'K boss.

A coup is it? Cool. I've changed your name to YourLeaderSapientia to help things along. (I've forgotten how to change it back though so I hope this whole thing goes well.)

We're always going to be stuck with hierarchies to an extent, but yes, the basic pyramidal hierarchy of the workplace determines for us more than just some abstract social position or set of rules or amount of material resources, it also determines (to varying degrees) the activities of our immune system, stress levels, self esteem, general happiness, and so on. Of course, institutions exhibit a variety of organizational structures, some more egalitarian than others, but it is worth emphasizing that entry into a workplace generally leaves us with a fairly stark choice: remain at the bottom of the hierarchy where we suffer from low status and its physiological as well as material effects or try to climb up the ladder to risk becoming more enmeshed in and more consumed by our organization.

And that leads to your questions. Regarding harm, I think work hierarchies are harmful generally. Though those who make to the top reap certain benefits, sometimes massive ones, and the shortfalls are going to vary wildly, the majority in a pyramidal structure will be relatively powerless and suffer for it. How to deal with this? For starters, more egalitarian team-based organizations in which hierarchical interconnections are more fluid and the proportional benefits of being at the top are therefore more equally shared should be encouraged where possible. This can work well in tech and other creative-type institutions (though it tends to translate less well to manufacturing, service industry, governmental ones etc, where executive functions need to be more clearly defined).

I say "should be encouraged" but really we're at the mercy of economics. As long as companies compete in a market they'll compete for the most efficient not the most egalitarian or fulfilling type of organization. Where the two meld; great; where they don't, wages and qualifications will decide who'll have to suck it up. So, the creation of hierarchies will always be a part of human nature but occurring within the context of the prevailing paradigm or culture which itself may be more or less hierarchical. If that paradigm was something other than run of the mill capitalism / neoliberalism then this hierarchical harm we're discussing could very well be mitigated. How to get there is the difficult question. Historical alternatives hardly seem preferable.

Why is most human behavior/interaction choreographed ? — Aurora

Path of least resistance.

Why have we relinquished our authenticity and our sincerity? — Aurora

It's uncomfortable not to. And being sincere or "authentic" with strangers is not necessarily a good thing.

And, by doing so, is what we have achieved worth it ? — Aurora

Some sense of security / predictability.

I get the bigger issue here though, which is the danger of being on autopilot too much of the time and that danger is a sense of a receding identity. Note though that we can authentically blag our way through trivial interactions knowing that frankly we have more important things to worry about just as we can inauthentically open our hearts to strangers because we think that somehow makes us more authentic. If you are creative and original in some way this kind of stuff is likely to bother you less. But, yes, the oil that greases social interactions is distilled from the faeces of male bovines.

How could one criticize these inexpensive universally loved products which people individually choose to buy and drink? Who wouldn't like to buy the world a coke? It's the real thing! So buy it, asshole. — Bitter Crank

Yes, and it seems like it's almost patriotic to drink it in the U.S. That's how deep the rot is. Whereas makers of this kind of semi-toxic crap actually should be ostracized, their product labelled as dangerous to health, advertising banned and heavy taxes put on it to pay to clean up the environmental mess it contributes to. These are the kind of practical steps I'd like to see taking place now.

I feel like you may be being overly conservative with regards to your predictive ability based on knowledge of past and present trends, but I won't badger you.

In practical terms I hope not, but I'm just asking you to look out your hypothetical window and at least imagine the ride there. Do you like what you see?

Besides, I was addressing your criticism of my claim that "[it's] better for the 1% to have £1,000,000 and the 99% to have £30,000 than for everyone to have £20,000." — Michael

Re your edit: OK, but I did specify (because I realized this did not amount to 1% / 99%) that it was the OP hypothetical I was attacking not so much the status quo. But seriously, that aside, what do you envision it would take to get us to 1% / 99% and would you be happy to live there provided your income was the same as it is now? And what else, if anything, do you think would change?

By that logic they could own any percent below 99% which would make the conversation pointless. Obey the spirit of the OP!!!

If you ignore just about every factor except the purely economic. Use your imagination. Dig a little deeper.

Lookin' good. :) (Y)

The top 1% do not yet own 99% of the wealth, which is the hypothetical of the OP. Not even close. It's more like 50%. So the question stands.

