Damn. Nice move.

Capitalism and its umpire is one I agree and struggle with. I'm a free market, open borders libertarian by sympathy, but I got over it. Somewhere along the line I realized that labor shortages are about profit margins rather than populations.

Have you explored distributist at all? As near as I can tell it's a traditional Catholic notion that heads of households should strive for independent ownership of a productive means of nondependency. The more who own the tools of trades the fewer dependent on whims of market manipulation.

@govols

The relationship between management and labor is interesting. Subsistence farming is an example of labor that doesn't increase wealth. The stock market is often an example of management that doesn't increase wealth. The socialists and capitalists both get it wrong.

The purpose of capitalism in a liberal democracy is to manage through voluntary compliance the kind of lifestyle people choose. In theory both irresponsible labor and management are self punished. For example drug addled labor's tend to fail and overly greedy managers should fail.

Societies require voluntary compliance which the one thing the objectivists get right. You cannot rely on the unruly.

What the environmentalists get wrong is that civilization itself is based on the management of excess production allowing for specialization of labor.

I will look into the distributist theory and get back with you.

@govols

So I reviewed distributist theory and don't find much to object to in terms of the goals.

As a practical matter there are problems. It ignores efficiency of scale, the value of competition and how value is set. An example of how competition and value our intertwined would be a professional athlete. Professional athletes receive lucrative contracts for what some would say is disproportionate to their contribution to society. Those extraordinary contracts go to the smallest possible unit of production the individual in keeping with distributist theory but they are just as exclusionary as the power of concentrated wealth. In this case not wealth but talent is the barrier to participation. I picked athletes because their talent is demonstrative and subject to fair competition. The value of their labor is set by the market place something that distributists don't seem to fully account for. Without competition the role of capitalism to regulate value is discounted as is the liberal democratic principle of voting with your purchases.

The issue of efficiency of scale may disappear with technologies such as 3d printing but for the foreseeable future distributists need to address it.

It is not surprising that distributists would have a religious bent, especially Christian in nature. What most people don't understand is that Christianity is an eschatological religion, at least in origin. As such it discounts worldly concerns and ambitions and focuses on the immediate spiritual concerns in relation to property. You need very little planning or competence in managing resources if the world is about to end. This explains why the distributists may discount competition and hierarchies of competence. It also explains why they may ignore the role capitalism has in managing behavior, religion being seen by them as sufficient to promote a slow lifestyle and individual responsibility.

To be honest I don't have an answer to the problem of capitalism concentrating wealth and power. Nor to how competence hierarchies tend to become tyrannical. Certainly some sort of anti trust system to prevent monopolies will occasionally be needed. I may formulate an opinion now that you have me thinking about it.

@govols

Are you still there?

@wolfhnd, yep. I've been pondering ideas about scale, and scaling up v scaling down. I think what was concerning the church, given pre-capitalist sort of leveling that at least to a point had been demonstrated, is something like the dependency developing in the form of eventual wage slavery.

I'm also trying to associate the idea of swarm intelligence, something I'm recognizing fits pretty well with my idea that Capitalism itself is an AI but with no guiding first principals beyond amoral efficiency and maximization of product, where distribution is guided only by the needs of the overall supply and demand chains, where demand is based on willingness to out-bid or under-cut the competition. It's no wonder the phrase "bug-men" got coined; we're existing as an ant colony.

@wolfhnd

I think a foundational aspect to the idea might be "being IN the world, rather than OF the world." If we have the ability to reject what's being imposed by worldly affairs, if we can provide for our families and communities without accepting the bullshit that always surrounds us, we can remain loyal to the church instead of turning away.

@govols

E. O. Wilson > socialism “Great Idea. Wrong Species.”

You are not going to turn apes into a social species like ants. That said Humans have been self domesticating for a very long time. Even the worst vulture capitalists are not wolves and the idea that they are psychopaths speaks more to the sorry state of psychology than to "reality". You need to look to their personal lives to see how anti social they actually are. We are not evolved to live in large groups.

What Wilson seems to miss is that civilization creates the environment in which ant like behavior is appropriate for artificial group selection. There is even evidence that living under civilized conditions for extended periods alters a groups genetics as long as there are high rates of both unnatural and natural selection. By unnatural selection I mean higher fitness for the upper classes who show signs of greater self domestication, high rates of capital punishment, and some regulation of promiscuity. Natural selection would be the uneven distribution of death from diseases, starvation, and other natural processes that discourage high mutational loads. The unpleasant reality is that evolution didn't stop 50 thousand years ago when we became "fully human".

