4 ms·
> Boundaries are imho critical to give structure to society. Looking at history I would even say that boundaries, as in the "need" to give a superior moral pos
by candiodari 9y ago
> Boundaries are imho critical to give structure to society.
Looking at history I would even say that boundaries, as in the "need" to give a superior moral position to a favored class, whether an economic class, intellectuals, a military class, or priesthood, was always where these boundaries were. The thing you can't see is that your/our "boundaries" are no different.
And every single time, those boundaries turned out to be, not "for trade" (e.g. the Roman Empire), "for the military" (e.g. the second Islamic dynasty), intellectuals (e.g. the French revolution - the first part, or Communism in Eastern Europe) or "for morality" (e.g. the West in the middle ages). I mean, I'm sure there was a period of, say, a decade, where they actually did what it said on the label. It never lasted.
Every single time, those "boundaries" served to guarantee the comfort of a favored class. Firstly, to safeguard their positions of power and comfort, their fortunes, but later even their ideas and egos.
The real boundary we are wanting to impose is that "we are right".
And it's real, real simple. There is a tiny little issue:
We
Are
Wrong
Boundaries do impose structure. The structure does not change, and the world does. That's fundamentally why the boundaries are wrong and the structure will not hold.
I do not know how or where exactly we are wrong, but we are wrong (although I have some ideas: any 5 year old, old enough to talk intelligently, but not old enough to be assimilated yet, will tell you when you walk with them through any city what we are terribly wrong about. There's plenty, I might add).
And that sucks. If it turns out that we are most catastrophically wrong about a moral issue, it will suck REAL bad. And that's happened before. Plenty of times.
It is funny how you see the bay area aging. When we started out, most were in our late teens, early twenties at best. And of course we all felt the same: society is VERY wrong. In all sorts of ways. For instance, women are not different, and certainly not inferior. We KNEW that 20 years ago. But now we're 40, and we feel that, dammit, we're right. And these kids, who seem to prefer economic gains over social issues. Lazy bastards !
And, like the rich 30 years ago, we've decided (whilst having pretty much every creature comfort we like) that moral issues (that just happen to keep our place in society safe and secure) are real important. And these upstart youngsters (who do not in fact enjoy many of our creature comforts), they're bad, mmmkay ! Dammit ! They MUST be stopped.
They will, of course, defeat us. Nothing can stop them.
And they will clobber more than some of our ideas.
And, they will abandon some of our morals.
The thing is, this is a good and healthy thing to happen.
- mooseburger 9y agoThe young aren't always right. Respect for due process, and freedom of speech, are absolutely not values that should be abandoned, even if it seems many of the young are in favor of that. I say this as one of the young. What are the ideas and morals that you think will be abandoned?
- candiodari 9y ago> What are the ideas and morals that you think will be abandoned? Well, for example, certainly authoritarianism has been on the rise. When it comes to democratic ideals like separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers there seems to be zero interest from younger people (see the Poland, Hungary, Austria and Czech situations). Also, when talking to Chinese, I notice that there is very little interest in making China democratic. Freedom of speech has a very bad rap outside of America, mostly undeserved. Now I get that this is hard to see in the middle of the US, but 7.1 billion people don't have freedom of speech (roughly) and 300 million do. The thing is, those 7.1 billion mostly don't want it. Even in America people don't uphold it very well imho. Obviously in the Bay Area high profile events have shown that private and, to some extent, government actions against free speech are tolerated. So I think that freedom of speech and generally freedom will be abandoned to an extent. Why ? Simply because that has advantages.
- Thiez 9y ago> Now I get that this is hard to see in the middle of the US, but 7.1 billion people don't have freedom of speech (roughly) and 300 million do. The thing is, those 7.1 billion mostly don't want it. Yes, as one of those poor 7.1 billion, I can barely contain my envy. Now let's have a look at the ranking of the US in, say, the World Press Freedom Index of 2017 (https://rsf.org/en/ranking https://rsf.org/en/ranking). Could you please explain why the US, being (supposedly) the only country in the world that has freedom of speech, hasn't even made it in the top 40 of that ranking? I don't see this obsession with America-style "freedom of speech". Sure, you can't go out in the streets and yell that you think that '<minority> are subhuman scum that deserve to be rounded up and transported to extermination camps' in most places (although I imagine that won't make you very popular in the US either, even if would technically be legal), but if you live in the nicer parts of, say, Europe, you won't go bankrupt when you need a hospital, you won't be living in a country with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, you don't have a two-party system, your vote isn't worth more or less depending on where you live, etc. Also what's this "free speech zone" thing? Freedom of speech isn't black and white, there are many shades of gray. If everybody feels they can speak their mind except for some people advocating genocide... well suffice to say I won't be joining Evelyn Hall in her fight to the death.