Firefly as a New Tribal Enterprise
POSTED BY: SergeantX
UPDATED: Thursday, October 16, 2003 05:27
VIEWED: 11276
PAGE 2 of 4
Hey, thanks to everyone for the interesting ideas and responses. As most of you don't seem to be familiar with the books, I'd like to say that most of the concerns/questions/criticisms raised are dealt with by Quinn in a convincing manner, but I'd be doing him a disservice to try and defend the ideas myself. I'd have to write a book just get the point across adequately and, well, he already did that. 
I will however try to give you a little better idea why the tribal alternative is preferred from Quinn's point of view. One of the biggest problems with our kind of civilization is that it is so expansionist by nature. It generates a population pressure that tends to, and in fact requires, a continued outward expansion. Not only is does it expand geographically but culturally, as it is fundamentally incompatible with most other culture styles. (imagine a major nomadic culture co-existing with an agriculturally based one)
Essentially the culture operates as a type of "Ponzi scheme"(my analogy), requiring more and more land and workers to support its continued expansion. But eventually the system outstrips its base, offering less and less to the base population that makes up its foundation. It has taken a lot time for this to happen, at least in human terms. Its been a short while from evolution's point of view. Quinn's conclusion is that the current civilization model is just not sustainable and will fall away as the human race evolves, assuming we do survive.
Again, what I find most interesting about this analysis, is how well it reflects the conflict between the Alliance and the former independent planets. The Alliance is a high tech bureaucratic culture that insists on expansion and requires the continued assimilation of fringe societies. Serenity, and other independent peoples, live on their own, making their own way with their own rules and values.
SergeantX
"..and here's to all the dreamers, may our open hearts find rest." -- Nanci Griffith
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First off, apologies to SERGEANTX for kinda taking this whole thread on a similar but not quite on topic tangent.
Okay- Answering BlueHoot's questions:
First off, I did mean that cowboys are paid next to nothing for all the work that they do... Farmers and ranchers really get jacked for all the hard work they put in for their products, and its just one of the many many things that I had about how our system screws people over.
Also, as to the lab scenario. First: Many animals are kept in local, small cages/buildings. I heard Perdue raises its chickens in tubes, completely featherless...
Second: When I meant raising meat in labs, I meant actual meat, not animals. We do have the technology now that can enable us to grow a steak (more or less) in a lab, no animals involved, except for perhaps a little DNA for the cell culture.
Third: Vegetables grown in labs can also be done without genetically modifying them. Everyone's heard of Hydroponics, right? Sure it takes a while longer, but in a multi-story building you could grow just as much for the population you are taking care of, without requiring as much effort to take care of the crops from pests/weather.
And for my final point, I am not suggesting the assimilation of all cultures and all peoples into this society. That is not only impossible, but insane as well. The structure of this society is not set to be a large, widespread experiment. It has been attempted before, but never succeeded. Large area societies (Soviet Union, China) get corrupted and diverge from the original intent. Small style communes never have enough resources to suceed properly.
I suggest at most, a city/state type area, because of two reasons. 1. Trying to convert an entire nation, of any size to such an experiment would be impossible, not to mention it would garner a stong opposition from those already in the country. 2. To try and succesfully integrate a new govenment like this, it would be best to try an place it in an area with little or no people to displace. It is evident with the current Middle East Crisis, that displacing any large population will cause too many problems. To keep the number of people displaced to a minimum, one would have to limit the area to a compact, efficiently planned city, with little or no room for open space.
Finally, for the people to inhabit this area, it is purely by choice. Today, so many countries complain about the number of immigrants moving in to "their land". With this city, people can come here, and form a true international society, where everyone more or less is a foreigner to begin with, and everyone knows it. It could become a central hub for refugees who do not want to deal with war an hatred anymore. Hopefully that will eliminate most of the elitism, but given time that might change, because others will begin to say "My family came here first, this is OUR country".
As mentioned, the idea is still very flawed... Nothing close to even being considered acted upon, and then actually acting upon it, would be many times more difficult to put into motion.
But I appreciate those who are responding and questioning.. It really helps to get the mind working deeper on what exactly to do.
Okay, rant over.. Now returning you to your regularly scheduled Quinn-Tribe thread.
LOTV: Ima-who-whata-whoichy-whoda-whazza--huh?
