[FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Fri Sep 18 15:50:42 EDT 2020
EricS -
I think this gives a good "hint" of part of what a fully Socialized or
Communal system looks like to some (e.g. Libertarians), and why they
resist what others of us might see as "reasonable attempts at leveling
the playing field".
I'm definitely ambivalent in the sense of being of "two minds". I am a
creature (ego?) shaped by the struggles and challenges I have
experienced... and "what didn't kill me made me stronger" or maybe more
to the point, I am a product of my experiences (nod to Glen's
"diachronic" vs "episodic" thoughts).
I have only the thinnest apprehension of Glen's "Anarcho Syndicalism"
(sure I've read a little, but have far from had time to think through it
all) but it has some of the positive features I look for like
"structure at all scales" and "self-similarity" possibilities,
explaining not only how "history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes"
(Clemens) but perhaps how cultural sub-units, "bubbles" if you will also
rhyme across geography/culture as well as time. A bit of a
cultural/semantic version of the "multi-verse foam" ideas in
physics/cosmology.
Also the best reason I can accept for a continued-to-expand humanity...
with consciousness being not unlike the big-bang, expanding (in quality)
right up to our current era where the likes of Musk and several
nation-states are aspiring to begin to colonize the inner system (at
least moon/mars) in our (their?) lifetimes.
- SteveS
> Nick, while I laud your motivation, I strongly disagree with your
> proposed solution. The desire for a basic fairness of some sort should
> be kept quite different the notion of creating a flatland. We WANT a
> society full of people who faced a variety of different struggles.
>
> This is a Peirce/Dewey democracy problem. /_IF_/ the rationale for a
> democratic system is that we make better decisions when we bringing a
> variety of perspectives to bear on a problem, then the push for
> flat-land destroys the rationale for having a democratic system. While
> we might easily agree that those struggles should not include a risk
> of literal starvation, that doesn't mean we want them all to start out
> with access to identical fiscal resources and identical educational
> opportunities. That some people have more food than others, in a
> system that guarantees everyone a baseline amount of food to support
> development, is perfectly fine.
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 11:32 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com
> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Eric. He came off better on the podcast. Glad to be
> corrected. This American Life did one of it’s quixotic treatments
> of systems in which leaders are chosen at random, and, of course,
> was quite pleased by the result. By the way, isn’t that how the
> Dali Lama is chosen?
>
>
>
> I still think we should randomize all the babies at birth, take
> huge amounts of money off the top and pour it in at the bottom in
> the form of education and flat-out income adjustment so that no
> child is disadvantaged by the station of his/her birth.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *Eric Charles
> *Sent:* Friday, September 18, 2020 6:20 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats
>
>
>
> So.... delayed response to the original... based on the longer
> reviews I've seen, this is partially a criticism of meritocracy
> itself, but also a very strong criticism of the neo-liberal
> bastardization of meritocracy. As it says in the opening line of
> the review in the original post: The thing being criticized are
> "pernicious assumptions" about merit. From what I can tell, his
> TED talk summarizes the book
> well: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_the_tyranny_of_merit
>
>
>
> He starts out with some discussion of moral luck, but in my
> opinion not a great discussion of it. Then he moves on to
> criticize a world where pieces of paper are confused for ability.
> In such a world, those without the right pieces of paper are
> deemed to lack merit and are told they can't have dignity. That
> part is criticizing a world in which our leaders continuously
> message that everyone should go to college, encouraging a false
> belief that a getting a degree somehow magically makes you
> successful, and encouraging the implicit (or sometimes explicit)
> judgement that not getting a degree somehow a personal failure and
> that getting a degree and then not succeeding is an incoherent
> position to be in. The failure of that program of thought has been
> huge. It is hard to explain how many of the students I taught at
> Penn State Altoona had their lives made worse by getting a degree.
> They are working the same jobs they could have worked out of high
> school, but with 4 years less experience, added shame and
> frustration, crippling debt, and a worse relationship with parents
> who can't understand why having a degree hasn't made their kids
> successful. And you can't try to defend this by hand-waving at
> education being virtuous in its own right, but it won't work,
> because by any reasonable measure they aren't very educated either.
>
>
>
> Even with as right as some parts of that critique are, it is all
> somehow seething with the suspect rhetoric of the protestant work
> ethic. There is nothing inherently virtuous in being exploited for
> your labor (in the Marxist sense of providing profit to a
> capitalist), and he is somehow lumping all "work" together in a
> way that obscures that.
>
>
>
> When all is said and done, it is an interesting argument, but my
> Libertarian Goat is doing fine, thank you :- )
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 1:28 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com
> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> This should do it!
>
>
>
> https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michael-j-sandel/the-tyranny-of-merit/
>
>
>
> The thesis is that “meritocracy” is the cause of the fact that
> the us is now the least socially mobile country among the
> western democracies.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
> <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam>
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
> <http://bit.ly/virtualfriam>
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200918/9fc3fd5d/attachment.html>
More information about the Friam
mailing list