Homer said in a comment on my last post, about why the tea-partiers don’t like Barack Obama:
You forgot to mention Obama is black. That is really the problem. All the rest of the crap is just sorta random whining and sound bites. The tea partiers “Want our Country Back†because they never, ever imagined one of the black guys would be running it.
Actually, I think it’s more complicated. They don’t dislike him because he’s black, or at least not just because he’s black. They dislike him because he defies categorization. He has a white mother but a black father. And his father wasn’t an American but a Kenyan. And he lived in Indonesia for much of his childhood. And his first name has origins in Swahili and (OMG) Arabic. And his middle name is Arabic and is the same as the last name of that guy who Bush said had WMDs. And his last name doesn’t sound ‘merican.
Kenyan father, Indonesian childhood, a name with multiple foreign origins. What do they do with all of that? At least “Jesse Jackson” is pronounceable, and his ancestors were American slaves. They know what box to put him in. They know all about black people — they have generations of stereotypes about black people to fall back on. But what about that Obama guy? What box do we put him in? How are we gonna stereotype him if we don’t know what box to put him in? Obviously he must be hiding something. Kinda shifty and suspicious! At least black people are American. This guy doesn’t even seem American!
That’s the mentality, as far as I see it.
I think the outrage is simple heightened Clintonian anger. Remember, these same people flipped the eff out over Clinton, were sure we were on our way to becoming a Commie nation…they pretty much threw out every hyperbolic contraption they could come up with and hoped something stuck. And it did. Because we still have enough insecure white men in this country to overcome the opposition.
Obama gets this in triplicate because of those uncategorizable circumstances surrounding who he is.
The right wing would react to anyone they perceive as being “liberal” (although Clinton and Obama are hardly waving red flags and singing “The Internationale”). Had Hilary won, we would still be seeing some of what we have today.
But it is Obama’s race and name and background that is taking things beyond the beyond. Ann Coulter once expressed the wish that someone had assassinated Clinton. Every president is at risk for assassination, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that Obama is at much greater risk than any President in recent decades.
haha. Of course we’d see it if Hil had won. Since she didn’t, have you noticed how “reasonable” and “sensible” she is to the right? Amazing. She’d probably have been about as conservative as Obama on most issues, maybe a little more liberal on some, but also far more to the right on others. They’d still be calling her a commie.
After seeing the NYT demographics of Tea Party supporters (heavy concentration of well-educated, Republican white males) I wonder if Obama represents to them the reality that diversity is here to stay and that a new world order in which white males are more of a minority and America isn’t the coolest kid on the block. For a sizable population, this would be a very hard pill to swallow. For others, it’s just the way it is.
I think it’s pretty clear that you all don’t know many tea-partiers personally. Kind of like the NY Times arts editor in 1972 after Nixon’s landslide- “How did he win? Nobody I know voted for him!”
I don’t think race has anything to do with it for 90% of Obama opponents. A combox isn’t the place to argue it at length, and I wouldn’t convince anyone, but little insular bubbles and stereotypes aren’t limited to one side.
I think it might actually be scarier to some if they realized tea-partiers weren’t motivated by race, just like it was shocking to some that tea-partiers were more well-educated and higher-income than expected. Jeffrey C is still hanging on to the “concentration of males” argument while 45% are apparently women.
I think tea partiers are out there. I couldn’t bear to be classified as one. But I don’t think they’re out there for the reasons suggested here. I really think it does cut down to basic political philosophy, and right now there is a “government is too big” backlash going on that I see as completely unconnected to race.
Just by way of follow-up to my first sentence: I know probably 10 people that I think or know are tea-party sympathizers, some in my daily life and some through FB. Of those 10, 1 clearly has some issues with other races and lifestyles. The other 9 I would classify as “small government conservatives” who in many cases are libertarian on social issues.
FI:
If the teabaggers are not motivated by race, and if nothing substantive has changed since Obama took office from the Bush administration, what exactly accounts for their silence from 2001-2009 and their sudden appearance now?
