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> Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, h

• imtringued 4y ago
  I agree, imagine perfect ideology X, it solves every conceivable problem but then people stop the utopia because they want to struggle a little bit and feel challenged.
• onelovetwo 4y ago
  Maybe we should stop looking to government for that?
• colechristensen 4y ago
  “There should be a science of discontent” Many modern political problems stem from people needing something to struggle for and other people fighting against it. There’s also a lot of shaping going on where if people weren’t so upset about X they’d realize Y was a huge problem so let’s distract them permanently with X.
  • busyant 4y ago
    > Many modern political problems stem from people needing something to struggle for and other people fighting against it. Reminds me of the lines in Fight Club: "We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives." I'm not sure if that precise quote is in the book, but it's certainly in the movie and it echoes your sentiment and those above.
    • refurb 4y ago
      And the saying “Good times create weak men”. And it’s true. You often see a growing discontent among wealthy societies where everything is taken care of. People need purpose in what they do and “my purpose is to fight for the survival of my country” is a pretty compelling one to many people.
      • kwhitefoot 4y ago
        > wealthy societies where everything is taken care of. Which ones would they be? The one that I live most of my time in, Norway, does not seem to have growing discontent, yet it is quite definitely closer to "everything is taken care of" than others, such as the UK, where "growing discontent" seems to be a thing. So unless you can name those that "You often see" I don't think the idea can be taken seriously.
        • alex_sf 4y ago
          > The one that I live most of my time in, Norway, does not seem to have growing discontent The mass shooting and terrorism rate there increasing seems like a reasonable counter to that idea. Along with steady suicide rates despite massively increasing spending on it.
          • magicalist 4y ago
            > The mass shooting singular > and terrorism rate there increasing er, no? > Along with steady suicide rates So not growing, then. I don't think anyone's going to argue Norway has solved society but let's not twist things to try to fit someone's off the cuff head canon.
            • gjm11 4y ago
              Pretty sure it's meant to be parsed as "(mass shooting and terrorism) rate": that is, he's claiming that the rate of mass-shootings and the rate of terrorist atrocities are both increasing. I don't know whether either part of that is true, but if it's wrong what's wrong isn't that "mass shooting" is singular. (And if, as grandparent claims, suicide rates are "steady [] despite massively increasing spending on it", that does seem like evidence of something getting worse. Again, I don't know whether it's actually true and I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't, but the criticism here doesn't seem fair.)
  • photochemsyn 4y ago
    Full quote (Frank Herbert): > "There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles. (Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan)" There are certainly many ways to fulfill this apparent necessity without resorting to war and other forms of tribal conflict. Exploration of wilderness, sporting competitions, running marathons, etc. They all have a kind of 'passing through the ordeal' similarity. (Incidentally this is a central reason why preservation of large expanses of wilderness areas is very important)
    • huijzer 4y ago
      >> "There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles." If you’re interested, Andrew Huberman talks a lot about how it is important to work for your dopamine. If you get it almost for free, like in for example drugs, food, and Netflix, then that will cause unhappiness in the long run.
• jl6 4y ago
  Honestly it sounds like exactly the form of government we have today, where all of those positive and “negative” features are available in varying quantities.
• euroderf 4y ago
  By all means check out the film The Tenth Victim.
  • Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    I've actually seen it, and even read Shekley stories it was based on. How is it relevant?
    • euroderf 4y ago
      Well, I thought it should be pretty obvious. > > > they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice > > This fact has been the downfall of every utopian ideology, and ignoring creates a vacuum that fascist regimes readily fill. > I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure. In The Tenth Victim, they fill the vacuum with a blood sport. Kind of like Rollerball, but without the corporate-level fascism.
• jancsika 4y ago
  > I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure. A serious specification for such a thing is going to be bigger than the SVG spec. At that point it's almost certainly cheaper to fulfill our need for adventure through eternal vigilance in a representative democracy.
• a-dub 4y ago
  > I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure. i think that's supposed to be sort of the idea behind free market capitalism. whether or not we should be fulfilling our emotional needs with the system of production is an open question, but i think that's basically the idea. business as a risky adventure with exaggerated potential upsides and downsides.
• yrgulation 4y ago
  > I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure. Any government that will satisfy my need of adventure and struggle in colonising the solar system and exploiting the endless amounts of resources it has and harnessing the virtually unlimited energy of our star will have my vote. But people prefer tribal adventures and struggles and here we are debating the very risk of an ideology promoted by a half testicled man 100 years ago making a comeback. Why dont we just struggle for the greater good instead of all this pettiness is beyond me. Anyway crazy comment on my part but i think we are wasting time as a species on petty crap.
