That's too reductionist. Ultimately "humans" do it, like ultimately atoms do chemical interactions, but there are absolutely "group dynamics", they have been studied quite a lot, and an "individual" in a group context can operate totally different (and has different options, tradeoffs, etc) than an individual alone.
A very basic example: a human can forget X.
A group, on the other hand, has a collective memory (institutional memory), and even if an individual forgets, it takes many individuals forgetting to erase something.
An individual is a system; using your own logic it is inappropriate to talk about how a human feels. One must talk about each individual neuron and cell.
You can talk about tendencies across a group, but cognition is inherently done on an individual level, even accounting for network effects.
OTOH if what you're saying is that large groups of people can tend to share the same psychoses, well, that's a totally different statement.
Not every observable property is available on the "atomic unit". Some only appear (emergent properties) after the association and observation of many such units, that is, in a group.
In particle-terms, a single atom can't be a crystal.
Or a living organism.
But there are absolutely things that happen at the level of crystal forms or living organisms, etc, that don't happen at the single atom level.
>You can talk about tendencies across a group, but cognition is inherently done on an individual level, even accounting for network effects.
Only in a crude understanding of cognition.
Name a property of the group that's more than a sum of the properties of the individual. Population, for instance.
The crystal analogy, again, isn't helpful because we're talking about social science, not physics.
An individual cannot exhibit groupthink without a group. They also can't have in-group bias without a group. Both important properties in group dynamics.
Roles and positions within a group are similar to the "crystal example" as well, with groups forming particular patterns under specific pressures, patterns impossible to the individual (e.g. an individual is not a "protest march" or a political party).
It’s a lot easier to commit violence against people when you can outsource it to someone else, so collectivism requires a strong, central authority. The less local that authority is, the less culpable we can convince ourselves we are when it goes wrong. The reason we keep building these large, dysfunctional political systems is because taking responsibility is hard, and most people don’t want to put in the effort.
I think as the parent poster was saying, this is possible with smaller groups. I think the best example would be townships in the US. Different townships decide on the level of tax and investing (especially into school systems.) Then, individuals self-select themselves into groups by choosing where to live.
I have friends upset about how not all schools are "top-tier" schools. I quote "top-tier" as it is in the eye of the beholder what that means. The thing is, not everyone wants their kids to have 5hrs of homework a night. Nor does everyone want to pay 20k+ in annual property taxes. Some would rather home-school or send their kids to private or parochial schools.
People often achieve this by joining a township that agrees with their appetites in spending and other political choices.
In the first, you decide to accept the general will in order to maintain your individual credit, hoping that by cooperating on this occasion you encourage people to encourage with you later. Alternatively, you can protest the decision, hoping in doing so to encourage your fellow townspeople to change their mind, or to raise the reputation cost to them of proceeding down that route. And if you don't like that either, you can leave (highly visibly or otherwise).
Not all collective decision-making processes are coercive, either, FWIW. There are systems built on unanimity where your issue doesn't even arise: if you dislike the decision of the other group members enough then you can veto the decision. This creates other issues (and doesn't scale very well) but it does happen.
You guys wrote 5 walls of text just dodging the easiest question on Earth.
Now stop bringing up absurd examples. Just living in a state exposes you to state violence, e.g. for not obeying the (tax) law.
If you wanted a realistic example of non-violent society, there are only few, mostly small remote tribes in deep jungle. Not surprisingly, those are very collectivist societies. The standard response to repeated badly non-conforming behavior in such societies is eviction from the community. Yes, that can be done non-violently.
If this was supposed to be a 'actually it all comes down to the threat of violence' gotcha then, sure - if you insist on your property rights, don't pay your taxes and then decide to fight the bailiffs you're going to have a bad time. Sorry.
Presumably, you could buy another home in the same township, and go thru all the above processes again. OR you could choose one of the original options given by a parent post:
1. Go to town hall and influence decisions
2. Exit township, find one that you agree with
3. Bear with it and stay in the township.
So, this is your "non-violent" collectivism?
Thank you very much. This is all I needed to hear.
The process is not coercive, but the product is. Laws tend have punishments and are enforced through various levels of force or violence.
In rural areas, this is typically how it works. Laws are more of suggestions, and unless you are causing a big problem for someone you are likely to be left alone.
As a native English speaker myself, I urge you to get into etymology and understand socius and collective and community and thereby inoculate yourself against a weird strain of anti logic parading as American political discourse and often used by folks who know better sponsored by the federalist society and Cato institute and such… typically for lowbrow crowd appeal.
No society, by definition, is free from a collective aspect.
I cannot believe that you went on insulting large groups of people while being unable to answer a simple 6 words question.
P.S. I speak relatively fluent Latin, so the etymology play made me chuckle a bit.