Garapagosu Last Update: 6/24/03
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Before you go any further, I would highly recommend that you read Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" There are many problems with your proposal, the least of which is that if you foreswear the use of coercion, your system collapses. Folks will disagree, do what they like makes them happy and to heck with your plans and intentions. (BTW: You do know what good intentions are called in Hell, right? Asphalt)
Rule 0: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always has to pick up the check. If it is not the end user, it is the guy cooking the food, or making the medicine. And if he is doing so at a loss, where all he gets is, what? your prase? he ain't going to do it.
Before long, people will note that they get all the free goodies whether they work, or create them or not. And producing goods does you no good, as the government comes and takes them (using force?) to hand out to others. It encourages free riders, discourages producers and everyone ends up poorer all around. See North Korea, and the former Soviet Union, for examples.
Hayek's argument however is different. Basically economic decisions are based on perceptions, which in turn is based on information the guy making the decisions has on hand. Centralized control of the economy does not scale. Beyond a small size, there is too much information for any single individual or small group to make all the economic decisions of a large population.
In short, the government will never be able to provide all the goods and services that you want them to. Democratic socialism is even worse in this respect, because while the deciding body is debating how and where to deliver a certain good, the situations change so much that the newly adopted plan is no longer effective.
To overcome this, the situation evolves to concentrate decision making capabilities into the hands of fewer and fewer people. There is no time for a vote, things are not working, etc. etc.
And the single guy who gets that power is the guy who will "get things done" has the will and drive to make the "tough decisions". Which means in practical fact, you end up with a Stalin or Hitler as the central autocratic authority.
But even he cannot garner enough information to make all the myriad economic decisions that a population will and needs to make every day. Scapegoats need to be found and prosecuted, or persecuted, blamed for the failures of the system. So you end up with death camps, or gulags.
"but we focus way too much on corporations and making money to do anything with it... " This is not quite true, but does indicate a misconception of what money is. Money is information, it is a means of measuring the subjective value of an object. Economic values are subjective, dependent on a particular individual. You might like chocolate covered raisins. Personally, you can't pay me to eat them. Our tastes differ, and so do our value of the raisins.
Making money is a key phrase here, because this is what businesses do, is create money, wealth, things of value to other people. When you take something nearly worthless, like say sand, and mix it with some other stuff, and create a computer, you have created something more valuable to more people than the sand and other raw materials alone (or even combined) are.
It costs you so much to take the raw materials and make something. Someone offers you a price for your manufactured item. The difference, the profit, is actually a measure of how effecent you are at taking low value items and making high value items out of them.
Yes, I know, money is not real, its an idea. But it is an idea that is extremely useful, it provides information to corporations as to how they are doing at creating things that people want. And in our society, it is the individual who decides what he will eat, drive, wear, or whatever, not some centralized authority. If people don't want your product, they simply will not buy it. Of their own free will, and may never explain why they decided to pass you by.
It is cheaper to have cattle ranches than meat labs. That sh
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"I think its more valuable to learn what we can while we can from these cultures and lifestyles "
I sorta agree with this, but probably not in a manner that you would like.
There is a reason why western culture has spread and all these other minority cultures are in decline. Mongols once ruled an empire that stretched from China to Europe and included much of the middle east. Today as you note, there are only a few. For some reason, the West has survived, while the nomadic mongols are dying out.
So it is a good idea to learn what we can, so as to avoid their mistakes.
It should be noted that a culture can die out in two ways, not just one. The first is by killing off all the individual members of a particular culture. The other is for those members to leave that culture and adopt or invent a new one. Sometimes people vote with their feet as to what they like better.
'my kind of stupid"
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(imagine a major nomadic culture co-existing with an agriculturally based one)
We don't have to imagine, you can read about it in history. They are called Mongols, Huns and Vikings. Note that in all these cases, the nomadic tribes were the ones invading the more pastorial and sedentary agricultural societies. Not the other way around.
"Essentially the culture operates as a type of "Ponzi scheme"(my analogy), requiring more and more land and workers to support its continued expansion." This is Malthus' argument all over again. Unfortunately, its still wrong. It ignores the effects of technology on food production. The fact that things like irrigation, pesticides and fertilizer all can increase the yeild of a plot of land, such that less land is required to feed a given population. (Or alternately, the same land can feed a growing population.)
The culture will and has evolved. After the Agricultural revolution, we've had the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. Buckminster Fuller is right, the entire direction of technical developement has been doing more and more with less and less. That makes it sustainable, despite the dire predictions of Malthus et.al.
There really is no rationale given for the Alliance's stance in the war. The independence is easy enough to see, who does not want to be free. However, why would the Alliance need, let alone want, a bunch of independently minded folks under their rule. I highly doubt it is a food issue, and obviously not a technological one. Its not about slavery, as the Alliance are the slave owners (at least not on the Alliance's side)
"my kind of stupid"
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"First off, I did mean that cowboys are paid next to nothing for all the work that they do... Farmers and ranchers really get jacked for all the hard work they put in for their products, and its just one of the many many things that I had about how our system screws people over."