Yes, I’m right with you on this, we’ve got to extrapolate not only from present material circumstances but also political and social dynamics in order to get a clearer view of the bigger picture here. We can already see what happens when the rich leverage their political power to pull more and more resources their way, and that is that the benefits of increased technological and systems knowledge don't filter down into increased living standards for the majority in the proportionate way they should. And when you get to the point where technology is racing ahead at faster levels than ever but living standards are standing still or even reversing then something is seriously wrong. Where have the benefits gone? Why aren’t things getting better for everyone? I’m thinking here of the US in particular which made massive gains in personal, technological and social wealth in the first half of the century largely as a result of technological and, particularly, industrial progress, but which has now become exhibit A in how the rich can use advances, particularly in media, to gain control over a system and game it to their advantage. One simple example of this is the use of brand power which allows companies to distort the market and sell their stuff at an inflated price. Trivial on the surface maybe, but in order to do that, they need to distort us. Hence modern marketing. And when you extrapolate the use of tools like this out to a scenario where the richest 1% have 99% of the resources and consider what the privileged few would need to do to the rest of us and to society as a whole to get there then you begin to envisage the kind of dystopian reality I outlined. Not only that but you may also begin to envisage the opposite, the society we could have if we focused on creating for ourselves the circumstances in which we can flourish not primarily materially but in other ways. Which brings us to the next stage of analysis:

I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that a major component of our consumerist civilization's continuation is the widespread agreement, albeit tacit agreement for the most part, regarding the values and assumptions holding sway over the way we think and act, the way we direct our energies and abilities. — Erik

Very succinctly put. For example the questions: What is work? What is the goal of work? What is leisure? How does entertainment function? What kind of material goods is it desirable to have? are likely to yield very ideologically loaded answers if asked of most people. And the often superficial focus of conversations concerning political alternatives or the results of political interventions are a symptom of the deeper problem: We don’t even know how to imagine ourselves out of a consumerist lifestyle and we judge alternate proposed scenarios based on the underlying logic of the one we are presently stuck in. A recipe for stasis, for rearranging the deckchairs, or even worse poking more holes in the hull as Agu would seem to want.

So the issue seems just as much (if not more) cultural and philosophical as it is economic. We stop buying needless shit, start spending more of our time cultivating non-instrumental relationships with others (and 'nature,' however pathetic that sounds), start reading and thinking and appreciating things that are currently viewed as non-productive wastes of time since they don't typically provide us with financial payoff, etc. That's a world I would like future generations to live in, if human beings are even around for much longer, since I see it as being vastly superior to the one we inhabit now. — Erik

Exactly, material goods beyond those that provide for basic survival bring quickly diminishing returns in terms of happiness. Opportunities for learning and self-expression in terms of creativity and relationships are much more key. But we’re not focused on that enough. It’s as if we think we’re perpetually in danger of starvation or homelessness when we should have reached a level of technology whereby those concerns can be left behind and we can put our energies in that which is beyond the material.

You're dancing around the issue a bit. What do you think a 1% / 99% society would actually look like and would you be happy to live in it?



But @fdrake already did the legwork in terms of analysis on this and provided you with ample evidence of the negative effects of unequal distributions of wealth.

Better for the 1% to have £1,000,000 and the 99% to have £30,000 than for everyone to have £20,000. — Michael

No, not necessarily. It's not even remotely that simple. There's more to quality of life than the gross amount of money we have at our disposal even if we specify that money has exactly the same purchasing power. For example, how are the rich using their money in Sapientia's 1%/99% scenario? Suppose they're using it to create a society of blind consumers just able enough to work and buy their crap? Suppose they have absolute control over the media and politics (which they would considering they own 99% of the wealth) and that they use this to unfairly entrench their power and privilege? Suppose their ultimate aim is to deindividualise the 99% to the point where no-one but them and their progeny are even able to think beyond their current circumstances? It's not impossible to have a dystopia with a solid median income but where the disparities in material wealth are so great that the relative power of those with the lesser share becomes essentially negligible. And as technology advances the means to create such a dystopia become much more accessible to those at the top of the wealth pyramid. To give the 1%, 99% of the wealth would be to give them virtually 100% of the power over which direction society goes in and that would be social and (for the majority) personal suicide.

So, we're not just talking about decontextualised amounts of money here, we're talking about social reality and our place in it. I'd much rather live in a less materialistic, more creative and more democratic society where everyone has a lower average amount of money and doesn't care because they're not blind materially-obsessed consumers than a run-away plutocracy where we have a bit more but that's likely to become intolerably oppressive if not outright dystopian.

There's already a discussion or three around about Borat and his evil deeds if anyone wants to revive one. Might be best to stick to intros here.

EDIT: e. g. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/33/things-at-the-old-place-have-changed#Item_52

There's no way to do that with the forum software. Though somewhere in this discussion Sophisticat provided a Chrome plugin that works as far as I know.

