Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Capitalism v. Socialism: Material Convenience v. Ethics/Morality


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I choose to label capitalism, in the most generous light of this pejorative, an “amoral morality”, since the individual is not necessarily subject to the aesthetics of their social environs. I choose to call socialism, benign despotism, because whatever good intentions and ends it seeks, there is the formal or informal imposition of values on the whole or ‘minority’ by others.

An argument for socialism would be the closing of aggrandizing loopholes for the leveraged few over the disadvantaged rest. The counter-argument for capitalism would be the genius and initiative, no matter the status of its origin, should be encouraged instead of repressed for non-manifested, intangible ends.

My personal experiences have seen (in another generously meant pejorative) the “benevolent despotism” of parental control and direction to my own questioning the relevance and facility of experiences and ways of the past being the arbiter of what could be done in the present or envisioned for the future.

Even if the argument is made that there are more indefinite to limitless options to the abstractions of the intangible over the minimally regulated access of material acquisition for the tangible, there is the ‘Elephant in the room’ counter-argument that prime examples of intangible abstractions, such as religion and other dogmas, have become a masterful instrument of repressive authoritarianism due to the administrative compulsion of creating a sustaining organized institutional culture for those intangibles. But since such instruments of repression are usually in a tangible, institutional hierarchy, there is a tangible perception of those levers of authority. In contrast, those minimally regulated, acquisitioned accesses to the means of control and thus authority over others can exist in a more nebulous, non-transparency of definitive identification.

One could argue the irrelevancy of ethical and moral aesthetics as non-practical and inexpeditious impediments to feasibly logical possibilities, even though the feasibly logical as an intangible idea and ends can be an existential adversity to the manifestly tangible cultural and social milieu.

This seeming mutual exclusivity of benefits for the adherents to the capitalist or socialist ethos, raises the question of boths ontology beyond their anthropomorphic origins. Could it be that there are two different Yin/Yang ontologies in cosmic existence? One would be for discovery and efficiencies, while the other would be for administrative integration. As symbiotic and synergistic partners they would produce an increasingly more efficient systemic operation. In a lesser symbiotic and synergistic relationship, particularly in more tangible systems, there comes into play a cannibalistic relation, in which the more sustainably organized system would prevail.

This would endanger the systems whose aesthetics may have more populist favorability, but whose organizational sustainability is lacking (former urban industrial-job and coal mining communities, and ‘not-too big-to-fail’ banks). The loss of the cultures cannibalized by the more operationally organized systems may not be so easily accepted socially and politically by those unwilling to adopt or adapt to the cannibalizing structures, thus establishing an inherent dysfunctional inefficiency as part of the predominating structure’s operation. The ‘management’ of such inefficiencies will engender the derived off-shoots of the predominant system's reforming, rehabilitating or repressive manifestations to bring the Yin-Yang incongruence back to some form of systemic, operational equilibrium as a legacy and organic, systemic fixture of the contrasting, contention between the two wills of aspiration .
Postscript:
A further clarification on capitalism and socialism: I would characterize my thesis as there being an issue with the transparency in the more sophisticated and nuanced forms of capitalism, so that an equitable regulation could be administered. That "equitable regulation", aka Socialism, should provide the equity of opportunity than the guarantee of, basic, not optimal existence results.
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Ficxa
I guess I know the subject besy of all, cause , I ve lived in time of socialism in Russia, and now I currently living in a country of great capitalism. And I vote socialism, Try to explain, In time of socialism in Rassia there was no unemployment, medicine, school, were free. Any one who started from a clean sheet of life coming home from army, and starting a civil life, no matter what branch of job. If he had no accommodation, he was guaranteed a small room in a company dormitory. After 10 to 15 years he would get a flat in a block of house. Life was easy, everybody was sure in his near future,. There were no super rich, and no super poor.
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Distant Lover
All of that sounds good. There must be a way to combine that with democracy and the right to dissent.
I suspect that if I lived under Communism, even the benign post Stalin Communist Ficxa describes, my tendency to express my opinions would have gotten me into trouble. :eek:I have read that under Stalin people were imprisoned for things they wrote in their diaries.
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Tallnfit
The issue isn't capitalism. Capitalism has been around since the beginning of time.

The issue is mass capitalism. It takes the power out of the hands of people who actually do something and puts it into the hands of way overcompensated supervisors and management. 
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Right man, we should find another word for tha, it is globalism.
Ficxa 479,
tallnfit

 
Not quite. Globalism has always existed. The issue is the mass produced way it exists now. It's really thanks to the Romans. They created the blueprint for impersonal capitalism and imperialism that other European powers later took and ran with. 
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Cannibalistic, monopolistic-globalist, management capitalism of growing inequalities and a captive employment labor pool for greater material consumption at the expense of a wage ceiling for hired labor, or the security of assured results of socialism within a communalist (other than communist totalitarian and repressive) authoritative, designated system. A seeming historically intractable set of Faustian contradictions.

Being of an ecological equilibrium bias, I wonder how we became the extreme ethos of natural selection and survival-of-the-fittest that has derived from the killing or cannibalizing for basic maintenance and sustenance efficiencies in the natural world. I wonder about the possible extra-terrestrial, genetic derivatives, such as the 'Boskops':

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A sketched reconstruction if the Boskop skull
done in 1918. Shaded areas depict recovered bone.
Courtesy the American Museum of Natural History
The following text is an excerpt from the book Big Brain by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, and it represents their own theory about the Boskops. The theory is a controversial one; see, for instance, paleoanthropologist John Hawks' much different take.

