> I think perception/searching for differences between you & others
(or
> your group & other groups) is fundamental to human psychology-
> probably neurology. In fact I'll bet my damp human arse that there's
> no-one alive who's innocent of this failing, if it is a failing (cf
> Bill Roh's (I think) post about the inevitability of conflict). [No
> aggression still BTW...]
...In modern Western Civilization we're trained to look for differences between people and then to reach conclusions about the relative value of people based on those differences. Sure it's always happened, there have always been tribal divisions but now we set about systematically expoliting those people to our own advantage - we don't seek to develop stable relations with them, acknowledging the inevitability of the occasional conflict and building in checks and balances to handle that; instead we subsume them into a corporate/state mechanism in which they are enslaved. ...we can divide all we like on our differemces, but we unite on the basis of what we have in common, and at this point in history we have one world in common.
> OO! [writing this reviewing the rest of what I wrote] do a websearch
> for stuff about computer simulations of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
There
> are magic findings in there, about situations where everyone
> cooperates all the time, and in which someone who exploits will do
> REALLY well, and the strategies that deal best with occasional
> cheats- it's good stuff.
...I like the Prisoners dilemma, but life's not like that - in the larger field there's no way to benefit in a real sense for any length of time at the expense of others. You can keep it going for a while but eventually enough people get fucked over [pardon the expletive, it's the most descriptive term I could think of] that they have common ground in the fact that they've been abused. So violence is no longer effective in controlling them. Then we had to devise a new system and so we got money, then so many people had been screwed that money was no longer a viable option, so the top of the hierarchy started screwing with the groundwork of belief and surrounded themselves with people who had no connection to the world or any of the things in it, who are forced by their surroundings to see things in humyn terms and so structured their lives according to humyn relations. Eventually this system will crack too and either the shit will hit the fan or a new system will be devised in which there are even fewer people making even bigger decisions for even more people who are denied their voice in the process.
> You seem to have a pretty negative impression of how people think
> about other groups. I mean, I consider the people that work at The
> Papermakers Arms pub to be (partially) distinct from the group of
> Booker Ltd computer programmers (my group, 9am-5pm, Mon-Tue.). BUT I
> /trade/ with the members of that group- I buy beer from them, they
> get symbolic social-debt tokens from me. And both groups think the
> other group is okay.
...this is actually a really good example of the kind of group interactions i LIKE. I think people think of other groups that they come into contact with in generally good terms - with full-context shared experience there's a commonly reality in which experientially defined symbols comprise an effective medium of communication. Lovely - shared experience in the ground of the world leading to common understanding. My very favourite thing in the entire world. ...compare that with the workings of a corporate or nation-state hierarchy where the members of an [us-group] have the composition, ideology and structure of the [them-group] wholly defined by a power structure beyond their control. People are told their lives are controlled on the basis of these constructed macro-groups but aren't given [and are taught not to demand] the right to interact with members of that group.
> You CAN look at modern societies as being depressingly over-divided,
> but then you can also look at them as an astonishing mesh of trading
> tribes. I was in (you're gonna LOVE this) McDonald's a while ago,
and
> had the weird experience of seeing it at once as this hideous
> corporate exploitation machine, but simultaneously as a gorgeous web
> of teamwork between people who're very different to each other.
...hmmm... processing.
> What do you mean by "enshrined in a hierarchy"? One of my favourite
> beliefs is that there's no group of people that doesn't more or less
> run on the energy provided by its members thrashing out a tribal
> hierarchy... I've posted before that a big part of culture's
function
> is to encode the tribal relationships, /vertical as well as
> horizontal/, between people. So I'd say there's no such thing as a
> hierarchy-less culture. Certainly not a STABLE hierarchy-less
> culture.
...I'd really like to address this point, but I want to make sure
we're operating with the same understanding of what we mean by
"tribe" and especially "tribal hierarchy" before we get into it.
...a tribe is a group of people united by a common symbol-structure
and story complex, this commonality arises out of shared experience
and direct lived communication in a common field of being.
...if we can agree on that [or some variation thereof] we can start
taking a look at the sorts of hierarchies implicit in tribal
organizations, which are very much different than the sorts of
hierarchies we have now. Tribal hierarchies are reciprocal - the
leader in any given situation is directly and immediately responsible
to her/his constituents. Also the role of the leader is determined by
the wellbeing of the tribal collective.
[tribal organization and the formation of collective organizations
for practical action is a personal passion of mine]
...IMHO for a culture to be stable it's hierarchy has to be adaptive
- changing its structure in response to changing situations, and not
static - which is the situation we have at present.
>>Cooperation is fostered within a system of >>cost/benefit analysis - people are encouraged to cooperate when it
...in modern western civilization power and advantage are measured
almost exclusively in material/monetary terms and or the ability to
demand compliance from underlings. All of these measures are
destructive because they divorce the symbols of status from the act
of achievement of the merits of status.
...advantage is also generally presented as [power over] rather than
[power with]: cooperation with [us] to gain power over [them], and
the only power we acknowledge is absolute, not relative - it destroys
context.