Lol.

They didn't create it in a vacuum and at some point if they're given too much everything will collapse anyway (the economy needs people wealthy enough to buy the stuff rich businessmen produce). So, try to imagine what a society where 99% of people are forced to share just 1% of the wealth would look like or how that would even be sustained. I mean, really.

Yes, I did say that and I did qualify afterwards what I meant too.

That said, the need to attend 'outwards' to the social doesn't entail a wholesale disregard for belief and intention, but for a more nuanced understanding of how to appreciate the significance of those beliefs and intentions, which I think you'd agree with — StreetlightX

Yes, I would, there's a certain alchemy of perspective involved.

Geuss wrote this long before the recent brouhaha over price gouging in the medical sector in the US, but it'd be an interesting exercise to look at the media coverage about it and see at what level journalists have predominantly tackled the issue (considering the spectacle that was made of and by, say, Martin Shkreli - who milked it like any good capitalist in the game ought to - I suspect the answer is obvious). — StreetlightX

How easy it is to fall in to the trap of impotent moral outrage. Yep.

Zoom out, and out and out - and then in. — StreetlightX

Yes, even critiquing capitalism in terms of rising drug prices doesn't get you far enough, zoom out again and you get the horrors of the Congo and so on, where characters like Martin Shkreli would be relatively angelic.

Ag's individualism is empowering to each individual, whereas the sociological view is disempowering. (non absolutely). — unenlightened

I don't accept that from the get-go. We're talking about what an effective sociological critique is. There's hardly anything less empowering than a poor argumentative strategy, or blowing your emotions on moral outrage at individuals when you could be identifying and discovering ways to disempower them through an analysis of what gives life to their bad behaviour. The recent exemplar is the sexual discrimination/harassment discussions. What were the most effective arguments there? Ans: Those that zoomed out and put things in socio-historical context in my view.

However, the sociological view is empowering to the managerial sector who are in the position to adjust the structures of society. Those with such power will be structurally directed to conserve their own power, and thus the lawyer, the advertiser, the social work supervisor, the planning officer, the editor, will all be manipulating us in the direction of passivity, compliance, subservience to 'the forces of social necessity'. Success over a generation or two results in rage against the machine - the machinations, that is, of sociologists....

Or to put it another way, we are indeed playing monopoly in a society that mandates greed, and with 50% of wealth in the hands of 1% of the players, we are near the end of the game. The game has been consciously arranged that way by people using the sociological view whereby their own actions are excused, and even laudable; they are realists as opposed to idealists - the latter being responsible for all the conflicts. — unenlightened

But that should be an argument for individuals taking advantage of the very same tools to fight back. They're armed so why shouldn't we be? Again, I see us as talking about what constitutes an effective analysis and you seem to be conceding the point but complaining that the tool is in the wrong hands. So, should we now shout and complain how bad advertisers and managers and so on are for feathering their own nests at the expense of us homeless hatchlings or should we figure out how to fly as well as them and dump their eggs on the ground.

So, the question as I see it and as I've said is:

"How do we most successfully approach a critical analysis of social problems?" and the thesis is that we look out at the social milieu not in to the psychology or behaviour of individuals. The question that follows then is not "What forms an agent of change"? but something like "How do we allow for collective change" and the answer is by aiming to understand the nature of the collective and the forces it has on individuals, their goals, their behaviours and so on, so as to tackle the problem at its root rather than focus on the branches."

So, you've identified a problem, a wealth gap. How do we solve it? By complaining about how mean and immoral the rich are? Or by looking at how they get away with it and fighting back at the structures and ideologies that sometimes not-so-obviously enable them such as the incessant glorification of entertainment and choice, which leads us to want to be more like them (and resent it when we're not) and ends up creating more "successful" thems and more "failing" anti-thems with the accepted criteria of "success" and "failure" remaining solidly in place.

So, you don't ignore individual persons any more than you ignore individual sentences in a book, and some sentences are more important then others, but you still need to read the book and compare it to other books and think about the nature of books and so on. (And I don't think your view is much like Agu's by the way. Agu is all for Individualism with a capitalist "I", the pursuit of wealth and power, glorifying the emperor and pretending to the throne, as his posts here, most of which don't seem very relevant to me, have shown.)

Also, you can only have the individual vs. society, the individual changing society, to the extent that there are gaps in that society that allow that to happen. Most societies that have existed have remained the same over millennia. Now we've got societies that are capable of fairly rapid change not simply because of particular individuals but because they are the type of societies which contain with themselves the seeds of their own development. Another reason to zoom out.



