the belief that ‘order = hierarchy’ is one of the most pernicious mythologies. and it is equally pernicious whether it convinces someone that order is bad, or when it convinces them that hierarchy is good.
order is good. hierarchy is bad. they are not linked.
What the fuck is ‘order’
i mean it’s not limited to this but one example for what i’m talking about is “socially agreed on protocol for acceptable behavior”
romantic notions that people can all just do ~whatever they want~ are childish and ultimately rooted in liberalism.
For this reply we’ve secretly swapped tumblr communist leviathan-supersystem with my conservative Mormon divisional Chief. Let’s see if anyone notices.
Your Divisional Chief Is Correct Though
Actually, “doing whatever you want” and “no need for hierarchy uwu” were both kinda steelmanned by Marcuse with his concept of ~surplus repression~.
The way he does it is simple but kinda subtle, and I’m bad at explaining it, he says it, like, more persuasively and less naively - but basically you don’t *actually* want to do that stupid shit [1] to the extent that people would need to shun you, call the cops, etc, right?
Self-image, self-interest, seeking immediate peers’ approval, etc - necessary repression in his Freudian-ish terms - would quite suffice for a more laid-back life, like they suffice in making (many) people e.g. wash their hands and flush toilets. But to do shit like Taylorist discipline, you need to beat people down more actively, past acquiescence and into submission - hence the “surplus”.
[1] Not unless you’re destitute, sick, angry, wasted, crazy, etc, which he kinda discounts, because, in his time and place, capitalism seemed to him about to eliminate glaring scarcity and obvious Dickensian misery. I mean, of course that looks incorrect now - but imo not that awful of him as far as extrapolation goes.
That sounds testable enough. Build a sufficiently low-scarcity intentional community with population and norms initially selected for prosociality, easy access to psych treatment etc. and let people do what they want, and see if it inevitably degenerates into either hierarchy or chaos. My money would be on “it probably could be done as long as authoritarians don’t get to fuck with it”
I think an orderly non-hierarchical community definitely can be done, but it requires the cultivation of specific social forces in order for it to be accomplished. if it was easy, it would happen more often, and less briefly.
i think one of the keys is that there needs to be a vigorous culture of debate, based around trying to refine moral concepts based around increasing everyone’s well-being. in other words, The Discourse needs to be the central pillar of the society.
That’s detail-level stuff on the prosocial norms, then there’s the fact that “sufficiently low scarcity” seems to be right now achievable by what’s maybe the global 1% (in literal terms) (or maybe I’m just a spoiled materialist brat but having so much stuff that fighting over it doesn’t make sense sounds like a good plan for eliminating fighting over stuff), and the fact that authoritarians really love fucking with other people’s experiments.
And that’s why I want less “hashtag some asshole 20xx” or “global revolution once everything is ready and then we’ll be screwed by some novel failure mode we can’t undo” and more “could you just please let these people try this thing out, without turning it into another replication of authoritarians fucking with everything and ruining it”.
I managed to convince a bunch of anarcho-communists to not only tolerate but encourage seasteading (with the simple boundaries of banning polluting and slavery) so if those people get their revolution many libertarians and ancaps would get theirs too, how the hell is it so difficult for conservatives and libdems to not be like “We know this is a bad idea even though it hasn’t been tested so we’ll use violence to make sure any attempts to test it will result in a failure thus proving our point, ad baculum don’t fallacy.”
4 months ago · tagged #promethea's empiricism fetish #win-win is my superpower · 191 notes · source: leviathan-supersystem · .permalink
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