If you say so, buttercup.

Sudden? Lol. Lane's been on my reading list since the book came out, and Hoffman's a nice compliment to that. I fully admit my theoretical promiscuity though - I even have Ulanowicz and Salthe coming up soon! But I'm still sousing in the sweet, sweet irony of your comment : D

But it is a shame that you bypass the content of my posts to jump straight back to the world from your point of view. — apokrisis

>:O

That blog post was fascinating! I keep wandering back to psychoanalytic point where the cheating husband's relationship with his lover only 'works' insofar as he is married: were he to leave his wife for the sake of his lover, the lover would no longer be desirable... Of course the psychoanalytic lesson is that our very 'subjective POV' is itself written into the 'objective structure' of things: it's not just window dressing, and if you attempt to discard it, you change the nature of the thing itself.

And I think this slipperiness is what makes it so hard to fix the status of a 'parameter': if you want to make a parameter 'work' (i.e. if you intervene in a system on that basis), you will cause changes - but that doesn't mean the system is 'in-itself' sensitive to such parameters: only that, through your intervention you've made it so.

AFAIK the mechanisms that link biodiversity to stability are still being researched, so it's far from 'settled science'. — fdrake

I imagine that approaching ecosystems through network analysis would have alot to say about this: i.e. more biodiverse ecosystems have more nodes that support certain cycles such that the failure of a few of these nodes would not lead to the failure of those cycles as a whole; and moreover, that such robustness also has a catalytic effect - the more robust a network, the more chance for the development of further nodes, etc, etc (I realize on reflection that we have different go-to intuitions with these kinds of subjects - you tend to focus on spatio-temporal specificity - as per the papers you've linked (and the discussion re: gene expression previously) - while I like to 'go abstract' and and think in terms of mechanism-independent structure; it's interesting!).

Do you mean the time series obtaining a local maximum through 'optimisation' or do you mean an ecological model obtaining a local maximum through optimisation? The relationship of the latter to an ecological model is more a matter of model fitting and parameter estimation than how a parametrised mathematical model of an ecology relates to what it models. The parameters are 'best in some sense' with respect to the data. — fdrake

Yeah, I could have been more clear here: I guess I have something in mind like a ecosystem - or local 'patch' - fluctuating around it's carrying capacity or something similar. I mean, clearly carrying capacity isn't something that the system is 'aiming at': it doesn't tell itself 'ok we going to try and fluctuate around this point', but, like regulatory chemical reactions, it just 'fall outs' of the dynamics of the system.

I personally wouldn't like to think about the 'modelling relation' between science and nature in terms of the 'for-itself' acting representationally on the 'in-itself'. Just 'cos I think it's awkward. — fdrake

I agree it's clunky as well, but the necessary vocabulary is kinda hard to pin down, I think. I think part of the problem is the fungibility of these terms: what may once have been a non-reflexive variable ('in-itself') may become reflexive ('for-itself'), and vice versa - the only way to find out which is which is to actually do the empirical study itself, and find out what exactly whatever little patch of nature under consideration is in fact sensitive to ('sensitive to' being perhaps a better phrase than 'what nature can see'). So when you say later on that:

I think ecology has some complications that aren't present in simpler relationships between model and world. I'm not sure I could make a list of them all, but there's always a difficulty in measuring properties of ecosystems precisely in a manner useful for modelling. It isn't the same for chemistry. — fdrake

I think perhaps the 'problem' is that ecology exhibits precisely a higher degree of the fungibility between the implicit/explicit sensitivity than chemistry does. This is what makes it more complex.

though maybe it's a useful pedagogical tool to get people thinking about humans in less individualistic terms! — fdrake

This, by the way, is definitely part of the motivation here - to think of the human in ecological terms is to think of the human in terms of populations, flows, and rates of change; I mean, even at the level of anatomy, we are, as it were, an anatomical ecology: populations of different cells, cycling through material and energy, hierarchically embedded, and structurally coupled with flows in the environment (a fanciful etymology of 'anatomy' is of course an-atomia; non-atom (non-individual?) - although the root really is more associated with the 'positive' act of dissection or 'cutting up').

