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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> people want all the cachet of being outside the boundaries, in lawless territories where you survive on the wit and bravery (or brutality) of Taking The Initiative and damn the costs and risks, but also want to be protected and safe with all the constructs we in Civilization provide

One fundamental problem is in the second word, "want". Many people take this childhood perpsective, based around 'want', like someone else will provide it for them. When you're an adult, you provide. There's nobody else to do it. The government, the community, the society is you. If you don't act to create a free, safe, prosperous, harmonious community, there's nobody else to do it. There's no cavalry, no parents, it's just you and me. What you do determines what community we have; if you're lawless, your community will be lawless - that's what you built.

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My sense is that community has always been something like a (inexact numbers) 5%, 35%, 60% split of "make things happen" "help those who make things happen" and "enjoy the fruits of the work of the minority, while occasionally making token gestures of contributing"

The prosaic version of Lenin's vanguardism. I also like to remind myself that those groups aren't fixed--at any moment the composition of the 5% can be different, and any particular person can often be placed in different groups according to context.

Except the implementation of Lenin's principles is 35% locking down those 5% by preventing their freedom of movement and competitive employment, so that their results may be bought at far below market rate and distributed between the remaining 95%.

This is where you begin to see state serfdom and exit visas.

Compound by the fact that everybody tends to be quite poor as productive people don't feel the need to overstretch themselves producing.

My sense is that our current society is pretty similar to what you write here except with the labels completely reversed, and the 5% that depend on basically the rest of society to operate and maintain the titanic lifestyle they've accustomed themselves to tell themselves that they are "the minority that make things happen". Ultimately we still need to dig food out of the dirt under the hot sun more or less, and nail together wood and lay down shingles, again either under the hot sun or in the freezing cold, etc, etc. Its a whole ton of getting your hands dirty and wrecking your body for decades until the bill comes due, and then watching as someone whose hands are buttery soft says "Thanks for the fruits of you labor, remember that I 'made this happen'" in reference to their token gestures of contributing.

Society in the large operates in many ways this way; I was thinking about community in the small. Groups within an order-of-magnitude of Dunbar's number.

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