Well, I guess we’ll just have to disagree on the “nothing substantive” has changed bit. That whole financial crisis thing, unemployment explosion, healthcare reform debate certainly didn’t kick into real headline gear until September 2008 when Lehman failed.
I think that if Bush were president, we’d see the same protests about government intervention (minus the healthcare bit). But he handed it off before things visibly hit their nadir.
The tea partiers in Arizona are blatantly racist. Just yesterday I drove by several who were protesting at a street corner- their signs basically said, “Take our country back from Mexico.” The tea partiers in the Arizona State Legislature passed a bill requiring presidential candidates to provide proof of US citizenship. This was never a problem before a black man was elected president (John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona before it was a state). While some of the tea partiers are fiscal conservatives, a large number are people who want the United States to go back to the magical and mystical past where white people had all the good jobs and the darker races (and homos) knew their place.
It’s true that I don’t know any tea partiers personally (although I haven’t looked at Facebook for a long time, so maybe I’m wrong). But if this is all about political philosophy, I don’t understand why these people didn’t protest when the Republican Congress and the Bush administration passed Medicare Part D with no way to pay for it, while when another president signs a health care law that tries to take deficit reduction seriously, they have nothing but vitriol for him.
Now, there certainly are principled, intellectually consistent people who find both Medicare Part D and the new health care law equally troubling. But most of the tea partiers are not them.
I guess they can argue that they would have protested Medicare Part D if they had known what was going on. But it certainly was in the news at the time. Maybe they would have protested if Fox News and Rush Limbaugh had told them that Medicare Part D was a bad thing. But would they really, since they seem to love their Medicare so much? For some people, government spending is fine until it starts going to help other people. (See the last few paragraphs of this.)
And I don’t understand what unemployment has to do with fear of the deficit. Governments are supposed to run a deficit
during periods of high unemployment. The stimulus bill directly created jobs, but they don’t seem to care.
And did they think Bush should not have bailed out the banks? I remember after the bailout failed on the first vote, Bush went on TV to say how important it was that the bailout pass, and I thought, “Oh my god, I actually agree with him.” Did they want the economic system to just collapse?
Different people have different reasons for joining a movement. But lots of them are just angry and frustrated and uneducated and misinformed and are looking for a group to belong to, which is a very human thing, because it feels good to be part of something. This is really an emotional movement unconnected from real principle.
And what they feel about Obama is emotional, too. As I said, it’s not really about him being black, but about him seeming alien, international, uncategorizable, Other, un-American. His otherness is a vector for their anger about the state of the country. The tea partiers keep talking about “taking their country back”; his otherness is part of what they want to take it back from, because they’re not thinking clearly and to them everything is combined in one big ball of anger and fear and confusion.
That the teabaggers are unable to present a coherent ideology is proof enough that theirs is primarily an emotion-based “movement.” They are motivated by real, material distress but they don’t want to or cannot focus their anger and resentment at the real causes of their distress. They instead choose to blame the “liberals” and the President who is alien and Other and thus the perfect scapegoat.
These are deep, systemic issues. The mystification of economic distress and the instilled propaganda that it is only the abuse of capitalism that is to blame rather than capitalism itself goes to the very root of our civilization. The obsession with the President is a systemic failing of the American Constitution which combines the Head of State and the Head of Government in one person, and also a result of the dumbing down and over-simplification of political discourse at the hands of the mass media and the education system.
However, if the teabaggers were really sincere about their concerns of limited government and protecting the Constitution and fiscal responsibility, they should have spoke up during Bush’s tenue. That they did not, that these same people who are rallying and protesting now generally supported Bush, is proof of their hypocrisy.
I don’t know any baggers personally, and I’m glad of it. I could never be friends with those who are hastening the downfall of the Republic.
