6 ms·

> Institutions can promote well-being and solidarity, or they can encourage competition, individualism, and hierarchy. Why is this presented as an either / or?

go13 5y ago
As if 'competition, individualism, and hierarchy' is bad. Well, somebody has to work hard, compete and provide to those who want to enjoy well-being and solidarity. In the meantime, the left wants to use this as a selling point to abuse the power and be the one in control without paying the hard price of working hard and taking risk.
ixtli 5y ago
They are mutually exclusive. Solidarity is the opposite of individualism.
mordae 5y ago
Because they are mutually exclusive. Competition, individualism and hierarchy will make sure that the ruthless will end up on top of the hierarchy, caring only about their individual needs, squashing attempts at solidarity and squandering opportunities to have any kind of well-being for others.
- christophilus 5y ago
  Competition is like eating. It’s an important part of everything that life touches. Whether or not it’s healthy is entirely contextual. A study which puts competition into the category “bad” is starting off with a highly questionable assumption. Same for individualism. I’m not a fan of hierarchy, and tend to see it as more bad than good, but even hierarchy isn’t one or the other. It’s contextual.
  - carschno 5y ago
    The assumption that "competition [...] is an important part of everything that life touches" seems at least as questionable.
    - aloisdg 5y ago
      Indeed and was questioned by Peter Kropotkin in his essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind evolution. He would go as far as theorizing a whole kind of organization around this.
      - ixtli 5y ago
        Further he was famous while he was still alive amongst scientists for his writings on this topic. It wasn’t until later that he became an icon of the Mutualist / Anarchist movements.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        Competitive evolution is seen everywhere, from plants evolving poison to deter animals from eating it to foxes evolving to hunt rabbits and rabbits evolving to avoid foxes. Cooperative evolution is definitely a thing, but you can't say that competition isn't a massive part of evolution.
    - ixtli 5y ago
      It was roundly disproven by many schools of naturalism in the 19th century. The notion that competition is somehow inherent to life is convenient to justify zero sum games but not observable, especially within a single species. Peter Kropotkin was famous during his life as a scientist because of how rigorously he demonstrated this.
      - goatlover 5y ago
        Capitalism isn't a zero sum game, and competition along with cooperation has existed throughout human history. Even with eusocial insects like ants, there is still competition with other colonies. Lions and hyenas are cooperative in their prides/packs, but they certainly compete for food and territory with each other.
        v-erne 5y ago
        >>Capitalism isn't a zero sum game Maybe at this moment not, but I suspect that it has tendency to become one (when the tempo of inequality increase surpass increase of total wealth)
  - rob74 5y ago
    Sounds like your soul is already profoundly shaped by neoliberalism - Thatcher would be proud...
- andi999 5y ago
  Why do you think ruthless end up on top? I do not see that follows.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - markdestouches 5y ago
    Consider rulers in most countries of the world. Democracy and rule of law is the exception, not the 'normal' state of things as it might appear living in the West.
- phoehne 5y ago
  First off, you can have competition and cooperation. Take a look at any sports team. It's a highly competitive environment that's also highly cooperative. You can't win unless you play as a team. I don't believe the strongest players on whatever football team you follow are squashing or squandering anything. You can't get to good graduates schools, even in garbage dump of politics the social sciences have become, without being more clever, interesting, and intelligent than your peers. It's laughable that people who make it to the more prestigious institutions, because of slavishly hard work for most of their lives, then turn around and say that merit based systems are inherently flawed. Should the Columbia just accept students at random? Even if they did, it wouldn't matter. The irony, in a world that isn't competitive, no one would pay more attention to their paper than a paper from Crappy Backwater University on why peanut consumption makes people more sedentary. Their result isn't surprising. When you value and reward competition - you get more inequality. However, societies that don't favor competition often have completely rigged and sham economies. I'm racking my brain to think of one economy outside the US, UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc, that isn't based on competition that isn't a morass of local bribes to the dictator's cousin's uncle or whatever. In China, for example, "common prosperity" is the cudgel wielded against any perceived alternate power center. It has little to do with actual prosperity. What I think is right to criticize, is how do we deal with the impact of inequality. It's fine to have inequality as long as certain needs are met. Access to medical care, housing, food security, and education are all things that should be available to everyone. It's okay to have inequality and competition as long as we mitigate the emotional and physical impact of inequality. But the thing that will allow us to pay for that is a highly competitive and effective economy.
  - v-erne 5y ago