When you go to the store, do you buy the most expensive food, or the least expensive that you can afford? Here is the problem that screws people over. You. You won't or can't pay the kind of prices that you feel farmers are entitled to. Niether will most other folks, as there are all other sorts of things, (like shoes, shampoo, housing, car, gas etc. etc. etc.) that have to be paid for as well, with the limited funds a person has.
As for your second and third point, again, it depends on the cost required to do what you want. The farmer that has less costs, makes more profits. Those profits he can put back into his farm, making it more productive. Buy a new combine, or tractor etc. Your lab grown food still has to compete with these low cost farmers, and if the profits are less, there is less incentive to do it. Profits are information, telling you how effective or efficient you are at creating things of value to other folks.
Maybe your ideas on how to grow meat and vegatables might work. Only one way to find out, do it. See if you can make a living at it. See if you can compete in the market place. Let other folks decide if your products are worth the price you charge.
And actually Utopian concepts are probably as old as mankind himself. These ideas, or something like them have been tried, and failed. One needs force to compel others to act outside their own interests, and especially to act contrary to their own interests. That is the only way to stear any large population in a direction you want it to go, is by force. Deliberate social engineering has a dismal track record to date, mostly because you are dealing with humans.
'my kind of stupid"
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Okay.. really deep breath here...(Thanks for all this input, I like typing long messages)
Free Lunch... I disagree. That's the point of a "communism" style society. Since the govenment owns the industries, as long as they have the resources to produce and perform the actions they need, they can do so without care of cost. Money is thrown out the window in the corporate setting. The only times it comes into play is for the trade of private goods. As the old model goes, people claim in communism, everyone gets a red bike. What if you don't want a red bike? Then you take your money, and buy a blue sportscar. You just have to take longer to get it. I'm not suggesting removal of money at all, just in the corporate standpoint, of "we can't produce this because its not profitable", and "we're going to pay Chinese workers nothing to make our shoes." That is unfair to others, and hurts humanity as a whole. I can't believe that people cannot have life saving operations because they do not have the money for it. That's bullshit right there. These are human lives we are talking about, that are losing those lives because some doctor/medical school/etc. has set the bill to their standing. If you wanted to be a doctor, I really hope it was because you wanted to save lives, because otherwise you would be a dispicible excuse for a human being.
I'm getting off topic.. apologies.
Again, in a "communist" setting, the government doesn't take the products, it creates them itself, then ships it to its own distribution centers. Not everything is free, only the basics of necessary human life, which can be argued, but there are basics that everyone would agree to. And we can use modern technology to keep track of who is regularly checking in to work or not. Mainting that a citizen use a keycard to sign it for work, and then use that same keycard to get their food, can ensure that there are no freeloaders.
You mention that there is too much information for one person to control an entire enconomy. Again, I emphasize this is a smaller scale idea, nothing on the scale of a full sized country, because its too difficult to manage, and leaders become too corrupt screwing the poor over. Because an entire economy is too difficult to manage solely by one individual or a group, you develop a "capitalist communism" model. The government creates companies, which run just as normal companies do in a capitalist environment, with presidents, industry managers, product analysts, etc. That way one person is not overloaded with an impossible amount of information. The main problem with that though, is dealing with which companies get the resources they need. Again, the focus is placed on the basic necessities, and those companies which cover the food, housing, utilities, etc. get the materials they need to support the civilian infrastructure.
Finally, little points before I stop taking up space on the net here. The reason I suggest lab produced meat is because the area I suggest for this experiment would not have enough room for large herds to graze around. I mentioned before that I would suggest an area that would relocate as few if any natives as possible. In today's world that basically leaves us with the Sahara, a small island in the ocean, or if you were lucky enough, some isolated area in Australia.
Also, using the Soviet Union and North Korea as your examples of communist states makes for a poor argument, because they never were Communist. The people who started the revolutions came into power, and they never gave that power to the rest. Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others." There is nothing to say that this idea would not fall to the same trap, for it would be run by humans, and humans obviously are poor people to place trust into. But I wonder with how much war, hate, and death we have today, if there weren't enough people willing to give it a try. That is my motivation to move people. Not death marches, not a revolution, or a war of any sort. Just to create a place for those who wan
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Grin, I knew this was going to be interesting.
