Theoretically, individualism is about treating each individual individually. Content of character &c, racial patterns in those characters notwithstanding.
In fact it's a hack that nuzzles Communism. Individualism works not by treating each individual as their own mini-tribe, but treating everyone as part of the same tribe.
Consider: self < nuclear family < extended family < tribe < clan < everyone. These are roughly the natural circles of intimacy. Individualism doesn't work by contracting the tribe or clan down to smaller areas. It works by expanding the inner circles. As per outbreeding: if you breed far enough, everyone is like your immediately family. Theoretically outbreeding could have resulted in loss of intimacy with family, demoting it to tribe, but in retrospect that could have only worked on paper. Instead tribes and clans and everyone are promoted to immediate family, in accordance with scripture, intention, and chosen method. To a member of the individualized races, everyone is your long-lost brother until proven otherwise.
Cousins are about 12% related, which feels close, and it seems evolution did freak out and nearly divide by 0 when someone might be like 3% related to you. Which is what, second cousins? Share a great-grandparent? (Why isn't this called being grandcousins?)
Since everyone is your brother, there's no need for indicators of tribal allegiance, nor any need to pay attention to someone who uses them anyway.
Unfortunately, intimacy in conserved. Relative gain in intimacy is paid for by relative loss, so intimacy with blood family was indeed lost. Unfortunately, the original circles stopped at [clan] not [race] or [nation] so there's no API calls that can interrupt this unfounded brotherhood when confronted with members of non-individualized races.
Get over sibling rivalry and everyone can be best buds. Calls for
genocide or prison tats whatever are merely a rebellious phase, they
don't mean it. If someone has a different religion, it's merely an aesthetic surface difference, they'll come around eventually. Worse, the distant foreigner might allegedly share your religion...
Exogamy is Communism because [from each family according to their ability, to each family according to their need]. Great clans have to marry into lesser clans and vice-versa, on account of not having any options. Harrison Bergeron started centuries ago.
Exogamy is Communism because families do need to be centrally planned. The patriarch needs to make the decisions, largely due to huge tracts of...transaction costs. Imagine trying to track a fee/debt every time your toddler wanted a snack. "Breastfeeding: $N per boob." Sorry, [go with your gut] is state of the art for intra-family accounting.
Supposedly the patriarch is restrained due to narcissistic love, but exogamy makes everyone more dissimilar, thus less lovable. Individualists treat society as a whole as if it ought to be centrally planned, based purely on affection and brotherly love, but disregard the familiar bonds that make that remotely bearable.
P.S. Of course, redistribution is impossible. The great families started keeping intricate geneologies to prove they were allowed to marry, while the peasantry became even more ignorant of their history. "Who is my ancestor, Bob?" "I dunno, Fred, everyone? Who is mine?" Eventually the great families bargained the church down and let them marry more closely, but only after the individual peasants had lost all their kinship supports. Each time the peasantry tries to replace these supports, the State has ferociously attacked their efforts. E.g. fraternal lodges. The church really had to fight for that one.
"Individualism works not by treating each individual as their own mini-tribe," it doesn't work at all because the individual cannot self-perpetuate. the individual has to go outside to reproduce. in other words, it's not a complete unit. in other words, the individual is not an "individual".
ReplyDeleteive been thinking on tooling past couple days from trying to learn blender again. my first thought was the existing thought, blender is unintuitive garbage. then thought to complain about 3dsmax being expensive and in essence needing to pay a whole college apparatus to train you to be able to use it. but then thought in reverse: what do i use? csp. did i get training to use csp? a little bit. i got ideas every now and then from very different places. at the most basic level, a very long time ago i was told to not worry about programs or brushes at all and do everything in "hard round" with pressure sensitivity on a single layer - in other words, a pencil on paper. but where did i learn how to use a pencil?...
in the end "i learned by myself" is not really an accurate statement. a child growing up does depend on the child eating and his body growing, but the parent-/society-shaped hole is still there, even if it's absentee and ineffective. that the highest end tools imply a lifetime of association and costs to produce a lifetime of livelihood is in the end not so surprising (e.g. 3dsmax is 2k/year, i.e. 5~10 users support 1 toolmaker's rent).
kealey says the cost of copying compared to cost of inventing is 100%.
probably true. but that's given the copying succeeded. which is not a universal. there is no comparison for all the instances where the copying failed. some things are outside your abilities to obtain no matter what the cost.
"some things" is probably a lot of things.
i feel this implies "schools of thought" are just another kind of being. or, that all things are beings. ideas are not universal, they also birth and die.
ReplyDelete"William Shockley invented the transistor, and there is noone alive today capable of running a chip fab who was not mentored by someone who was mentored by someone who was mentored by William Shockley."
some ideas are so prevalent and so simple it seems they're the same and they're everywhere. but maybe a lot of them are not. maybe like sunlight something overhead can obstruct the rays somewhere sometimes. and maybe it's not true "anyone" could've done it. ideas and technologies do get "lost" and "found" after all. even if someone does do it again it may be hundreds of years from now. maybe there's a simpler explanation, and that's where teaching and training are.