Atlas667

Strictly it is capitalists who run the government.

While an individual can be wealthy, it is those who own the wealth-making-assets who control the government, AKA the capitalists. Because controlling the wealth-making-assets makes you an important element of national security, so you get a seat at the table.

While making 750k a year means you get a seat at your companies table to do what they require of you. It is very very different. It's capitalists VS workers that matters. Not strictly the wealth levels.

PS. Also I got laid off, I'm broke, lol. To all you childish mofos who think I'm a socialist because I'm currently broke: False. Some people are raised socialists.

I mean, It's the same as consciousness of ourselves in the present.

There are pieces of media that present the real struggles of the average worker. But not that many. Many films are instead invested in the ephemeral (and ever lasting) questions of reality, fiction(fantasy/action/drama), or inane or politically convenient biopics (if not totally altered).

You will occasionally see a nod to "struggling to pay bills" or some mundane romanticized struggle, stuff like that, but almost never a picture of what its actually like.

For the few popular films that do show it, and this is my critique of most media, they never compel the viewer to ANSWER the question of why this happens. This is because to present the real working class life is also to critique it and the conditions that create it.

The working class life reveals it's own critique. And that critique is not something that media owners like because it puts into question the whole status quo. It is INHERENTLY politically charged content.

So they avoid painting a real picture of average people. This lack of real exposure is a heavy influence on our ideas of reality. And essentially the viewers take this image and runs with it. The viewers ends up not learning HOW the world works, they start to see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", and end up seeing society as a pool of ever-permanent social mobility, its just not their turn yet.

This is, essentially, the same thing they do with the past.

And I do not have anything against "special people" in media. This can be helpful, even, if done appropriately, by being sure to present kids with the REAL AND RELEVANT paths on how to attain this specialty (if it isn't real and relevant its just escapism). What I critique is the role that medias self-reflection plays in the world and in the past that is problematic.

To come back to the actual post: Who originally started to view cottage living or working class farm life as cute and WHY? Was it truly our grandmas and grandpas? Or was it people compelled and organized to sell historical-fantasy books?

Peoples idea of their own history are influenced by the media (print, film, tv, etc).

The owners of said media often prefer to fund historical content from the perspective of rulers, as this reflects their class character and aspirations. Meaning they have an infatuation with royalty because they do not think of themselves as lowly.

The people then adopt similar mechanisms of reflection to how they view their ancestors in the past.

I say this mechanism of reflection is a political tool designed to entice average people to think of themselves as above average in the past. And thus eliminate any consciousness of historical class continuation.

If you say "what?!" again, I'm just gonna have to assume you disagree but are too afraid to do so out loud.

Many people romanticize their past so much that they side with historical oppressors. Oppressors who most likely subjugated most of their ancestors.

This is not a coincidence, but is the result of consuming media from people who engage in this same act of romanticizing their history, or this media comes from people who were themselves actually related to these oppressors.

I'm definitely aware of this.

This is a very very far stretch from saying your family was royalty. Though i do guess you are technically correct. Forgive me, your highness. lol

Let me add that you've delineated a technicality with no real consequence to my argument. If anything supporting my argument by suggesting that makes anyone proper royalty.

We need this for the Romephiles who definitely don't think they would have been slaves during the Roman Empire.

In the same vein, a racist meme shared around the internet is that supposedly some black people, while remembering their shattered ancestry, say "We were kings" [in Africa]. But a lot of white people will genuinely believe they were kings or at least related to kings.

And these erroneous class beliefs are very very common.

It even goes so far as to be used to widely support racism in the "my people" argument. Sir, sit down, statistically you were a illiterate or barely-literate peasant like the rest of us!

This is what happens when you use history as a political tool. This is how the powers that be erase class consciousness from peoples brains. They keep showing us a flawed history that almost always sides with the rulers and we adopt it. They make us forget what we are and where we come from so we side with the oppressors.

