You been reading Hayek? He said price reflects all pertinent information in a free market. It's a powerful idea, especially if you're an investor.

Except Hayek approved of dictatorship as the best method for insuring a free market.

They can't actually give you an infinite amount of pasta.

It's the nature of business that partnerships go sour. You have to nail everything down in legal documents and even then, a former friend is likely to stab you in the back. Much better to go it alone.

Nothing competes with a really good German chocolate cake, and make it homemade strawberry ice cream. Mmmm.

Jamón serrano (well and perfectly sliced) with a large baguette accompanied by olive oil from Córdoba. — javi2541997

Wow! What to drink?

I was just kidding.

Will the virus ever escape its deep-frozen storage vials? — BC

I was told that after 911 they were thinking about the possibility of starting small pox vaccines again. I guess biological warfare was a concern.

Capitalism made and deployed the small pox vaccine, so that saved 530 million people so far.

One could even say that great enterprises like revolution, colonialism, imperialism, communism, capitalism, and so on generally entail breaking trainloads of eggs on the way to the grand soufflé. — BC

And fascism. That was quite a few eggs.

Plus Russia had no experience with democracy. They had an absolute monarchy up to the 20th Century.

Yep, it's interesting. Maybe off topic for this thread.

Yes, although Wikipedia indicates the Mongol invasion killed between 40 and 65 million, so they're up there too. — T Clark

They were definitely badass.

:up:

Wikipedia says that a very uncertain estimate of deaths caused by Communist regimes is between 60 and 150 million. — T Clark

Based on a examination of the records from the time, Hosking estimates 37 million Soviet citizens died unnatural deaths between 1917 and the 1950s. It appears the Communist plan was to bring about a better world through destruction of the old, which actually wasn't the Marxist vision. Marx believed capitalism was the precursor for communism. Russia never had a real capitalist era. They just had a few foreign factories in St. Petersburg. Trotsky had some explanation for why Russia was able to leapfrog Marx's prophecy, something about the character of the Russian culture, that it easily reflected foreign ways.

China is a different story and a much larger scale of destruction. China appears to have engineered a famine that killed about 40 million people. Communist China tops the list of the worst things the human species has ever done to itself.

You do realize that nation functions differently to this day? — EdwardC

How so?

:up:

What I mean to say is that if the population of Russia’s working class proved to be inadequate for operating its industries, then I’m sure there were measures in place. I would assume more highly educated members of the party would be tasked to this. — EdwardC

At the time of the revolution, their factories were mostly owned by the British and French, so there wasn't any native expertise. I wonder how they managed as well as they did tbh.

Qaddafi believed democracy-socialism could work with religion as a third column. It would probably sour eventually, but don't all social schemes?

…the crucial property of an autonomous system is its operational closure. In an autonomous system, every constituent process is conditioned by some other process in the system; hence, if we analyse the enabling conditions for any constituent process of the system, we will always be led to other pro­cesses in the system. ( Mog Stapleton)

That's what Rosen was getting at, but I think he ends up saying that what we're really analyzing here is the way we think about life. We think of it as a causally closed system in the sense that it acts for its own sake. He's focusing more on the concept of purpose rather than autonomy.

But doesn’t Rosen accept that emergence within dynamical
systems represents a kind of freedom without dualism? Isnt that the point of such systems? — Joshs

If it's weak emergence (all is reducible), then I don't see how any kind of freedom has appeared. If water is weakly emergent, that doesn't mean there's any break in causation. I think to have a real break, you'd have to have causal dualism. To paint a picture of that: God can cause things without being part of a causal chain herself. She's the prime mover in Aristotle's proofs of God. She interacts with the universe while also being beyond it. This is break I'm talking about.

The monotheistic God is a projection of what we think of ourselves. God has the power to choose and create because we think we have that power. Maybe.

I just make it up. I figure nobody will check. — Joshs

:lol:

Juerrero discusses this distinction between a closed and an open system. The key point concerning emergent freedom is that it is made possible top-down self-organizing constraints. — Joshs

If it's strong emergence, it's dualism. Weak emergent freedom is a contradiction in terms.

A causally closed system doesn't have to be one that has no environment with which it interacts. Robert Rosen devotes most of his book Life Itself to that. Also, how the heck do you whip out a quote regarding any topic you happen to be talking about? That's amazing.

Global organizations produce meaningful normative expectations, out of which creative possibilities emerge. When we try to trace back this behavior to the behavior of its parts, we find that these parts have no identity beyond their role in the global patterns , and as these patterns change, so does the role of the parts. — Joshs

Wouldn't that be efficient causality, though? As long as you think of yourself as a causally open system, the logical conclusion is determinism. Your differentiation from the environment around you is just a matter of language. Determinism is associated with a causally monolithic universe, and when you note that cause and effect are interdependent labels, the whole universe dissolves into a united blob.

