[wahnfrieden]

I think we focus a lot on procrastination and less on a severe and widely experienced social illness, of being controlled by others. How often are we ordered to do something by another person in our communities that we can't readily disobey, how easy is it for any of us to choose to relocate to another community, how much of the value you can generate is taken from you. Living this way strips our agency and limits/devalues our individual capability for vision.

Adapting to this and considering it normal is bound to lead to other issues that we end up blaming ourselves for, because it is possible to cope and do better within the framework so it feels that any lack of progress there is an individualized failure

[zamfi]

This is a very western perspective on the role of the individual. Not to say that it is wrong or others are better or anything, but there are other ways to interpret the interrelatedness of actions by individuals within a collective, that maybe don’t result in a feeling of “being controlled by others” in healthy circumstances (of course, there are cases of toxic environments, workplaces, communities, etc., and this isn’t meant to minimize any of that).

One way to perceive the impact of community desires and needs on the individual is “control” but alternate framings include support, belonging, mutual aid, etc. — again not saying any is “better”, but I do think the singular conceptualization of the individual as being solely responsible for his/her own decisions and ultimately outcomes might cause a lot of the friction as reality doesn’t quite support that notion.

Dan pink’s “autonomy, mastery, purpose” trifecta is enlightening here, as it illustrates how “autonomy” doesn’t mean “free from control” but is ultimately about the respect an individual feels, regarding their decisions, from others.

Just some food for thought.

[coldtea]

>This is a very western perspective on the role of the individual. Not to say that it is wrong or others are better or anything

No, it's also wrong, as the whole luxury of choice the parent pretends to be the ideal situation, is based on a whole lot of other people supporting them (from parents throughout childhood, to social structures, technology, resources, and infrastructure, security, to healthcare, someone else whipping their ass in some nursing home when they're 80 and so on).

[wahnfrieden]

not sure what you're saying, that you can only imagine support networks in societies through this current system - seems like both a limit of the imagination and a lack of looking at where that's been demonstrated (in likewise post agriculture, large scale society). I didn't elaborate in my OP on solutions, I only offered some ways of evaluating how healthy/"advanced" a society is (not just looking at individual potential)

[coldtea]

>seems like both a limit of the imagination

Imagination of some future utopia is a dime a dozen. Scenarios that actually work are much less easy to find.

>in likewise post agriculture, large scale society

I don't see any post agriculture "large scale society". I see an even more increased role of agriculture, amidst food and resource wars, and society dropping in numbers (and scattering to smaller dwellings), what with climate change, and all.

[wahnfrieden]

lol goodbye

[rtpg]

Perhaps its a western perspective, but I think you might be oversubscribing this as individualism.

A common phrase is about how you don't choose your family. But you often choose your friends, and many can choose certain communities to actively be in.

I think that you can have a sense of community, of some sort of greater good, of buy in, when you have that choice. For example, someone who has the choice of moving across the country to go to a school that interests them, to help out with an organization that aligns with what they are interested in, to work in an industry that they appreciate.

When society is built in a way to provide people the ability to move around, then those inside it will understand the value of it, and will be active participants in the societal effort. and they will be way more onboard with the "demands" from the society as a whole as a result. Though of course this is a question that can come up at every scale.

At least that has been my experience. I care a hell of a lot more about society when it has given me the opportunity to be part of communities that make sense to me, and to see how others get this opportunity as well. And so I gladly pay my dues, even if I might complain a bit.

[zamfi]

Okay, and as a counterpoint: being able to up and leave your community on a dime to choose another one leads to filter bubbles, mutual distrust, easy "othering" of communities not your own, and makes more challenging any work to improve dialog, communication, and mutual understanding and respect across society and across class because: why bother repairing or bettering your community when your BATNA [1] is "I'll never have to see these people again"?

