vicdan wrote:Diebert van Rhijn wrote:That's just a bunch of unfounded speculation Vic.
No, it's just a fairly probable scenario -- but it would be utterly devastating. Even if you assign it only a 10% chance of happening (and i think it's much higher), it will ruin our society. This is the socioeconomic equivalent of playing Russian Roulette.
You fail to explain where exactly the attraction lies in some (extremely) basic housing and food supply for the voluntary unemployed of the general populace. Even the common welfare systems in 'socialist' Europe are generally unattractive as to the height of the financial support (
not because of stigma) and that is even above and beyond how I would envision the DVU (Dole for Voluntary Unemployed). It would perhaps turn out to be closer to a prison complex but without the locked doors or other depressing factors since the whole point is to provide a psychological sound base level from where people might get interested again to participate in the economical system. Same is done already for people diagnosed with some kind of mental disorder, so it would be only a matter of extending the label toward a distinct personality
structure instead framing it as merely dysfunction.
Yes, it might. it might happen that we have to pay people to not work, the way we now pay farmers to not grow food. That of course will in itself be a monumental failure of socioeconomic policy.
Work is never the goal but functionality or self-respect and happiness can be goals. So the question becomes: how to keep people happy and society functional when work and non-stop entertainment would become decreasing options. To answer this a bit more creativity is required than the question "to pay or not to pay them".
However, that doesn't address my core issue, which is risk valuation. I simply refuse to countenance betting our society's very existence on an untried idea like this. We had seen before what happens when a radically new socioeconomic order, hatched wholly in the laboratory of the mind, is tried -- just look at the former eastern block countries.
But you still failed to make the case that facilitating voluntary unemployment would be any 'radical' new thing with a credible potential for any great social change. In many modern countries who
have arrived in the 21st century the system is already very close to the suggested changes. A country like the USA is really one of the exceptions in the modern world.
You made an irrelevant disclaimer which missed the point. Uni himself agreed to frame the issue in terms of death -- he constantly states that to refuse to support the indolent dickwads like him is to condemn them to death. I merely ran with his own assumption. Again, the point was to explore what his own ideas really mean, by framing them in very stark and immediate terms.
Fair enough, I wouldn't agree with Uni that it's like a condemnation to death in
most cases. I'd guess he framed the issue in very stark and immediate terms as well which helps just as little as your continuation of the terms.
if you don't feel refusal to institute universal dole is a death sentence for the voluntarily indolent, you should be telling that to Uni, not to me.
I tell you both then: there are many imaginable causes to the deliberately choosing unemployment over work. Refusing support by some 'principled' stance doesn't seem very responsible to me because it
might in cases lead to death or other severely negative consequences out of anyone's control.
Diebert wrote:Most will survive all-right, but then again, death is not the worst thing in life, not at all actually.
What an utterly idiotic statement. If your situation is worse then death, then
kill yourself. You only have a justification to claim that X is worse than death if you are being forcibly prevented from committing suicide while in the situation X. Otherwise, it's just a way to exaggerate the difficulty of the situation in question.
A situation cannot be deemed better
or worse than being dead since we cannot compare the death state (a non-state) with something else. We can only have a fear of death or sadness over someone else's death or feelings about the prospect of an ending to something we're attached to. These are all fully circumstantial and often quite cultural too. So circumstances will decide if death would be seen as an improvement, for example the believe that it might benefit someone else who lives on.
Then it follows that something can never be
worse than dead, since it's an utter unknown. We cannot even know that our supposed suffering stops since we might get caught in a stretched out time experience in the last millisecond of our life and have to loop through our memories in all kind of ways. You might be reliving them right now as you're reading :)
So death in itself cannot be said to be bad in any way. It's the
situation defined by a life and its meaning contained in it that says something about a possible death. Exactly in that sense the way a life is being lived or
forced to be lived is way more relevant than the ending of such life in itself.
Yup. it's the understanding of human psychology. if the notion of indolence at others' expense becomes normalized, and a new generation of people grow up who had been inculcated with this idea since childhood, reversing that inculcation will be essentially impossible. Reversing it would take generations, but the society can collapse in mere years, decades at most. We do have an excellent example in history to look at -- ancient Rome. This was largely what happened there. Rome had kept going for a couple of centuries afterwards, but it was a zombie state, a failed state. There was no going back. Once panem et circenses became the norm of the land, that was it. Rome was dead.
There are many different views on the causes of the fall of Rome amongst historians. Your casual linking it to the bread distribution seems quite uninformed.
Actually the reverse point could be made way easier and with way more
facts backing it (and even exemplified by the mounting trouble for the current USA). In general it could be said that Rome's downfall were caused by the same things that made it strong. One could say its date was expired.
One of the mainstream points made by historians is Rome's increasing maltreatment of the poor and lower working classes. They got increasingly abused in forms of wage slavery, military service and
taxation. Free bread and circuses became then the only way to prevent a major defection or uprise. So it extended the life of the state, for a while. It didn't solve the deeper problems of military expenses, general decadence, internal conflict and organized enemy tribes, often lead by Roman trained ex-mercenary generals.
To summarize: the
panem et circenses could be said to be an attempt to revitalize a dying and increasingly unstable empire. But it certainly wasn't a cause of any kind and only in the most superficial sense comparable to social welfare in a modern state. It's an interesting topic and I could recommend a good history book to explore the finer details.
I can hardly believe an obvious intelligent person would make such leaping errors.
probably because you aren't as intelligent -- or as wise or as insightful -- as you think you are.
Oh, I'm not that special, way beyond average perhaps but still having a long way to go in skill, knowledge, reasoning skills and communication. The
redeeming factor is to know ones limits very well and that can only be known by fully understanding what things like intelligence, wisdom and insight
are. And one cannot know that just using intelligence. This forms then the beginning of wisdom which really lies beyond things like facts, reasoning and technology, and even beyond the 'purely functional'. Not that it means anything to you right now.
