I have been considering this for awhile and wanted to see what folks had to say on it 🙂 This was going to be in response to a multiculturalism post, but I realized I ventured way off into the weeds, so I thought I would post it here, in its own thread.
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Let me ask a question..what if there was abundance?. In other words, no one had to struggle for the necessities of life whatsoever. They were provided for them as much as that is possible, and people were allowed to form living arrangements that they liked, form groups they liked to form.. with no pressure from anyone to alter their preferences. If the only laws really were based on something like “Everybody gets food and shelter, health care, energy, freedom of expression, privacy and freedom of association.. and no one is allowed to infringe on anyone’s rights to those”.. I believe we would see a vastly different world.
Let’s just assume.. literally zero people are wanting.. that our system was entirely automated somehow, with humans being taken care of in this basic way by it. And all competition was about excellence, but not survival or freedom of thought. 100% of humans could live a life of daydreams, philosophy, literature, physical fitness, math, physics, whatever you were called to.. and nothing would stop you.. there would never be a reason to change unless your interests changed. I ask that you consider all of that for a moment…you can literally do anything you like, all day long, and in the privacy of your home, literally anything goes except hurting another person. No alimony, child support.. none of that is necessary because people are all taken care of, and its all automated in some way. There are no humans that must work to maintain this system.. 100% automated.
I propose the reason we are upset about anything has to do with scarcity, or the impingement of our privacy and freedom of thought. Why, for example, does anyone care about Islamic Terrorists? It is because they are a danger to us, and our way of life (or at least, thats whats been propagated to us by media and government). Why does anyone care about nuclear weapons? About “Those people” moving into the neighborhood? About health care, on either side of the debate? Its because of scarcity, and our drive to protect what ‘we have’, or in contrast.. seeing resources ‘over the fence’ that we need to survive and live a healthy life, and trying to get a share of them.
In tribe thinking is an outgrowth of this. We identify with people and groups we identify as part of our tribe. We forgive them of crimes we never would forgive, if they were committed by a member of another tribe. We give advantages to them and give disadvantages to out-tribers. This is all a mechanism we use to protect our resources from use by humans who do not share our interests, are of a different culture, race, creed, whatever. We protect the resources of our own, and of those we feel are most likely to share WITH us if we are in need.
So, it makes no difference if we are talking about white christians, black muslims, yellow buddhists.. each tribe has the virtually identical motivations against all other tribes. Each tribe justifies its superiority by some standard or measure that they believe is sound, but are all mutually exclusive. No tribe is special, by this standard. Some are more successful at getting what they want, others are not.. but that isn’t a judgement against the people of those tribes necessarily… we don’t blame the humans who are struck with disease if they didn’t know about sanitation, for example.. its just unlucky. (read Guns, Germs and Steel sometime. Interesting book and goes into some of this)
Secondly, what outcome in the USA (or anywhere else) will multiculturalism have? The only way it will work is if American actually creates a culture of its own that absorbs all other cultures, and is pre-eminent, since we are still living in scarcity. America is a hodgepodge of various cultural stories, all unique, and although we have been whipped into a greater nationalistic narrative from time to time, that is dissolving now as the nation fails to take care of its poorest members in record numbers, and is crushing its middle class under the weight of debt. So, it seems that what multiculturalism will do, in any situation, is create more strife, given we are operating under scarcity.
People don’t give a s~~~ about nationalism if they are hungry, or so deep in debt they can’t see getting to 70 in a dignified way. American nationalism is eroding because the vast majority of Americans no longer believe in The American Dream, and that is because the economy has been manipulated in such a way as to make it harder every year to succeed for anyone, including the “lower upper’ class, that is to say..being in the top 3% doesn’t mean anything anymore. Now, you have to be in the top 0.5% to be guaranteed security.
What about those folks.. the 0.5%? The wealthy are doing the same thing that I described above.. they are engaging in in-tribe thinking. They don’t care about any of this, since they are protecting what they see as their resources against scarcity. They have their larger cultural groups.. but more importantly, they see other wealthy people as their true tribe, and identify with them.. give them advantages.. give us disadvantages.. and this is why the economy has eroded over the last 40 years. They do compete with each other somewhat.. but on the grand scale, they are all in it as a tribe. Google Bilderberg for details… try to avoid the hysterical things and focus on the facts 🙂
I believe THIS is the reason a ‘Social Bottom’ might be.. I say might be.. a good thing for the human race. It goes to evo psychological reasons.. to the very basic instincts of protecting against scarcity.. All War is about this. literally 100% of it, if you look back into history. There are often lofty reasons given.. but we know that Caesar killed the Gaul for gold, That Troy (if it actually happened) was about marrying into royalty, that Iraq, and everything else in the ME, is about the Petrodollar. So.. how does the human species deal with this? I believe that one good way would be having this sort of Social Bottom. I believe it has the potential to eliminate war, and create a human society that would thrive in perpetuity.
We know that there have been zero genuinely communal governments, and that in large groups, people tend to go crazy and everything falls apart in this model. We also know that slackers and sociopaths would destroy a ‘shared work’ model. So I am not suggesting anything like that.. I just wanted to open a discussion about this idea.
What do you think? How would you do it in a way that excluded no one?
Qbeck01 4 years, 2 months ago.