I'm not advocating for the alternative, in the slightest -- being forced to be part of a community that doesn't respect you the way you are (as was true for MANY pre-internet, including anyone who wasn't part of the heteronormative or neurotypical hegemony) is horrible, toxic, abusive, etc., and I wouldn't wish it upon anyone. But the dramatic filtering of American society into factions that mirror political parties with shockingly separate information worlds that frankly describe completely different realities is made much easier because it is so easy to silo yourself.

There is no easy answer here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

[wahnfrieden]

the thing is we've had societies, at large scale (beyond dunbar number nonsense), post discovery of agriculture, where those freedoms I listed were much greater than today. current conditions aren't inevitable or the only realistic option. these usually involved cooperative society (a focus on collective, without severely limiting these freedoms in the name of so-called necessary bureaucracy and hierarchy), I'm not talking about a libertarian utopia. I'm talking mostly about modern research on indigenous societies (before europeans arrived or other cases)

[zamfi]

The freedoms you list: whether you can relocate, disobey community orders (norms?), or “keep” most of the value of your labor, are fundamentally rooted in a notion of the individual as separable from the community or society they exist in.

It sounds like you are saying that these values are very important, and that missing them is a “severe … social illness”.

I’m not making any historical claims here, nor any claims of relative correctness or value (though plenty of others in this thread are) — I’m just noting that these are a specific set of values and not universal ones, and I’d caution you about universalizing your notion of individual by characterizing the lack of these freedoms as a “social ill”. For example, one might easily value connectedness, belonging, mutual aid, and social support above the ability to relocate, etc. — in most societies the freedom to relocate is not the freedom to relocate your social support — and giving up social support by relocating in order to “keep” more of produced value is a big trade-off that many don’t choose to make.

And as you note, other societies have had other notions of the individual across history throughout the world.

[wahnfrieden]

yeah these are not traditional ones, I'm paraphrasing from ones that graeber/wengrow suggest we use over other measures of societies we've used traditionally (such as how economically successful they are, how much production, etc - the types of measures that obviously favor capitalism as the measure of success)

> (I) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

these are proposed as more meaningful ways of evaluating how "advanced" a society is in its liberties. which is interesting for reevaluating current conditions, (post agriculture, large scale) human societies of the past (that may have been dismissed as primitive before), and for imagining where we can go from here.

[zamfi]

Yes, my point is that using those as a measure of liberties is a particular definition of liberties that makes assumptions about what humans value most.

Not everyone values these — nor even liberties in general — and describing their lack as a “social illness” as you did originally universalizes them in a way that may not be warranted. I have no doubt that other cultures have these values — the point is that not all cultures do, and not everyone does even within cultures that do.

[wahnfrieden]

yeah they are proposing them as values to adopt, and they are standing them up in contrast to existing conflicting values

[coldtea]

>I'm not talking about a libertarian utopia. I'm talking mostly about modern research on indigenous societies (before europeans arrived or other cases)

And how are these revelevant to a modern, much more elaborate, society, if it wants to also keep certain things (like production, technology, education, infrastructure, etc.)?

[wahnfrieden]

you can go read a book for the answer, dawn of everything, I won't try to discuss with you

[coldtea]

Just because an anarchist leaning professor wrote some ideologically driven ideas in book form, doesn't mean it's the way things are.

>I won't try to discuss with you

I figured as much

[wahnfrieden]

you're free to dismiss the research material and form your own judgment of it without reading based on politics

[alexalx666]

"without severely limiting these freedoms" - I think that they will be devalued automatically by collective, which will lead to the stagnation and demise of that society.

[wahnfrieden]

well, I submitted a new article on the research that elaborates if you're interested to learn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32127961

[zamfi]

I’m extremely confused by how the lesson you drew from Wengrow and Graeber is that the notions of freedom to relocate, disobey your community, and keep the value of your labor are actually universal and not based in a specific notion of individualism.

It seems like you’re making an argument about hierarchy, rather than individualism. Yes, hierarchy is not universal. But I’m not sure what that has to do with the above freedoms you describe? Taxation? The existence of laws? Please enlighten me.

