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xssve -> RE: Ayn Rand and altruism (4/16/2012 8:23:17 AM)
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quote:
Where I think she goes off the rails is attributing altruism to collectivism. There is nothing whatsoever "altruistic" about totalitarianism regardless of the particular political or theocratic wet-dream that motivates it.
Well they're being altruistic to each other aren't they? they aren't expecting much from each other than collusion in keeping it on the lowdown.
Look, it's tribal thing, thinking of it as "society" is going to get you nowhere, the archetypical tribe is comprised of extended family, including in-laws, clans, and a limited number of clans with common goals and problems to solve, and sharing a common environment make up a tribe.
Once you have civilization, the whole thing changes: it's not one big group of people with common goals, it's a bunch of clans and tribes making up a supertribe, and economic clans form - insofar as it remains based n the extended family, economic clans operate similarly to the way they operate in nature, with the exception that resource base has shifted from hunting and gathering to the exploitation of labor - the most successful are not the best hunters, they're the best at exploiting the labor of other clans and tribes.
Civilization is based on the exploitation of labor and clans will collude to do that - artificial clans will form, we call those cabals, and collectivity, they will scheme to exploit labor as a collective - one of the ways of doing this is promoting the idea that it is a collective, rather than some people exploiting the labor of others, i.e., what good for the exploiter collective is good for the exploited collective, that's who they mean when they say "society", and when they say "society will collapse" if the collective doesn't allow itself to be exploited, they're talking about the fact that their exploitation schemes of the exploitation collective will collapse without a labor collective to exploit.
There can be some parity as long as labor has value, if it ha value, it cannot be exploited without just compensation, and the same goes in a competitive labor market, competition means you have to increase compensation to attract the labor, and there are acceptable levels of exploitation, the only way to reduce compensation, and thus increase profit margins, is to expand the labor market, more people than jobs, which at least provide (ideally) a sustenance level of compensation, and wages can be cut to sustenance levels - more jobs than people, wage have to be competitive to attract labor.
Thus there are all sort of schemes, religious and political, to expand the labor market by expanding the collective, religion being chief among them - now religious feeling, or spirituality may diverge greatly from this, may stress the individual and their relationship to the universe, but as an institution, it's typically an organ of the exploitation collective, and follows their lead.
Anyway, you might be starting to get the picture, there is no such thing as not-collectives, people form collective more or less axiomatically, but there is always some difficulty in forming one large collective, these tend to have short shelf lives, because the only really self evident thing about it is that it's better to be the exploiter than the exploited, and exploiters are invariably going to split off and form their own collective.
This happens in religion, economics, politics, hell it happens in clans - fathers exploit the labor of their offspring, until they are able to split off and form little collectives of their own to exploit, the difference between that and the cabal, is that the clans motives are primarily to preserve and maintain the genome, and all that exploitation benefits the genome by making sure labor adequately benefits, it's "all in the family" - once you start exploiting people outside your immediate genetic group in order to benefit your genome, then there is less reason for that labor to benefit, as long as it's facilitating the health prosperity of your genome, in fact it might be in your immediate interest to keep those competing genomes down by exploiting them even by forming exploitation cabals, etc., etc., all over again.
Always works that way man, but the meta collective is really the entire gene pool, and the entire gene pool benefits from both adequate compensation (health, nutrition, diversity) and these exploitation collectives, by trying to keep it in the family, tend to degrade their genome through lack of diversity, cousins end up marrying cousins, etc., and overexploiting the labor pool, degrading their genetic health, and these thing sometimes get to a point where everybody just has to let the whole unholy thing die and start over.
It's the pattern of civilization, European civilization benefited from a safety valve in form of an entire new continent to exploit, but this is the last time around.
You can save yourself a lot of trouble going through this over and over by simply accepting that people will allow themselves to be exploited at adequate levels of compensation, and acceptable levels of exploitation, that why we have contract and labor law, etc., and the labor collective need to be healthy and diverse enough to form a collective worth exploiting by the exploitation collective, and just stabilize that goddamn arrangement, because it's never going to work any other way - and sometimes we even manage to turn that whole business in a win win situation, whereas left up to the exploration collective, it never ends up anything but zero sum, because wealth is an abstraction, it has no logical or biological limits, whereas human health, genetic health and diversity do have logical and biological limits.
But there is no "collective" there are "collectives", and you'll never get away form that, it's an empirical process, where as the archetypal Adamic superman is a pure abstraction.
Doesn't mean exceptional individuals do not arise from time to time, every age has it's exceptional men and women, but that usually ends with the exploitation collective talking the labor collective into nailing their ass to a tree, cause they tend to rock the boat, before it tips the fuck over and everybody drowns.
So when you say "collective" I hear you saying: "my collective is better than yours".
The "big" collective is the collective gene pool, and what is good for that collective is good for everybody, nothing else.
Empirically, it's the only yardstick that matters.
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