> If culture is stories to give interactions meaning... hmm... you're
> definitely coming from a more political, less evopsychological, er,
> culture than me. I reckon the stories we tell, which are largely
> statements about what ideas (and what tunes, and what football
teams)
> are Good and Bad, are us symbolically displaying which tribe(s) we
> belong to.
...absolutely. But don't you find it odd that our tribal divisions are largely based on tunes (perpetrated by a structure of power who act in their own best interests by deliberately fragmenting the social structure of the disadvantaged), football teams (symbolic referents which have no direct connection with everyday experience and whose action is based on the elimination of competition to achieve a purely abstract reward) and ideas (which we recieve from authoritative sources and don't arrive at though lived experience)? The stories we tell each other arise out of our experience of life - speaking in evopsychological terms [did you make that up or is it an actual field of study, I want in] the humyn mind has developed to convey information, in chunks, about the relations of the world we inhabit. A people devise stories out of their common experience to describe their common relation to the world, stories are the biggest chunks of information we can convey to someone who shares our common ground of experience - they contain objects, the relations between the objects, subjects and the relation between subjects AND they encode process, the way a people understands things to happen. ...tribal structures are incredibly complex things that we as a society have allowed to be simplified and devalued.
To me, culture is psychologically bound to the process of
> differentiating peers into My Group/Other Group.
...to me culture is a system for symbolically ordering and communicating a common experience of the world. Which has - as one of its components - a differentiation between groups, but it also explains the relations between the groups and [why] the relations are that way. Group relations are much, much more complex than simple us/them dichotomies - alliances, enmities, common endeavour - all these are part of the network of tribal relations. The present social structure builds arbitrary tribes and then alters their relations to suit the best advantage of the people who sit at the top of the heap.
> Erm... does it? I get the impression that you believe that
> contemporary society qualifies as one whose members explain their
> actions in terms foreign to their experience. So... are you saying
> that contemporary society has collapsed? [Blood adrenaline levels
> still close to zero, in case you're wondering]
...I'm saying that contemporary western society no longer gives its members any meaningful context in which to structure our lives. As entities we've collectively devised an insanely intricate system of symbolic communication which originated to describe the pattern of our relations to the world. But our symbols now refer to products or - at very best - simplified ideas with which we can form no meaningful connection because they are foreign to our experience. Because our symbols can now only describe the world in terms of humyn construction and commercial relation we have no ground for seeing ourselves as part of a larger system. The social structure is still here but its only basis at this point is exploitation - of people, of other species, of biomes, minerals - we're sucking the world dry and stripping it barren to support a system of ever-increasing delicacy for the benefit of a tiny fraction of our population.
> how do you decide what's alien and what's not? to defend yourself
> from imposed culture, you'd have to tell that the would-be imposers
> of culture are distinct from your mates and therefore that their
> stories shouldn't be believed... an us/them distinction, followed by
> non-cooperation with Them. Tricky.
...culture grows out of shared experience. Symbols represent things in the world, which we can only experience personally. You and I both have an experience of X, that experience is going to be similar because of our broad biological kinship but it's particulars will vary so we agree on an arbitrary symbol for it. That symbol [X] now gains meaning because of its relation to other components of our world and our mutual interaction with the defined thing. ...when someone imposes a culture they inject foreign experiences into a cultural ground and then - through the use of coercion or bribery - force a recontextualization of the original symbol-set [arrived at often through years, if not lifetimes of shared experience] in terms of the new experiential model, over which the dominator culture has complete control.
> Funny, I didn't see you as a wearer of Nike Air Terra Goateks.
> Appearances can be misleading. :)
...you're right about that... I don't wear corporate logos of any kind, the single exception being my shoes cos I've been completely unable to find durable, affordable shoes that aren't made by starving children in some part of the world I know next to nothing about. This is a source of constant vexation to me.
> It's a partial illusion: the people that wear those brands have
> (maybe tenuous) links to the tribe that made the trainers.
...but in a very important sense we're all one tribe. Despite all our differences, all our variation, all our incomprehensibility to one another all humyns are one species, one nation, one tribe. And that tribe is one part of a huge biological superstructure composed of hundreds of millions of other tribes and subtribes. Animal tribes. Vegetable tribes. Here we all are, living on a tiny little planet with an incredibly fragile life-supporting envelope, acting as if its resources were limitless and we could possibly act in it without there being damn serious repurcussions from our actions. I completely fail to comrehend that framework, and it's not from lack of trying.
...the idea that there's an impersonal "outside" to which we must adapt doesn't make any sense to me. The Gaia hypothesis is not news, it was first published just before I was born. I learned about it, then started reading older ideas, then I found out that up until approximately Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon in this social history this particular piece of data was more-or-less common knowledge. coevolution, karma, resonance, response not reaction - these principles make sense to me.
> But then, I'm sure if we didn't define ourselves by purchases we'd
> define ourselves by something like learned songs/dances, and there'd
> be someone in our group who was better than anyone else at
> singing/dancing, who'd accept favours to teach those dances, etc
> etc.