If anything the lesson from The Dawn of Everything is exactly that there are no universal or even “native” notions of society, collective, hierarchy, etc.

[wahnfrieden]

sorry for paraphrashing sloppily, I wrote the OP hastily because usually this kind of anti-capitalist stuff is unwelcome here and gets downvoted lol, I didn't expect this attention

this is the specific passage of what they suggest as new measures of social liberty:

> (I) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

[Dracophoenix]

> “autonomy” doesn’t mean “free from control” but is ultimately about the respect an individual feels, regarding their decisions, from others.

How is respect defined here? One man's definition of respect will clash with another's. Some define respect as cult-like devotion, some as a recognition of one's boundaries, some as a transaction at a specific price, some as engaging in an expected cultural performance, etc. Freedom from control or, more precisely, imposition and interference is well-defined. Desires for respect can balloon into wishful thinking, if not self-delusion.

[chongli]

Respect is defined by the respecter, not the respectee. How someone shows respect is up to them as an individual, mediated by societal norms. On the other hand, if someone feels disrespected it’s because they have detected either insincerity or outright hostility/antagonism directed towards them.

Of course, some people may have more or less difficulty detecting sincerity in others but that’s no different from other social skills.

[Dracophoenix]

So in short, your view is that respect is simply the sum of the subjective expectations of countervailing forces (i.e. respector, respectee, and society)? If so, that doesn't provide a clear definition for the term. Instead it leaves the act of defining to interpersonal power plays.

[wahnfrieden]

there’s plenty of power play mind game “respect” abuse that doesn’t neatly fit into your categorization imo, which unravels the rest of what you’re talking abt

[coldtea]

>How is respect defined here? One man's definition of respect will clash with another's.

Respect shouldn't be entirely up to the invididuals to define what action (note: what action/stance/etc, not which person) deserves it -- otherwise it's not respect, it's just a personal whim.

[Dracophoenix]

That is the point I am trying to get across. As a side note, whim isn't limited to mere individuals. Whole societies can and do build their morals on cargo cults and arbitrary delineations of what are and aren't respectable practices.

Given our agreement that whim should not define respect, then what is it defined by exactly? If the individuals themselves are not the ones to determine what constitutes a "respectful act", then where does one obtain the ability or authority to draw the line as to what qualifies as respect and what doesn't?

[EUROCARE]

I really dislike calling these kinds of attitudes "western". Asia has plenty of hyper-individualistic behavior, even (or especially?) where nominally socialism or communism rules.

[uoaei]

It is a philosophical framework that grows directly out of Western culture per philosophical tradition during the Enlightenment era. Western culture had much more of an effect on this tradition than Eastern cultures did.

It's not about where the philosophy exists in individuals, but about what socio-systemic forces brought those modes of thinking into being. Ironically this mirrors the point above about how the framing of this issue itself is rooted in individualist perspective.

[wahnfrieden]

it’s a misreading, they’re projecting something onto societies they evidently haven’t read up on

[krisrm]

Somewhat orthogonal to your point, but it is interesting to me how easily some will dismiss perspectives or ideas by referring to them pejoratively as "western".

[zamfi]

I think you’re projecting. I’m not sure how I could have caveated my statement more than I did — I am not dismissing the perspective I describe as “western” at all, merely noting the existence of alternatives that may offer other perspectives on the question at hand.

[weakfish]

It’s not perjorative in GP’s case, simply an observation IMO. It’s valuable to assess ideas from varying cultural standpoints

[zamfi]

I’m all ears if you have a better descriptor for philosophies emerging from enlightenment-era thought in Western Europe. (Sure, I could say all that but it’s a mouthful!)

[EUROCARE]

The point is, these behaviors clearly did not emerge only there as we have plenty of examples in completely unrelated cultures. There is no point in calling something "western" only because it's happening there as well - you have the same thing everywhere else, so why not call it "eastern" or "southern" instead - or why use meaningless names at all?

