Interesting, but not convincing. Yes, we all learn to fear, as we grow up. But PTSD has specific triggers, and the trauma has to be actual and either severe or repeated multiple times. So, while I am not exactly sure what you mean by "embedded trauma" I think that goes only part way to saying what is in operation. There is also a calculating persona who sees that predation by others is possible and not easily restrained, and so looks out for ways to behave selfishly for personal advantage.Robert Tulip wrote: humans have massive embedded trauma due to what the world is like, and what our ancestors and their victims and oppressors did historically.
Democracy was not totally imaginary when the philosophes began to construct that hypothetical, but they worked out key details, in particular the separation of powers and checks and balances, while merely contemplating the possibility. I think there is a lot to be said for detailed exercise of the imagination - if Marx had not settled for "the state will wither away" in contemplating the biggest weakness of his analysis, we might have had a very different world.Robert Tulip wrote:Hypothetical imaginative history is a bit like thinking about multiverses and such like, interesting thought experiments of little practical value. Far better is discussing how people can be sorry and repentant for what actually happened.
I was speaking of moral decisions, which typically do not involve changing systems or making choices for others. Moral failure is actually quite common - almost every case of criminal law is created by it, and there is another 9/10 of the iceberg in transgressions which do not reach the level of needing intervention by the authorities.Robert Tulip wrote:Disagree. A classic case of that error is the false argument from Karl Marx that philosophers have interpreted the world but the point is to change it.Harry Marks wrote:More often, the problem is to do the right thing, knowing pretty well which choice is which.
Sure, on such issues of "public" or "governmental" morality, I agree.Robert Tulip wrote:[there is major moral dispute on the balance between freedom and equality, and until such questions are in a better state it is risky to say we know what is good.
I took it that much of this material was just to point out that simpler cultures do not generally rely on private property as an institution. In other words, it is possible to contemplate a world without it. He also points out, in the "drive" part, the impulse of upper class competition which was behind much of the exploitation of slaves and extermination of Native Americans.Robert Tulip wrote: In the first use, at the end of Chapter One on Columbus and the Indians, Zinn states “behind the English invasion of North America… was that special drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive… the need for land was transformed into murder of whole peoples.”
In a later mockery of property as brutal and strange, Zinn quotes a Congolese leader asking if the Portuguese allow people to place their feet on the ground, indicating that the concept of property is simply an exercise in social control.
Zinn also mentions the first large-scale intervention on behalf of property, which was the enclosure movement in which lords, i.e. hereditary nobility, took over land to which they had formal title and put the peasants out to fend for themselves on the road, so that the growing export of wool could make the lords richer. This competitive acquisitiveness reached a fever pitch when the fortunes made in sugar in the West Indies allowed ostentation to reach new heights in Britain. It was neither natural nor particularly productive, and if the traditional ethic of sharing had instead been followed, could have elevated the lives of many workers instead of providing for ornamental snuff-boxes and elaborate ball gowns for the rich.
Well, I also think much of the left has a romantic, impractical idea of the workings of property and the possibilities of communal ownership. However, there is definitely a downside to the hyper-competitiveness of the rich, and it is a great relief to have Gates, Buffett and others using their obscene wealth for the public good.Robert Tulip wrote:The ambiguity described by Zinn is shown in how the romance of communal ownership persists in the political left, in ways that resist logic and evidence, due to class mistrust of the power of money. Quantitative analysis, such as by the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, illustrates how the banking collateral unlocked by laws around private capital is a primary area of superiority of the rich nations of the world.
The study of effects of collateral by Hernando de Soto (also studied by Robert Klitgaard) turns out to be one-sided and the downsides (loss of the land to debt) overlooked. The theoretical benefits are clear, but in practice it delivers less than the promoters wanted us to believe. It was de Soto's other pet cause, the elimination of bureaucratic discretion, which makes the most difference.
And yet the modern corporation, which, as "The Visible Hand" and the work of Schumpeter pointed out, has delivered much of the benefits of the private economy, turns out to be internally bureaucratic and shuns property-like incentives to arrange for coordinated motivation. I remain unconvinced that such coordination could not have happened just as successfully in cooperatives (like Mondragon in Spain) or other communal institutions. Certainly the collateral damage to society would have been less.
Harry Marks wrote:One view has it that such an idyllic (it probably wasn't) structure would be impossible with cities, division of labor, scarcity of farmland and commercial enterprise. I find that to be a post hoc fallacy, like saying that because the Chinese were more economically advanced (which they were until at least 1500) that civilization required a single dominant power, regular flooding which needed central coordination to control, and pictographic writing. What we have is not necessarily the best that could be.