Copyright © 2008 by the authors and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.

These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. They brought the find to Frederick W. FitzSimons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.

The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.

Might the very large Boskop skull be an aberration? Might it have been caused by hydrocephalus or some other disease? These questions were quickly preempted by new discoveries of more of these skulls.

As if the Boskop story were not already strange enough, the accumulation of additional remains revealed another bizarre feature: These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. This phenomenon is sometimes used to explain rapid evolutionary changes. For example, certain amphibians retain fishlike gills even when fully mature and past their water-inhabiting period. Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates.Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop’s appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.

The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:

“There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”

Boskops, then, were much talked and written about, by many of the most prominent figures in the fields of paleontology and anthropology.

Yet today, although Neanderthals and Homo erectus are widely known, Boskops are almost entirely forgotten. Some of our ancestors are clearly inferior to us, with smaller brains and apelike countenances. They’re easy to make fun of and easy to accept as our precursors. In contrast, the very fact of an ancient ancestor like Boskop, who appears un-apelike and in fact in most ways seems to have had characteristics superior to ours, was destined never to be popular.
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Could that have been one of the GMO'ed derivations off the existing hominid line, but for their own structural makeup went the way of the Do-Do bird culturally-going back to my hypothesis on cultural organization?
 
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tallnfit said:
It has nothing to do with natural selection. Most people at the top of society wouldn't last a day out in the wild, where natural selection actually exists.
 
Capt_Snowflake
But that's not the entirety of natural selection. Creatures adapt to their environment. That's like saying, "Sharks wouldn't last a day out of the water." Well, no shit. But the people they were talking about, "people at the top of society", have adapted perfectly to their environment. Not that I wouldn't want to see them last a day out in the wild, but I'm nerd enough to point out that the analogy doesn't hold. Natural selection favors those who can adapt to whatever their environment may be. 
 
tallnfit
Uhhh no.  Because nature didn't invent our completely artificial society.
What got the vast majority of people at the top of society where they are is privilege and a lack of real competition for their opportunities. They have probably never had to adapt to anything in their entire lives.
Your analogy is horseshit. Sharks don't exist in an artificial existence. Maybe you should focus less on being "nerd enough" and more on actually knowing what the hell you're talking about.
Natural selection doesn't exist in a society that is entirely a byproduct of imperialism. 
 
Captain_Snowflake
Ah, so you don't believe that our own biology, our own "human nature" had nothing to do with how society developed? That's fine. If we can't agree that our own nature was part of what created our society, then we have no common ground to continue this discussion on. No problem. I'll be on my way. Have fun with your philosophy of society. 
 
Editor/OP
@tallnfit said, "Natural selection doesn't exist in a society that is entirely a byproduct of imperialism..."
In a macro-sense, would the different forms of 'patriarchy' and other '-archies' then nullify many of the historical analyses of human development; except that it's been a de facto, engineered selective process? 
 
Postscript
An interesting corollary that was in my email:
A taste for fat may have made us human, says study Long before our ancestors hunted for meat, a taste for the fat in scavenged bone marrow might have offered them the nutrition needed to develop bigger brains.  
 Post-Postscript
'Natural Selection' as a politically weaponized trend of rhetorical acceptability. Not the genetic, greater suitability.
My mentioning the Boskop branch WAS implying that whatever made them an instinct race (and it could have been their supposed superior IQ with a larger brain, made them psychopathically inclined to the point that they were ruthless in their dealing with each other, as they prayed on their lessers of their kind, than being the victims of abusive assaults by the other humanoids.
 

OlDogger
Because Ayn Rand was a philosophical cultural influence by the sympathetic resentment of victim-hood for the "put-upon producers" by she promoted that galvanized an articulate emotional synergy in her followers made her my stereotypical point of contrast for this post. 
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Bitsman
Last report I read was that something like 60% of this generation supports Socialism... This really baffles me... These kids never experience a Duck and Cover Nuke drill in school... For a 6 or 7 year old kid those were kinda scary... Looking back now.. They were kinda funny... I mean 10 or 15 Megaton Thermonuclear detonation anywhere in the general vicinity and there would not have been much left... 
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Me/OP
The kitchen debate upload_2019-3-11_21-34-8.jpeg between Khrushchev and Nixon pointed to the irreconcilable paradigms that led to that Fall in '62 when I not only wondered about my short-term existence to me, but to the cute girl 2 rows over who skin shone like that what Don Henley would sing about 22 years later.. Socialism was a rhetorical bogeyman with a terrible sponsor.. (Of course that was MITIGATED by "Malcolm's", MLK's, RFK's assassination along w/Vietnam and Chicago Riots, Chicago-8 Trial, Kent State, Chile, etc.. which said that there was a mailed fist awaiting those who didn't accept the precepts of materialistic docility..)  
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BigSuzyB
Soooooocialism ooooowwww. Boo!
If having a little input on how my tax dollars are spent is socialism, spank my ass and call me Pinko.
The US gives billions to Israel every year and guess what. They've had Universal healthcare for twenty years.
Free University education, fifteen weeks of paid maternity leave and the list goes on. They have all the radical benefits that Bernie suggests.
Why does the US support these Commies and make their own citizens go begging? 
 
 

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