For free will, you need to be causally closed. You have to actually be causally separate from the rest of the universe. In other words, determinism/free will is essentially: causally monolithic universe vs. causal dualism, or primal unity vs duality. For free will, you have to be supernatural. There's no way around it.

Fortune magazine says the reason we haven't had either a soft or hard landing from the Fed's efforts to control inflation is private lending. This is basically the super wealthy providing private loans, thereby subverting regulations. Fortune says the reason this has allowed the economy to avoid recession is that the loans are relatively invisible. If a company misses a payment, it doesn't show up in the WSJ, triggering a wave of trading that amplifies the original problem.

"Protestant" maybe isn't any thesis at all, but a historical category? — Moliere

It's was an element of a large scale shift in power in Europe. The old Catholic view was that if you were born poor, this was God's will for you. To promote social mobility was blasphemy because it meant you were defying God's plan. The Catholic clergy were generally sons of the aristocracy, so Catholicism and the aristocracy were joined at the hip. Protestantism was backed by the rising merchant class so they could break from that kind of thinking. To them, it was obvious that God intended everyone to fully express their potential, whatever that may be. So Protestantism was the ideological grounding for social destratification. It was about freedom. The Catholic Church reacted to the rise of Protestants by becoming violently ultra-conservative. Where it had once been a rich forum for diverging ideas, it became just a reflection of the Protestants. That's what Catholicism has been ever since.

By the way, Erik Erikson wrote a really interesting book about Luther. It's part biography and part psychoanalysis. When Luther went off to become a monk, his father showed up at the monastery and stood outside screaming about the fact that Luther had abandoned the family's plan, which was about social mobility. Luther's father wanted him to study law and become a burgermeister, which would have been another step upward out of the mines and into a position of power.

Does any of that fit with Kant?

Right. Free will is the idea that there are choices and you're responsible for what you pick. If there is only one choice, you have no responsibility.

Yes or no?

My thinking is that Kant is protestant, through and through, because while he accepts there are other possible ethics he believes the only rational faith is believing in the Christian doctrine of immortality, free will, and the existence of God.

It's not so much about the baptism into community but about how God influences your ethical life as an individual rational being. — Moliere

I don't think there is one Protestant ethical outlook. One potent vein of Protestantism is Calvinism, which disconnects your actions from reward or punishment. You don't act ethically for a reward, but rather because your life has no meaning other than to glorify God. For Baptists, God loves you and is ever-forgiving, so at any point, you can be "born again" into innocence by just waking up out of your degradation. I don't think either one has much to do with community vs individuality, but the Catholics had explored that opposition pretty thoroughly before Protestants came along.

Protestant faith belonged to those who struggled against the aristocracy's control over social structure, so there's an element of egalitarianism to it, like Hussites whose grave stones are all the same, no matter who you were in life. It's equality in death.

And then there's fortune. It's just a wheel that turns. There's no plan. It's just the way things are. One day you're fantastic, the next you're in a dungeon.

Following and going against a rule is recognisable by a community, and forms the way in which a community functions — Banno

Kripke gives good reason to doubt that this is what's really happening. It certainly sounds plausible, but falls apart in the details. Maybe the missing piece is empathy... emotional bonds.

Maybe you could have free will by imagining something like the multi-verse scenario, and you have the ability to pick which universe you end up in.

If there is a power vacuum, someone will fill it, and no matter who does, the nature of power is to corrupt, and so they will be corrupted and will take advantage. — Frog

I think cultural forms always express the same story arc. They start with a golden age where everyone is strong and true. Then they progress to greater maturity and what was black and white starts to become grey. In the final stages pessimism is rampant. Listen to some of the people on this forum and you can hear the sound of profound pessimism, where it just seems absurd to love yourself and your culture's ideals. It's all turned to shit and there's nothing can be done. In this world corruption is common because nobody believes in anything anymore. And then a reformer comes and starts the cycle over.

What I'm saying is that every cultural form goes through these phases. The adage that power corrupts is mainly true in the final stages. How does that sound?

Once the distributors are revealed it appears the transaction is less and less sharing as it is a racket. — NOS4A2

That's true. But if you rely on a government to enforce your property rights, that also becomes a racket. You'll have to protect your stuff with your little arsenal out there in northern Canada.

I've long been fascinated by Russian history. I read a book by Hosking that didn't paint a rosy picture of Lenin. But I absolutely agree that suffering (of all kinds) is the fuel. Schopenhauer said essentially that: that cold, hunger, fear, anger, lust, etc. Those things drive the engine of the mind. Without them: oblivion. So yes, that's what propels the pendulum.