Now, could you explain how this is collectivism and not voluntaryism?
You’re missing the point. You don’t force anyone. If someone doesn’t want to do the thing, you don’t make them. You find a different way to accomplish your goals.
Capitalism is almost completely coercive and controlling, but direct violence is mostly reserved for minorities and for war adventures in distant countries.
At home it's coercive through financial violence (especially income restriction and forced debt), extreme economic apartheid, and overt and covert behaviour modification narratives in the various media.
"The crowd" is very much not in charge of any of this, but is persuaded that it is.
Arguably all of this is better than a more overtly dictatorial system where any form of dissent attracts direct violence. But it's not necessarily less coercive - just less obvious. And more efficient.
You can scale that back and have collective systems which rely on a tradition of consensus. It's not even all that unusual on a smaller scale. Teams/groups make decisions, some people disagree, but when consensus is reached everyone works towards the same goals even if they have misgivings.
This works if you allow feedback, goal monitoring, and resets so the system is responsive and self-correcting. But it also requires all participants to be rational, reasonably intelligent, non-sociopathic, and capable of adult decision making.
Which is why it doesn't work at scale. Only about half the population - at best - has those abilities, and as soon as your group includes at least one sociopath they will destroy that dynamic and replace it with a toxic one which relies more on coercion than consensus.
Do those examples work for you for people being physically punished for refusing to take on debt? Because I'm also happy to include sick people who need medical care and people who need money for food/heat/shelter/clothiers as being punished physically for refusing to take on debt by being deprived of those things
Violence comes in when one small privileged group wants to maintain power.
Also, by definition, anarchist collectivism has no strong central authority. People who aren't compliant probably shouldn't be living in an anarchist collective in the first place, but choice of social/economic system is sadly not granted as an option. In so much of the world today, people are forced to live under capitalism, like it or not. And people claim that this is "freedom"
Wedge issues like guns, abortion, etc are designed to break traditional democratic constituencies from the herd. Catholic priests were leaders of socialist revolutions in Latin America. In the United States, some catholic bishops were in favor of child separation due to abortion.
It’s the insistence on ideological uniformity on these fundamental issues that creates the “wedge” between people who might otherwise cooperate on relatively mundane economic issues.
Case in point- gun laws, abortions, gay marriage are simply not a focus of right wing parties in India. Because these were never nurtured and developed as wedge issues by BJP. Instead the wedge issue they have nurtured and developed is the hatred of muslims and Christians. Absolutely no one gives a shit about abortions or who does what, (except for the government preventing female infanticide). Whether right/left wing they consider abortions as personal business of the woman/man involved. This topic has not been nurtured as a wedge issue because it doesn't align with the BJPs wedge issue- presence of muslims/Christians in society.
I am not sure what the significance of Bangladesh 's creation is in this context. The primary reason for independence was Pakistani governments failure to cede power to the east Pakistanis who had won the elections .
Your take feels very cynical, along the lines of "religion is opium for the masses". In this view, people are dupes stringed along by Machiavellist figures, who cannot possibly have strong feelings about various topics themselves.
Gun laws may not be very relevant in India, but neither are caste-related topics in the USA. This is normally called a different culture.
But the right-wing playbook is the same everywhere, frame these issues in a way to maximize fear and link that fear to nostalgia of a better past. In the US guns are big. In Russia there’s an appeal to the bygone Soviet era where all Russian speakers were under one flag.
In the US, the gun argument is the most transparent. Gun marketers evoke (mostly bullshit) memories of how great great grandpa fed the family shooting turkeys with his flintlock, then fought some redcoats for freedom. Then they hard pivot to why you need a concealed carry pistol to stop wild Mexicans from raping your daughter. It’s a really effective argument because it links the gun, crime, immigration, abortion, etc. Then after you spend this money, the liberals are gonna take your guns, so buy more.
The more moderate side is a different kind of coalition driven by different goals and ideas. Black and Hispanic voters are socially conservative, and don’t care about LGBT issues. Progressive voters care about everything, but the get out the vote machines are more moderate.
Despite your own personal viewpoints guns are very popular in the United States among both parties.
From a perspective of a country where gun controls are far stronger, this idea that democrats are "antigun" seems hilariously partisan. Democrats only seem to be proposing modest gun controls compared to Republicans.
What do you define as "most of their funding"? What percentage of Democrat funding comes from Soros or Bloomberg?
I had a weird upbringing. One side of my family was big in county republican politics, the other were unionists and involved in democratic politics. Nobody talked about any of this crap growing up.
What did change is crazy people become prominent starting around Obama times. People I’ve known for years are now difficult to talk to as they have been pulled into a world of paranoia and crazy.