[zamfi]

In this case, the name is really only indicative of where the current canon of philosophical thought identifies the first recordings of these notions as explicit philosophical notions, and has nothing to do with “these behaviors” as were not even talking about behaviors.

The name isn’t meaningless — and I’m not using it from a belief that “western” people are more “individualistic” or something than others, as you and others seem to be implying. Obviously there are plenty of individualistic behaviors in people across cultures.

But the notion of the individual with agency creating a state to protect individual agency is recorded explicitly by Kant and enlightenment rationalism, collectively typically referred to as “western” by philosophers. The OP here was discussing freedoms and values, and I was pointing out that they seem to derive from this notion of the individual, which is only one among many.

Do you also open discussions of Newton’s Law of Gravity with a critique that it’s misnamed because gravity is present everywhere?

Apologies to anyone triggered by this jargon, it wasn’t my intent.

[wahnfrieden]

it’s funny bc i’m specifically citing research from indigenous populations mostly in the americas and asia

[Fargoan]

No. You're just wrong.

[weakfish]

Please elaborate

Edit = spelling (dang autocorrect:-()

[muzani]

That is how society works. I do not rear chickens. I do not behead the chicken. Sometimes I buy the chicken, forget to eat it, and worms get to it. I look in disgust at my worm-filled trash, but it's some other guy that carries the trash and the worms to an incinerator.

The trash guy goes home, turns on the tv, lies in bed complaining about how there's too many choices on his streaming service but nothing to watch.

But somewhere out there's a guy like me who makes sure that the trash guy gets too many choices instead of going out at night to buy pirated DVDs. That's how we change the world. On Wednesday, we will start event storming sessions on a million dollar project to get the Japanese subs and dubs to say the same thing.

Trash guy wishes he was valued higher for his labor. I wish I could watch trashy shows on weekends instead of looking at procrastination flowcharts. Somewhere out there there's a CEO making a 8 digit salary from controlling people, but he wakes up at 4 AM and considers it a good day if he logs off work at 7 PM.

[uptime]

I read this and say that it sounds fair, but I remind myself that it all hinges on compensation and freedom. I am not comfortable with the notion that they are all equally trapped in their burdens.

CEO and The World Changing Content Delivery Guy can always apply to be the sanitation worker, every day until they land that job, in order to rid themselves of the nagging feeling that they could be consuming more content.

Trash Guy might be able to pursue his dream, hanging off the outside of a truck at 4am, of becoming a World Changing Content Access Guy but only if he has the funds and time to do so.

I fall into this trap myself, wondering if I should have just delivered packages for a living, but I forget that lower wages never decrease stress, and very rarely buys freedom.

[BuckRogers]

Good points except I’m not sure about lower wages not decreasing stress. Not in and of themselves. But typically I’ve been happier and lower paid jobs. I’m a highly responsible person, so project work stresses me more than it probably should. I preferred to do a job and just come home like most human beings do. Unless I am the boss collecting all the money, I don’t really see the advantage to project work with long projected schedules and all of the stress that comes with that if you’re a relatively low paid software developer.

The best situation is to get a government job that’s well paid, what usually with a pension, good benefits and healthcare. Even if that is picking up trash. It’s pretty tough to beat. It may not be completely fulfilling but the grass is always greener on the other side and being under stress is healthier than being overstressed.

[mancerayder]

The CEO only needs to do this for a year or two to have enough resources to become financially independent, that's the difference with the other characters in this story. Everyone else is working as part of lifestyle. And that's what's troubling so many people, the lifestyle around obligation blows.

[throw827474737]

There is so much ill and wrong in this.. true this is how it is in a lot of places, but accepting and sating

> That is how society works

is just resignation and ignorance (and sad to read) that it could, can and actually is different somewhere else ;p

[vanjajaja1]

like an inverse? where the trash guy controls people and has an 8 figure salary, but the ceo working 4am to 7pm gets paid peanuts?