    >> First off, you can have competition and cooperation. Take a look at any sports team. It's a highly competitive environment that's also highly cooperative. You can't win unless you play as a team. Sport is probably the worst possible analogy for any fair economic system. It promotes cooperation between people only as far as crushing your opponents team go. How exactly exactly promotes cooperation between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid within it's rules ? Who would want to live in a world where there is place only for one winner? >> I'm racking my brain to think of one economy outside the US, UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc, that isn't based on competition that isn't a morass of local bribes to the dictator's cousin's uncle or whatever. In China, for example, "common prosperity" is the cudgel wielded against any perceived alternate power center. It has little to do with actual prosperity. I believe that corruption and bribes are orthogonal to economic systems. Capitalism is full of corruption and especially corporations are full of kick back schemes (I have seen few personally that would make comrade Brezhnev blush). My personal standing is that corruption comes from people who have to much decision power and too greedy to play by the rules. Only proper build in control systems can restrict that.
- nine_k 5y ago
  This sounds as if all actors are completely independent, and there is no long-term strategy in their actions. Henry Ford famously cared for his workers to be well-paid, so that they could afford the cars his company produced.
  - kingkawn 5y ago
    Henry Ford was a Nazi not the greatest example
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - markdestouches 5y ago
    And yet there is not another Henry over 100 years in the waiting
  - ixtli 5y ago
    This isn’t true unfortunately. I recommend reading a biography of the man because he was, amongst other things, an old school Fascist and this ideological belief helped him succeed.
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    And there are infinitely more people in similar positions who are completely the opposite. The fact you have to go back in time as far as Henry Ford proves the point, frankly. It's an exception, not the standard.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      You don't have to go that far back. You're assuming something that's not true.
  - comice 5y ago
    That's a myth. Ford increased wages only to stop the high levels of staff turnover, which was affecting productivity and quality.
- jrsj 5y ago
  This can’t be true imo because neither absolute could actually ever exist. There’s always elements of all of these things at play in various aspects of society. Despite being grouped & framed as polar opposites they can’t be mutually exclusive if they’re always intertwined with one another.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lawrenceyan 5y ago
  As long as 2/3 of all individual actors are honest, consensus can always be reached. Capitalism acts as a consensus mechanism that solves for efficiency and productivity. To your point, though your take is cynical, it's meaningful to consider the adversarial condition. In my opinion, what we need is to figure out a mechanism that solves for distribution, which as a byproduct also will solve for well-being (key point: and will be robust even under adversarial conditions).
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    The problem is that it is based on economic efficiency and productivity, which both escapes from material means and strives to maximally exploit people, potentially ending in one or another kind of a trap - a global minimum of human life quality for most of the people, as there's no profit to be had in getting it higher; or conservatively limiting research that would be threatening to capital owners. (Death of start-ups, ownership of science.)
    - lawrenceyan 4y ago
      I think realistically having a high “global minimum” is all we can really achieve that’s sustainable in the long term. I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and though there’s a certain sense of satisfaction in wanting to bring down the elite / establishment, it doesn’t actually solve anything from the perspective of helping the average person.
- jdthedisciple 5y ago
  They are just as mutually exclusive as saving money and staying alive: You can't save 100% of your money as you need to spend some on shelter and food among other things. The obvious notion here being that there has to - and CAN be - a balance of the two.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    Agree, it’s a common trick to subtly insert some false dichotomy where the real possibility space is continuous.
endisneigh 5y ago
How do you reconcile solidarity, aka consensus with individuality?
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Through: liberte egalite fraternite People have been doing it since "at least" the French Revolution, I am sure that you could chuck some Pericles speeches in there too
- jrsj 5y ago
  By accepting a compromise between the two, which seems like the only sane way to do it to me. Otherwise if you go too far in terms of solidarity you end up with totalitarianism (everything is the state & the state is everything)
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    The compromise you speak of is simply neither, which is not reconciliation
    - jrsj 5y ago
      It’s sort of a false binary where neither can actually exist, they’re just ideological terms. If you wanted to think about it in a simplified and overly broad way you could model it as a range of 0 to 1 where the actual reality can only ever be a decimal.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  Individuals can very well voluntarily donate to charities without having government goons force to give half of their profits
  - WithinReason 5y ago
    This would work great if we were a species of ants
  - 5y ago
jrsj 5y ago
It reads to me that the true intent is more in restriction competition and individualism more than it is promoting well-being and solidarity. I’m no fan of what they’re criticizing but you do have to consider what the alternative would be and who would be implementing it, and given the current political power structure that doesn’t seem like an attractive option either.