I'm with you up to a point. But rather than aim for specifics, which are always very culture laden, I tend to take the more general view that society should facilitate as much variation as possible as much creativity and change as possible while still maintaining itself, i.e. not collapsing into anarchy; in other words take full advantage of its resources, express the full potential of its patterns, the set of relationships that make it up in a sustainable way. As it grows and develops in this way, we cannot but grow too (which emphasises again the point, that to set one against society in the abstract - if not against a particular form of society - is suicide).

So, exactly where is the hope? — TimeLine

But hope is the opiate of the masses, no? ;). In circumscribing expectations, in delimiting our scope, there is still the potential for willing change. And the very will to attack a problem in that way signals there is always hope, and not just a restless yearning hope, a palliative hope, but a focused empowering hope.

Is there an individual or not? And if so, what is it? Is it as I say, moral consciousness, our capacity to reason and transcend this narrow and inescapable micro-social position? But, if you are saying what I think you are saying, then when I say "authentic individual" and the "construct of the individual (i.e. faux)" than essentially you and I are saying the same thing. — TimeLine

Well I don't want to go too far with it as it could end up sounding counterproductive, but the metaphor I would use for society and the individual would be of the sea and its waves. The sea, society; we, waves. Most waves are small and travel in the same direction, but some are larger and very occasionally you get a Tsunami that quickly changes the very map of the sea but you don't get waves separate from the sea, floating over it so to speak; no waves without the sea and no way to separate the two. From birth, the process of individualization is the process of socialization. It's no coincidence that the older we get and the more we consider ourselves a developed individual the more socialized we tend to be. The only true individuals (in the sense of being non-socialized) are babies and the insane. That understood, we can go back to talking about individuals while recognizing we carry around this micro-society in our heads and basically are it with no way to escape except through insanity or death. So,what we are talking about when we talk about significant individuals is those that are larger waves - they separate themselves further from the surface and often pull others along with them; we're talking about people who are different in terms of the power they exert, but they're still part of the sea. (Other individuals who are different and exert little power, waves that travel in their own direction don't tend to last long or get forgotten. Are they less individual? Depends how you look at it, but we're all made of basically the same stuff.)

What happens to rationalism then? Are we never able to access the tools we have in the mind to learn and escape the apparent inescapable? — TimeLine

But what exactly do we want to escape? And why? And is not all this wanting to escape and hoping to escape not just part of the merry-go-round that keeps things just as they are? "I want to escape, I hate it all therefore I've expressed myself as an individual, I've rebelled against the "system", I've done enough". No, I don't think the focus should be negative as if there is no baby in the bathwater or that that it is even possible anyway to escape given that escape from society in general (if not a particular society) is death or insanity. I think it's more about vision and imagination at the personal and social levels. Not "I want to escape out of society" but "I want to create into a specific form of society".

How about introducing yourself as: "Hello, I'm Baden, and I'm mean as shit." — Hanover

Just to prove you wrong, I'm going to leave all these dumb non-introductory comments here. Enjoy wallowing in the mud you bastards.

Edit: Hello, I'm Baden. In my spare time I knit and play with kittens. Don't fucking cross me.

(Anyway I need to call it a night. I'll pick it up again tomorrow.)

You have a habit of reading into comments and OPs whatever it is you happen to want to talk about. That may be convenient for you but it's not going to lead to a productive discussion.

If it were a startlingly new perspective, one might uncritically applaud the goal, but the amoral sociological perspective is the spectacles 'we' have been using for a hundred years now, and arguably is the source of just the manipulative, pacifying consumerism, the monopoly of power relations, the dehumanisation, that is being critiqued. — unenlightened

You say "arguably" but so far you've only asserted. Give us something more to chew on.

I wouldn't disagree. But it's a case then of viewing that in context too. Is the conflict one that really threatens or ultimately reinforces social structures? Favours some over others? Moves a society in a predictable direction or destroys it? What types of societies are prone to such conflicts? What does this say about their stability? Can we make predictions based on such interactions between the micro and macro to help us with future social planning? The avoidance of catastrophe? And so on. From a critical perspective, the goal is always to improve things at a social level. At least that's the way I describe it as the minute Marxism or anything with even a shade of it is mentioned there are certain elements that will cover their ears and run away screaming. ;)

How it is you seemingly quote Zizek and yet purport relevance to what kind of relation to society it is that we want to cultivate is beyond me. That is how the faux 'authenticity' behind genocides are legitimised just like how power is reinforced by so-called 'individualism' where opinions move in masses. — TimeLine