FI:
“Concentrated” doesn’t imply overwhelmingly male as you seem to be suggesting I was saying. I merely was noting this comment from the NYT article: “The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.” from this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html
Well, Jeffrey, when I read “heavy concentration” as you wrote, that seems to imply more than 5% above a 50-50 split.
But look- we all come at this from different perspectives, and that’s totally fine and a great thing about this country. Daniel, as no fan of capitalism to begin with and not being one to give the American people much credit for coherency either, is going to analyze what he sees in the tea partiers very differently than I will.
Homer, in Arizona (where I spent four years in the ’90s), is going to come at this with a different regional perspective (although I’d remind him that DailyKos most certainly DID question McCain’s eligibility at first, which a google search will reveal).
TinMan has another perspective, and I generally agree with his comment that “[t]his is really an emotional movement unconnected from real principle.” That is true for almost EVERY political decision Americans have ever made throughout our history as a country. There will always be a small number of intellectually consistent people; the rest of us can sway with the wind in response to the events at any given moment. And really- what’s wrong with that? Why is it that intellectual consistency is “better”? All intellectual consistency proves is that you like to stick to a framework.
I can think of many moments where it would have been much better for leaders on both sides of the conservative/liberal divide to be swayed by emotion, by a sense of compassion, by feelings- and I can think of many great moments where leaders on both sides HAVE been swayed by emotion and made great decisions.
Anyway, to finish up- I come at this with my biases and my framework. I don’t think the healthcare plan is socialist, but I think it’s stupid because it does nothing to get at the underlying costs. I don’t want to pay more taxes, even though theologically I believe I should pay more taxes. I didn’t like Medicare part D as policy, but I didn’t protest it because I understood the need to help people afford their medications.
This isn’t open-and shut, and the Republic has always survived. I’m optimistic it will continue to survive, and thrive.
Emotion in politics is fine, as long as it’s connected to facts. What’s problematic is when emotion is untethered from any facts. So many tea partiers blame Obama for the deficit and the bad economy, when a large percentage of the deficit came from the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the prescription drug program (and whatever one’s opinion of any of these, they did cost money). The stimulus bill directly created some jobs, thereby helping the economy, and yet they ignore this. If the tea partiers are conflating the bailout with the stimulus, that is a failure to engage with facts.
It’s fine to sacrifice intellectual consistency if one is doing so for the sake of pragmatism — engaging with the facts as one finds them, and not letting oneself be shackled by overly rigid principles that don’t deal with changing realities. I think this is generally a good thing. But sacrificing consistency for pure emotion — that seems to me to be counterproductive, because it can lead to extremism. Whether emotion leads to an irrational hatred of Obama or an irrational hatred of capitalism, I think it’s a bad thing.
Tinman’s got it. Doctrinaire adherence to an intellectual framework is just as bad as letting one’s political opinions be driven by emotion. I do not give the American public credit because they – we – have tended to display these vices instead of reasoned political discourse. Emotion, the non-rational, is a fundamental part of being human and a necessary component to politics (yes, justices should have empathy). But emotion should not be allowed to derail discourse into the irrational.
That is what the Teabaggers represent. Obama is a socialist. Obama is a Nazi. Obama is a fascist. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is the Antichrist. Obama is not a citizen. We need to take back the country. We need to restore the constitution. Our liberties are being threatened. Obamacare will set up death panels. Obama hates America. Obama wants to ruin the country…
These are all emotional reactions devoid of any real-world basis, devoid of facts entirely. Millions of people feel economic distress and they feel politically disenfranchized. These are real problems. However, they have decided that the Other in the White House (and all liberals by extension) are the cause of these problems have mobilized against them, inventing more problems and threats in their imaginations and repeating them so often they believe in them.
That is why I don’t give the American people credit. The American peoele are lazy and self-indulgent and deliberately ignorant. The majority derelict their responsibility as citizens to be involved in the civic life of the Republic and the few who do get involved are too easily swayed by propaganda and soundbites and emotion-laden rhetoric. I blame the right for the bulk of this: the left simply has nothing to compare to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, World Net Day, Townhall, Freerepublic, or any of the other ideological consciousness creating entities conservatives can boast.
