Comment by Manglano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Manglano | Hacker News Reader

The institution of "Social Credit" could easily become an apparatus of social coercion indistinguishable from the Truck Token systems.

An individual not behaving according to the interests of the group would face starvation and homelessness for not adhering to certain social norms. It would be trivial to enforce beliefs (no matter how odd or antihuman) through this apparatus. Under a currency system driven by public opinion, survival becomes a matter of "Obey or Die."

In such a system, existence is analogous to slavery.

This is not an advocation for lawlessness, but rather for the continued use of currency and the independence of the financial organ from the whims of human opinion. The human mind is subject to ongoing cognitive and social distortion. Currency independent of these factors is a mitigating measure against human cruelty.

A strong social benefit system and the show of empathy in which one is anchored is a stronger mitigation against antisocial behaviour than the Social Credit concept.

Slavery is the rule of one group, usually ethnic over another. China's digital legalism here has very little to do with it, as it genuinely applies to everybody equally. This is a thousands of years old doctrine that goes through Chinese history. It's not the individual that is the frame of reference,but the collective and the belief is that good behaviour should be rewarded by a strong state and bad behaviour punished. This is in many ways more impartial than moving morality into the cultural or social sphere, where it is subject to identity and economical interests and so on.

You can criticise it of course, it is coercive but it is definitely not slavery, it's the stark opposite. Slavery was moving fundamentally ethical concerns into the private, people were turned into property. The Chinese system moves fundamentally ethical questions into the public legal system. Bureaucracy has one big advantage, it subjugates everybody, powerful or weak alike to the same rules. No bureaucratic system can be maintained if it exercises gross violations of this principle because that's the thing it has going for it. The CPC is acutely aware of this. There is of course practical corruption but never to the degree that it undermines the system.

He said existence is analogous, not "is". It's a matter of feeling by the person. While their every move isn't dictated - because it's impossible to enforce at such a scale - the parallels to slavery are there.

>> Bureaucracy has one big advantage, it subjugates everybody, powerful or weak alike to the same rules.

I'm fairly confident some small party at the top runs the show and everyone else is a subject. Every non-democratic government boils down to being an oligarchy, and those at the very top usually have the most freedom.

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