For the most part however humans are not genetically programmed for a caste system. In the ant colony the queen is as much a slave to the workers as the workers are to the queen. To make the ant like nature of civilization work specialization must be a matter of competence not caste. There has to be laws that reinforce social hierarchy as a matter of competence. Ideally those laws and customs will create the ant like structure in which the higher classes are as much slaves to the workers as the workers are slaves to the higher classes. This principle needs to extend to institutions as much as individuals.

The problem with socialism isn't so much that it tries to make us ant like but that it encourages a natural fast lifestyle. Our instinct for fairness is disconnected from productivity. Fairness is adaptive in an easy but unstable environment for which we evolved. Civilization however is all about managed productivity and a hierarchy of competence. In practice that is why socialism always becomes authoritarian with extreme hierarchies. The problem is those hierarchies tend to be based on networking not competence. The same phenomenon takes place in our corporatist environment thus the term "crony capitalism". In organizations such as the EU communism is a technocracy. In theory that is the place for competition to take place in terms of education etc. The Chinese already tried that system centuries ago and it doesn't work. As it turns out ability to manipulate theory doesn't insure managerial competence. You may not even want the highest IQ individuals as managers because both the high and low end of the curve are likely to concentrate mutations. Especially mental and emotional abnormalities.

What we are looking for is a system that encourages a slow lifestyle. Where planning competence is paramount in placement in the hierarchy. A slow lifestyle also implies being highly K selective and a strong inclination to adhere to prosocial customs. Prosocial customs such as devotion to family, production and resource saving, emotional stability, civility, avoidance of drugs, personal responsibility, acceptance of legitimate authority derived through demonstrable competence, etc.

@wolfhnd

It sounds like we're looking at egalitarian hunter gathers and the mechanisms they had socially evolved to put down both free riders and cult violators, along with the cults they had established to bind the group together. So, we have the human animal as extended family units, largely egalitarian, largely pair-bonded, holding a territorial range through and against inter-tribal conflict, breaking off whole sub-populations as the clan becomes populous enough that conflict arises within the clan. Sub-population moves off to find, settle, or conquer a new territorial range; repeat.

The question of settling down is an evolutionary biggie, for that required a certain amount of self-domestication in order for a group to not just roam about as a loose collective, but to begin to evolve enough, what? agreeableness? devolve just enough aggression? that the population could live together in large enough numbers to actually stand ground rather than constantly move along within a range? The ability to live in larger groups while managing in-group conflict allows specialization, institutional memory and technology, blah, blah, blah...

Do you and I agree that agriculture and specialization came from settling down, rather than agricultural development allowed for settling down and then specialization?

Do we agree that, no matter the order of operations, this is the level of social complexity that demanded a further development of cult toward hierarchy?

Are we fairly sharing the prehistoric model?

@govols

I was largely raised by nuns in a Catholic school. I'm sure that those childhood experiences continue to influence me. I have over time lost interest in the religious aspects of my education. I never really had that much interest in the organized religion aspects even as a child and by my mid teens had stopped religious observance. For practical reasons you could describe me as a long term atheist although I'm fairly agnostic. My experience has not left me hostile to religion. The exception would be the extent to which religion unnecessarily increased human suffering. I would have to research the issue but celibacy seems like an example of religious practice that may need examination. I just want to make clear that I do not hold the same level of hostility towards religion as people like Daniel Dennett who I may otherwise admire for their intellectual clairity.

The distinction between living in the world as opposed to being of the world seems like splitting hairs as a practical matter. I understand the philosophical or theological difference may be important to a religious individual. For example I view Christianity as a pacifist philosophy. Theologians may be able to get around that with mental gymnastics but if pacifism was taken as the default Christian dogma it would be a problem for me. There may not be any good wars but I can't say that there are no necessary wars. This attitude of pacifism extends beyond warfare and is my major concern with the concept of living in the world. The question is how much good is neglected when the focus is on the afterlife.

@wolfhnd

Let's go ahead and finish the one exchange: I'm not religious (though I have a very high regard for the way religious culture binds peoples together), I don't consider you to be hostile, and while I often get irritated with people who are more hostile than I think to be reasonable, I mostly understand.

So, the thing that looks good to me about the idea of distributism, and living in as opposed to of, is the ability to walk away from whatever the dominant cult is attempting to impose. I don't interpret Christianity as pacifist, but... take the turn the other cheek thing. To me that reads, when a "master" gives you a backhand, stand there and challenge him to throw an actual punch. Maybe you don't go to war over it, but you challenge the authority to escalate to the point of absurdity.

The reason I see it that way is the consistent way Jesus submitted himself before the humble but stood defiantly against authorities. I can see it both ways, but I just don't see people writing books about the pacifist version.