[wahnfrieden]

yes in ways, there’s been findings on (post agriculture, much larger than dunbar number) societies in which such hierarchical roles were purely seasonal with roles useful practically or ritualistically becoming devalued off season and tyranny-level powers flipped somewhat in favor of the other side, or even ones which have police forces that are simultaneously clowns and thus kept from overstepping their status with their power (I can elaborate more on details on this one if I look up the citations again from Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything)

[pydry]

There are probably "CEOs" of three person startups who work those hours, but a fortune 500 type CEO works those hours it's because they want to.

There arent really any down sides to being at the top of the capital hierarchy aside from guilt perhaps.

[s1artibartfast]

>fortune 500 type CEO works those hours it's because they want to.

I think the parent post was more a statement about the human condition than economic equality.

There are a lot of successful workaholics that are unhappy. On paper they have the economic ability to change their situation, but reality has more barriers.

Humans of all types are capable of depression, confusion, delusion, and disappointment.

[muzani]

Bob Iger did 6.30 AM to 4.30 PM as Disney CEO. And then another 8-10 PM. He says it gives him plenty of family and solitude time, but it makes me wonder what hours all the other CEOs do, especially the ambitious ones who neglect family.

[wahnfrieden]

it’s performative in many cases to set standards for workers who have less innate reason (no meaningful stake, stolen wages) to overwork

[TedDoesntTalk]

> There arent really any down sides to being at the top of the capital hierarchy

Really? What about sacrificing family time?

For example: Elon Musk has 8 children. How much time do you think he spends with them, if any? Maybe being a father is simply not a priority to him, and that’s his choice. But it’s not his childrens choice, I can guarantee that, and those children will suffer for it.

[BuckRogers]

That’s interesting but I would say that being at the top of the capital hierarchy has no connection with loss of personal time. There’s plenty of people at the top of the capital hierarchy that don’t do anything at all. Or very little. I doubt Paris Hilton is up at 6 AM. Unless it’s to get hammered by some dude that she met at the bar.

I think linking capital to work as a correlation is pretty dangerous. That conversation will only lead to people realizing that they’re not paid according to the value they produce.

They’ll learn that they’re paid according to their ability to demand it. Soon after that, you have unrest. You have workers demanding unionization. Which is the correct answer.

[wahnfrieden]

There’s a heavy capitalism realist veil over most of the other comments in this thread. And this does come down mostly to control over one’s own time (you can see it even with the most workaholic CEOs, who on whim can veer off to fancies unrelated to their CEO role or for their personal benefit with ease when they have any need or want to)

This has heavy implications. For example, with the ability for the working class to protest anything; rich business owners are the only ones who can take days off for that without collapsing through meager safety nets

[BuckRogers]

Agreed. I'm essentially out on the streets in a few months if I don't maintain in income. And that's a lot easier done with accumulated capital than it is by labor. Of course we could just chop the legs off many contrived industries like finance, and stop bilking everyone with usury, if we just realized the authority to mint money is the peoples to begin with. We could get loans from our own government. That would stop a lot of implicit or soft abuse.

One commenter said the trash man wants more money, but instead enjoys his weekends. I can't agree. He should be paid more. The books should be open, either through union power or worker's cooperative power. Taking out the trash is a valuable service, if no one does it, it's a pretty big deal very fast. That requires a form of solidarity between workers to exercise that power, but it's all about the trash man's ability to demand it. Employment is predatory if you examine the nature of the employer-employee relationship, and the goal is achieved because people are desperate. Including me, and I'm in software.

Your point about money buying back your time is an important one, because that's your freedom of choice. Freedom of choice does involve Pepsi vs Coke, but it more importantly involves how you spend a very short and finite life.

Simply put, my country (the US), needs more unions. It won't be perfect, no human endeavor ever is, but it will be better.

[zerohp]

The downside would be worse if he had 8 children as a poor person. His parenting is due to his character not his wealth.

