Mr. X wrote: ↑3 years ago
Femina - fundamentally you keep measuring yourself against others which is the flaw of fairness arguments. That pits people against each other.
Only if it isn't fair? When one measures themselves against the mean average of society and finds themselves in the middle, they aren't ordinarily driven to conflict. I think the problems in America today is that a larger and larger majority keep finding themselves beneath the 'mean' of what we should expect despite the numerical differential, while those at the extreme end of success are SO successful that they're polluting where the 'mean' actually is. Pretending like there is no measurement to be made isn't historically a healthy philosophy in its own right, since just assuming that the failures of those in your wake can't possibly have had anything to do with yourself or anyone else is its own road to conflict, just ask the French Revolutionaries. It's perfectly healthy for everyone at every level of society to at times, pause, take stock of where they are and how they got there, and respond accordingly. WHO was involved in that process is as valid a statistic as any other.
I'd like to believe that I measure humanity by the behavior under which it has presented itself since the dawn of civilization. I merely do not hold out so naïve a hope that we can suddenly and so completely alter our natures as to be capable of living peacefully without some form of civil requirements. How you choose to interpret that is irrelevant, but my fundamental beliefs are my own, and your continued assumptions into how I measure myself or how 'Hobbessian' my views appear to you are irrelevant and dishonest. For example, lets say that I assume that you definitively ARE an Objectivist. You'd argue that you are libertarian, but to me since I've decided you are an objectivist it won't matter, I assume you are dishonest or ignorant of what you actually are because everything you say reads to me like objectivist propaganda and I hope that my pointing it out will discredit you. In actuality It doesn't MATTER what philosophies we ascribe to in this forum. Suffice it to say, that 'fundamentally,' the fact that you and I cannot see the world in the same light is essentially all the proof necessary in the pudding that there is no path currently in an individualist society leading to anything but different forms of conflict. In order for Individualism to be fair, we must all individually behave and believe in exactly the same thing, and the thing we all believe in has to be the social good... since if everyone believes and behaves individually, then nobody works together for anything but selfish gain, and will inevitably stab each other in the back or be stabbed in the back. In order for us both to be treated with a semblance of fairness, society as a whole has to decide what is fair for all of us.
I understand the desires of individualism and accept that we all deserve a measure of autonomy and privacy, I admire the individual who chooses to make the world a better place for everyone without needing to be asked, but as a species of individuals, we DON'T reliably do that. So hoping for everybody to just get along 'because' so completely as to cut out the safeguards to guide them is, in my opinion, a recipe for chaos, confusion, and yet more violence. We can't treat everyone fairly, as a species, individually because each individual has their own conscious and subconscious biases and preferences that bump with another's biases and preferences. If you want to take that as me measuring my own ideas of how I operate and applying it to the rest of the world, go ahead, you do that. Then realize that you need to do that with every single other human being in the world, because even if you don't realize it yet, we are ALL as incapable of knowing what is in their heads as you are at judging what is in mine.
Leaving the state of argument here, I'd like to believe that at the very least neither of us believe ABSOLUTELY in what we discuss here. I don't believe in absolute governance, I'd HOPE that you don't believe in absolute individualism, and that our discourse amounts to little more than the tug of war that hopes to move the center of the rope into the right balance... but I can only hope this is so, because I AM an individual.
ivandobsky wrote: ↑3 years ago
uncontroversial take: people are idiots.
Indeed.