Life has a way of providing a balance, consequences and yet... no real justice. It provides struggles, solutions and no guarantees. For instance... sexually transmitted diseases lay hazard to the unfaithful, promiscuous and careless, yet MANY people who have STD's weren't necessarily living the life of a sexually active person. Over indulge in the pleasures of food? Life hands you high cholesterol, obesity and the increased risk of a heart attack. Yet there are many people who've died of heart attacks who may not have even been overweight. The risks are always prevalent.
So here we are, seeing ourselves constantly threatened with our own survival. People, for the sake of their own survival, will retaliate when their safety is threatened by another. For example, if I were to go around punching people... eventually someone would try to fight back and could even potentially kill me. In a way, life just sort of works out to keep things at a certain (yet unpredictable) balance.
What's really fascinating is the various ways different societies cope with this inevitable survival that we all struggle with. Human relations power is a part of this balance in life. You're as powerful as I am, so I empathize your struggle. We lay equal risk to each other and there for... we find ourselves at a mutual understanding.
Of course, with power, comes the obvious problem of hierarchy. If I'm a human and you're an ant... where's my incentive not to squash you? Will your ant friends get mad and try to bite me? I can just kill your entire family for fun and then enjoy the rest of my day. Matter of fact, it's interesting to note that humans are by far the smartest animal on the planet which places us at the top of the food chain (nature's hierarchy of survival) which gives us little, if any, incentive not to eat all the animals below us. Again... life provides no certainty and occasionally an animal may kill a person.
The reason for mentioning the person killing an ant scenario is to make an analogy of hierarchies with human interactions. Our natural incentive to empathize with people of equal ranking of ourselves is thrown off track when one person places themselves on top of another. This is why state leaders are often quick to go to war. There is no empathy for peasants in far away lands. There is little to no empathy for a state leader's own citizens (their only motivation to be nice is in a representative democracy where their own lust for power is threatened by majority rule).
Perhaps the only reason that the notion of anarchism isn't a highly celebrated world view today is because people feel threatened by hierarchy. That's right... people are afraid of anarchy (a lack of hierarchy) because they're afraid of hierarchy itself. "Who protects me from the bullies?" Here's the part that most people don't get though. There is something known as a collective power. Collective power as a whole is stronger than any individual... yet collective power wouldn't wield violence on itself because... well... that would defeat the purpose of the whole notion of survival.
A society based on collective power could regulate itself because it would create a communal sense of survival. If you don't believe this to be true... next time you have a family gathering... just start punching the shit out of one of your relatives and see if your family cheers you (the bully) on as your grandmother lays on the floor in a pool of blood.
Cooperation and collective power is the only way we can really survive in this world if we want to live in further safety.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
"Top Down Prison Land"
Intro:
This thing we call "work" is such a large part of our existence, that I can't imagine people not wanting to be in control of it. I can't even fathom the idea of people accepting this as anything even close of being tolerable. We live in an age where the bad guys have won and they've raised generations of people to accept it. We live in a top down prison land!
Part 1: Education
Of course, the story all starts with our first day in school. You're nervous about making new friends, it's a whole new big world, new experiences and you get your first glimpse into society. You learn all the defaults of how your little school world works. You learn which kind of kids you get along with, you learn personal responsibility, social skills and last but not least... obedience.
Yes, obedience. Your number one key to success! Get to class on time, do all your work, stay quiet, raise your hand to ask a question. Sure, personal responsibility is a great key to life, but what's the point of all of this? To be apart of a functioning society? No. You're taught obedience to save yourself. You always have to answer to an authority figure or a number of authority figures.
Now, to be fair, it's not so much the structure in the class rooms which is the problem but the lesson that the students take with them home at the end of the day. After all, it'd be a wishful thought to assume kids weren't in need of guidance. But the lesson they take home with them is one they'll most likely run with for the rest of their lives which is to find personal success, ignore the success of your peers and focus on pleasing the master (or the "teacher").
Familiarizing children with hierarchical systems is an early default taught to them by the older generation. It's the same logic that's kept humanity enslaved to each other since the beginning of civilization.