This is kinda how I've come to view psychology because in the context I was raised mental health support was a luxury left for the wealthy. Albeit more about personality, upbringing and status rather than just individual idiosyncracies.

I understand that this may be a categorical error, since psychology can be the categorization of symptoms, but a lot of the things I learned "from the outside" really still stick.

Like the wealthier populations getting neat little explanations/excuses whenever convenient. Theres the scholastic benefit of ADHD diagnosis and anxiety diagnosis, which can help a lot in school/academia and to everyone else who cant afford it they get the cheaper label: "being bad at school" or "dumb". And still requires even more effort.

Theres the trauma and therapy cycles for otherwise normal behaviors like separation anxiety from parents, not being popular or highly esteemed, stress from not attaining goals, etc. The cheaper treatment being to suck it up.

What is normal for the poor to carry is a diagnoses and special treatment for those who can afford it.

And this is also reflected within the office as well! The outcome can be better if the professionals empathize with the one seeking treatment (theres a whole class/racial component here).

I agree with your sentiment and I think it's really all down to wealth and/or availability.

Is it a democracy when theres a whole class of people who can take over the political apparatus?

Is it democracy if a group of people totally coopt the electoral process by cultivating all the candidates and their policies behind the scenes and then present a few issues for us to bicker about?

Democracy is supposed to be everybody.

And you may say "but you can pick the person and representatives". But often these are already cultivated by the rich OR the political apparatus has been so corrupted that picking them does nothing.

Not only cause you can't influence policies after you vote, so that voting essentially becomes a pinky promise you make with the candidate. But also because the rest of the govt is so corrupted that an individual candidate, even if independent, is gonna have a hard time working in favor of the people.

You say in between theres an ocean, but for analogy purposes, what can the Millions of us do in an ocean if we don't have a boat?

Where's your think tank and lobbying group?

A rich billionaire has millions of times more political power than you.

You are living in a dictatorship right now. The dictatorship of capital. And just because our culture does not draw a line to differentiate capitalists and workers doesnt mean a difference doesnt exist.

Capitalists arent "just another citizen like you or me", but thats what they want us to think. It keeps the dream alive and the story going.

Oh "its us against the government". lol. Really?

Im telling you. The capitalists, the wealthy are the government.

As if you have a say other than "that guy" or "that other guy".

The wealthy already fund politicians' careers, they fund judges, they fund campaigns. The wealthy already run the country. They fund both parties as a tactic. The parties are just "good cop/bad cop".

You're simplifying too much.

So to you its the state VS who? The rich billionaires + us?

The rich billionaires are the state. We're the ones with no real representation.

The fundamental divide is workers vs capitalists, not simply people vs government.

The AI astroturfing campaign.

If you had billions to gain, would you invest a few 100k or millions in an astroturfing campaign?

> If you actually make individualized decisions by votes of the entire public, that's direct democracy. But it doesn't scale.

You're right. I was making a mistake.

What I'm actually talking about is delegate democracy. Where representatives act only as mouth pieces for their directly involved constituents.

The title of this wiki article may make you cringe but its a good, short summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy

For this to work it requires a culture of active democracy, not just, often rich, representatives estimating what we need from their detached lives.

It may answer your logistical questions, though i suspect it won't ease your power-dynamic worries.

> If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it.

You're right as well. In many cases the type is defined by its use. In many socialist practices local councils barred individuals or group of individuals from employing others for production. This settled that distinction. While at the same time using your own property to produce yourself (or your family) is fine. The point of socialism is recognizing that capitalist production becomes a social illness, not individual production.

Another way of putting it is that socialized production for private profits creates a power imbalance.

If you are an employee at MY food farm, helping produce the same food you consume, then I have leverage. This is a very very simplified view of capitalism.

> And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.

True, this is what lead to the fall of the USSR. There was a conspiracy to destroy it from within. When it fell what happened next is national assets worth billions were bought by individuals for literally next to nothing.

And this same thing you point out is also what is causing so much corruption and de-regulation in all capitalist economies.