That’s not true. About half of Black people oppose same sex marriage, about the same as republicans. But they go along with white liberals on social issues in exchange for getting their support on civil rights issues. But, for example, they voted in favor of California’s 2008 ban on same sex marriage. (Back then, they overwhelmingly opposed same sex marriage.) There’s a fair argument that what pushed the referendum over the top was very high Black turnout because Obama was on the ballot.
Similarly, Muslims mostly vote Democrat and support same sex marriage… for other people: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres...
Non-whites vote democrat for different reasons than whites. For them, issues like civil rights, immigration rights, religious freedom for minorities, etc., are often dispositive of other issues. And insofar as many are immigrants, they don't feel ownership over the broader culture. My parents vote Democrat and view these social and cultural issues as being between white Americans. That works both ways--if Democrats supported outlawing abortion they might have some "population control"-type objections, but really wouldn't care because they'd never accept abortion in their own circle anyway.
When you look at the older voting population, numbers skew different.
> Case in point- gun laws, abortions, gay marriage are simply not a focus of right wing parties in India.
I said social and cultural issues are important to people—the specific social and cultural issues that cause disagreement obviously different between countries. Guns are a flashpoint in America because there are lots of people like my wife whose family history involves guns. Her ancestors fought in the American revolution and used guns to secure independence. They used guns when crossing the continent to settle the frontier. They used guns to protect themselves and hunt long before there was police officers and grocery stores anywhere nearby. All of this stuff is part of their cultural identity.
Obviously that specific issue isn’t relevant in India because it’s been fully settled for thousands of years. But the conflict between Hindus and Muslims similarly involves cultural identity.
> Instead the wedge issue they have nurtured and developed is the hatred of muslims and Christians.
So your example of how cultural and social issues aren’t important to people is to point out the conflict between Hindus and Muslims? Don’t you see how that parallels the conflicts in America between Christians and secularists?
And if you think religion is an inconsequential “wedge issue”—I’m sure those Muslims and Christians will be willing to conform to what the Hindus want, right?
> I am not sure what the significance of Bangladesh 's creation is in this context. The primary reason for independence was Pakistani governments failure to cede power to the east Pakistanis who had won the elections.
Yeah but why did they do that? It was because East Pakistan was a different cultural and ethnic group (Bengali) than west Pakistan. Bangladeshi nationalism was sparked by the language movement, where Bengalis began to think of themselves as a distinct people with a different culture and language.
What did you study?
Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies in order to save what are almost entirely insensate lumps of cells which some folks believe have been animated by ghosts bestowed upon them by folks imaginary friends isn't a tenable position. We already have long since arrived at the compromise position of making it vastly more expensive and challenging by forcing people to travel substantial distances to few clinics with substantial expensive resources to get services their insurance wont cover to mostly take a few pills. This helpfully leaves them open to public shaming and rebuke.
We also make darn sure that this doesn't occur beyond what we deem viability even though a beings ability to survive outside the womb is an artifact of present tech and doesn't measure any reasonable objective benchmark under pain of prison.
They by any measure got what one would consider substantially their way along with a sharp per capita abortion rate decrease.
It would be politically impossible for the liberals to give them any closer to absolute victory without mutiny of the electorate. In fact it would even be harmful to conservatives because it would drastically increase turnout if indeed it could be achieved over the will of the people.
This is an interesting topic. The two questions I have, seem to be difficult for people to answer and have them be consistent in other areas of our law and culture.
1) What defines a human life from a logical perspective?
This one seems difficult. For example, you seem to think that if one cannot survive without medical treatment that they don't count as a life or are not worth protecting, yet this is inconsistent with our laws on things like duty of care to special needs individuals, children, or incapacitated people.
2) When is it acceptable to take, or not save, a life?
This is definitely and interesting topic.
So I think the real debate is over when it’s acceptable to kill a human at an early stage of development. That is fundamentally a moral compromise, in the same way that e.g. the law of self defense is a moral compromise. Nothing in science says a fetus has a “right to life” just as nothing in science says anyone has a “right to bodily autonomy.”
I think partisans and ideologues try to take this issue to extremes based on principle, but I think most people (especially mothers) have a mushy view. They know miscarriages happen naturally in the early weeks and so support some abortion right. They support exceptions for life of mother or fetal abnormalities even in later stages. But for they’ve also seen ultrasounds showing something that looks a lot like a baby at 15 weeks and aren’t ideological enough to think you should be able to kill that without a really good reason.
I used to believe this too because of America’s awful science education. It wasn’t until I went to the ultrasound appointments for my first kid that I realized how incorrect that was.
A 13 week fetus, which under Roe can be killed for another couple of months still, has a face, hands and feet, finger prints, etc. They can suck their thumb and have other human baby reflexes.
> which some folks believe have been animated by ghosts bestowed upon them by folks imaginary friends isn't a tenable position.