The American people has successfully allowed itself to be divided into two irredeemably hostile camps over issues of smoke and mirrors. It is not enough to simply disagree with a fellow citizen these days: no, if someone disagrees then he must hate America and support the terrorists, he must be evil incarnate. And you can’t rationalize or compromise with absolute evil.
The Republic has been mostly a sham from its founding, but at least it was an ideal to be aspired to. The trends we see today, if they continue, will bring it down. I blame the parties and the media, but mostly I blame the American people. We’ve brought it upon ourselves.
Oh, and just in case this was directed at me, my “hatred” of capitalism is hardly irrational.
I believe the capitalist mode of production and the so-called “free market” are moral evils because of the real, observable, and quantifiable effect they have on underminging the quality of life and increasing the material distress and misery of the vast majority of the human race. If this were an unchangeable force of nature, I’d have to to suck it up and accept it, but it’s not: it’s a human-created system so it is a human-changeable system. It’s only greed, selfishness, and a lack of imagination that stand in the way.
But greed and selfishness are part of human nature; so doesn’t human nature stand in the way?
Hmm. I guess here’s what I fundamentally disagree with you, Daniel: “real, observable, and quantifiable effect they have on undermining the quality of life and increasing the material distress and misery of the vast majority of the human race.”
I do not believe capitalism undermines the quality of life, or increases the material distress and misery of the vast majority of the human race. I agree, as the famous quote goes, that capitalism is the worst economic system ever invented except for all the others. But I am curious as to what quantifiable evidence you have on some of these views. Countries with capitalism as their base have longer lifespans, much higher incomes, and surveys and academic research show they have higher levels of happiness. (The US seems to rank in the 20s on these surveys, generally.) There is a balance, but there is no practical evidence to show that non-capitalistic societies can sustainably compete on income and happiness metrics. And there is evidence that adopting capitalistic tendencies can sustainably increase wealth (see: post-WW2 Japan, China the last 20 years, South Korea, etc).
I respect your viewpoint. I think there is an intellectual case to be made for it. I’m just more optimistic that we aren’t as divided as you think. I’m also surprised that the populist surge we’re seeing hasn’t been much more anti-business; I really thought in 2008 that was going to be the likely outcome.
But here’s a challenge: I don’t think you recognize your biases. You write that the Republic has been a sham from the beginning. If you really believe that, then of course it looks like we’re headed for a massive decline. But I really think we’ve seen ups and downs in a variety of ways, and in fact discourse now is no less civil than it has been at various points in US history. Even in the last 50 years, we had presidents like LBJ who were so personally powerful they could do almost anything under the table.
Why does emotion need to be connected to facts? It’s perfectly normall, if you had a relative murdered, to want the death penalty for the killer even if you know all of the facts about the ineffectiveness of the death penalty. It is perfectly normal to fear being a crime victim even if you live in a gated community. And by “normal”- I mean “human”. Human nature has helped the species survive this long; I hardly think it will lead us to self-destruction now.
Millions of people voted for Obama (and McCain, for that matter) based purely on emotion. Hope. Change. The way his speaking resonated. I view that as fine. The same thing happens in every country- Why has Clegg surged to 2nd in the UK polls? Not because people know his background or his platform, but because he spoke well in a debate. Why isn’t Germany bailing out Greece? Because the Germans don’t want to help the lazy bums who retire at 55 and take bribes. Why is China afraid of Tibetan independence? The list goes on. Emotions rule the world. Emotions rule relationships. Love is irrational. Fear is irrational. Greed is irrational. Hate is irrational.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just still idealistic that we continue onward and upward.
@Jeff:
There is no such thing as “human nature.” We, like everything else in the universe, are works in progress. Greed and selfishness are learned behaviors and products of specific environmental factors. They cannot be eradicated over night but they can be redirected. Hence the lack of imagination. If people could come to realize that their own wellbeing comes in cooperation with other rather than in competition…
FI: As much as I ideologically want to, I can’t hate you. You’re very well-written and your sincerity is apparent in your comments here.