I don't like all this talk about authenticity vs faux authenticity any more than Street really because it's itself corrupted by a kind of romanticized individualism in my view but then I don't really like unqualified talk of our relationship to society either when the "individual" is society's term for the essentially micro-social. What is an individual but society expressing itself at the most micro-level? It's not that there's no society only individuals as Thatcher said but in some sense there are no individuals only society (at different levels) making the myth of the romantic individual vs society even more pernicious. It's not just that the individual has no hope against society, it's that that "individual" does not even exist as an "individual". At best within individuals dominated by the socialized aspect there is that which rebels against a particular form of socialization projected outwards. Maybe there in the darkness there's the possibility of a glitter of "authenticity" but all it really aspires to is the remaking of the social only at a more coherent level with respect to the "individual". It's almost like we are aiming for our own demise in the perfect society that consumes us with our consent precisely when we see ourselves most at odds with a particular social milieu.

(Incidentally my vpn isn't working so I couldn't watch all the vid but I saw the first few minutes and got the general idea I think.)

What I love about it is that it speaks to what I think ought to be the basic analytical instinct for anyone attempting to discussing social problems: the instinct to look not at the behaviour of individuals, but at the social milieux by which any such behaviour is conditioned. — StreetlightX

From the above, the question of the OP is something like: "How do we most successfully approach a critical analysis of social problems?" and the thesis is that we look out at the social milieu not in to the psychology or behaviour of individuals. The question that follows then is not "What forms an agent of change"? but something like "How do we allow for collective change" and the answer is by aiming to understand the nature of the collective and the forces it has on individuals, their goals, their behaviours and so on, so as to tackle the problem at its root rather than focus on the branches.

And you can't even make of sense of the notion of individualism without recourse to its relationship to the social and its emergence in certain types of societies nor can you make sense of any particular individual nor can any individual even make sense of himself except in terms of relations to external and internalised social structures without which he/she couldn't possibly function and which then create categories that only too make sense in context: sane/insane, acceptable/unacceptable, successful/unsuccessful, honour/dishonour and so on. So you need to look out. You'll always to some extent be in a hall of mirrors but at least you can realize that's where you are or you haven't even got to step one. Look in to an individual and all you'll see is shit as Zizek would put it, some of which will inevitably be shit you put there, historians put there, speculation, excuses, stories. Shit basically in terms of understanding. Look instead at actions in context, and at each layer of context right up to the macro-social layer and its own meta-social context.

Anyway, I suppose the inspiration for this discussion, and a decent example of the point, were the recent discussions about sexual discrimination, particularly the one @Sapientia started. Some of us may have approached this in the wrong way by pointing out the bad behaviour of individuals and working our way out from there. Then you get bogged down in arguments about what constitutes bad behaviour, what were the intentions of the protagonists and so on. But if you look at the macro social level and ask yourselves what social forces have led to the creation of workplaces like these and should those forces be reinforced or weakened, the answer seems clearer. I don't want to re-run that argument but zooming out is often a good way to make sense of your moral instincts without needing to get involved in micro moral issues many of which can turn out to be irrelevant.

It occurs to me too by the way that your constant refrain with regard to Trump is that he is a product of his society, a society that must change, and rather than focus on his failings you tend to focus on and criticize the forces that shaped him. Why then take the opposite tack here?

I'm just going to delete non-introductions from now on, folks. Too many Shout box type discussions around already.

Well, in anticipation of Agu's reply I was going to talk about the deeper issue of being unable to escape a hall of mirrors but at least knowing you're in one, which is a parallel metaphor I think.

(Y)

Don't you think a sensible first step in sociological critique would be to examine the lens through which you yourself view social relations instead of simply presenting it as the ultimate viewing aid? If you don't do that you'll blindly project onto your critique the results of your own immersion in the social milieu you find yourself in and that will completely undermine your analysis. So, yes through your unexamined lens in the context of the particular society that's formed you, you think we should look at individuals rather than society as a whole when understanding social change. That's not sociological critique in itself but simply a demonstration of what happens when it's not undertaken.

It's bizarre the way you keep repeating the same mistake as if you wanted to prove how necessary the discussion is. Thanks. I think.

Well, we don't hate you and wish you well in your quest for spiritual enlightenment. You no longer posting Star Trek gifs everywhere is a good first step, methinks. (Y)

(Y)

Astrology...

Ok, Leo. Well I would have said that but it sounded too complimentary. Now tell us how it works. Even if you don't believe a word you're saying. (Y)

As long as it's not the same as me. That would mean we're virtually the same person. :-O

Duly noted.