Rules and society.

jackiebrown

Victor wrote: »

I can't look inside my head - my eyes point the wrong way. In any case, I am looking for the answers inside the people who are making the proposals. If we don't talk, if we only look inside, how do we share ideas? One of our great failings (not pointed at you) as people is coming up with ideas and not thinking them through or bouncing them off others so as to get a different viewpoint.

Theres a joke (stereotyping, I know):

Q "Whats the last thing a redneck say before he dies?"
A "Hee maw, lookat this!"

You can then imagine Bobby-Joe dies in perhaps a horrible bathtub-chainsaw accident(?) as he hasn't thought things through. Under your system, without some sort of state organised safety board, other people may not hear of and learn from Bobby-Joe's accident other than the newspaper "weird news" section.

Take the example of road safety - under the NSC, road safety was a tertiary issue, at least in part because a lot of its funding came from the motor industry that had vested interests - insurers and tyre makers and the like pushing their own agendas. With the RSA, at least it is now a secondary issue - someone has taken ownership of the issues and addressing them in a more systematic fashion. Not perfect, but much better than before.

At an EU level, do you think manufacturers would have improved safety without government pushing them? Private industry, even with a private standards organisation in place, will often still go for the cheapest / most profit route for them, not what is best for all stakeholders. The motor industry is no longer killing us to make money for themselves, well, not quite as much anyway.

Do I? I, and many boardsies reaslise that real power is in sharing information and providing leadership. find truth in reality, not opinion. Sharing my information and kowledge and gaining the same from others empowers me, not weakens me.

I tried that over the last few days and came to the conclusion you were wrong.

Lol.:D

Its the people who do all the things you talk about, not government. Too much of our power is given away to people who do not have our best intrests at heart. Our power bailed the banks out yet their not returning the favour. Why?. Cause those pulling the strings want to stay there, cause once we realise we dont need them and could do it better ourselves, they'll be the least able out of all of us.

turgon

I see where your coming from, but one of the points made is that people are to be given more responsibility. Its their responsibility to find out if the car they drive is safe, not the states responsibility to force them to.

AngryHippie

jackiebrown wrote: »

Who does all these things now?

The civil service, for the most part, some voluntary organizations like RNLI and civil defense do their bit, But most of it stems from the various governmental departments, and none of it would survive without funding, without it you end up with any of the various tragedies of failed states around the world, with the possible exception of Cuba, which seems to muddle by, but even there there was a planned and systematic takeover of the previous governmental systems, Reset isn't really an option without loss of life and/or financial stability, so restructure is the only workable option that can sustain majority public support. It would definitely take a full generation to make the changes, and there would of course be sacrafices and compromises on the way, which would cause support for the movement to constantly erode. It won't be easy.

jackiebrown

AngryHippie wrote: »

It won't be easy.

It'll be the hardest thing we ever have to do. Until we become independant in our minds then we'll never be physically free.

I always like to think of the world like this:

Imagine a man is wrongly convicted of murder and sent to prison for twenty years. For the first ten years he is brutally beaten everyday. For the next ten years he is chained up in solitary confinement but is no longer beaten. Relative to him life has improved but he is still not free.

I've been a bit of an outsider all my life and until only recently it had troubled me greatly. However I've realised that society is its own best police force. I keep myself to myself but the amount of times people have approached me, even people I'd never met, to let me know how much they dislike me was eyeopening. Someone who is on the outside is forcably, through society norms, encouraged to tow the line and if they dont will be treated like I was. The most important thing, in my opinion, that we need to do is be critical of everything we see and hear and find the reason why people act as they do and say what they say. If you listen hard enough people will tell you what they want.

If a reset was to occur then I dont believe for a minute that chaos would ensue. On the contrary, we would find our independance and the meaning of self.

Ostrom

donegalfella wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Just read over this thread, interesting reply.

Are you suggesting that 'society' exists purely as an abstraction or just maing a case against its use as a justification for oppressive social justice?

Are you suggesting that people do not organize themselves in distinct predictable ways? I'm assuming you are referring to political uses of the term?

Joycey

Sorry but Im not buying this thread at all. The idea that humans have this intangible, practically unquantifiable, exceptionally hard to define property of "freedom", which, insofar as it can be described or measured at all, seems to be (in this thread's conception) to some degree inversely proportional to the level of influence other humans have on us, seems far more abstracted from reality then is the notion of society, which at least manifests measurable effects on the individual agents of whatever species it is constituted by.


Here is this from wikipedia:

A society is a body of humans generally seen as a community. or group of humans or other organisms of a single species that is delineated by the bounds of cultural identity, social solidarity, functional interdependence, or eusociality. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture or institutions.

I mean how can you deny functional interdependence, or social solidarity, or culture? Perhaps one can argue that terms like culture are simply an abstraction from a set of individual cases, and that there is nothing in the definition of "culture" (such as shared language, religion, ethnicity or whatever) which is manifested in every single instantiation of what we might call a culture. However the exact same can be said of "table". There is nothing in every single instantiation of what we call a table which can be known as the defining characteristic of "tableness" and hence reduce level of abstraction which occurs whenever we attempt to describe the external world. However, talking about tables, functional interdependence, or even culture, seems to me far less abstract then does talking about "freedom".

If someone would care to define "freedom" for me and clear up my confusion around the concept perhaps it would add to the discussion in the thread.

Ostrom

All concepts of society are ideal types; as DF was pointing out, ontologically 'society' exists as an abstraction. You can deal with social forms conceptually as concrete entities for the purposes of study, but again as ideal types.

I'm more curious about the political side of your point (Libertarian I assume?). I dont know much about it and would like to know how your position above translates into action.