  • imtringued 4y ago
    That sounds like a weird case of suburban sprawl.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • numpad0 4y ago
    > adventure and struggle in colonising the solar system and exploiting the endless amounts of resources it has My hesitation won't last a minute before voting for such an adventure, but I think I cannot really rule out a rogue entity in such expedition that could cause a "kinetic winter" situation on Earth, that has to be first addressed(or taken as a managed but ultimately inevitable risk) before we would be able to do this.
  • superb-owl 4y ago
    You should read the Parable books by Octavia Butler. By the sound of it maybe you have already!
    • yrgulation 4y ago
      Thanks for this - havent heard of her books, but after a quick google search they do sound like something i should read!
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• dcolkitt 4y ago
  The counterpoint is that regional support for the Nazis generally indicates the opposite. Their weakest electoral performance was in the West and South, which generally was the wealthiest and most liberal part of Germany. By contrast their base of support was the Prussian hinterlands which was already the most militaristic part of the country to begin with, as well as having a weak region economy. I think it’s under-appreciated how much the rise of the Nazis was a direct result of Germany’s loss in World War One. It’s hard to overstate how central the prestige of the military was to the national consciousness of the German Empire. The failure of the military was largely internalized as a failure of German culture itself. The Nazis offered a do-over, revisionist view of World War One, and a promise to restore Germany’s traditional militaristic prestige. (Not to mention being directly astroturfed by the old guard of the General Staff.) German liberals were more than happy with “comfort and safety”. It was the traditionalists stuck in the pre-liberal past that dragged the country into “struggle and self-sacrifice”
  • Animats 4y ago
    "I think it’s under-appreciated how much the rise of the Nazis was a direct result of Germany’s loss in World War One." Under-appreciated today, well-known at the time. See the beginning of "Triumph of the Will".
  • ProjectArcturis 4y ago
    Yes, the Nazi appeal was largely a response to the absolutely crazy things that had happened to Germany between 1914 and 1933. Losing a world war, and all the death and humiliation and privation that entails (The winter of 1916 was known as the Turnip Winter, because of food shortages, and that was barely halfway through the war!). Hyperinflation, where an egg might cost a billion marks. Then a Depression! And all the while, a ton of money gets siphoned off to pay reparations to the WW1 allies. I'm not at all saying Nazism was justified. I'm saying that the insane German experience over the 20 years leading up to it had caused the average German citizen to accept extremely radical solutions.
    • etempleton 4y ago
      It is always a poor choice to humiliate your opponent after defeating them. You either completely annihilate them or help them back up.
• xg15 4y ago
  it might be a start to actually archieve "comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense" for all. Then we can see if they still want struggle and self-sacrifice. There may be some dispositions of the human mind that are susceptible to this sort of thing, but for now, I find it somewhat remarkable that this supposed need for struggle and self sacrifice is almost always employed by classes in power to keep lower classes at bay. Hitler is no exception: > He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. This stuff seems less like a "science of discontent" and more like a "science of distraction" to me. As in: let them argue about race, gender, religion, patriotism and whatever else as long as they don't argue about classes.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    Yes - comfortable people saying that comfort isn't enough for people; they'll still just complain, kill each other and die. Without ever having tried giving people comfort, that will always sound like a rationalization. It's an excuse comfortable people use to excuse everything from the wealth and income gap between US blacks and whites to silencing complaints about UI changes on software projects. It's a statement that people don't actually want what they say they want, all they want is attention and drama. The logical way to respond is by not acknowledging anything they say, and enforcing the behavior that you want to see, by force if necessary. The real problem is that improvements in general comfort are difficult, and require lots of force to be organized and applied in a rational way. It's easier just to insure that you and your friends stay comfortable, and to silence or redirect elements that may intrude on that comfort. Ultimately, though, the failure mode on that is catastrophic. Once discontent overwhelms the institutions created to suppress it, the institutions shrink or convert while the discontent grows. Very soon, the discontent becomes the new, young establishment, and if you haven't joined yet, you're now the problem that the new institutions are intended to eliminate.
• AshamedCaptain 4y ago
• EUROCARE 4y ago
  Why can't people struggle and self-sacrifice for utopia?
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    I mean they can, they'll probably just fail.
  • tehjoker 4y ago
    they did in the Soviet Union very admirably.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      And in the US, which gave the world May Day (a day to remember the fight for worker's rights.) Sadly, it gave the US (the country that ruthlessly crushed and salted the fields of the organizations that fought for worker's rights) "Law Day," where we celebrate obeying the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States)
  • closedloop129 4y ago
    Most do. Most often, the problem is not that people are bad but that people choose to fight for a good that isn't compatible with others. From their point of view, they are fighting for an utopian society.
  • nelox 4y ago
    Strictly speaking, utopias are fantastical and by definition unattainable.
• mcnamaratw 4y ago
  Maybe the strange centrist form of government that the US had from about 1935 to maybe 1995.