> So how are you envisioning this working?...........

These are things that would be worked out by the people in that job. The point is to keep the place running and everyone satisfied. Generally, people are paid according to how much they work. You don't work you don't get paid. If the place is running efficiently the people keeping it operational reap more benefits.

Look at it this way. In capitalism efficiency is kind of terrible for workers because they get laid off. In socialism efficiency means less work for more benefit. And if you automated it, great, the world is a better place, go find another thing to do. There's always shit to be done, no need to limit work to profit-generation.

It's self sustaining, actual social benefit.

> The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.

Many people who lived through it remember it fondly. Especially when they're comparing it to their now capitalist countries. The CIA actually recognizes that at one point the USSR had similar or greater avg caloric intake per person than the US. Sure, there were downturns, sure there was Stasi (Stasi is a CIA/FBI). But a lot of it is bogey man propaganda.

People are people, you can't run a country with absolute abject repression anywhere in the world. Sure, there are always periods of repression in any country. The US has had its periods as well: the great depression, the red scare, the extreme racism, the deep classism, the defense of megacorp theft, the war-mongering at the cost of its youth, the US also has the most people in jail, more than any country on earth (this gets spun as tough-on-crime).

I'm sure the USSR was a tough place during the civil war and during WW2. The US benefited from not having a civil war in the 1910s, and it benefited from not having a world war fought on its soil. The Germans were literally trying to annihilate the USSR, where more than 2 times more Slavs than Jews died during WW2. These things objectively made the USSR rougher to live in.

Even then, socialism, to me, is only tangentially related to the USSR. I am not a fanatic or anything like that. The USSR was a country who tried to do it and failed, plain and simple. They made terrible mistakes leading to massive loss of life AND also had terrible conditions to work with. In my mind it is similar to how the US has lead to terrible loss of life inside its own borders and through out the world due to policies and wars that have only made a few people rich.

What I'm saying is that for socialists the USSR, in and of itself, is never the point.

> What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?

The satisfaction of their own needs. A council of workers can abstract resource distribution in an even better way than money ever could. Money is like the lamest proxy for work with too many exploitable flaws.

> ...people in Florida care a lot about hurricane response but can't command a majority and people in Illinois or California have little reason to care about it.

You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making. You're presenting your absurd ideas and saying their mine. There are many, many ways of going around this. Mind you, states are somewhat independent within a federal system.

> ...get some representatives whose job is supposed to be to do the caring for you, but then they become the privileged elite...

Political parties are actually the BEST way to achieve this. A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.

> If nobody actually owns anything then that isn't your house or your phone, it's everybody's.

This is the most childish take of socialism I have seen in a while, I'll still address it. Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property. Productive property being property that serves others. A house is personal property, even a mansion or a castle is personal property but a retail company that feeds 180 million people should not be personal property. But it is.

Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.

My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.

Production is limited by the profits of a few and ONLY socialism can unleash productions best side. With everyone employed we can satisfy most material human needs. Right now.

> it's why the USSR was a dystopia.

This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires. And there's plenty of them. It's propaganda made for you as an American citizen. The CIA themselves claim the USSR wasn't a dictatorship in analysis they made in the late 60s. They then lied to the American people, such as yourself, because of the threat their ideology presented to the megacorps who rule america.

I do not believe the USSR was rainbows and sunshine tho. Do not misinterpret me. My point is not that I want to imitate a USSR, not even in the very slightest. It had flaws that caused its take over by capitalists. The USSR was a real country like any other with real flaws.

My point is that production can only be accelerated by socialism to go past the confines of capitalist ownership and into a realm of self satisfying production.

You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.

These are, really, gestures towards socialism that I'm giving you. I'm just one guy, I don't represent much past me. But I know this, with the current technology that we have there should be much less needs in the world than there are now. And i know some people make money off others' needs.

> The only way to have a large central government but not have a small handful of people with an outsized amount of power would be to make the decisions through direct democracy, which is the thing that doesn't scale to organizations that size.

