Any society, civilization, or nation geared towards the select few is doomed to fail.
The needs of the many and multitude outweighs the needs of the few.
Better to have a majority dictatorship than a minority one.
I agree with you that people have become, decadent, corrupt, and full of destructive avarice as morality or ethics has become lost on this world presently, but the only thing that is worse which far outweighs all of that is the corruption of our so called leaders.
The people at the top echelons of human civilization should know better along with all of those career intellectuals yet they do nothing as their greed and general apathy has completely consumed them leaving nothing left of humanity. The grotesque global dark age of the great corruption.
Moreover even if there was a group of people wanting to overthrow the top of that pyramid they would only send their endless assassins for hire in the dark snuffing out the lives of anybody that threatened their grip of power or control. It is because of that there is no rebellion or insurrection because of all the previous decades of assassinated, tortured, and imprisoned martyrs.
Yet as a student of human history and I truly mean a student of all of it there’s one thing left to defy the top of that pyramid where nobody else can where that is the means of primordial chaos itself. The out of control elites think of themselves as the masters of chaos to where it serves them at their every call or beckoning yet chaos is a cruel mistress and temptress always teaching the hard lesson that nobody is ever fully in control of anything. The top of the pyramid will learn this very hard lesson soon enough and where nobody rebels against them now that primordial chaos surely will because in the end they’ll find out that their very worst enemies are in fact their own selves. That’s where we’re at currently in this world I think.
Oh the stupidity of the indoctrination and the inability to realise that without cooperation and support, everyone one of us would still be working the fields, have no rights and have to live on a pittance. I just can’t get around the degree of indoctrination that many Americans and increasingly Europeans are deluded by.
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I am not really a fan of the political concept that is freedom, instead I tend to look at things like efficiency, happiness, social order, and stability.
My politics looks to needs, desires, suffering, public health, productivity, and collectivized profit over that of freedom.
Are any of us truly absolutely free the moment we’re born in this world and the moment we die? No, I seek to lessen human suffering in this world and to transform the state into an enlightened compassionate institution meant to elevate the existential human condition. At least that is how it would work in my ideal world through my perceptions of things.
I have a feeling though with current global circumstances it will be a long road before we see anything like that if at all as I see a future of complete devastation pressing down upon us.
I am defining it the only way possible, which is producing net money, and establishing that a government, by definition, cannot satisfy it.
You go on to make some points about some potential emotional value of what the governments can produce. Very well. My point is not about the beauty of its product. My point is about its net destructiveness. You may want to take the position that destruction is worthwhile. All I am pointing out here is that, if this is so, then the only things worthwhile are things, by definition, with an expiry date. Either by explosive or gradual degeneration.
However beautiful their products may be (and here you and I must have very different experiences of the beauty of government products, but we’ll call this one subjective), they can only exist destructively.
If you don’t produce enough money to continue to pay for your projects, you eventually cease to be able to pay for those projects, those projects cease to exist. They may have been beautiful, they may have been “worthy,” but they were also a slow (or very fast) consumption onto death.
They were this, because if you can’t pay for the school, you can’t make the school. Unless you can explain how this is not so. Maybe slavery? Ah, but slaves cost money, too. At the end of the day, even if you somehow enslave all of humanity, you will have to feed it.
It necessarily is because, without money, it will cease to exist, and so will all the resources which, through the chain of exchange represented by money, went into it.
Whether it produces something that is of value to you personally or not changes nothing about it being destructive.
This is another problem with socialism and socialists. The inability to admit this fact. The pretence, the looking away. If you worship destruction, because it produces some government-made “beauty,” own it.
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Well, those cookies accurately symbolize that times have changed. They got more cookies at the top. Socialism has had many problems, but I can’t really see it as the likely form of economic government in the West. Capitalism (in shifting form) has been the economic system throughout, with some hybrid forms that are still fundamentally capitalism in Scandanavia.
The wealthy have more ways of making money without any labor on their part than they used to. Corporations profits were once linked to production as the primary source of income. But financialization of organizations, especially corporations, keeps increasing the amount of money they make, the %, from non-production activities, which they can also, like individual and family wealthy people do, to consultants and managers of their funds.
You do not have to produce anything to make money. Though you need to be wealthy to benefit from all the changes that let to this. It’s a myth that if you have income, you are producing something, unless you are on welfare, say. And, of course, AI is making this even easier, because you don’t have to even pay these consultants anymore, not that that led to hardship.
