An Ideal Society

ā€œRightnessā€
like ā€œtruthā€
is a measure of the accuracy
of a premise
when compared
to the standard;
reality.

I have not claimed
you are incorrect.
I have questioned
your particular
ideals.

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Under Hitler
the standard reality
was burn the jews
Under Stalin
it was execute all dissenters
rightness?
truth?

you and I
have different standards for ideal behavior
I will stay with mine
if you please
I suggest you post somewhere else

Reality is determined by moods. The universe does not care if we live or die.

The ideal society.

One in which everyone has the opportunity to give meaning to their life.

Why would we want to do that
if we are products
of an uncaring universe?

Well, suicide does seem like a rational response to the absurdity of life. But to deny this absurd life is to deny reality. You too are committing a form of suicide by covering up the absurdity of life. But to do this only misrepresents who people are.

Invocation
of Godwins Law
is not an effective way
of winning arguments.
You may wish
to consider
your chosen form
of debate.

Reality
is the standard
against which
human perception
is evaluated.

Stalin
and Hitlerā€™s
interpretation of reality
is not a standard
but merely
an interpretation.

When the majority of a nation
accept that interpretation
it then becomes their standard

The ideals I listed
are beneficial to all
immutable
timeless
a basic standard of individual and social behavior
that can lead us all to a peaceful
and creative global society

Your objections
are counter productive
and add nothing to the debate
other than allow one to reiterate
the importance of the OP

An Ideal society is one that is favored by the cosmic process. Nature is always breaking down and destroying what its children Build.

Why is
it necessary
to type
like this?

Someone wants to seem overly comprehensible, as though what they say is so very simple and obvious like politicians do when they speak publically. But it doesnā€™t escape the astute that you are a short sighted moraliser. All these criteria are SO far abstracted from the motivations from, and circumstances within which they come about that it is obvious that you are far removed from reality. This is a common case amongst so-called philosophers: their thoughts wander only inside the sphere of comfort and optimising abstractions that amuse the thoughts of those living a comfortable and detached lifestyle. Tell Marx that this is not the type and kind of life you lead.

Incentive goes far far beyond the ā€˜moralā€™ dignation to be the best citizen that you can within a egalitarian or new-testament-style set of values. Motivations revolve soley around the means to continually produce your life and/or its surpassing as a real individual within your society, and historically this has already been shown to not always fall in line with egalitarianism or tolerance and indiscriminate benevolence.

You preach a dead, static, final set of inflexible rules: another common case amongst co-called philosophers. In proposing this ā€˜immutableā€™ and ā€˜timelessā€™ ideal (which is already proven wrong if you even glanced at the varied societies of present and past) you completely disregard the merits of its binary opposites, such as change, evolution and variety. Read some Nietzsche.

because it is no longer necessary
to save paper
or be concerned
with punctuation

The rest of your ā€œastuteā€ observations
add nothing to the dialogue
but leave us
with the same old same O

I practice
what I preach
or at least try to

Instead of regurgitating the banal
try and say something original and constructive
for a change
and become a practicing philosopher

Just because somethingā€™s not necessary anymore, doesnā€™t mean you have to change it. Youā€™ve gained nothing by using your ā€˜new formatā€™ other than having proven an extremely small point about the internet versus pen and paper.

Youā€™re right that my comment is criticism so its focus is subtracting from your ideals, but considering the nature of them Iā€™ve actually improved them by taking away from them. Your ideals are removed from realistic changes in attitude IN PRACTICE and they donā€™t cover the transition from what we have now to what you propose in a way that would properly appeal to everyoneā€™s motivations. This is why itā€™s an atrocity of typical bourgeois abstraction and why I have to address it in such an urgent manner. Ideals need to be REALISED to actually exist.

So whilst you claim to practice what you preach, you wonā€™t lead by example until you link everything realistically to other peopleā€™s real situations and real motivations that are directly linked to their means to produce their own life.

Anyway, enough of my taking away - now to address your accusation of my lack of originality, creativity and ā€˜adding to the dialogueā€™. At the end of my post you may have noticed my encouragement to allow flexibility and growth, which rigid sets of principles and ideals donā€™t allowā€¦ so in fact Iā€™m encouraging a MORE original and creative approach than you.