Part 2: Domination Culture/ Techno-Bureaucracies
We are all living in a hegemonic culture in which we subscribe to normal domination structures. Unlike totalitarianism, where we all succumb to one dominant power, capitalism has loosened our chains a little and instead divided us into thousands and thousands of miniature forms of tyranny. These little top-down structures consist of politicians, police, financial institutions and most noticeably... private corporate tyrannies. This is also known as "managerialism." I think it's important to label it as an "ism" to decipher it from what most people would consider it to be... a natural human tendency.
Corporate hierarchies generally consist of the chairman, then the CEO, then the general manager and then the other little managers below that person. It's a general system where everyone basically has to answer to someone else. One of the problems with a top-down work environment is the relationships it creates between employees and managers. Many people get the feeling of incompetence from their managers because of the persistent feeling of being looked down upon and reviewed while they work. Generally speaking, most people don't prefer the feelings of mistrust and scrutiny, especially while working for eight hours.
Another issue with having various ranks of employment is the balance of responsibility. Managers have higher amounts of responsibility in regards to the welfare of their company which leaves workers below feeling less entitled and concerned about their jobs. Imagine having someone who was expected to drive your car around for you whenever you needed to go some place, all the while you had the competence in you to learn how to drive yourself. You would never feel entitled to learn to drive and therefore you'd be less skilled and more dependent. This would also lead to deficiency.
Part 3: Four Hour Work Day
Our free market, as you may or may not know, is anything but free. The various constraints it puts on workers is nothing short of a voluntary prison sentence. Of course... you don't have to be subjected to a corporate 9 to 5 job. There's always homelessness or... I guess throwing yourself in front of a bus could do the trick as well.
There is no democracy for workers in your typical corporate structure. The only real reason workers have any safety standards is because of governmental regulation and the only driving force outside of managerial decision making is the profit incentive. The amount of hours you receive at work all depends on the company's ability to schedule you from which is determined by the amount of profit it receives.
An important thing to distinguish is the amount of productivity that takes place versus the amount of time a worker spends at their job. For example, having an eight hour schedule doesn't guarantee eight hours of output. The amount of income a business takes in doesn't equate to the amount of hours a worker actually works. Therefore, a company may have excess product or excess time that amounts to absolutely nothing.
Now, while a worker may financially benefit from the extra hours they receive, it's also important to note that this is a waste of time as far as productivity goes. The point being, people waste lots and lots of time doing nothing. This is a part of the reason why efficiency suffers and also people waste away so much time that they could've been enjoying.
One step towards solving this issue would be to create workplace democracy on a large scale. Give people the power to control how much actual time is needed for a good day's worth of production. There would need to be an alternative to the current profit driven production.
Part 4: Alternative Proposal
It is a widely accepted idea today that competition is what drives productivity, but does the average worker really go in to work each day with the idea that their hard work is going to destroy their company's competitors? The true force behind productivity is more likely to be our collective struggle for survival. At the end of the day, people just want to eat, have a bed to sleep in, enjoy themselves with their hobbies and socialize with the people they love.
The idea that cooperation has failed because state communism has failed is just absurd. State communism failed because it was implemented through totalitarianism. State communism was based around serving the ruling party and a command economy. Neither of those two actually dealt with cooperation or democracy.
So while some may point to the pathetic examples of North Korea (or any modern day tyranny) as reasons to why "communism" has failed, there are numerous other examples of cooperation actually being very successful.
A lot of the examples of successful cooperation would take more time to expand upon than I'd be willing to explain (because they've already been elaborated on many times). Some examples worth looking into however would be the 1936 anarchist Catalonia, the worker-run Argentina factories, the various examples of worker-run cooperatives all over the world, the Mondragon Corporation, Dan Pink's TED talk on the science of motivation or any of the other mountains of evidence which show the success of worker-run, horizontal work structures.
Outro:
Looking at the real issues of managerialism, it ultimately comes down to power relations. When does a person possess too much power? How can power be justified? Although worker control has its roots deep in socialist theory, everyone across the spectrum can generally agree that their own personal oppression is worth fighting. But how can we ever solve the issue of oppression when we treat it with power struggles (tugging back and fourth to gain control) rather than dismantling the very hegemony that keeps it going?
The issues of power that we're presented with are always set up as false dichotomies. Democrat or Republican? Socialist or libertarian? More taxes or less taxes? Union or management? But at the end of the day, your own free will is what ultimately suffers and you're never satisfied, but there's always the next election... the next chance for hope and renewal.