Because industrialization happened with an economy based on private property, that does not imply it was the only or the best way that it could have happened. Our inference that it played a strong role is based primarily on comparison to traditional societies and to totalitarian Communism, as well as on theoretical considerations, but certainly European Democratic Socialism has an impressive record, as does the Japanese industrialization in which profit motive played an ambiguous part. There is a real possibility that Zinn's insinuation - tribal cultures could have evolved to a more humane system of industry and prosperity if left to their own growth path - is true.Robert Tulip wrote:I don’t see a post hoc fallacy here, which occurs when two events which happen sequentially are wrongly assumed to be causally related. It is not a fallacy to say the emergence of cities, labour division and enterprise caused modern wealth. The issue here is whether communal tribal culture is compatible with modern commercial enterprise.
Israeli kibbutzim continue to have an impressive record of productivity, including in competitive industrial enterprises. General level of education has more to do with development than incentive structures.Robert Tulip wrote:There is a strong argument that communal practice destroys incentive and productivity, and that nations need to shift to individual private ownership structures to sustain economic growth.
Surely. Without innovative modern banking we could never have had stock manipulation, insider trading, Ponzi schemes, Collateralized Debt Obligations creating the Great Recession, leveraged buy-outs to break up profitable companies for asset-stripping, Trump University and other munificent gifts to modern society.Robert Tulip wrote:Property is also a set of rules about borrowing money, providing the basis for the dramatic advances of modern capitalism and banking in the creation of wealth.
My point is that there are a wide range of arrangements, and having a residual claimant who just happens to be using other people's money is not necessarily the wisest. The Great Depression was not created by common property frameworks.Robert Tulip wrote:Common-property frameworks are stagnant.
Limited liability is a form of common property. We simply don't know whether an innovative system of community enterprise might have done just as well as capitalism, but the Dutch invention of joint-stock companies was as much like common property as like private property. And it revolutionized commerce.Robert Tulip wrote:What is the alternative you are suggesting to limited liability?
In some form, yes. But the idea that it must be the strongest among the powers, subduing the others, rather than an agreement by consent of the governed, is patently untenable. Until global warming the world was doing very well without Leviathan imposing order between nations.Robert Tulip wrote:What is the main problem you see in Hobbes? I find his concept of the state as the basis of stability to be important.
But this is mere correlation, and it could be just the opposite, that societies which are robust and vigorous become, if not channeled effectively, unequal. The main question is whether we can sustain the effective channeling which we have created to date.Robert Tulip wrote:We could all agree that equal societies are more morally just, but the problem is that equal societies are less robust and vigorous than unequal societies.
Or maybe education has been the great driver of economic production.Robert Tulip wrote:There is a dialectic here between cooperation and competition. Inequality, including the hierarchical concept of rank, has been the great driver of economic production and military security.
Military power was the original case of economies of scale. Concentrating forces has always been the prime dictum of military doctrine, unless you like hiding out in caves like the guerrillas.Robert Tulip wrote:An unequal society with leaders whose words are obeyed functions as a social unit, and historically has defeated egalitarian groups who lack chain of command.
Sounds like Marxism (just teasing).Robert Tulip wrote:On the larger stage of the conquest of the New World, the British settlers have largely established seemingly sustainable societies, even though their origins lie in genocidal ruthless elimination of previous cultures. The trauma for victors and victims from that conquest endures today, as a pathological source of cultural blindness and bigotry on the side of the victors, as a broad source of anomic meaninglessness and loneliness in society, with individualism not providing a story of belonging and identity, and with the despair of the vanquished.
Stable? I don't think so. Caring as praxis is likely to be the next stage of civilization, but it is not easy seeing how corporations, which have become sociopathic, will adapt.Robert Tulip wrote:the challenge is to retain some of the robust ethics that have powered the stable fecund culture of domination, even while opening to more of the anarchistic liberty inherent in care as a guiding ethic.
Interesting observation.Robert Tulip wrote: The whole emergence of globalisation and communication makes concealment of oppression much harder, with the trade consequences able to isolate repressive regimes.
Some truth to that, but the USSR collapsed mainly because of economic stagnation. The limits of centrally planned, quantitative (rather than qualitative) economic growth had been reached, and thus they lacked the glorious future of growth which China could anticipate as a way of maintaining party focus and motivation.Robert Tulip wrote:The event that really shifted my thinking on this topic of hierarchy was the Tian An Men massacre in Beijing back in June 1989. Prior to that I was more of a utopian dreamer, but comparing the trajectories of Russia under Gorby and China under Deng gave me a view that stability must be recognised as a primary moral value. Deng prevented collapse of China into civil war.