So, yeah, socialism has problems. And communism has problems. But the rich are getting richer with less and less labor and production. It’s like worrying about snow in the Sahara.
Bob, I used your post as a jumping off point. This is not a critique of your post.
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Well, historically and ideologically, social democracy is a reformist tradition within socialism which sought a peaceful, evolutionary path from capitalism to socialism. However, it’s true that, in terms of actual economic systems today, most social democracies are capitalist economies with strong welfare states, so they are often distinguished from socialism in the strict sense.
In Marx’s own schema, socialism is not identical with communism, though people sometimes say, “socialism and communism” as if they were the same or treat “communism” as just “extreme socialism.” But theoretically, communism is a specific, more radical endpoint, while socialism is a broader category that can take many forms.
Social democracy (in its modern, post‑war form) usually accepts private ownership and markets as the core of the economy and uses taxation, regulation, and welfare to reduce inequality and insecurity. It does not aim for a stateless, classless, moneyless society.
Some people have said that an oligarchy has much in common with communism, only that it is a minority that profits. This is because in practice, many self‑described “communist” regimes developed oligarchic structures, where a small elite controlled power and enjoyed privileges while the majority did not.
So, when we face modern oligarchies, which are ruled by a small, privileged minority that controls key levers of political power and the economy and uses that control to secure disproportionate benefits for itself, we may not be far from the communism that oligarchs warn against.
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Yes. plus enough characters to go over 15
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That’s true. Society is just a collection of people. The rules they set have to be objectively based. They aren’t currently. They are based on envy.
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You need the updated version of that meme, allow me to produce it here for you.
(Does Bob have me on ignore? I don’t even know anymore. )
I think people are more frustrated towards authoritarians of any type, rather than socialists. Would you have the same interest in socialism, if there was a socialist group that applied socialism between themselves and people could join and leave it as they please? (And, of course, follow the law in all regards)
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Yes, of course, your politics is about worshiping need. It’s your standard of value. But you’re not at all interested in what life requires.
If human life requires thinking and production, then these are objective needs of life. If life is a process of self-sustaining action, then life is inherently self-interested. Pursuing those things which you objectively need to live for yourself is an objective requirement of life.
This is not my opinion.
This is not ideology.
This is not arbitrary speculation.
This is biological fact.
You are your own keeper.
You are responsible for your needs.
You need to be free to be responsible.
You need to work.
You need to be able to keep the products.
Socialism and what you call Capitalism will never work because they are incompatible with human life requirements. It’s the system built on self-abnegation. It’s a system that holds need, lack of ability, lack of ambition, and helplessness as the altar on which success, human ability, and greatness must be sacrificed.
Human life and self-sacrifice are irreconcilably opposite.
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If you reject capitalism, socialism, or communism, how do you go about solving the dilemma then?
Let’s make it a little more concrete. Let’s take public schools.
The US government allegedly spent some $981.57 billion dollars, let’s say a clean trillion, in the fiscal year 2024, on public schools.
They are horrendous places, with armed guards sometimes, where children are violated, by each other and by “teachers,” in an oppressive environment that causes life long trauma.
They are glorified prisons, with all the abuse that is associated with them, and all of the learning.
A trillion dollars is spent on them, which evaporates into the ether, minus whatever percentage of it was absorbed by intermediaries. A trillion dollars, gone. Well, invested in the abuse of children. Any of those children that need even the most basic math will then have to go to other institutions to learn it, or use an initiative that they could use just as easily at home with a book, or pay money for a tutor.
That is to say, eliminating them from the accounts ledger would not pose the question of what to replace them with. Simply doing away with them, with no alternative, even without putting the trillion dollars back in circulation, would already be profit.
Pure destruction.
I don’t know, how could I notice if I definitely was one, in your view?
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Our whole society is second-hand. People don’t look at reality; they glance sideways to see whether they are meeting approval or what the accepted belief is. They have this idea of what success is: having lots of stuff. Having the big house, the fancy car, the jet skis, the vacation in Vail. They want approval. They see someone who “has it all” and think they are behind. They attack the rich but secretly want to be rich. They see someone with more, and they want more too.
Notice at Christmas or Halloween. The neighbor gets a new inflatable decoration, and soon everyone has the same one.
They compete with each other instead of competing with who they were yesterday.
I see someone with all that stuff, and I say Wow, I’m glad that’s not me. Imagine the amount of money and time it takes to keep all that maintained.
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