Re: capitalism. One thing it is good for, perhaps the only thing, is concentrating massive quantities of wealth together that could not be achieved under previous modes of production. This has led directly or indirectly to most of the luxuries and conveniences we enjoy today … if we can afford them. That is the problem: the basis of capitalism is the commodity and in capitalism everything — even human labor, even the basic biological necessities of life — are commodities to be bought and sold. Those of us not fortunate to own free and clear our homes and sufficient means to provide for our own food other needs have to sell the only real commodity we have — our ability to do work — on the “free market” to get money to buy food and shelter and health care and so forth. However, that exposes us all to the irrational and capricious dictates of the Invisible Hand. If there is no demand for our labor, then we cannot get a job and are fucked.
Like my friend Mark, who is an architect and has been out of work for 15 months because no one is building anything and no one needs an architect. He cannot find a buyer for his labor power and, since he only has experience in architecture he can’t compete outside his field, either. He’s pretty much completely fucked and has been contemplating suicide. And that’s the case of an educated white male in the heart of the Core of the world system.
The quality of life of the people in the periphery, who make most of our consumer goods, is infinitely more appalling. The greater the wealth in the system, the greater the disparity between the haves and the have nots. Money tends to gravitate toward money. Capital inevitably tends to concentrate itself. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the middle class gets squashed out of existence.
Re: the Tea Parties:
I think the reason you don’t see much anti-business populism is because of the bizarre union in American conservatism between the social and economic conservatives. They have successful welded together an ideology that somehow allows one to serve both God and Mammon and seems to equate the two — with the Enemy being Godless liberal Marxist socialists. That is mostly left over from the Cold War, but it remains alive and well. With the exception of the banks — like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers — the “populists” have tended to focus on the supposed Maoists and Marxists in the government. I think the only reason the banks have been targeted is because they are the root cause of the problem and both the companies and a lot of the executives have Jewy names. Remember: “international finance” and “international Bolshevism” have long both been code names for “Jews” and despite the supposed philosemitism of the fundamentalist Christians who want a Greater Israel to make Jesus come back, Jews remain just as much as an “other” as black African foreign-named Obama.
Finally, I think there is an important distinction to be made — as I made above — between non-rational and irrational. As you say, love and hate and hope and fear are all parts of “human nature” such as it currently may be. But they are non-rational elements of the human psyche separate from and complementary to reason. Emotion, as a non-rational element of the human person, is intimately connected with facts and reality. Irrationality is a completely different animal and that is what we are seeing today.
“Human nature” may not lead the species to self-destruction — that remains to be seen. But what history proves is that nations and civilizations that rise always eventually fall, and they generally do so from within. I don’t see much in American culture today that points to any sort of reparation or rapprochement between the two main factions, not as long as you have the Becks and Limbaughs creating strife and discord for their own sake and to make a quick and sordid buck off the demise of democracy.
This is kinda fun — I’m glad there can be respectful disagreement here.
Dan, I guess where I part ways with you on human nature is that I don’t see greed and selfishness as learned behaviors. I see them as an intrinsic, biological part of being human, along with altruism, love, fear, empathy, prejudice, desire to protect one’s own kin and own kind over other people, etc., and I guess I don’t see how they get eradicated in anything but a very small percentage of the population. To eliminate greed and selfishness would seem to require a level of self-awareness and discipline that most people simply don’t have — and I don’t mean that as a condemnation, but as a simple observation. Most people are not deep thinkers. And most people will always want More — or, more charitably, most people will always want to ensure they have Enough for themselves and will usually overestimate how much Enough is.
Capitalism isn’t ideal by any means, but it seems to align with human nature better than anything else a globalized society could come up with. Communism might have worked in the past, when human societies were much smaller and tribe-based, but I don’t see how it would work in a mass society, let alone a globally-interconnected world.