Any business that does not "care about cost" is doomed to failure from the beginning. Money is not being thrown out the windows of corporations, if it is, I want to know which windows to camp out under. You may not agree with their investment choices and such, but still it is their money and their business. The laws of the market reward or punish them.
It is important to recognize what a corporation is, it is essentially a bunch of people banding together volutarily for a business activity. A government is also a bunch of people as well, so transferring ownership from one bunch of people to another bunch of people does not solve your problem. Indeed ans the Soviets found out, it makes things worse for everyone, because the government does not have as vested an interest in the corporation as the original owners do.
If a corporation cannot produce something because "it is not profitable" that should tell you something right away about how valuable this thing is to the population at large. It tells you that people don't want it, demand it, as much as you think they should.
There is a similar fallacy at work when you talk about Chinese workers and their pay. At this stage of the game, their pay is low. It is also true that their standard of living and access to goods is also quite low as well. They live in a different part of the world and standards of living are different for different people. (Some folks can't live without their morning Starbucks. Some don't even know what Starbucks is.)
And again, it comes back to you. If you, (and a heck of a lot more) were willing to pay more for those products, then their wages would not be an issue. But people go for the best deal they can get, the lowest price they are willing to pay for the product. That pushes businesses to reducing costs, including wages.
As for "setting the bill" This is not accurate. Prices are set by the laws of supply and demand. Something that is rare, and in high demand, has a high price. Whether it is medical treatment or shoes, it does not matter. It costs a lot of money, time, and effort to become a doctor. While we would all like to gain his services for free, that would render him nothing more than a slave. Not a good idea.
You might find the reality despicable, but it is the reality you live in. Life saving medical treatments that in principle are available for anyone (who can pay) were science fiction not that long ago. Not available to ANYONE regardless of how much money they had. And even now, it costs people to provide those services, to get the training and build the equipment. Those costs have to be paid by someone, either in cold cash, or starving bellies.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always pays, period. Either the guy building the factory eats, or starves to death. Either the guy performing surgery eats, or before long, you lose him.
You talk about key cards and rationing. Again, short of force, how are you going to make this work? Showing up for work is not the same as providing value to your employers, and using modern technology to spy on your population, well, again, read Hayek. This is the beginning of the police state.
As for "governments creating businesses" how is this to work differently or better than what is available today? Again, whether it is started by this group of people or that, I don't see any improvement.
And lastly, the Soviet Union and North Korea are EXACTLY apt examples of what you are talking about. Government ownership of business. Yes, you are right they were never "communistic" in the sense you want them to be. That is because communism simply does not work. Its a nice theory, but it requires rewriting the pysche of the entire population. (A new Soviet Man)
Humans are selfish, greedy folks. They had to be, otherwise they would have died out long ago. Humans exist as individuals, they form and create groups in order to further their own selfish, greedy interests, (such as staying alive) but the group is merely a fic
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Alright, last post on this subject, and then hopefully someone will return this thread to its orginal purpose, because 1: I am never going to change your opinion, and 2: We are off topic by far.
1. Communist govenment taking control of a corporate structure.
Medicines are often not made or produced because they aren't profitable. We could have roads and cars that are efficient, drive themselves, and are completely safe. But no one wants to do it because there would be no profit. Don't you see? The would could be cleaner, safer, and more efficient if someone stopped giving such a damn about making a profit.
As to doctors being slaves for their work. How many well are there who could become doctors to help other people out, but can't because medical school costs too much? I can guarentee that someone who wants to be a doctor to help humanity, rather than their own wallet, will be a much better doctor. That's why in this society, the necessary basics for living (which include EDUCATION) are covered. People can become doctors if they want to and have the mental/physical capabilites for it.
And if you haven't noticed, our lives are dependant on everyone else. If that doctor, who saves lives, didn't have his garbage taken out, or a farmer to feed him, he would die pretty soon. Everyones job is important. That is why everyone get the same needs for free, and the same pay for goods that they might want.
Finally: Humanity. Yes, we are basically, by nature, greedy, stubborn back stabbing monsters. But we can ignore those emotions you know... That is what makes us Human and not animals. We can rise above our instincts that others cannot.
Perhaps you should give it a try sometime. Might make your neighbors like you a little more.
Peace Out, Everyone.
Back to you seargentx
LOTV: Ima-who-whata-whoichy-whoda-whazza--huh?
Garapagosu Last Update: 6/24/03
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Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda.
A Communist society won't work if human beings are in charge of it. Been tried. Utopia requires an omniscient and omnipotent dictator who is absolutely uncorruptable.
--Anthony
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