Why not? Councils at different scale can certainly achieve direct democracy and if any conflicts arise the president would help determine the best course of action. There are many ways of organizing the fine details like majority or consensus, presidents decisions require voting or not, etc.

Most direct decisions don't even need to go all the way up. There could be a period of determination and direct voting, followed by a final plan that will be enacted and this is what is spread throughout the whole govt.

It could even be cryptographic voting and traceable blockchain finance (where applicable) could help undo many ills and corruption.

> Nearly by definition the only types of organizations are public (i.e. government) and private (i.e. capitalism, any organization that isn't a government). If you don't like private organizations, and the government is corrupt, then what are you even proposing?

I am proposing a world with an economic system that CANNOT overtake the government AND at the same time where the people are directly the government. So no capitalism, because like I said, and has been evidenced, capitalism is just oligopoly with extra steps.

So, yes to actual people ownership, but no to individual ownership. As individual or small group ownership leads to having interests that go against your society, incentivizing corruption for profits.

This way we can all benefit from the goods of production, we can all have an interest in keeping production going and making it better, as it increases our pay, and the corruption incentives are subdued by our collective vested interest.

This is logically the only way to solve this power imbalance which stems from the organization of production and not any mental faculties like morality or ideological leanings. This, of course, requires a culture of collective ownership if you want to keep your society free. This is also socialism.

Nah, I think the rich are the kings, politicians are their court.

We have a bunch of little kings with a public court that theyre all trying to use for themselves.

IDK you but I think you cant get rich by being a good person. You actively have to ignore others' needs to focus on growth, to use people.

Someone at the top isnt necessarily autocratic. To preside is not autocracy. Both of them freed the slaves.

> These are inherently synonyms for each other. As soon as you have anyone deciding how resources are allocated, they're taking them from whoever did the work to create them to begin with.

Nah, this is a very wrong take. If that were true what are portfolio managers doing? If they ran away with your money what would happen? Thats just a tiny little example.

There are millions of other examples where trust is employed without theft because the consequences matter.

> The best you can hope for is voluntary interactions...

Thats the deep problem with capitalism. It intends to be free but its own laws allow it to quickly be dominated by a few. And then the rest of us are supposed to trust the very-corruptible government to aid us? Capitalism REALLY is just oligopoly with extra steps. They know this and count on it.

What are you talking about?

I don't think authority is bad. What we're talking about isn't purely organizational, its economical. Of course we need leaders, and groups, and hierarchy. What we don't need is structures that take from peoples labor.

Hierarchy can be an abstraction of group decision making and not a relationship to the products of labor (as it is now).

Or do you think people will only do things if others own the products of their labor? Would it be impossible to exist as a society without a small group of people owning the products of millions of peoples labor?

Like I said with my original comment our current notion of great men is mostly a political fabrication by the rich. The rich being the people who own the media outlets we consume, the publishing houses, the internet, the people who own the vast majority of the things we need. They have the power to influence our morality through information culling, exposure and/or volume. Thus they have birthed the modern idea of "great men". "Great men" as they exist today are not great by us, they are great by them.

Do you think these forms that currently exist are the end form of human organization? These forms breed too many ills to be able to last forever, monetary corruption IS the real manifestation of these forms of human organization.

Could cryptographic voting/blockchain, which is already a reality, be a part of this new system?

I believe it will, or something similar at least.

But I am a programmer, not a cryptographer. I'm not THE guy. I'm just some random bloke trying to think about something other than making money.

if this is a possibility then we as a people should start taking it seriously. Get open source standards, software and hardware (open chips) and put it to practice.

Though I'm sure the rich would hate this. So would anyone else who has a lot to gain from controlling public offices.

IDK, man, I hear Christians talk about people being misguided (spiritually) all the time. In fact I think they're the ones who say it the most.

But I actually meant it as a sort of drive (spirit), not wholly about belief (spiritual).