Consider this: to whom is it preferable to NOT adhere to principles? Itā€™s exactly the creative who create new ways to look at things outside rigid principles. You only support creativity in adbstracted word, not in realistic practice. Your ideals will do more to restrict mankind than to improve it. I propose change, rebirth and lack of boundaries - there, thatā€™s my addition to the dialogue that you wanted. It is directly opposed to how your ideals would make their attempt to work in practice so you wonā€™t like it, but there it is.

Those to whom the norm is not good enough and to those whoā€™s bodies demand more of them than the safe and tolerating restriction of loving or caring for everyone equally until you have the atrocity of typical bourgeois abstraction of heaven for everyone, your heaven is hell. Phyiscal love IS unequal. The body DOES discriminate in order to stay alive in the most preferred way. Inequality isnā€™t just preferable, itā€™s essential and unavoidable. To socially advance, relativity says you must advance beyond another being who will, relatively speaking, fall behind. However this is not a bad thing - those who fall behind in 1 situation will find an alternative way to achieve and succeed out of necessity. This is the creativity that is born only out of inequality.

You speak out of naivety and the day that everyone has it equally good is the day that creativity dies.

You missed the larger point
that by breaking with old-fashioned convention
based on the conservation
of stone tablets
papyrus
linen
and wooden pulp
I am being original
and enjoying myself
by exploiting virtual space
with all the extravagance
formerly wasteful
but I will let that slide

convention dies hard
for those who are enslaved to custom :mrgreen:

So you are saying that my universal criteria
for ideal personal behavior
are the abstractions
of a 'bourgeois?

Shall we revisit them

Keep mentally and athletically fit
eat moderately
exercise daily into old age
hike and camp in Nature regularly
engage in a sport that maintains a strong arm and sure aim
give at least seven years of service to the nation
maintain a home in good order
plant a garden
hone and perfect a craft
keep a busy workshop
practice a fine art
stay current with events
continuously improve your intellect
practice a daily spiritual discipline

I did leave out
test oneā€™s courage
and beg correction

Many would say
they are the basic attributes
of a devout hard-working peasant
who is a true nobleman at heart
It is what I expect from myself
and each of my children
and hopefully
from my neighbors

and I would say
that you are too lazy
and too aimless
to even think of practicing them
hence your objections

What do mean by ā€œrigidā€ principles?
One cannot be a dilettante and bend principle
You either have them
as a foundation for guiding your conduct
and stick to them to the point of death
and beyond
or donā€™t have them at all.

Listen to yourself!
You are advocating unprincipled behavior
that would be chaos

A creative person may well not adhere to custom
and in that way lead us to a new social consciousness
but one without principles
would be a vagabond
and create nothing moral
or immortal

One cannot measure love
but we do know
one is a zombi without it

If you replace ā€œinequalityā€ with individuality
your point makes sense
otherwise it is unfairly divisive
offends the fundamental family value of meticulous sharing
and creates the wars
we are currently experiencing

One cannot measure goodness either
but we do know
that without it
ignorance rules

Iā€™d quote sections of what youā€™ve written to refer to them more specifically as you have easily been able to do with mine, but it would make my post 10 times longer and Iā€™d spend all day scrolling. Iā€™m all for happiness and exploration, but I object to the persistent use of devices beyond appropriation. It just reminds me of the self-satisfied conceit of the petty whoā€™re so blinded with the delight of having finally adopted a different approach to something ahead of any established trend that they feel the need to show off their approach repeatedly, even when it is far from complementary to the whole point of what theyā€™re communicating, until everyone is sick of it. It permeates this thread obnoxiously and itā€™s ironic that you seem to skate around the accusation that Iā€™m bound by my format. The irony is extended further by the amount of empty ā€˜airā€™ blowing around within these vast posts of yours inadvertently complementing the vacuous nature of the thoughts they contain.

