[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.