The world was created or just is?

I dont think Thatcher was lying or being hyperbolic when she said "there is no such thing as society" - if we are to embrace capitalism and markets in a near totalizing way, we must all be individual, atomized subjects with our own desires, needs, truths, wants etc. That is the highest and most exalted level of service in a vulgar free trade system. So what chance does any sort of universalism beyond some ill-defined "greater good" served by mere free exchange of value stand? Nice trick to say serving yourself is actually serving the greater good, gets us out of a lot of social obligations.

 

It certainly is it. While I take some solace that it comes from a position of weakness rather than strength, the American political system is uniquely set up for counter-majoritarian rule. Not great!

 

Paul is the one who told the early Christians that the mere determination to live a godly life would bring persecution. He also expressed the concern (against the once saved, always saved faction) that he himself would be disqualified from the heavenly race. My takeaway: low bar makes for nice company, but high bar is required and is liable to get you in trouble.

 

I see this as semantics; I have no problem with a learned/observed/experienced event by only one individual being identified as a "personal experience." I believe Murph clarified that he was using knowledge in a scientific sense, and hopefully he recognized that I wasn't. Just different use of terms.

What is the corollary between a "unique experience" and a "strong personal feeling?" I miss the old empiricism/rationalism discussions that would take place around here. Much more interesting than the political gotcha threads. For as much of an empiricist as Locke was his *proof* of the existence of God was not very empiricistical. Frankly, I don't agree with it. I'm not sure how much thought a 17th century man gave to extra-dimensions, but his notion of what is and isn't possible does not seem to be based on science, let alone that which we can experience.

I've never intentionally tried to push my view here on others, and I don't believe anybody is trying to diminish my experiences; honestly, it wouldn't bother me if they did. I think skepticism is normal, healthy, and perfectly reasonable. I was just trying to address that (1) the Bible calls for faith and knowing (it's not heretical)...again I believe Murph and I understand where each other are coming from, and (2) it's not contradictory for both to exist. An example I thought of: I don't "know" how computers are put together (sure, I get some of the parts or even how they work in the big picture, but I don't know how they were assembled and what each particular micropart does and what have you), but I have faith in these parts, and I "know" how to use the completed product.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

Elinor mostly had to be a historical sleuth since the land grants don't really function any more. So, she uncovered mechanisms that she thought aided cooperation. My wife designed experiments to test those mechanisms & that is why they crossed paths. When my wife went to U. of Indiana for a few days, Elinor was in a conference room down the hall from her office doing yoga.

 

I think there is some wisdom in the idea that prices convey real information and therefore can act as a guide to societal needs. However, if these prices ever became our only guide to societal needs, we would indeed break many of our important historical social relationships, or extra-rational institutions as Schumpeter called them. Many of these losses appear to have occurred and feel tragic indeed.

 

To this point, prices do convey some information, but they are also abstractions. The product itself and the price necessarily conceal the social relations that produced those things. Does the low price of your fruit on a clean grocery store shelf convey useful information or guide us to wise policy choices, or does it conceal a system where people toil in abject conditions to deliver that nice looking piece of fruit (out of season locally perhaps and flown in from far away) at a nice low price? If that prices changes, is their conclusion that the conditions under which that fruit gets to the shelf might be improving so its worth the increase? Definitely not, because those conditions are concealed from them. People dont know how that fruit gets there and what misery anyone endures for that to happen, they just see a number go up or down (and perhaps the price at which they must sell their labor has gone down due to things beyond their control). (This was inspired by a "can you get bananas anytime under socialism or are they a treat" internet debate). So much of the work of our culture and society is concealing those conditions, and moving the market to all walks of life is about creating those idealized conditions in all spaces, so that everywhere is just a nice looking store display where the underlying problems of society are invisible, and only a product and price remain for you to see.

 

Awesome. Thanks Wes.

I do think that Locke’s claim was an example of rationalist vs empiricist argument and was likely speaking directly to DeCartes’ earlier claim that “every clear and distinct perception” “must necessarily have God as its author.” If this be so, Locke noted that God must be author of contradictory truths, as we all have different, clear and distinct perceptions. In your case, I understand that you see God clear and distinctly, but others clearly and distinctly perceive very different origins and meanings of life. The problem is that we don’t have a common currency to evaluate these claims against one another as they are all the personal kind of knowledge.

Clearly, Locke wasn’t trying to disprove the existence of God here. As I understand him, he was just suggesting that ideas can’t be deemed true just because one person is convinced of them. I haven’t actually seen lock attempt at a proof of God. I did read DeCartes’ proof, which I also didn’t find very convincing.

 

We may be getting a little far a field from the OP, but then again, the OP was basically ‘what the hell is this universe?’, so perhaps that is an impossible result.

Anyway, I love this question, and I appreciate your point about prices being an abstraction. Indeed, any single number, trying to convey a very rich concept, such as value is bound to be an abstraction. However, if we insist on having large markets, global or even just national, I’m not sure that we can ever represent the complexity of what goes into the creation of a product other than through a severe abstraction. What alternative do we have?

For all their shortcomings, prices do at least respond to conditions in far off lands regarding people and occurrences that we consumers can know nothing about. It would seem to me impossible to coordinate efforts on such a grand scale through any other mechanism.

Still, I’d like to come back to your overall point that, regardless of our mechanism of valuation of material goods, giving over too much of our meaning in life and work to the production and exchange of these goods can rob us of our underlying humanity.

 

I hope we can find an alternative (or at the very least create spaces free of the market and other things which require elaborate abstractions as stand ins for reality), because the more society is based on abstracted representations, the more we are divorced from a shared reality and social confusion will flourish. Perhaps its already too late in that regard, if we are determined to have a consumer society. Perhaps we should have paid more attention to postmodernist media theorists 40 or 50 years ago haha.

 

Perhaps I’m overly pessimistic, but it seems to me that the world is just too complex for our little minds to model it with any great detail. I don’t this was the case during Hunter-gatherer times, where we likely lived in tribes of fewer than 150 people. In that world, I think each member had at least a fair idea of the processes that sustained him/her.

Today’s world is just so different. There is a book called Thanks a thousand, where the author decided to thank everyone that had a hand in making his morning cup of coffee. I believe this project took months and brought him into contact with hundreds of people across the globe. And that was just one cup of coffee. What kind of mechanism could possibly bring us that kind of information regarding all the stuff we use in a day?

This whole project is complicated by the fact that many of these people working abject conditions, as you see them, actually chose that path over their other options. Marxism sometimes seems to argue that people are making the wrong decisions for themselves because they have been brainwashed by their environments, which I think is a good lesson take personally but a dangerous posture to assume with others. ‘We can live your life better than you can’ is an attitude that can clearly lead to some terrible outcomes. In the end, it seems to me that our only two realistic options are 1) use prices, or 2) go back to tribal life.

Ok too far, now you take that back!!

 

Two cents …

I just don’t see authentic Christianity as a workable system for any nation. It’s far to radical I can only see it functioning as a robust counter-culture. And in the West it’s ceased to attain even to that.