But also, you must take into consideration all the ill effects of poverty. Such as crime, lack of education, lack of opportunities, the emotional faults of poverty, unchecked mental health problems, anger, frustration, ills with socialization, etc. All of the effects derived from poverty. All of these get bunched up into a single shallow view of the poor: "they're just like that" - kinda tone.

While the rich get the material wealth and the status-privilege of their families, the rich are assumed to be valuable.

This is literally what the article is talking about, albeit within a more aristocratic context.

> As is the idea that everyone is an interchangeable unit of labor, all producing the same outputs if only they were given the same inputs.

Agreed. That's why I don't believe in that. And actually that's kind of what I'm criticizing: the fake science used to judge peoples behavior.

But I do know we're way WAY more similar than our cultures would have us believe.

> I don't know what you mean by this, but I am highly skeptical of anything that claims a title like "incorruptible". Such things are usually the exact opposite, sort of like countries with "Democratic Republic" in their name or ships billed as "unsinkable".

I'm saying we can devise a political system that is incorruptible. Just like we generate mathematical proofs that underpin technologies which handle our worlds economy. But the creation of an incorruptible democracy can ONLY be done by the people who benefit from it. As in, the rich would never help us do it, only the poor. In fact, the rich would probably view us as enemies if we seriously tried.

You know, I am not a historian. And I'm not gonna talk as if I know anything about how kings were viewed by the people.

But in my mind kings can be "good" in the same way slave owners can be "good". Not that much, if any at all, contextually.

> could reduce their achievements to whatever configuration of gray matter

Even if we could do that it would not "reduce" any personal value. I think these are biases you may have. Accountability can be defined, even in that total view.

And right now, even in the incomplete view that we have, it is defined socially and politically. And that's what my real take is:

That the ideas that most people have of self, person-hood, achievement, merit and value, are political ideas.They are not necessarily true/accurate ideas. They serve a political purpose.

> What level of analysis would you consider "complete"?

We can go further than what we have now. In fact I think we MUST go further in order to make the world a better place.

Our current analysis is really just a cheap political tool that serves to preserve a sort of caste-system, most employed for classism and racism. That vague notion that "some people are just different" is the base for many political violations.

If anything the ideal, final form of what I am saying is this: Real Incorruptible Democracy.

So we don't need a scientific model describing of a persons thoughts in real, chemical, atomic detail, we need a world that can take peoples individual circumstance into real political consideration and action.

This could be what a real science of people is.

> Is that the traditional meaning of 'great' in "great men theory"?

It isn't, though I may be tangentially speaking about Great Man Theory, I wasn't focusing on it.

> If so, why not just say "strong men" or "powerful men" instead?

I thought using "great men" gives space for virtue and a spiritual/intellectual worth, not just a morally ambiguous "power".

If you were to truly do a science of people would you not take into account all of the circumstances that person was in, in order to understand them?

You say: "One achieved it, but the other person in similar circumstances didn't achieve it"

Well how do their circumstances differ? Don't you think it's important how they differ? Actually, couldn't how they differ be the key?

Why, then, do you draw the line at an incomplete analysis? Maybe because it is convenient? Maybe because we'd rather not destroy our illusions of ourselves? Maybe its convenient not to understand others?

What is real in regards to ones self and others? There shouldn't be a loss of pride with understanding.

Yes, facts make it necessarily both.

But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality?

The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured.

If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.

Like kings. Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land and could chop your head off or let you rot in jail for saying otherwise.

The reality of which you speak is not compatible with the implications of the world we live in. This truth about the world cannot exist practically, materially.

"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand." - Karl Marx

My last few comments on this site have been precisely about these ideas. These ideas, in my view, are inherent flaws of philosophical liberalism, of which modern liberalism and conservatism stem. This ideology places itself at the forefront of morality, but can't even seriously analyze the conditions of the individual.

A rich heir is self made, but a poor man is morally and spiritually bankrupt. This is how far this modern ideology goes. Totally unscientific and is also the birthplace of modern racism.