I use rhetorical devices myself when writing if appropriate. Concise stabs suit my cutting points. The increased density of my word layouts mirror the impenetrable solidarity of my understanding. Not straying from certain customs all the time can show good taste. It is in bad taste and disrespectful of ancestry to persistently attempt to escape custom to overexaggerate your individuality, as though you think you are great and separate from the manifold historical factors that have contributed to your current situation, when in fact you are just blind to them. Your high-horse is so high, you darenā€™t jump off it.

Yes. Your entire list is a list of pursuits as though they were leisures that everyone can take for granted and indulge in if they see themselves as cultured enough. Youā€™re so bourgeois you donā€™t even seem to be aware of different lifestyles to your own. None of the list is noble, except the one you had previously left out, ā€˜testing oneā€™s courageā€™, which you immediately go on to sully with narcissistic displays of humility by exaggerating and prostrating yourself in servile apology. ā€˜Ignobleā€™ doesnā€™t go far enough here. Then you go on to illustrate further ignorance with your accusation of my aimless laziness in refusing to idiotically moralise. My objection is towards your objectional attitude that anyone who doesnā€™t organise narrow minded criteria to ā€˜sensiblyā€™ structure their lifeā€™s practices is lower than you.

It seems being a vagabond here would actually benefit you so I definitely advocate unprincipled behaviour for one such as yourself. It would at least widen your experiences of life and give you an improved idea of totality. Maybe it would even thrust you into the life-giving rush of a bit of chaos. Your idea of moralising is in fact just a form of fascism. You prescribe rules to restrict everyone else to the knowable, sensible, restrained box of pacified dispassion because this is the only situation in which you feel protected and safe enough to hide in. You essentially outlaw the realms of explosive flourishes and chance because theyā€™re not focused enough for you to cope with and you would feel scared in a world where they proliferated. What a world that would be, in the face of this one, where you could feel alive and well matched once again because everyone was as unrestrained as everyone else and capable to engage passionately with one another to their heartā€™s content.

We live in a weak rotting society where every weakness is doted upon and raised up to the accepted norm, such that we dissolve our minds with pity and prune all the new exciting growth clean off our bare wilting stalks, to at least be all weak together. To the strong this is hell, and your signature shows your blindness of what it is to be strong, NOBLE and capable. To reduce oneself in the face of such potential so that the incapable donā€™t feel outdone is frustrating beyond words. Itā€™s a sick joke that nobility is now so commonly mistaken for equality.

Equally backwards is your notion that lack of goodness breeds ignorance. It is precisely your goodness that blinds you to the merits of what you have branded bad and evil and that makes you ignorant. You actually think that wars come from being unfairly divisive and unsharing. Further irony can be noted here with the observation of your unknowing divisive ways, separating you from those you are ignorant about and separating those who follow your principles from those who see the merits of freeing themselves from them.

You only seem to understand sharing as a meticulous moral imperitive. Real sharing is an uncontrollable release of need to bestow upon equals because of what they have given to you by simply being a life-giving match. This is love and I agree you canā€™t measure it. I would argue that you are the zombie here because you donā€™t recognise this kind of love, only a meticulous moral imperitive to share because itā€™s ā€˜rightā€™. The kind of love that I here mention is the only source of creative immortality that has always been timeless. You arenā€™t creating here, you are restricting life to focus on one area of it as morally principled and thus deny the totality of love by outlawing part of it as morally ā€˜wrongā€™.

Phewph. I think thatā€™s me done, I do love passion. Now just imagine if I typed all that out without punctuation and with one or two words per line, perhaps even justified to the middle or right of the page to further explore the freedom of the internet post haha.

My dear, Shadow
having crammed virtual space
with verbose denunciations
of an unideal being
and though negatively flattered
to have been singled out in this unflattering way
perhaps you can get back on thread
and grace us with your version
of an ideal individual
and how such a being
multiplied 6 billion times
can grace the planet
with an ideal society

Youā€™re doing it again. Itā€™s not necessary to single yourself out as the only individual against whom I present my argument. There are far more who think like you than you may or may not be aware, and they go back a long way into history and were even praised for it when it was new and first exposed to many via the printing press or word of mouth as religion/law. I do address you directly, but as a single person of many who, when combined, form a significantly frustrating mass of moral abhorence. However, it is much more potent to engage with you one at a time because as a collective you would much less likely listen since you would no doubt feel more complacent in your position: as though numbers of people agreeing made each more justified.