And of course, every part of this system is more or less differential: processes will play out differently - will 'do' different things, contribute to different ends - depending on the context. We're basically a series of loops, some only residing 'inside' us, some extending far beyond our skin. Perhaps the best representation of a human - or in fact any 'thing' - is this:



(Will reply to your latest post a bit down the track)..

Nature seems to care about the parameters since we can study ecosystems using them and learn things, but I don't think nature 'sees', say, the distinction between altitude's effect on the spatial distribution of soil bacteria (propensity-to-change) and the functional form we specify. Nor the specific way we measure ecological parameters. — fdrake

The question of paramatizaion is facinating to me - like, what is the exact status of a 'parameter'? Is it simply 'epistemic', 'merely' a way to gain a handle on things? But it can't be merely that because it has to in some way 'track' a real change occuring in the 'thing/process' itself. So what exactly is happening when you see an 'optimization' of a parameter along a certain dimension in a time series?

My intuition - probably along the lines of Csal's distinction between the 'in-itself' and the 'for-itself' - is that most parameters are 'emergent'; I mean, thinking of certain rate-regulating chemical reactions, there are 'loops' which only ever kick in after chemical levels fall above or below a certain threshold: if 'above', you have an inhibatory reaction (slows rates of growth), if 'below', you get a catalytic reaction (speeds up rate of growth). Of course you can ask how a certain process 'knows' if the level is too high or too low, but it's all just mechanism: because these systems are 'looped', the end product itself influences the rate at which that product is produced. Thus - at another analytic level - the usual alternating-periodic 'sine wave' pattern of certain preditor-prey cycles, which I'm sure you're well, well farmilar with:



But then something happens when a variable in the system can relate to that cycle by, to paraphrase Csal, by 'reflexively taking it's own parameters as a variable that can be acted upon': so humans will cultivate food so that we don't have to deal with - or at least minimize the impact of - cycles of food scarcity and die out like wolves with too few deer to prey on. This is the shift from the 'in-itself' to the 'for-itself', where the implicit becomes explicit and is acted upon as such. And this almost invariably alters the behavior of the system, which is why, I think, the two descriptions of the 'X’wunda trade system' (quoted by Csal) are not equivalent: something will qualitatively change if the system itself 'approaches itself' in Friedman's way.

Methadologically, I suppose, the ecological question is always: does the system see itself in the way I'm describing? And if not, how careful must I be with respect to the conclusions I'm trying to draw with my data? And of course one can relate all of this to Heidegger's 'ontological distinction' and the so-called horizon of intelligibility where beings appear as beings, and animals with are 'without world' etc etc. I think a really interesting project would be to try and think these two things together, but I'm not ready to pursue that here! And yeah, all of this should indeed be linked to your other question: "How does nature learn what to care about?"

Well, I am a little cross that you haven't really provided an argument for what you've said but I think I can reconstruct where you're coming from any reply anway: I think there's something to what you're saying but the difference is this - the conservative insists upon community for the sake of 'conserving': 'this is the way things are done, this is the way things should be done'. But I'm not interseted in conserving things - I think the whole point of a rich ecology is that is allows for - and you might glower at me here - lines of flight.

In ecological or evolutionary terms, one can think of this in terms of robustness: robust ecosystems, those that can best handle 'perturbations', are also those that can best accommodate diversity and change; in evolution, phenotypic robustness actually allows for a maximum of genotypic change, change that cannot be 'seen' by natural selection because it takes place below the level at which selection can exert pressure on it. I've not studied the ecological analogs of this (perhaps @fdrake will have more to say), but I can only imagine the same applies.