Sure, if you wave your hands and say that your side is obviously right about the issues at the heart of a political dispute, you can make any issue seem manufactured. You should go to India and tell the Hindus and the Muslims that they’re both wrong about their “imaginary friends” and that their dispute is a manufactured triviality.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but the whole fixation with personal conscience, individual self determination, and the equal dignity of every individual—ideas that animate American social liberalism— also come from Protestant Christianity. Nobody is making amoral utilitarian arguments for or against same-sex marriage.
> It would be politically impossible for the liberals to give them any closer to absolute victory without mutiny of the electorate.
Incorrect. Over 65% of Americans would support making abortions illegal in all or most cases after the first trimester: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort.... The public opinion is basically closest to the Mississippi law that’s up before the Supreme Court: 15 weeks with exceptions for health of mother and baby. Incidentally, highly secular countries like France, Denmark, and Finland have settled on 13-14 weeks as well.
But more to the point: if abortion is a manufactured wedge issue, why do people in California care so much about what laws people in Mississippi choose to govern themselves?
It actually doesn't say that most people believe abortion ought to be illegal after the first trimester. What it actually said is that 38% believe that it ought to be illegal in most cases. This is overwhelmingly the people who believe that we are violating the magical ghost that their god hath breathed into even a lump of cells. Also notably this is virtually the same demographic that literally believes the earth is 6000-10,000 years old.
Of the 61% who believe abortion should be legal 44% believe the first trimester ought to be the line. Another 12% think the second trimester ought to be the line and another 44% think birth ought to be the line.
There are two questions. Ought abortions happen outside extraordinary circumstances and where do we draw the line. If we have discerned that a woman has a right to an abortion it makes no sense to average or combine the people who think the line is at zero and the people who think the variable has a value and use that to set policy. Firstly because the average of undefined and an integer is undefined and secondly because that is a fucking terrible why to deal with something that actually has a scientific answer that being basing it on birth rendering it an independent person or brain development such that the fetus goes from having never been conscious in the first place to something more akin to sleep.
Take it from the child of an Ahmedi who left Pakistan in 1986. When _you’re_ the wedge issue, you don’t have many other choices.
Muslim shops are being vandalized and burnt all over India https://twitter.com/meerfaisal01/status/1513541836756848644
Almost all the neocortical prenatal brain development takes place in the third trimester. Electrical activity exists at 13 weeks but it's incapable of consciousness.
It's simply ridiculous to tell a women who unequivocally is an actual human to subordinate her body to the preservation of a less than mouse if she doesn't want to.
The simplest solution is to declare a person a person if it survives birth or is liable and intended to.
It's only complicated if we make it so
The OP is not deceiving anyone when he says that watching an ultrasound made him change his mind on abortions. This is just a narrative trick that presents the " human life begins at conception" belief in a very dramatic fashion. OP probably made up his opinion much earlier when he decided which tribe/ingroup he is going to sign up for, and will support all of the Republican platform right think one way or another.
The artificial creation of the wedge issues is so absurdly obvious that it sometimes defies belief that people don't recognize it. A reply to an apparently benign business question "is usps actually losing money" will immediately reveal the person's voting choices with 99% accuracy. People are asked to sign up for a tribe in their formative years and then they simply take down notes from the propaganda and assume rigid positions. Propaganda was invented to convince the American people that joining world war 1 was necessary. It has never left us, since.
https://www.history.com/news/world-war-1-propaganda-woodrow-...
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17189302/si...
The real issues facing the country are absurd health care costs, dropping life expectancy, unavailable urban housing and ridiculous student loans. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are interested in solving the problem. Who really has the time to worry about other people's abortions and guns in the middle of all of this.
While Republicans are absolutely nuts, Democrats can be forced by massive public pressure to make at least some minor moves to address these problems - thanks to Bernie. But they will do it in a way that their corporate brethren are not hurt in the least bit.
Consider the price cap of 35$ on insulin. It doesn't mean that the insulin manufacturers profit will drop. Merely that everyone else's premiums will increase so that corporate profits aren't hurt. Bush shafted Medicare's ability to negotiate drug prices too.
Rephrasing - if X is a manufactured wedge issue then why is it a wedge issue? I think you manufactured an unintended tautology!
Groups - even small government types, weirdly - seem to fall into a trap whenever something goes wrong. The answer to a challenge is "centralise power, then do things my way". Never mind that power is difficult to coerce, rarely does things your way and any mistakes made are standardised and amplified accross an entire country.
I recall in the early days of the COVID crisis where the US banned working COVID tests (I forget if it was the CDC or some other government body) in favour of their own faulty one, which totally scuppered any chance of controlling the disease. Foreseeable outcome of the strategy. But despite that sort of thing being easy to pick, groups don't argue for parallelism in an emergency.