This is how far the equality goes, that is, not very far at all. The liberal revolutions of the last ~400 years must be called the aristocratic revolutions. One where the organized aristocracy came into power, and so did their morals.

Luddism is a reaction to the current situation as it pertains to labor. Marx had this to say about it:

"It took both time and experience before the workers learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."

- Karl Marx. Das Kapital Vol 1 Ch 15: Machinery and Modern Industry, 1867

Tech can always be good, how its used is what makes it bad, or not.

I dig what you're saying...

I have to quote one of my favorite thinkers here:

"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand." - K. Marx

This world knowledge is built upon piece by piece, the conceptual tools of the past create the conceptual tools of the future, that line is drawn through books and projected through minds, again onto books. This whole society depends deeply on cohesion and cultural continuation.

Our intellectual thread is the cultural knowledge and technological progress itself, its not even down to great individuals alone. I think believing in great individuals is a product of a sort of personality-fetishism (though individuals can do great things, if that makes sense).

This fetishism or mystification of the person who contributes I view as a product of an old frame of thinking which is called philosophical liberalism. This framework does this because it posits that all peoples exist under equal social value (political, legal and economical), thus people who contribute more must have a greater capacity that is innate and unexplainable or untraceable; inherent. Its a widespread philosophical frame of thought that does not consider the conditions of the individual.

We most see this employed with rich people. We hear they are truly great, savvy, exceptional individuals, when in reality a lot of the times the explanation for the vast majority of the rich is that they had rich parents. Where would you be if your parents owned an emerald mine? or Where would you be if your parents gave you a small loan of a million dollars?

In the same vein this human progress that we encounter, which seems to be carried on the backs of the Newtons and Einsteins of the world, is in fact a steady drip-feed of collective human knowledge that gets compiled and analyzed, made consistent and expounded upon by a few persons every certain amount of time. No lesser of a feat, mind you, the work is still there. I am not minimizing these persons, but contextualizing them.

[Insert the "on shoulders of giants" quote here]. Is a great example of humility and awareness by a visionary.

One thing I find impressive at times is the vast amount of German intellectuals throughout history, which upon looking at history can be explained by their colonial exploits leading to greater national wealth, leisure, and cultural amplification. This is often the case with Europe and the USA as well.

So there is a chance that we are all base-level intelligence, since we are all essentially the same species. What changes that is access to the cultural wealth of information, and not only access to this cultural wealth of information but a CULTURE OF ACCESS to that wealth of info. A level of social development around you that enables you.

People would rather immediately jump to physiological and even genetic explanations of intelligence rather than look at the social context of the individuals involved. This is because of the flaws of philosophical liberalism at contextualizing and actually scientifically looking at the world around us.

Again: there's a good chance that we are all just base level intelligence. What we know is actually different between us is the preparation and economic/social context of the individuals.

A bunch of anecdotal evidence follows:

There's this popular notion that humans are fundamentally different beings to everything else, which I believe is just a form of narcissism.

If intelligence is used to navigate the world, then it is derived FROM the world, and your role is to be able to use those facts in your mind to change the world.

I'm sure a wolf is as, or more, intelligent at surviving in the wild, with the tools it has, than your average suburban adult.

Wolves understand distance, time, sun-time light levels, resource economy, body-energy economy, they know prey behaviors, complex hunting tactics, the basics of sound transmission, they know about self security, seeking adequate shelter, they know the basics about fall damage and how that may relate to height/weight, they know how to step when running, they know momentum, etc

They absolutely do calculate a very very basic physics and animal psychology.

Because, essentially, beings know/are intelligent about the things related to their survival. They have to be, its their existence.

Therefore I speculate bees may know more about time than even this article suggests. And probably as well as sound transmission and perception and maybe even air pressure due to flying being such an important role for them. Maybe they also have a basic space-time vulnerability conception. They for sure have excellent home etiquette and social awareness.

Im sure having a tiny brain doesnt eliminate the basic physics processing capacity that all beings need, maybe it just makes it shallower.