In short, the interconnectivity I'm after is precisely for the sake of maintaining maximum change or variability. Apo earlier in the thread chided me for not distinguishing between senescent ecologies and immature ones: a conservative ecology would be precisely a senescent one, one that, yes, acknowledges the need for 'community' and so on, but that doesn't valorize the changes that such community fosters (correlatively, a philosophy of individualism lies on the other side of the spectrum). The 'best' ecosystems are precisely those perched halfway between immaturity and senescene, insofar as they can accommodate change in the best way.

wait StreetlightX you've used 'see' a lot - maybe we're drawing on the same sources, here. Are you referencing Scott? — csalisbury

Nah, I think I picked it up from some texts on evolution re: what natural selection can and can't see. Who's Scott? ... Fitz?

upstart lefty idealists think they know better than whats worked for billion of years, want to rationally organize things, plant this there, and that there) — csalisbury

Eh, this is a question of strategy no? Perhaps we need a new ecology entirely rather than fixing this one...

One way to understand it, is to see that SX's "single animal as a kind of bounded ecology", for MU translates to "a single animal as a closed ecological system" — Πετροκότσυφας

Yep! Bounded does not mean closed - I was going to reply with this exact same distinction, but you got there first.

Hey! Long time so see!

The point that really resonated with me, I think - and it's hardly new - is that idea that well-established, richly functioning ecologies are rich in networks: things rely on everything else, but also and importantly in ways that are cyclic. The focus on cycles in the OP wasn't incidental, I think it's really important: cycles establish both temporality and spatiality, they 'fill out' ecosystems and give them specific spatio-temporal characteristics that individuate them, dimensionalize them so it's not just a matter of plotting individual organisms on a flat 2D map; you get an irreducible dimension of depth, differance, if you will.

I like even more @fdrake's correction that an ecology can't be seen as one monolithic system, but one composed of an entire assemblage of local, regional and global systems that interact with each other such that "overall system patterning must be understood in terms of a balance reached between extinctions and the immigration and recolonization abilities of the various species." So you don't just have this single trajectory from neonate ecology to legacy ecology constrained solely by geographic region, but, as it were, a whole slate of 'options' in-between that depend on local contingencies, and which, even more importantly, are patterned across time.

So I guess the socio-political point is that this whole gamut of complexity is lost when or if we simply attempt to treat organisms in the abstract apart from these cycles of interconnection and mutuality. One imagines a fresh field of soil, with sprouting saplings planted a meter apart from each other: that's the philosophy of individualism. And moreover, that's what it sees when it looks at a forest. From a policy perspective, you can see just how disastrous this is: if you can't even 'see' the dynamics that encourage growth and suppleness ... or rather, if the only dynamics you can 'see' are cellular growth and base your environmental policy no that alone... well, you're going to end up with an impoverished ecology.

This requires extending the metaphor from ecology to biology to sociology with life and complexity being points in common. — Galuchat

I think this is not only perfectly desirable, but has in fact an already-established legacy: the psychiatrist/ecologist Gregory Bateson, for instance, was perfectly happy to speak about 'ecologies' of legal systems, ideas, and even - in his famous phrase - 'an ecology of mind'. Basically any self-relating system composed of networks can be treated in ecological terms. Elsewhere, it's perfectly possible to treat something as abstract as an economy in ecological terms.

The image of ecological succession in terms of discrete developmental stages of the distribution of plant matter over an area is outdated. The most dated bit of it is the idea of ecological climax, which contains within it a sense of ecological equilibrium (self regulating/homeostatic interdependence), there's no evidence for this. The preferred view atm is one of dynamism and flux, focussing on the possible disturbances and potentials for the ecosystem than rather arbitrary categorisation of stages of plant development. — fdrake

This makes a heap of sense, and is a really nice corrective. Thanks.

The reproductive behaviour of organisms can also be considered as part of an ecosystem though. This is why colony collapse disorder for bees is terrifying, no mo' bees is no mo' trees. — fdrake

True, true. I guess it's more that living things have a 'dedicated' 'in-built' hereditary system (even though it's not the only hereditary system that living things have - i.e. the epigenetic, behavioural and symbolic systems charted by Jablonka and Lamb), whereas ecologies are more modular and not fixed by any particular system like that of DNA.

I'm not sure what is referred to here by 'such behaviour'. Neither is it clear to me which 'economic theory' you're referring to, given that the so-called 'rational economic actor' is, at best, a contestible model of human action even within economic theory, with economists themselves increasingly recognizing the abstract and entirely divored-from-reality idea that it is.