  • TingPing 4y ago
    Only if you were white middle class.
    • mcnamaratw 4y ago
      It's a good point. But I don't think the moves away from New Deal economics (e.g. reduced financial regulations, increased wealth disparity) have helped non-white folks or poor folks.
• tehjoker 4y ago
  star trek, which depicts a moneyless quasi-communist society but with the fleet organized along traditional navy lines is an interesting concept
• cgh 4y ago
  Yes, I absolutely agree. For much of our evolutionary history, young men were optimized to fuck and to fight. I’m not sure how we square this with the needs of modern civil society.
  • SyzygistSix 4y ago
    Quality sex education and martial arts?
    • krapp 4y ago
      More like a rigid patriarchal class hierarchy that harnessed male violence and sexual aggression into "noble" and "gentlemanly" codes of behavior, in other words, "masculinity," where sending boys off to war was considered a good way to condition them into men, and a list of sexual exploits before marriage was a signal of masculine virtue, at least among elites. And the parameters of masculinity are far more culturally than biologically imposed, so they change over time and place.
• swayvil 4y ago
  A real explorable, pioneerable frontier would serve this need for adventure. A new continent. Or space. The present popularity of gender-flux might be an expression of that. Gender as a wild frontier to conquer?... Ok maybe that's a stretch.
• antupis 4y ago
  Capitalism does it pretty well problem there is that outside information technology those frontiers are kinda closed now at western countries thanks strong regulation or need for several years of education.
• moomin 4y ago
  I dunno, but they’d probably use catchphrases like “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country.”
• flipbrad 4y ago
  It's also an observation made by Agent Smith in the Matrix. It's even observable in the schoolyard, with kids subjecting themselves and others to utterly avoidable drama, for no discernible reason
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Kids do it for the same reason politicians do it - there is an entire social hierarchy and jockeying for the position of the top dog that lets you boss around others. All psycologically healthy people can easilly tell that apart from 'real' conflict, as most kids do not try to open each-other's skull with a rock.
• aj7 4y ago
  Good comment. JFK government. Reagan demanded nothing, started the stuff we’re in today, perhaps inadvertently.
• lampshades 4y ago
  > I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure. America
  • IntelMiner 4y ago
    America is the worlds richest third world country
  • lostlogin 4y ago
    You’d describe American governance as centrist?
    • lampshades 4y ago
      For some meanings of centrism, sure.
    • causi 4y ago
      You often see the "America is super conservative" claim but that's only true if your definition of "the world" is North America and Europe. The US is fairly centrist taking the entire world into account.
• tasty_freeze 4y ago
  The funny thing is we are facing a deep crisis that will require sacrifice and huge effort, but 50% of the country claims it's a hoax and the other 50% accept the problem but are whistling past the graveyard. I speak, of course, about climate change. We have had a century of millions of people worldwide working ferociously and spending tens of billions of dollars every year to extract coal and oil for profit. To fix this problem will require a similar, sustained investment in labor and capital to halt that process and even capture and sequester some amount of what we are releasing at this very moment. That seems like a struggle and self-sacrifice that is sufficient to unify not only nations but the world. Yet apparently it is not. I admit it lacks the adventure aspect.
  • cherrycherry98 4y ago
    The insistence that climate solutions involve self sacrifice I believe is a misguided one. I view the transformation to a low carbon future as happening primarily through the existence of natural economic incentives to do so. People aren't buying electric cars and installing solar panels on their homes out of self sacrifice. Electric vehicles have many desirable features like being very performant, lower maintenance, able to be used as a home battery backup system, refuel/recharge at home, and are cost effective in a high gasoline price world. One of the major selling points of solar panels is the return on investment through lower electricity bills. The fact that both are considered green and makes some feel good that they are helping the planet is merely extra. In general, sacrifice too often considered the path to virtue. I increasingly believe this to be mistaken. If we want the masses to adopt green technology it must materially improve their lives (superior in features and/or lower in cost). The benefits of being green for climate's sake I fear are too intangible be a significant driving factor in decision making.
    • smolder 4y ago
      > People aren't buying electric cars and installing solar panels on their homes out of self sacrifice. This idea is simply wrong. Many of them are doing exactly that, they are using their brains and making sacrifices in their daily life in hopes that collective action in reducing impact will at least give us the time to course correct or reduce the impact of our collective failure with respect to climate change. If you don't know anyone doing this, that's because of who you know. > I view the transformation to a low carbon future as happening primarily through the existence of natural economic incentives to do so. Yes, we will need economic pressures to get everyone overall to conform to a sustainable lifestyle, mainly because we cannot coordinate global human action any other way. No, those pressures are not "natural" ones unless you mean as a result of destroying Earth's climate to the point change is necessary for even day to day survival. We have to choose our future, however hard it may be.
• deleted 4y ago
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