[weakfish]

Can we not try and better society? It hasn’t always been this way.

[muzani]

That's why UBI was proposed.

Otherwise there's blocks of tribalism. Some workplaces are tribalistic - they actually do care for you like family once you get past the initiation rites. Most of it is replaced with faux tribalism though, to squeeze more out of some other party.

[wahnfrieden]

the refreshing and recent research from graeber/wengrow showed in detail how we don’t need to collapse back down to small tribal groups to support a healthy society (healthier in terms of freedoms I mentioned) at scale. their work should expand our imagination for future society by looking at what we were able to already demonstrate under similar in useful ways conditions in our past (post agriculture, in large society above dunbar number bs)

[wahnfrieden]

oh my bad, I forgot that’s how it works

[csouza-f]

Why be sarcastic like this? This don't add nothing to the conversation here.

[wahnfrieden]

sorry, I can be as dismissive of reactionary nonsense while being more helpful - here’s a compelling realm of research that they’re evidently missing out on and not speaking to and choosing to treat something demonstrably avoidable as utterly inevitable/exclusively practical: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32126771

[YZF]

This hits close to home. I've moved to a different country. I've left various communities. Switched jobs. All partly because I wanted to feel like I have more agency. We seem to have a lot of people that like ordering other people around and we seem to have a lot of people that like/want to be ordered around. I would almost call this the militarization of our societies. Starts at school perhaps? Going to school is usually not optional. You have to do your homework. You have to be at class at a certain time. So in many communities and organizations the way to get agency is to be the person that tells others what to do. Not all, but most. Servant leadership exists here and there but is rare.

All that said I guess it's not clear what society looks like if everyone is "truely" free. Perhaps like some tribes in the Amazon. And does that mean the nearby group that compels people into the military just enslaves all of you.

[TedDoesntTalk]

> We seem to have a lot of people that like ordering other people around and we seem to have a lot of people that like/want to be ordered around

“Some of them want to abuse you. Some of them want to be abused.”

[dboreham]

True Scotswoman.

[k1m]

I enjoyed Jeff Schmidt's book on this topic. Disciplined Minds: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds

[wahnfrieden]

thanks for sharing. looks like a good companion to graeber’s bullshit jobs

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

Personally, much of my procrastination is on stuff that I’ve decided that I want to do and nobody else cares if I do it. A lot of the time there’s some outcome that I want, but one or more of the steps to get there that is scary or involves some kind of toil that I don’t want to experience. There’s a conflict between my long-term desires and my short-term comfort. The dissonance when short-term comfort wins is the uncomfortable procrastination feeling.

[hirvi74]

I forgot where I read this, but I read somewhere that procrastination is sometimes a semi-subconscious protection method in order to protect one's self from exerting effort for a task in which one's effort will not be adequately rewarded.

In other words, one might be procrastinating because the juice ain't worth the squeeze. I believe there might be something to this too -- maybe what we are struggling to do might not be worth doing in the first place? Obviously, I would not attribute this to all or a majority of instances of procrastination, in my experience. But sometimes? Absolutely.

Perhaps in times of resource scarcity, this could be beneficial to certain creatures? I have no idea, but that is my wanna-be hypothesis.

[musha68k]

> How often are we ordered to do something by another person in our communities that we can't readily disobey

Psychologist Christopher Ryan touches on this topic through his research and books on pre / post agriculture.

Basically it boils down to loss of freedom through territorialism and resulting patriarchy of modern civilizations. I can recommend both "Sex at Dawn"[1] and "Civilized to Death"[2].

Cheer up, at least we've got donuts and dentists today.

[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24521078M/Sex_at_dawn

[2] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27911904M/Civilized_to_Death

[wahnfrieden]

Hmm, I recommend you acquaint yourself with more modern readings and findings of anthro/archaeological evidence on this topic that has some radically different fundamentals than what you’ve shared - I shared an article that elaborates here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32126771