So, how do you address that issue manifest by the guiding principle of liberalism and neoliberalism that what is rational is to do what is best for one's self-interest? — Posty McPostface

By rejecting such ideas as among the most deleterious and damaging ones ever peddled by anyone, anywhere. Or more specifically, by rejecting the incredibly impoverished and anemic understanding of 'self-interest' that undergrids such horrible notions.

I'm not sure what you mean with your question. Like, what exactly would need reconciling, and why? Could you elaborate?

Oh, and to shoehorn in a point of politics, it might be argued, on the basis of the above, that philosophies of rugged individualism are thus philosophies of ecological infantalism, or else ecological sickness.

Nick Lane - The Vital Question: Why is Life the Way it Is?
Peter Hoffman - Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos

Not usually one to zombie a thread, but this was too perfect an easily-digestible illustration of the major points of this thread:

A problem, I think, is that the need may be too easily addressed by a vision that's attractive because it's thoughtless (in the sense that it is based on the willing, even eager, acceptance of simple, unquestionable, maxims), exclusive and intolerant. That seems to have been the case with other visions of what it is to live well that have been accepted in the past. I understand that's not what you mean, though. — Ciceronianus the White

I agree though, that this is exactly the advantange that most reactionary political philosophies have had over so-called 'progressive' ideas: a monopoly over the imagination with respect to a well-lived life. The left, by contast, have largely let their discourse become bogged down with legalese and state-orientend rhetoric - over 'rights', 'discrimination', 'tolerance', etc - important concepts, but anaemic ones with respect to a vision of life. Also of note is the co-option of that language into the discourse of bigots, who now argue for 'tolerating different points of view' or 'respecting religious rights' in order to shine the scum of their bigotry.

Not sure what that inspiring new narrative could be, but it's something I think about all the time. Eager to check out those links. — Erik

check out Monbiot's precis for his recent work on a 'politics of belonging' here: http://www.monbiot.com/2017/09/11/how-do-we-get-out-of-this-mess/

"It is the commons that anchors community. The difference between this approach and David Cameron’s cynical Big Society is that it is not just responsibility that has been devolved, but power, resources and the wealth arising from them. But crucially, it ignites values – community and belonging – that are shared by people across the political spectrum, and across the Brexit divide".

Another work that I thoroughly enjoyed was Bonnie Honig's Public Things.

Heh, I reviewed that album for a publication when it was realesed and scored an interview with the guitarist as well. It's good stuff.

Thay said, 'what kind of world do we want to live in?' might just be one of the basic questions of democracy.

It's entirely possible to think that to live and live well is to distinguish good from evil and then act on this realization. And if that's possible, then it's not immediately understood what you mean by living well. — Πετροκότσυφας

True, but to think of living well in terms of good and evil is also clearly a 'narrowing' of the former, which can - and I think ought to - be understood in more general terms. One can think of a Spinozist ethics of joy, for instance, focused instead on the augmentation of our powers, or an environmental ethics of cultivation and care, focused on maintaining and sustaining the ecologies around us. No doubt these too can be 'co-opted' and thought of in terms of 'good and evil', but I don't think such a move is either necessary or desirable.

But how economic policy (e.g. cuts to military expenditures in order to introduce universal healthcare) does not offer "an ethos" in an (even more) immediately identifiable way? — Πετροκότσυφας

I think it's a question of both participation and imagination: marriage is exemplary because it combines both: one can see oneself - or others - getting married, and to get married is to (among other things) exercise an expression (among others) of love and commitment. In some of the political literature, this stuff is talked about in terms of world-building: what kind of world do I want to live in, and how can one build, and be part of, that world? World-building in this sense is always 'outward looking' and participatory: one builds (or rather, helps build, in concert with others) the world around oneself so as to better exercise one's capacities in that world.