Enough of these ā€˜verbose denunciationsā€™: they come in this form as a direct overflow of my heartā€™s demands, I shall humour you and elaborate on my preferences in practice in place of my criticisms of yours.

But firstly, I would be moralising hypocrite if I prescribed an ā€˜idealā€™ society myself, where the only difference would be the ā€˜idealā€™ person doing different activities and having different values being multiplied 6 billion times. Of course, I am using inverted commas because I would never use the word seriously. The ā€˜idealā€™ that you can improve man is, to me, a ridiculous one. This is evident when you consider that a man is as much of a man as he ever will be until he is restricted or focused, i.e. weakened. You canā€™t add on to a human like a machine or something. He will always be only a product of the bodily needs that drive him. You can only control or restrain parts of him to direct his frustrations towards what you deem as more subjectively constructive to you. These are what laws and morals do because they mistake weakening a man with improving him via a personal prescribed focus: essentially you create the kinds of people you want to engage with. This is crude and embarrassing when, like yourself, you propose a uniformly ordered and disciplined, predictable bunch of pompous misunderstanding fools. You reveal instantly your inability to deal with any kind of chaos, explosive passion and directly overflowing human strength in all the forms you donā€™t condone. This overflow of power of which I speak, I would call NOBILITY, but never ā€˜idealā€™. It is the source of all drive and creativity.

This makes your REAL request of me to ā€˜graceā€™ you with my version of what kinds of people I would like to be surrounded by in my society. In which case, I answer: the exact same people with whom I am actually surrounded by in my society. By no means do I find almost all of them satisfactory enemies or friends because they are far too small, and I get little satisfaction from them being without challenge and easy to belittle from showing the slightest shred of unfettered capability. But this makes it all the more special when I come across a good match. Since this is the nature of the least repressed actual LOVE, and there is so much variety when thereā€™s 6 billion different people, it goes without saying that real love is specific and picky and rare. Anything less and reaching peace with just anyone can only be more weak and withdrawn towards merely ā€˜toleratingā€™ their proximity and influence on your life. To say you merely tolerate someone is cruel. To say you love everyone in the way I talk of love is a lie. To attempt to reduce suffering to zero, you eradicate all the ways to lose and thus all the ways to win, so everyone is equally weak and the strong suffer terribly.

As such, 6 billion people in an ideal society is an impossibility. All you need, and all that is even possible is already a reality.

Since they all exist in symbiosis
every social system on the planet
excepting mankind
live and enjoy life
in ideal societies

no specie except our own
wages war on itself
or needs to lie on a couch
and be psychoanalyzed

Ants and bees are particular examples
of the peaceful industry that can be accomplished
when an entire hierarchy works in harmony

nor does a single ant
or single bee
lose its individuality while engaged in social cooperation
on the contrary its individual sense of self-empowerment
is immeasurably magnified by the mass harmonic
and thus
unhampered by the negative load of unequal contribution
to the well-being of the whole
work whole-heartedly
with individual feats of prodigious strength

At heart mankind
who is an extension of that same natural state of consciousness
and who survive in similar hives of communal activity
yearns for a return to the same mass harmonic
we once enjoyed

Attend a stirring concert
or football game
and you can see and hear it again
loud and clear
cheering its heart out

We were all joined together in a family harmonic
during the Stone Age
and then in clan harmonics
during the Bronze Age
and then in national harmonics
during Iron Age
and then in colonial harmonics
during the Steel Age

As each progressive evolution of consciousness
demanded more complex social adjustments
the original family group harmonic
which every culture shares
became slightly more discordant in relationship
yet its central syncopated melody
based on shared family values
remained intact
no matter what language or creed we practiced

This being so
with us all agreed on the same family values
and our individual responsibilities to it
It is ideally possible
at the start of this new Nuclear Age
for the whole of our specie
to come together
via the home-based medium of the internet
and plan to work together
stewarding the home planet
as a single family estate
with every individual doing his or her own bit
to make the harmony a master piece

If we all agree to sing the same family song
not one of us will lose our own voice
and every one of us
while singing in the same chorus line
will soar to heights
no single individual
can ever hope to attain
alone

Iā€™ve probably lost you since youā€™ve disengaged with me and gone back to how you started off. Fair enough, Iā€™ll change tack. Before, I was demonstrating the vim of one who would feel left out of what your ideals strive to achieve. Now, I shall be a little more calmly and coldly analytical about it in the continued hope that you will realise why a complete reevalution of your values is in order.