:up:

The selfish human desire is both nature and nurture. It is built into us (selfishness means more food means better chance to reproduce; therefore evolution makes us selfish), and built into our society, too (ex. capitalism). The urge to own private property is an example of selfishness. But selflessness is, too, built into us, though not to the extent that selfishness is (selflessness means community means protection; therefore evolution creates a selfless element within us. This is furthered within our cultures regarding respect, kindness, honour, and other traits that integrate one into a society, and make us protected). To be able to give up on property is to be selfless. — Frog

Yea, I also thought there might be a spectrum with extremes of selfishness and selflessness on the poles and a mixture in middle. Conceptually, at the extremes of selfishness, no society is possible. No one can compromise. No government is possible. At the extreme of selflessness, the society is like a pervading super identity eclipsing individuality completely. I would speculate that we never see either extreme in reality, but we can see cases where the pendulum has swung toward the extreme.

What I was wondering was: what causes the pendulum to swing? What are the conditions that result in society where selfishness dominates? I hypothesize that the answer is that selfishness dominates in a world where a strong government exists. Nobody really ever worries that the society will fall apart. They're so sure of that that they let their selfishness free. It would be in a world where government is fragile that people reflexively become sheep-like, sensing their vulnerability. So I'm leaning toward saying that what's really innate is dynamic tension between the two.

So yes, I agree with you that the extreme of selflessness isn't realizable. Thanks for hypothesizing with me! :grin:

I don't see much stability now, nor any time in recorded history. — Vera Mont

I think the kind of stability you're looking for only exists in the grave.

The AI answer:

"Yes, Karl Marx believed that communism was inevitable. Marx's theories of history and economics, which he called economic determinism, argued that capitalism would be overthrown by revolution and replaced by communism. Marx believed that capitalism was inherently flawed and unsustainable, and that it created contradictions that would eventually lead to its downfall. One of these contradictions was the exploitation of the working class, or proletariat, by the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. Marx believed that this exploitation would lead to a growing class conflict between the two classes, which would eventually result in a communist revolution."

It's not likely that we'll have a global proletariat revolution before climate change destabilizes the present global order. Maybe after we reestablish stability? A few thousand years maybe? I doubt it though. All signs suggest Marx was just wrong.

No, that's the communist fallacy, which I'm on extensive record of not having made. Communism could not have worked in China, because it was never attempted in China — Vera Mont

:grin: According to Trotsky, Communism wasn't the kind of thing anyone tries. It was supposed to be the inevitable unfolding of events according to the internal integrity of the universe. That didn't happen. Marx was wrong.

Socialism, on the other hand, is the sort of thing we bring into being by our own wits. The Russians did socialism. They just did it while simultaneously placing the USA, recently morphed into Godzilla, on their shit lists.

When people say, “more money than God,” what might be a real number for that amount of money on Earth that God has? ....If you’re looking at the Catholic Church alone, “God” has at least — and we’re putting a huge emphasis on “at least” — $73 billion in assets.

You're doing the Socialism fallacy: because Socialism didn't work in China, it won't work anywhere, except you're saying that because the Church ended up being greedy, it never stood for selflessness. It did, and I think in general, religions are about social well-being as when the people gather to repeat the phrasing of the voodoo priest. It's about us, ideally anyway.

Tribalism is far more likely to become the norm. — Vera Mont

For a while, yes, but the world's biggest religions came out of tribal societies who lived in the devastation that followed the Bronze age collapse. History repeats itself.

The global situation is already falling apart, as complex societies fragment into hostile factions, tribes demand self-determination and populations are displaced by weather, war and famine. Debt/profit -driven economies collapse when the debt can no longer support the profit; international trade collapses when countries default on contractual obligations; commerce collapses when a large enough percent of unemployed due to automation can't buy the products and services. Killing off wide swatches of productive people and destroying infrastructure isn't particularly helpful, either; no more is spending mega-resources on weaponry and waste. And here comes another summer of wildfires, drying-up rivers and deaths by heat-stroke. — Vera Mont

I agree. People turn to religion when they don't feel good about the world. I think the old religions are worn out. Maybe a new one will appear shortly. Historically, religion doesn't get along well with money grubbing, so the idea of ownership might wane, but continue to reside in the collective psyche, waiting for it's next appearance as God.

The global/galactic situation would fall apart as societies of that size would subdivide into minisocieties — LuckyR

The US is made up of subgroups. Couldn't that work on a larger scale?

No: I was commenting on what a consequentialist would have to commit themselves to. They would have to claim that sometimes it is morally right (or at least permissible) to kill an innocent human being. — Bob Ross

I see.

ECB dropped it's rate by 25 basis points. In the US, unemployment is rising, so we might be next.