...the difference being that you participate in a song or a dance or
a story - it's a lived process to which you are intimately connected
with the whole of your being. The person best at the song or dance is
the person who loves it most and has devoted their whole selves to it
with the most of their energy.
...a product has no connection with anybody, one of the major drives
of the telecommunications changes and technological developments
since Ford and Turner has been the deliberate removal of personal
investment from the production process.
...songs and dances and stories etc. gain their meaning through the
involvement and investement of the people who develop them. Just like
the best mathematicians are those who love mathematics [nobody paid
Newton f'rinstance, Einstein did it for love of the structure].
Products are blank things, ciphers that we try so hard to invest with
meaning, try and try until the product, the material thing and not
the process and understanding it represents, are all that we can
relate to anymore.
> Getting there... my perspective's very different to yours though.
> Have you ever read any Spectacular Times, BTW? I've got a copy of
The
> Spectacle- a Skeleton Key. You kind of reminded me of it.
...nope. My very favourite book in all the world is 'Papillon' by Henri Charriere, my very favourite essay is "Patriotism" by Emma Goldman, my favourite work of non-fiction... I'd probably have to say Fritjof Capra's 'the Web of Life' [just read it, amazing] and my favourite fiction... Probably Bruce Sterling or Orson Scott Card.
> Which it's got to be, if you want to talk about it: "this
> unmeasurable gap is bigger than it used to be, we must take action
> NOW!"
...If you stub your toe, that's one thing, if you fall face-first into the barbecue, that's more severe pain, though not necessarily quantifiable.
> I've realised a deep conceptual flaw in my pseudo-logic regarding
> the "who's better off than they used to be" parts of my argument. Do
> you mind if I stop pushing it, because I think it's about to
> collapse.
...not at all.
> What else /is/? Corporations aren't any more Borg-like than any
other
> group of people... just because the guy who agrees to buy the coffee
> represents a company, doesn't make him not an individual.
...the entire business paradigm of corporate business organization is based around the separation of personal and business concens. "It's not personal, it's just business." If the guy who buys the coffee carries out his directives without taking the time to interact with the person growing the coffee as a whole person with a whole mind, then the buyer negates the status of the grower as a person, reduces them to functionary status - even members of other tribes are people. ...for dramatic examples of this mindset look at the deliberate decisions made by corporations like Nike to have their product made in 3'd world child-labour sweatshops, the insistence of corporate lobbyists that humyn rights be separated from business concerns with respect to relations with China [as if that were possible], the actions of Union Carbide after Bhopal and on and on and on
> Isn't there a risk that a group of 100 people that all participate
> in decision-making might be wiped out by another group with a firm
> chain of command and strong elements of
> decisions-taken-on-your-behalf? I'm thinking that maybe societies
> aren't designed, they emerge from processes kind of analogous to
> malthusian, biological processes. Downer.
...I agree with you - societies aren't designed, they can't be
designed, they have to grow out of common endeavour and shared
experience. But we [mod. west. civ.] are not allowing that process to
happen. A group of much more than 100 people has, in fact, been taken
over by a chain-of command structured group, but the basis of that
dominator group is eroding because the only mechanism presently
availiable to them for controlling the amount of people they need to
control requires that hideous amounts of resources be stripped from
the flesh of the planet.
...a people can be controlled by violence - but then there's someone
to point to who'se keeping you down, so you can rise up
...a people can be controlled by money - but the people with the
money will always be targets so there has to be force to back it up
...a people can be controlled through the structure of their beliefs,
and this control can be total, but it's extremely resource-intense
and is thus only viable on a limited scale.
...So the power structure forms a shell around itself over which they
have control of the belief systems of its components, outside that is
an influence ring of wealth - bribes negotiated and paid directly for
the deliberate application of force to an ignorant populace living in
squalour, enslaved to the machine.
> I see your point. What's the alternative?
[question retained, pessimism snipped]
...I don't know an alternative, I'm working on it with everything
I've got. I do know that a comprehensive and critical analysis of the
present state of affairs is essential, so I'm trying as hard as I can
to teach myself that.
...I know that a knowledge of how people communicate, form groups,
construct identities and learn is essential, so I'm working on that
too.
...and I know that ultimately I can only be responsible for my own
actions, my own choices and my own road; but that I'm responsible TO
the whole of my world and everything in it, so I try to make the best
choices I can make and teach others what I know, and try very very
hard to listen to what people have to say so I can learn.
...I can't see the end of the road, only the next step.
And... how can you ensure that everyone shares a common culture?
> Impose one? How do you decide what culture to impose? Everyone would
> vote for theirs, and how can you say that yours is the most valid?
...everyone doesn't need to share a common culture, everyone just needs to participate in a culture based on lived experience of the world. We're biologically similar [not identical, but similar the way a fractal is similar - variations on a theme] and so there will be inevitable commonalities, and differences - chords and dischords. ...all I can do is make the best contribution I can to a culture that is both participatory and reflects my experience. So that's what I do. That and learn.
> Oh yeh, no worries. Hope my response doesn't annoy you too much.
...I think at this point it's probably safe to conclude that neither of us is arguing with the other and we can stop tiptoeing about the end of the posts.<grin>
-psypher