First Iā€™ll be Derridean about deconstructing your enunciations. The entire proposal is based on privileging peace and fulfilling cooperation over their binary opposite. This will seem like an absurd comment to you Iā€™m sure because it seems that in your sphere of experience, no-one could possibly want this binary opposite. Evidently many people do haha, hence this binary opposite persistently happening to the point where people question whether itā€™s just human nature. I think youā€™d call them, from your cosy internet chair: wrong or evil; unenlightened or ignorant. In reality, people are driven to these activities through necessity as well as passion and for gaining the initiative or upper hand. Youā€™ll say it shouldnā€™t be necessary, but it is because there are many long established interpretations of peace or success in the world. For there to be global peace youā€™d need all these interpretations to come to an agreement, which evidently at the moment hasnā€™t been possible because of physically impossibly reconcilable contradictions in any possible synthesis. If what you came up with was original, youā€™d just be adding yet another irreconcilable set of principles to the fray.

A brief tangent here referring to your comments on other species: strictly speaking, epistemologically, a human understanding of another speciesā€™ society is restricted by exactly its own human understanding and imprinting of its own values upon the society in question. You canā€™t physically be a bee to have a beeā€™s understanding of its own society for example. Disgracing myself a bit here with this ludicrous piece of abstraction: maybe in a beeā€™s point of view, humans are harmonious and bees just canā€™t seem to get along haha. But that quickly aside, you see my point, back to reality. Any human understanding of any beeā€™s society will not observe a significant division of labour to the degree that interests within the society clash. Now time to get a bit Marxist. All social behaviour in bee or similar insect societies can be explained in terms of direct biological imperitive to pursue only the tasks that the memberā€™s body physically demands that it do. There is no removal of interest by a dominant member of the society that dictates the imperitive to act differently so each bee seems able to act away to its heartā€™s content in perfect bee-bliss.

A step up from this and we find pack animals that have roles like alpha male and strict hierarchy enforced by physical strength and abilty, like the wolf. Here there is division of labour towards roles like pack leader etc. In this case it is in every male memberā€™s interest to be the pack leader. Every male wolf has a direct bodily urge to dominate and have control over the rest so that it can contribute to the packā€™s interests as well as to its own as this is the most satisfying bodily outcome. War is most certainly present at a microscale here and the only wolf who doesnā€™t want it is the alpha male.

But then at the top step (in human understanding at least) you have humans. Our societies increasingly outnumber any bee swarm or pack of any other species in the entire world. We arenā€™t the most common species on the planet but our societies incorporate the most members. We have progressed far beyond these swarm and pack behaviours that we attach to other species and previous incarnations of our own species. Division of labour has gotten to the point where the working classes are practically completely removed from the ruling classes. Thereā€™s so many people that the number of roles is off the chart. Generations of specialism of those within their roles passing down knowledge has isolated their general understandings of the society as a whole to an understanding of the few with things in common with themselves. We have factories on the other side of the world set up by executives whoā€™ve never been close to the factory sites. This is what the global commincation of the internet has been able to do. Use it for more personal communication and youā€™ll still never ever have your whole upbringing in more than 2 places at once in this huuuuuuge vast planet. Your understanding will never be deep of another whoā€™s division in labour is far removed from yours, so you will never be united together as one as you so seem to desire.

