Eh? I thought we were discussing
intermediate states between
collective and
private. What's my core premise?
At this point I've lost that thread, and I apologize. Are there definible and defensible intermediate states? I'm not coming up with any, except for the point you develop below about tribalism.
Hmmm...War is an externality (generally negative), and an anomaly--unless you mean it in an allegorical sense. Does one need to deal with War on a regular basis? Not likely, so using it as a determining element in this case is somewhat divergent.
I disagree. i do not consider war the anomaly but peace. The long peace in the Western world is almost without precedent since the days of Rome ascendant. They pushed their war activity into the periphery for a long, long time. the fall was all the greater, and I fear we're heading for something similar in scope and consequence.
However, contracts...honorably held. That is causing me to pause very carefully in thought. At both extremes (collective/private), there is need for some manner of honorably held contract. I don't see how this negates the potency of public goods to act as a unique branch from the collective/private dialectic.
Ahhhh...now that is difficult to deny.
So how is it that concepts such as sharing evolved?
How did primal love or communal safety in herds become "do unto others..."? Are these not also ingrained?
Perhaps these impulses are not as strong or robust...
I think they are as strong, but i also think that they do not generalize well past the social unit of a size that an individual can oversee ... the tribe or the village. As much as 200 in a sort of extended family-type unit. Allegiances to larger organizations are real but more of an abstraction, a sublimation. I find it instructive how very much energy a totalitarian state must invest in enforcing loyalty to the state-sized unit, and how even with that energy invested the control fails, usually in a spectacular realignment. Not always, as the evolutionary gentling of, say, the Catholic Church has shown.
Why do you wish to be shown wrong? It's ingrained within us to be that way, otherwise one would be completely naive.
But the question of degree of misanthropy has a wide range of answers.
From a "cautious mistrust" to "I'm going to eat your babies like they were seals and then roam through your garbage for dessert just to piss you off that extra bit, you evil bipeds"
[video=youtube;zaJ1hfVPUe8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaJ1hfVPUe8[/video]
Interesting...the gentleman near the end needed to pay 15k Euros to join Mondragon? That bears investigation...
Because until I am shown wrong ... i hold that the collective experiment is doomed to fail on the shoals and reefs of our selfish and tribal sentiment, even instinct. That is why my response esp. to anarchist concepts is Pffff. Such ideas commit the cardinal sin as their basic premise: they place the cart of abstraction ahead of the horse of our nature.
