Re:Ask HN: How to continue to be gracious about the good for...
by xapata on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @09:26PM
(#29804208)
Not all social systems. A deep exploration of anthropology should give you a few examples of societies that allocate resources via complex patterns of reciprocal gifting.
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Re:Ask HN: How to continue to be gracious about the good for...
by mc32 on Tuesday January 04, 2022 @09:27PM
(#29804221)
Fair enough. I think small isolated societies may to some degree be able to be like that, but not any current large society.
Re:Ask HN: How to continue to be gracious about the good for...
by cercatrova on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @02:31AM
(#29806178)
I hear this argument a lot from socialists, but I have not seen one example of such a practice working in sufficiently large societies. It seems, historically, that societies of sufficient size have used some form of hierarchical control, and to lack that does not seem rooted in what we have seen already.
Re:Ask HN: How to continue to be gracious about the good for...
by xapata on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @10:36AM
(#29810252)
Part of the problem is that hierarchical neighboring societies tend to absorb their neighbors.
But, I agree that one would likely need some technology to scale up the reciprocity system. Money and the free market is a reciprocity system of you squint at it.
Re:Ask HN: How to continue to be gracious about the good for...
by inglor_cz on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @02:24PM
(#29813636)
Pretty much all the societies of today are the ones that could survive millennia of endless wars and come out of them alive. Current societal systems are selected for military prowess.
(This has various exceptions, e.g. isolated places like Iceland. But there isn't any big and pacifist state out there.)