rah @ rah @feddit.uk

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2 yr. ago

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we will be the first to suffer

Uhh.. eh? What do you mean?

countries can sell to their neighbours

They can't sell food they don't have. How can you still be thinking that climate change is going to be like a temporary blip in food supply? Don't you understand that we're all fucked? You really think that Brexit and all the rest of the bureaucratic nonsense people have considered important up until now will mean anything when half the population of the planet has starved to death? Don't you get where we're headed?

It’s not like people, especially anarchists, somehow didn’t notice that people can sometimes be awful to each other.

In my experience, many people who follow an ideology or who have some deluded conception of reality or humanity believe that people will cease being awful to each other when some specific better future comes about. Communists with the revolution, Christians with the return of Jesus, deluded "spiritual" people with the New Earth or "new age" people with the Age of Aquarius and even, dare I say, some anarchists with non-hierarchical society.

You came to the anarchist instance to tell people that mutual aid isn't believable?

No that's not anything like what I said.

The existence of mutual aid behaviours doesn't mean much, in any animals but particularly human beings in the context of anarchism. Humans can cooperate when it's beneficial and also stab each other in the back and step on one another when it's beneficial. The behaviours aren't mutually exclusive. Anarchists should expect negative behaviour along with mutual aid.

Other factors of evolution include but are not limited to:

• Lying
• Stabbing people in the back
• Taking credit for other people's achievements
• Fraud
• Theft
• Rape
• Murder, including patricide, matricide and infanticide

A click bait headline would also be "Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature".

Do you understand what "clickbait" means?

I didn't say the posting of the title was clickbait, I said the title was click-bait.

Click-bait title

The UK is known for rain

Had been known for rain. Until recently. When the climate started shitting on the status quo.

will let me know

ROFL

A free trade agreement wouldn't make any difference, we're all fucked either way.

Speak for yourself. The climate's a bit fucked in case you hadn't noticed. Each year now I wonder: is this the year we face the first famine? (Of the many to come, until most of us are dead?)

Someone who says the lords name would be upset about "the lords name" specifically.

But it's not "the lord's name" because it's not "the lord", it's "their lord". Why would you include yourself as a subject of Christians' "lord"?

Wrong sub. Perhaps you want !windows@sopuli.xyz ?

It's a common thing religious people say

Exactly. How come you're saying it?

the lords name

I'm not religious

Wut? If you're not religious, why are you using the phrase "the lords name"?

This is the typical argument of "it can't exist because it doesn't exist yet". It's facetious.

By the same token, if there's no practical evidence of prefigurative communities being effective in fostering wider sociopathy-less societies then your/the proposition is solely theoretical and adherence to the ideal is a matter of faith.

By this argument one could argue 500 years ago that liberal democracies are impossible just as well.

Nobody set out with liberal democracies in mind 500 years ago. The societies we have now have evolved very slowly and are a mish-mash of different ideas and influcences, often conflicting, both over time historically and together now in its current state.

I don't think you have any actual honest interest to understand

I did, I'm just extremely skeptical. I feel I do have a better understanding now though and to be honest, in light of that limited understanding I'm not feeling motivated to seek more.

I'm bowing out now

Fair enough.

practical cases show that when such groups are created they are unbelievable stable and don't collapse

This seems odd. If such groups are extant now on planet Earth and have proven to be unbelievably stable then where are the sociopathy-less societies that they have fostered? If there are no sociopathy-less societies, then the idea that prefigurative communities can be effective would appear to be false.

outside of external pressure

This seems to be key. There will never be an absence of outside pressure which, again, implies that preconfigurative communities cannot be effective.

Very simply that there is no "reward" to be had for asocial behavior. When there is no hierarchical power or wealth accumulation to be had, acting in a way that alienates those around you doesn't provide any benefits.

This is just a regress. How can one create a community without reward for asocial behaviour? In other words, how can one create a human social group without benefits for getting ahead of one's peers? How can one avoid getting ahead of one's peers at the skilled endeavour of not getting ahead of one's peers?

As I understand it, that's not how human social groups work. We inherently and necessarily create hierarchy. It's built in. It's how we've evolved. Like chimpansees.

I've been (peripherally) involved in organisations that superficially espoused non-hierarchical ideals but in practice had those who drove the group forward and whose opinions were given more weight than others. Unsurprisingly because it's built in for people to be like this when they're in a group. There's even a specialised part of the mind whose sole purpose is to attempt to construct other people's opinions of us so that we can be better at gaining social standing.

These kinds of behaviours and social structures are instinctive and stem from our evolution. We can't get rid of them. We can't create a human society without hierarchy any more than we can create a human society without breathing.

You seem to have a lot of questions about anarchism

Not really, your comment just piqued my interest. I'm curious if you actually have a practical plan for bringing about such a society or whether it's just an exercise in "wouldn't it be nice if.." like Marxism and the Venus Project.

Maybe this will help

OK, read that, seems pretty simple to me.

How do you propose preconfiguring in a way that doesn't promote sociopathy? To quote the page you linked to:

Prefigurative communities often struggle with financial sustainability, external pressures such as state repression and conflictual internal dynamics, such as tension between those who want to do prefiguration and those who want to engage with existing power structures.

What is the difference in kind between "prefigurative communities" and the general wider society we have now, that means the base desire for social status and greed ("sociopathy") will not be promoted? How do you propose eliminating the "conflictual internal dynamics" that arise from those desires? The page you linked gives no information about that.

It seems to me that the "conflictual internal dynamics" are simply a reflection of the conflict inherent in all human social groups, at all levels. In other words, that "prefigurative communities" suffer from the same problems as wider society and that there is, in fact, no difference in kind between them. Therefore, "prefigurative communities" will necessarily always fail to change wider society because the flawed, base people comprising those communities are no different from the flawed, base people comprising wider society.