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You should look elsewhere then!
(Oooh, Alex got burned~)
Indeed, I suppose equating order with civilisation was the main mistake in my rhetoric.
But for the sake of my argument, any social group works. Even in small communities, obliterating the needs of the individual is the key for long term success.
I was under the impression that rational conversations meant not taking lessons from ED.
It seems to me that you are equating freedom with the selfish desire to do whatever you want, when that is only one aspect of what freedom is.
In the end, freedom is necessary for civilization. At the same time, however, freedom also makes civilization break down.
If you have civilization without freedom, you end up with an oppressive, totalitarian system of ruling, wherein nobody can do anything they want to merely because they desire it.
If you have freedom without civilization, you end up with... Well, you don't necessarily end up with anarchistic chaos, but the more people are around, the more likely it is- especially when creature comforts are so desired, yet scarce.
But:
This is just utter bullshit.
Civilization and community are not end goals in and of themselves.
The idea of building a community is one that is shared. However, the purpose in building a community is not just to have a community; rather, the purpose of the community is to make the lives of everyone within it better.
Seeking to get rid of the needs of the individual does ensure long-term success of the community, but it also defeats the purpose of having a community.
The better solution would be to find synchronicity between the needs of individuals and the collective.
Which is, I believe, what the current system is striving for.
The current system has a pretty significant bias in favour of the individual, given the incredible wealth disparities at play, especially with the downturn of collective wealth since the middle of the 20th century. Right now, we don't just live under capitalism, but an exceedingly extreme form of it. That's what an unregulated, or poorly regulated, free market system does.
Mind you, we get examples of exceedingly wealthy individuals who are also exceedingly generous and trustworthy -- Bill Gates springs to mind -- but by and large, we live under a system that incentivises the collection of fiscal capital to a ridiculous degree. Capitalism has the potential to find synchronicity between the needs of individuals and the collective, but it's failing heavily to meet that balance right now due to favouring, massively, private enterprise over the practical needs of large populations.
There's actually a staggering number of regulations on the market system. They dictate what companies can and can't do, how they need to treat employees and customers, and a lot more. There's enough fuckin' regulations in there to spend a year studying it at high school and still only be at a basic level of it.
Currently, I do believe the market system is an attempt at a compromise between the individual customers and the companies themselves, all of which is an attempt to make the customer be treated better.
It doesn't work very well. I don't think socialism would work very much better for this many people, though.
In principle, these regulations are supposed to reduce negative externalities. Generally speaking.
Whether they do or not is constantly under dispute, and these disputes are extremely serious business, so serious that countless hours and billions of dollars have been spent on them, yet they continue without end, and I'm certain that countless numbers of people have lost their jobs because of them, and some may have even died or committed suicide from its effects.
Yes.
On the other hand, the lawyer business is now thriving.
There's plenty of evidence to suggest that current regulations aren't enough or are poorly enforced, though. A good example is crunch time in the video game development field, where many development teams are forced to work overtime without additional pay for weeks or months at a time. Then you have things like monopolisation of certain resources, where world supplies of certain things are in the hands of very few companies. Oil, diamonds, high-value resources such as those. Owning property also became much less realistic for the average person over the last decade, and then you had the 2008 shenanigans as a result of debt culture to cover the contradiction between a culture of spending and a shortage of actual money.
Hell, the world's finances largely run on debt right now. There isn't actually enough money existent in the world to cover what is actually being spent by nations, companies and private individuals alike, leading to a convoluted series of debt agreements. That's far beyond insane. Then compound that with cultural values that consider gold more valuable than resources actually necessary for survival. Our world is layers upon layers of insanity.
(Well, for one, you really could have just left it here.)
Actually, I'm just going to bow out, because I'm not willing to put in the effort to continue this argument, especially when it's kinda silly.
Peace out, yo.
"I was under the impression that rational conversations meant not taking lessons from ED."
It's choose-your-own-witty(TM)-rebuttal time! You can pick:
[ ]Rational? Cos I only saw irrational in that opening post.
[ ]Lessons from ED? Moar like highschool-level Introduction to Philosophy, which teaches such wonderful stuff as not running a philosophical concept into the ground by only interpreting it as its logical extreme.
[ ]ED? As in English Dictionary? Because that actually defines terms nice and concretely, unlike the OP.
In summary, the main problem with this sort of stoner macro-philosophizing is that it falls apart the moment it crashes into complicated reality. See the rest of the thread, with people debating examples on far smaller scale that probably also have millions of sub-examples? What you posited was a principle and equating it with a fact. It's fine to have peace-outweighs-freedom as a general moral guideline, but I assume you have to compromise on it or reïnterpret it in a manner that makes it actually useful in day-to-day life constantly.
Do elaborate. I am curious now.
Well, normally with sets, you have objects that belong and objects that don't: That cat is female, that chair is red, that one is not, etc. Since this relationship is binary, we usually use 1s and 0s.
However, when we work with more qualitative denomination, this becomes somewhat impractical. The classical example is the glass of water: A glass at half capacity, belongs to the empty or the full set?
For such a purpose, some guy named Zadeh (I think he was Indian or something) developed the concept of "fuzzy" logic, wherein an objects belonging to a set could be expressed as a function taking values between 0 and 1, rather than just those two.
While many people have epistemological objections to this theory, in practice it has proved to be very useful... hell, your washing machine probably uses it.
And while, yes, this is merely a more obtuse way of stating "You absolutes too much", I brought it up because it seemed to be directly related to OP's original argument: the idea that, using logic, CIVILIZATION (or ORDER) => -(FREEDOM). If we see freedom as a fuzzy set, then he could reconcile both notions, since different degrees of belonging to ORDER would mean different degrees in freedom, making it possible to have both (albeit, not in an absolute state). And also, because fuzzy sets are fun.