Capitalism seems to work best when tempered with a great deal of socialism to soften its rough edges. I don’t know why your friend is contemplating suicide, but if it’s because he’s running out of money and is on the verge of starvation, unemployment benefits on a sufficient enough scale would be enough to help him through this rough period. And those benefits are obviously not sufficient right now. I think the difference between you and me is that you see socialism as a step on the path to something else, whereas I see a mix of capitalism and socialism as a realistic goal for society.
Jeff:
The key issue is scarcity.
If I believe there is only a limited amount of X and that there’s a chance I won’t get enough X, then I’m going to try to get as much X as I can so I never run out and I’m going to try to keep my X for myself rather than share it with others and I’m going to be jealous of those who have more X than I do.
But what if X were abundant? What if there were no shortage of X and everyone had access to as much X as he could ever want or need? Then there would be no greed or selfishness. In our part of the world, we are not greedy and selfish over air or water. They are for us abundant and we each are fortunate enough to have as much as we could ever want. We don’t even have to think about them.
The problem is that we don’t have replicators like on Star Trek. It takes wealth – in the form of raw materials and labor – to make the commodities we need. The need for raw materials is timeless. The way the need for labor has been met has been the defining feature of each economic system we have ever practiced.
One way to increase the abundance of commodities is to eliminate as much as possible the need for labor. One method was slavery: if you don’t have to pay your workers anything, if all you need to give them is enough food and water to keep them alive and functioning, then they yield a greater surplus. Our present economy is not really that different except that workers have the illusory “freedom” to work or not work or go somewhere else while the employer gives us money to buy food and shelter rather than provide the necessities directly.
But what about a different kind of slavery: the exploitation not of humans but of machines? We have the technological capacity for pretty much all commodity production to be automated. Anything we could ever need can be mass produced by robots. The robots would still need raw materials to work with and the occasional maintenance and supervision, but the surplus they could produce would be so immense that there would be no scarcity in the necessities of life.
Of course, in an economic system in which everyone must work for money to buy food and water and shelter and medicine, that would be disastrous. It would make a massive percentage of the work force redundant. But would it be so difficult for food, shelter, medical care, and other basic needs to be made available to everyone free of charge? The core of all prices is the labor necessary to create the object; if no labor is needed beyond the overhead of raw materials and maintenance, then these commodities would become essentially free. If the overhead were paid by taxes, then no one would need to directly pay a dime for the basic biological necessities of life. It would all be as free and abundant as air and water.
Can you imagine a world where no one had to work to eat and have a roof over their head? Where you wouldn’t have to sacrifice 8 hours or more a day in a dead-end job just to earn a paycheck? We would be free to devote our full productive energies not on making money for employers but on developing ourselves and our own talents and interests and abilities.
Think how much human potential – how many great writers, artists, musicians, scientists, etc. – are wasted in every generation because they do not have the opportunities to develop their skills because they have to work all day mopping floors or cleaning toilets or making shoes or working in fast food restaurants or sitting in cubicles answering phones and filing! That is surely a crime against humanity, against nature itself!
Some might claim that if the basic necessities are just provided free that no one would work. Some might make that choice, yes, but would they be any different from the children of the wealthy who do not work but luxuriate in their inheritance? Anyone who wanted more would be motivated to go and do more. There would be a demand for finer goods that cannot be mass produced by machines. There would be the natural drive to explore and learn and understand, to pursue one’s own passions and interests.
Best of all, no one would face hunger and homelessness because the Invisible Hand decided their skills were not needed. THAT is the greatest evil of capitalism.
At least in earlier times you were just at the mercy of nature. You could go hungry if there was a bad harvest, for example, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Today, people can lose their livelihoods surrounded by wealth that they cannot buy because they can’t sell their labor power for wages.
If the foundation of our Maslow hierarchies were all provided to us by technology, we’d each have a greater chance of reaching the top. We would need to be careful that the robots not become self-aware, but it can be done. It is only selfishness, greed, and lack of imagination that stand in the way.