Truth is... the only way out of this mess is to work together. As simple as it sounds. Cooperation is the key to finding liberty. It all starts with education. That was the very point of all of this. This is to present the evidence. The cases for cooperation can all be read online. It's not a dream world or a utopia... it's just a way of dealing with our human nature. A dream world is one where people can be trusted to rule over others, economic inequality and the crime it generates is a way of nature as well as the justification for the wars that were all fought in the name of some grand power struggle. In a dream world, it's ok to be poor and the economic deprivation that's forced among children growing up in low income housing is completely justifiable. In a dream world, we can look down upon the low productivity of welfare recipients while completely ignoring the excessive wealth granted to those at the top of this cannibalistic social food chain.
We need to deal with our own reality and confront the entire domination culture at large. Until we realize our true potential, we'll never stop making the same mistakes over and over.
Information Sources:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
http://thinksimplenow.com/productivity/the-4-hour-workday/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_Catalonia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
http://vodpod.com/watch/3439516-the-take-naomi-klein-2004
http://www.syndicalist.org/archives/llr14-24/15f.shtml
This thing we call "work" is such a large part of our existence, that I can't imagine people not wanting to be in control of it. I can't even fathom the idea of people accepting this as anything even close of being tolerable. We live in an age where the bad guys have won and they've raised generations of people to accept it. We live in a top down prison land!
Part 1: Education
Of course, the story all starts with our first day in school. You're nervous about making new friends, it's a whole new big world, new experiences and you get your first glimpse into society. You learn all the defaults of how your little school world works. You learn which kind of kids you get along with, you learn personal responsibility, social skills and last but not least... obedience.
Yes, obedience. Your number one key to success! Get to class on time, do all your work, stay quiet, raise your hand to ask a question. Sure, personal responsibility is a great key to life, but what's the point of all of this? To be apart of a functioning society? No. You're taught obedience to save yourself. You always have to answer to an authority figure or a number of authority figures.
Now, to be fair, it's not so much the structure in the class rooms which is the problem but the lesson that the students take with them home at the end of the day. After all, it'd be a wishful thought to assume kids weren't in need of guidance. But the lesson they take home with them is one they'll most likely run with for the rest of their lives which is to find personal success, ignore the success of your peers and focus on pleasing the master (or the "teacher").
Familiarizing children with hierarchical systems is an early default taught to them by the older generation. It's the same logic that's kept humanity enslaved to each other since the beginning of civilization.
Part 2: Domination Culture/ Techno-Bureaucracies
We are all living in a hegemonic culture in which we subscribe to normal domination structures. Unlike totalitarianism, where we all succumb to one dominant power, capitalism has loosened our chains a little and instead divided us into thousands and thousands of miniature forms of tyranny. These little top-down structures consist of politicians, police, financial institutions and most noticeably... private corporate tyrannies. This is also known as "managerialism." I think it's important to label it as an "ism" to decipher it from what most people would consider it to be... a natural human tendency.
Corporate hierarchies generally consist of the chairman, then the CEO, then the general manager and then the other little managers below that person. It's a general system where everyone basically has to answer to someone else. One of the problems with a top-down work environment is the relationships it creates between employees and managers. Many people get the feeling of incompetence from their managers because of the persistent feeling of being looked down upon and reviewed while they work. Generally speaking, most people don't prefer the feelings of mistrust and scrutiny, especially while working for eight hours.
Another issue with having various ranks of employment is the balance of responsibility. Managers have higher amounts of responsibility in regards to the welfare of their company which leaves workers below feeling less entitled and concerned about their jobs. Imagine having someone who was expected to drive your car around for you whenever you needed to go some place, all the while you had the competence in you to learn how to drive yourself. You would never feel entitled to learn to drive and therefore you'd be less skilled and more dependent. This would also lead to deficiency.
Part 3: Four Hour Work Day
Our free market, as you may or may not know, is anything but free. The various constraints it puts on workers is nothing short of a voluntary prison sentence. Of course... you don't have to be subjected to a corporate 9 to 5 job. There's always homelessness or... I guess throwing yourself in front of a bus could do the trick as well.
There is no democracy for workers in your typical corporate structure. The only real reason workers have any safety standards is because of governmental regulation and the only driving force outside of managerial decision making is the profit incentive. The amount of hours you receive at work all depends on the company's ability to schedule you from which is determined by the amount of profit it receives.