go13 5y ago

As if 'competition, individualism, and hierarchy' is bad. Well, somebody has to work hard, compete and provide to those who want to enjoy well-being and solidarity. In the meantime, the left wants to use this as a selling point to abuse the power and be the one in control without paying the hard price of working hard and taking risk.

ixtli 5y ago

They are mutually exclusive. Solidarity is the opposite of individualism.

mordae 5y ago

Because they are mutually exclusive. Competition, individualism and hierarchy will make sure that the ruthless will end up on top of the hierarchy, caring only about their individual needs, squashing attempts at solidarity and squandering opportunities to have any kind of well-being for others.

christophilus 5y ago
Competition is like eating. It’s an important part of everything that life touches. Whether or not it’s healthy is entirely contextual. A study which puts competition into the category “bad” is starting off with a highly questionable assumption. Same for individualism. I’m not a fan of hierarchy, and tend to see it as more bad than good, but even hierarchy isn’t one or the other. It’s contextual.
- carschno 5y ago
  The assumption that "competition [...] is an important part of everything that life touches" seems at least as questionable.
  - aloisdg 5y ago
    Indeed and was questioned by Peter Kropotkin in his essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind evolution. He would go as far as theorizing a whole kind of organization around this.
    - ixtli 5y ago
      Further he was famous while he was still alive amongst scientists for his writings on this topic. It wasn’t until later that he became an icon of the Mutualist / Anarchist movements.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Competitive evolution is seen everywhere, from plants evolving poison to deter animals from eating it to foxes evolving to hunt rabbits and rabbits evolving to avoid foxes. Cooperative evolution is definitely a thing, but you can't say that competition isn't a massive part of evolution.
  - ixtli 5y ago
    It was roundly disproven by many schools of naturalism in the 19th century. The notion that competition is somehow inherent to life is convenient to justify zero sum games but not observable, especially within a single species. Peter Kropotkin was famous during his life as a scientist because of how rigorously he demonstrated this.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      Capitalism isn't a zero sum game, and competition along with cooperation has existed throughout human history. Even with eusocial insects like ants, there is still competition with other colonies. Lions and hyenas are cooperative in their prides/packs, but they certainly compete for food and territory with each other.
      - v-erne 5y ago
        >>Capitalism isn't a zero sum game Maybe at this moment not, but I suspect that it has tendency to become one (when the tempo of inequality increase surpass increase of total wealth)
- rob74 5y ago
  Sounds like your soul is already profoundly shaped by neoliberalism - Thatcher would be proud...
andi999 5y ago
Why do you think ruthless end up on top? I do not see that follows.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- markdestouches 5y ago
  Consider rulers in most countries of the world. Democracy and rule of law is the exception, not the 'normal' state of things as it might appear living in the West.
phoehne 5y ago
First off, you can have competition and cooperation. Take a look at any sports team. It's a highly competitive environment that's also highly cooperative. You can't win unless you play as a team. I don't believe the strongest players on whatever football team you follow are squashing or squandering anything. You can't get to good graduates schools, even in garbage dump of politics the social sciences have become, without being more clever, interesting, and intelligent than your peers. It's laughable that people who make it to the more prestigious institutions, because of slavishly hard work for most of their lives, then turn around and say that merit based systems are inherently flawed. Should the Columbia just accept students at random? Even if they did, it wouldn't matter. The irony, in a world that isn't competitive, no one would pay more attention to their paper than a paper from Crappy Backwater University on why peanut consumption makes people more sedentary. Their result isn't surprising. When you value and reward competition - you get more inequality. However, societies that don't favor competition often have completely rigged and sham economies. I'm racking my brain to think of one economy outside the US, UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc, that isn't based on competition that isn't a morass of local bribes to the dictator's cousin's uncle or whatever. In China, for example, "common prosperity" is the cudgel wielded against any perceived alternate power center. It has little to do with actual prosperity. What I think is right to criticize, is how do we deal with the impact of inequality. It's fine to have inequality as long as certain needs are met. Access to medical care, housing, food security, and education are all things that should be available to everyone. It's okay to have inequality and competition as long as we mitigate the emotional and physical impact of inequality. But the thing that will allow us to pay for that is a highly competitive and effective economy.
- v-erne 5y ago