Okay, I have read this over a few times now.
It seems to me to require an incredibly idealistic and unrealistic view of human nature.
For instance, I don’t buy this part:
What if there were no shortage of X and everyone had access to as much X as he could ever want or need? Then there would be no greed or selfishness.
I still believe that greed and selfishness are inherent human traits, as inherently human as self-preservation.
Not to mention testosterone. You say that people will spend their time developing their talents, interests, and abilities. But there will always be people who want to have more than other people, to be better than other people. There will always be people who want to game the system. It’s a natural human trait. There will always be people who are driven to compete and win at all costs and be better than everybody else, because there will always be people who spend their adult lives trying to earn the respect and admiration they never got as children and others who just need the rush that comes from beating out other people. Along with all the good stuff like love, humor, hope and altruism, there will always be anger and fear and tribal thinking and hatred. Utopias are imaginary for a reason.
I also had a problem with this part:
The core of all prices is the labor necessary to create the object; if no labor is needed beyond the overhead of raw materials and maintenance, then these commodities would become essentially free.
That’s basically the case now, so why don’t restaurants sell a cup of soda for, say, 10 cents, when that’s all it costs to make? Why isn’t soda “essentially free”? Because people want to make money. They want to make money even if they already have enough money, because money is a status symbol. People want to have more than other people have. People don’t need enormous houses or expensive cars or designer clothes for subsistence. They need these things because they want to show off. They want to appear as good as other people, or better than other people.
Not everyone is like that. You are probably not like that. But a substantial portion of the human population is like that. This is the way people are.
Society can’t be planned and controlled. It just doesn’t work that way. Primarily because people don’t want to be told what to do and be forced to change their lives. It’s my life, why should I change it? Secondarily it’s because nobody can predict the future and there are always unintended consequences, even in your robot farmer world. But primarily it’s because people will always be people.
Society can only develop organically, chaotically. It’s the small things that change the world for the better, the lightbulbs and the transistors and the penicillin. Grand schemes for the way people should live do not work. In fact, people who think in grand schemes kind of unnerve me. The people who think they know better than anyone else how other human beings should live seem to be the people who least understand how most human beings function and who wind up making homemade bombs. Instead of spending so much mental energy on utopias, why not just accept an imperfect world?
Jeff, before I answer, what’s with the snide negative tone? What emotional investment do you have in this issue to respond to me in such a way?
Of course people will still want to compete and have “more,” but what is this “more” that they want to have?
It has taken different forms over time and across cultures. In our crass materialist culture its measured in money and luxury goods. In other cultures it has been measured in social status or honor or other things. The measure of status is culturally determined which means it can be changed so that the individual’s desire to advance himself benefits society as well instead of tearing society apart like we do. Plus you give people too much credit. The majority of the human race are easily controllable and suggestible and can be conditioned to follow whatever instructions one wants. They can even be made to believe they’re doing so of their own free will.
Your soda analogy is flawed because you’re conflating service vs. industry and wholesale vs. retail. It also presumes that the production and services are carried out by private companies instead of public collective enterprises and/or the government. Private companies exist for no purpose other than to transfer money from the consumer to the seller. But what if the sellers and the consumers are the same people? That’s how government “of the people by the people for the people” is supposed to work.
You keep saying “people are people” and “that’s human nature,” and you’re not alone. But how do you know this? Where is “human nature” written in stone? What is magical about human nature that it alone, our of everything else in the universe, is immune to the relentless constant of change?
Finally, what does anyone have to gain from accepting an imperfect world? The world is so full of horror and evil and injustice that if one gave up the hope that it could ever be different, what would be the point of going on living?
Well, that was a little bit OTT. Sorry. My feelings were a little hurt by what I perceived as your tone. I just should learn not to discuss this stuff with people because 1.) No one ever agrees with me and 2.) It’ll never come true anyway :(