The point is, bees seem to get along because their interests are still directly in touch with their physical needs. Wolves seem to never have large scale wars because their packs just havenā€™t become big enough to separate enough to create intra-pack war through removed conflict of interest. Of course, they do have inter-pack war over territory but nothing like we do with our vast vast communities that only get bigger and more separated with increased communication. As soon as we humans are past the point where division of labour has separated our interests from our immediate bodily awareness and direct fulfillment, total harmony dissolves to make way for increased dominance and maximised satisfaction ONLY for those of the ruling classes. And even their satisfaction deteriorates once theyā€™ve passed the point where mostly everything is under control because theyā€™ll have appeased their working class as part of their aims to the point where no one has anything better to do than think about how to eliminate all the work thatā€™s been done by banding together under erroneus principles of an out-of-touch abstraction artist such as yourself O:)

All human family groups
even if they may not practice them
respect the same family values
which have been imprinted in our common gene pool
over the past 100,000 generations of humane evolution

Sharing ethic
work ethic
courage ethic
community ethic
caring ethic
communication ethic
creative ethic
intellectual ethic

The commonalty of those values
ensures intimate understanding of each other
irrespective of race creed or location
and sustains the solid foundation
of a single family group
who appreciate ad respect their common origins
and aspire
to a common destination

All of course
except silhouette and his like
who only have a shadow
of common understanding ](*,)

Haha nice play on my name :smiley:

You raise an interesting point though finally. I reject common understanding in favour of uncommon understanding because it is a lot more personally rewarding to me to succeed and create outside of the recycling of the common values. So inadvertently I privilege the one over the other, which is getting left out of my thoughts. This will be where we clash.

Now if youā€™ll only acknowledge the exact same privileging in your own method, but in reverse, then you might finally see my arguments a lot more clearly. Not everyone finds their own ideal in yours, as I have demonstrated through myself. No doubt you would prefer to pass my case off as an unfortunate result of the current lack of upholding of your principles in society. But as long as there is genetic variation in the world, the same upbringing will necessarily never be enough to satisfy all of us equally. More importantly, if you cut out those such as myself ā€˜and my likeā€™ you cut out progression and a feeling of advancement, which as an immediate bodily rush of achievement, is one of the most rewarding experiences possible.

I bring up the division of labour because it maximises production efficiency and allows for the new technology that we enjoy today. You must acknowledge the result of those outside of your ideals as a preferable result of the current lack of upholding your principles in society! Genuine creation doesnā€™t happen in practice under your imagined celebration of unity through diversity, only maintenance, so your like can only maintain the creations of my like. Creation happens only when necessity emerges out of rejection and dissonance. We cease to be honest to our creative drives the day that we abandon the individual in favour of the greater good and all these ā€˜ethicsā€™ that you mention.

Anyway, as long as there is genetic variation, the body will have naturally varied preferences that donā€™t always prefer your principles: this is inevitability. Division of social groups will emerge out of inevitability as this family-like mutual appreciation extends most strongly to those who empower ourselves by supporting our own values and less to those you donā€™t. Hence your conviction here in a situation where you commonly find this empowerment in others who were attracted to the same place. I embody those who oppose your empowerment and reduce it to dust with creativity and strength. You cannot deny the existence of this in society and I implore that you recognise the merits of their existence! No matter how much you maintain your preaching. You even abandon your values in practice by being frustrated and withdrawing away from me. Any compassion youā€™ve previously shown seems false because itā€™s merely tolerance and not the natural attraction to those who support you. Given this natural variation in attraction, you can no longer uphold your ideal that attraction and appreciation can be equal, even towards those outside your exact preferences. In a world of 6 billion people, you wonā€™t find equal appreciation. Your family values donā€™t extend beyond a certain amount of people.

Am I getting anywhere? Or are you stuck in a small minded loop of maintenance and self-replication? A magnet repels just as much as it attracts, man.

My dear Silhouette
much as one can sympathize
with your insistence
that only the uninhibited individual
is capable of original expression
I am forced to remind you
that there is nothing new or original under the sun
everything
with only slight variations
is an off-shoot
of what has already been thought of and accomplished

what we do know
is that when one of us gets it perfectly right
or nearly so
all of us recognize the same perfection
and it gets a standing ovation
FROM ALL OF US
this common recognition of excellence
is not possible without a common appreciation
of shared values

such a mass ovation it is not at all possible
if we accept your world view