By contrast, something like universal healthcare - which I think is an unalloyed good, to be clear - is less participatory and more 'passive': one is bestowed something by an outside agent. This is all a matter of degree of course, and I'm purposefully sharpening the differences: to be able to see a doctor, to relieve one's pain (or to see others being able to live better as a result of better health), is also in some manner participatory and imaginative. DeWolf's book on Hong Kong street practices is also useful: he charts a dimension of politics inseparable from a sense of place and life lived in that place - the rooftop enclaves where people build community, the neon signs which individuate the streets, the unlicensed community projects to build useful infrastructure along inaccessible mountain-paths, etc.

These things resonate in a way far less abstract than - the still vitally important - talk of company tax rates and infrastructure privatization. The trick, I think, is to be able to speak about the these and the animating ethos in the same breath.

Christopher DeWolf - Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong

A strangely perfect follow-up to my Invisible Committee reads. Perhaps every city in the world needs a book like this.

#Triggered

Tried reading it but was too disappointed by the typically awful understanding of Foucault to go on :(

It's a whole branch of study:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

Awesome.

In this you give undue credit to the maker of the video — charleton

Dude, he literally freeze-frames the line "The dynamic relationship between individuals and social systems is what makes social life happen" in big bold letters. If you missed it, that's on you.

And I legit can't read that wall of text that is the rest of your post.

I perhaps take a more Rousseau approach and see the system as the primary issue or problem that restricts our cognitive capacity to naturally evolve, — TimeLine

Then we disagree irreconcilably unfortunately :(

All these are the result of poor individual choices if you ask me — Agustino

Analytically challenged it is.

It's in the growing precarity of the labour force, the dwindling growth of workers incomes, the systematic dismantling of labour laws, the offshoring of manufacturing, the watering down of social support, the wild growth of monopolies across all sectors along with all the antitrust issues that entails, the explosion of incarceration rates of the poor and the ethnic, the unparalleled growth of household debt (in the West at least), the wildly differential means of access to education, insurance, healthcare, and social networks, the massive divestment of public justice, the ongoing war against progressive tax mechanisms, the ongoing privitaization or dereliction of public resources (driving up costs for the poor), the use of austerity measures to devastate and keep down entire national economies, the use of IP to suppress newly emerging market-players, the ghettoization of poor urban spaces - and plenty more.

If you can't see it you're either blind or analytically challenged.

In the meantime, you can educate yourself.

The thing is, the real problem isn't that the 1% own a disproportionate amount of wealth - as disgusting as it is. It's that that wealth is used to entrench the means of wealth creation in that bracket while keeping that means out of the hands of the 99%. The problem isn't to be located in the inequality of distribution - that's just surface level, symptomatics: a re-distributive response, for example, would still keep in place the very system through which wealth accumulated there in the first place. The problem is at the system-level which widens the channels of upward-flowing wealth while purposefully narrowing the channels of downward-flowing wealth.

The individual talents of this or that entrepreneur-flavour-of-the-month is entirely irrelevant. As usual the focus on the individual is simply sociologically inane and obscures the real issues.

I love, love, love this passage. I think it's the most important one in the book.

but what I got from his OP was that we cannot escape and that we are nothing more than an 'incentive structure' — TimeLine

One thing that ought to be questioned is the very desirability of 'escape': if our attachment to society is the very condition of our individuality (and, as Baden said, the very condition of self-intelligibility (contra Cartesian atomism)) , it's not too far a stretch to think that the desire to 'escape' is not unlike the desire of Kant's dove, for which "cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space.” I've been reading the work of the Invisible Committee recently, and they put this in stark and beautiful terms:

"What am I," then? Since childhood, I've been involved with flows of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don't form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges - at certain times and places - that being which says "I." Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.

... The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn't the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them ... The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can't rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied." (The invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection).

Freedom is not somehow opposed to the social; the social is freedom's sine qua non. Further reading: Hannah Arendt, What Is Freedom? [pdf].

The only true individuals (in the sense of being non-socialized) are babies and the insane. — Baden

No wonder the philosophy of individualism is either madness or infantilism...

