go on ahead without me, old paint.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Century of Self gave me more insights into this thread.
Implicit in that documentary is the concept that there is something called "society" which (in this case) is ruled by an elite.
I accept that "society" exists. That it is a real entity with its own sources of energy, it's own lifespan, it's own requirements for survival.
There are also individuals within those societies which have their own necessities for survival.
Societies can't exist without the individuals within it, and humans (specifically) can't survive without "society", even if that society is comprised of just a few individuals. That is necessitated by the fact that human babies are incredibly helpless and require MORE THAN ONE ADULT to survive.
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Having gotten that far, there are many (what I would consider to be) entirely dysfunctional societies which manage to survive and even (in some senses) thrive:
The Taliban, for example, consigns its female members to a degraded life of poverty and constraint, but since women have NO role except to have children, and no choice in the children that they have, they will. Unless the food, health, or security circumstances are so dire that women and children are dying in droves, the Taliban society could expand it's population quite quickly. And that's a successful society, isn't it? Able to reproduce its members and its memes at furious rate?
The circumstances that people live in ... the foods they eat, the technology that they use, the control that they individually have over their lives and the height of their hierarchy, the way they treat each other and "foreigners", the way they treat their environment, what they think is "real" and "not real"... are to a great extent set by their society (interacting, of course, with the environment).
And "people" can live in an extremely wide set of circumstances that are set for them by society. There have been societies that sacrificed thousands of people every year, societies where most of the people (including all of the women) were slaves, societies that ruthlessly and relentlessly killed others in its various colonizations .... there is no guarantee that just because a society survives and even "thrives" ... i.e. brings more and more people under its control and expands its physical reach .... doesn't mean that it's a "good" society or one that WE would like to live in, just that it continues to reproduce its physical members and continue its memes.
Counterpose what "society" needs to what humans need (and desire). Humans need sufficient shelter, water, food, and sleep for reproduction. Imagine lab rats in a not-so-nice ongoing laboratory environment.
But our evolution drives us in certain directions. Evolution has guided us to the highest-calorie foods, the most labor-saving methods, and a fairly robust sex drive, especially among males. (Also, among males, a tendency towards intraspecies competition - from "showing off" to outright fights.) That is, more food, more sex, and more fun with less work.
Evolution has also built in a need to have some control over our environment (remember the electric-shocked rats) which involves at its most fundamental level the ability to observe, connect an event with reward (or punishment) which prompts an activity (repetition or avoidance), remember the results, abstracts the situation and predict probable outcomes the next time.
And since we are (mostly) SOCIAL animals, evolution has also built in (for most of us) a desire to interact with others, and especially the need to feel accepted by a group - and therefore safe.
So although a society can thrive by exploiting its members terribly, we would probably want a society which meets our evolutionary drives as well as our physical needs. That doesn't mean endlessly "pander" to our desires ... do we really want to be diapered and fed by mach
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