  >> First off, you can have competition and cooperation. Take a look at any sports team. It's a highly competitive environment that's also highly cooperative. You can't win unless you play as a team. Sport is probably the worst possible analogy for any fair economic system. It promotes cooperation between people only as far as crushing your opponents team go. How exactly exactly promotes cooperation between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid within it's rules ? Who would want to live in a world where there is place only for one winner? >> I'm racking my brain to think of one economy outside the US, UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc, that isn't based on competition that isn't a morass of local bribes to the dictator's cousin's uncle or whatever. In China, for example, "common prosperity" is the cudgel wielded against any perceived alternate power center. It has little to do with actual prosperity. I believe that corruption and bribes are orthogonal to economic systems. Capitalism is full of corruption and especially corporations are full of kick back schemes (I have seen few personally that would make comrade Brezhnev blush). My personal standing is that corruption comes from people who have to much decision power and too greedy to play by the rules. Only proper build in control systems can restrict that.
nine_k 5y ago
This sounds as if all actors are completely independent, and there is no long-term strategy in their actions. Henry Ford famously cared for his workers to be well-paid, so that they could afford the cars his company produced.
- kingkawn 5y ago
  Henry Ford was a Nazi not the greatest example
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- markdestouches 5y ago
  And yet there is not another Henry over 100 years in the waiting
- ixtli 5y ago
  This isn’t true unfortunately. I recommend reading a biography of the man because he was, amongst other things, an old school Fascist and this ideological belief helped him succeed.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  And there are infinitely more people in similar positions who are completely the opposite. The fact you have to go back in time as far as Henry Ford proves the point, frankly. It's an exception, not the standard.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    You don't have to go that far back. You're assuming something that's not true.
- comice 5y ago
  That's a myth. Ford increased wages only to stop the high levels of staff turnover, which was affecting productivity and quality.
jrsj 5y ago
This can’t be true imo because neither absolute could actually ever exist. There’s always elements of all of these things at play in various aspects of society. Despite being grouped & framed as polar opposites they can’t be mutually exclusive if they’re always intertwined with one another.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lawrenceyan 5y ago
As long as 2/3 of all individual actors are honest, consensus can always be reached. Capitalism acts as a consensus mechanism that solves for efficiency and productivity. To your point, though your take is cynical, it's meaningful to consider the adversarial condition. In my opinion, what we need is to figure out a mechanism that solves for distribution, which as a byproduct also will solve for well-being (key point: and will be robust even under adversarial conditions).
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  The problem is that it is based on economic efficiency and productivity, which both escapes from material means and strives to maximally exploit people, potentially ending in one or another kind of a trap - a global minimum of human life quality for most of the people, as there's no profit to be had in getting it higher; or conservatively limiting research that would be threatening to capital owners. (Death of start-ups, ownership of science.)
  - lawrenceyan 4y ago
    I think realistically having a high “global minimum” is all we can really achieve that’s sustainable in the long term. I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and though there’s a certain sense of satisfaction in wanting to bring down the elite / establishment, it doesn’t actually solve anything from the perspective of helping the average person.
jdthedisciple 5y ago
They are just as mutually exclusive as saving money and staying alive: You can't save 100% of your money as you need to spend some on shelter and food among other things. The obvious notion here being that there has to - and CAN be - a balance of the two.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  Agree, it’s a common trick to subtly insert some false dichotomy where the real possibility space is continuous.

endisneigh 5y ago

How do you reconcile solidarity, aka consensus with individuality?

CyanBird 5y ago
Through: liberte egalite fraternite People have been doing it since "at least" the French Revolution, I am sure that you could chuck some Pericles speeches in there too
jrsj 5y ago
By accepting a compromise between the two, which seems like the only sane way to do it to me. Otherwise if you go too far in terms of solidarity you end up with totalitarianism (everything is the state & the state is everything)
- endisneigh 5y ago
  The compromise you speak of is simply neither, which is not reconciliation
  - jrsj 5y ago
    It’s sort of a false binary where neither can actually exist, they’re just ideological terms. If you wanted to think about it in a simplified and overly broad way you could model it as a range of 0 to 1 where the actual reality can only ever be a decimal.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Individuals can very well voluntarily donate to charities without having government goons force to give half of their profits
- WithinReason 5y ago
  This would work great if we were a species of ants
- 5y ago

jrsj 5y ago

It reads to me that the true intent is more in restriction competition and individualism more than it is promoting well-being and solidarity. I’m no fan of what they’re criticizing but you do have to consider what the alternative would be and who would be implementing it, and given the current political power structure that doesn’t seem like an attractive option either.