One confusion that seems to have arisen in this thread (exemplified by @charleton's post), is that at stake is a simple displacement of agency from 'individual' to 'society'. But this is wrong. Even the video makes this quite clear: social dynamics are what takes place between individuals and the social system. It is not a question of saying, as @Agustino mistakenly has, that 'there is no individuals, only society': 'Society' is no less a self-contained entity than an 'individual' is. The paradigm at stake here is 'interactionist', and not 'entity-based': individuation (of both society and individuals) is a result of interactions, and not the other way around.

However - and this point doesn't seem to have been addressed by anyone - the larger point is that those the shape of those interactions themselves are molded by socital incentive structures. Or as I said in the OP, this is the rough system of rewards, punishments, pleasures, accolades and disincentives that permeate it. In the terms of system dynamics, incentive structures can be thought of as attactors in a system, where attractors are points towards which trajectories tend towards (without being 'determined' by them). The presence of a Lorenz attactor in a system, for instance, will result (roughly) in the ossilation of a value around two points:



Society can be thought of as precisely a system permeated by an enormous range and distribution of such attractors: factors of "push and pull" which structure the individual trajectories of the elements that compose it. Note that the 'elements' here don't necessarily have to be individual people: in fact I think they'd be better thought of in terms of flows (of migrants, of money, of food distribution, of access to education and employment, etc). The politics of migrants, now so prevalent in the Western discourse, is nothing but the politics of flows. It is literally impossible to see 'the migrant problem' as one of individuals in abstrcto.

Another important caveat is that attractors in society also act differentially: not everyone or everything will respond in the same way to the same pressures and incentives: individuals too are composed of their own set of attractors and thresholds which determine what they can and do respond to. And lastly, the incentive structure of society is not something that is 'set' or unalterable. One of the virtues of thinking of society in this way is that it's very dynamism also means that such incentive structures can be changed or modified: society is plastic. 'Politics' can be thought of as the field which most deliberately aims to modify exactly those structures (and the 'players' can be companies, institutions, people, governments, etc).

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. — Baden

Yes to everything you said! 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. Raymond Geuss - who has similarly written on the need for any plausible political philosophy to attend to 'action and the contexts of action' - has written some great stuff on this as well:

"The emphasis on real motivation does not require that one deny that humans have an imaginative life that is important to them, aspirations, ideals they wish to pursue, or even moral views that influence their behaviour ... What it does mean, to put it tautologically, is that these ideals and aspirations influence their behaviour and hence are politically relevant, only to the extent to which they do actually influence behaviour in some way ... A realist can fully admit that products of the human imagination are very important in human life, provided he or she keeps a keen and unwavering eye upon the basic motto Respice finem, meaning in this case not “the best way to live is to keep your mind on your end: death,” but “Don’t look just at what they say, think, believe, but at what they actually do, and what actually happens as a result.” (Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics).

But Geuss also gets at something else that the OP is interested in (and yes, you're right that I brought up the video here as an offshoot to some thoughts re: the sexual harassment thread), which is the critical danger of 'misplacing' the level of analysis when trying to think through social phenomena:

"If I focus your attention in a very intense way on the various different tariffs and pricing schema that doctors or hospitals or drug companies impose for their products and services, and if I become morally outraged by “excessive” costs some drug companies charge, discussing at great length the relative rates of profit in different sectors of the economy, and pressing the moral claims of patients, it is not at all obvious that anything I say may be straightforwardly “false”; after all, who knows what “excessive” means? However, by proceeding in this way I might well focus your attention on narrow issues of “just” pricing, turning it away from more pressing issues about the acceptance in some societies of the very existence of a free market for drugs and medical services. One can even argue that the more outraged I become about the excessive price, the more I obscure the underlying issue."

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). But otherwise yeah, you've captured the thrust exactly - see a social problem? Zoom out, and out and out - and then in.

Here are some in-depth, rigorously researched studies:

http://bfy.tw/A0J5

Ah well I guess reality has a Marxist bent then. So much the better for reality.

Marxism? Try basic social science.

The very dichotomous categories by which you frame your reading of the video - in terms of 'society' against the 'individual', 'community' against the 'self' - is exactly what it aims to contest. It's not clear that you understood it at all, which is unfortunate.