An important thing to distinguish is the amount of productivity that takes place versus the amount of time a worker spends at their job. For example, having an eight hour schedule doesn't guarantee eight hours of output. The amount of income a business takes in doesn't equate to the amount of hours a worker actually works. Therefore, a company may have excess product or excess time that amounts to absolutely nothing.
Now, while a worker may financially benefit from the extra hours they receive, it's also important to note that this is a waste of time as far as productivity goes. The point being, people waste lots and lots of time doing nothing. This is a part of the reason why efficiency suffers and also people waste away so much time that they could've been enjoying.
One step towards solving this issue would be to create workplace democracy on a large scale. Give people the power to control how much actual time is needed for a good day's worth of production. There would need to be an alternative to the current profit driven production.
Part 4: Alternative Proposal
It is a widely accepted idea today that competition is what drives productivity, but does the average worker really go in to work each day with the idea that their hard work is going to destroy their company's competitors? The true force behind productivity is more likely to be our collective struggle for survival. At the end of the day, people just want to eat, have a bed to sleep in, enjoy themselves with their hobbies and socialize with the people they love.
The idea that cooperation has failed because state communism has failed is just absurd. State communism failed because it was implemented through totalitarianism. State communism was based around serving the ruling party and a command economy. Neither of those two actually dealt with cooperation or democracy.
So while some may point to the pathetic examples of North Korea (or any modern day tyranny) as reasons to why "communism" has failed, there are numerous other examples of cooperation actually being very successful.
A lot of the examples of successful cooperation would take more time to expand upon than I'd be willing to explain (because they've already been elaborated on many times). Some examples worth looking into however would be the 1936 anarchist Catalonia, the worker-run Argentina factories, the various examples of worker-run cooperatives all over the world, the Mondragon Corporation, Dan Pink's TED talk on the science of motivation or any of the other mountains of evidence which show the success of worker-run, horizontal work structures.
Outro:
Looking at the real issues of managerialism, it ultimately comes down to power relations. When does a person possess too much power? How can power be justified? Although worker control has its roots deep in socialist theory, everyone across the spectrum can generally agree that their own personal oppression is worth fighting. But how can we ever solve the issue of oppression when we treat it with power struggles (tugging back and fourth to gain control) rather than dismantling the very hegemony that keeps it going?
The issues of power that we're presented with are always set up as false dichotomies. Democrat or Republican? Socialist or libertarian? More taxes or less taxes? Union or management? But at the end of the day, your own free will is what ultimately suffers and you're never satisfied, but there's always the next election... the next chance for hope and renewal.
Truth is... the only way out of this mess is to work together. As simple as it sounds. Cooperation is the key to finding liberty. It all starts with education. That was the very point of all of this. This is to present the evidence. The cases for cooperation can all be read online. It's not a dream world or a utopia... it's just a way of dealing with our human nature. A dream world is one where people can be trusted to rule over others, economic inequality and the crime it generates is a way of nature as well as the justification for the wars that were all fought in the name of some grand power struggle. In a dream world, it's ok to be poor and the economic deprivation that's forced among children growing up in low income housing is completely justifiable. In a dream world, we can look down upon the low productivity of welfare recipients while completely ignoring the excessive wealth granted to those at the top of this cannibalistic social food chain.
We need to deal with our own reality and confront the entire domination culture at large. Until we realize our true potential, we'll never stop making the same mistakes over and over.
Information Sources:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
http://thinksimplenow.com/productivity/the-4-hour-workday/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_Catalonia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
http://vodpod.com/watch/3439516-the-take-naomi-klein-2004
http://www.syndicalist.org/archives/llr14-24/15f.shtml
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Monogamy/ Feminism/ Sex/ etc.
After doing lots of online reading about the ideas that feminists have, I've become quite puzzled on a few things. Firstly, there's sex-positive feminism and sex-negative feminism. I found myself being completely put off by sex-negative feminists but I have a feeling they would be in the minority of feminism anyways, so I won't generalize and hold that against the entire feminist movement.
To me, sex-negative ideas have always seemed regressive. How can one person say that our natural desires (which if done consensually) are a form of victimizing or directly relate in anyway to the patriarchal mindset? Sex-negativism may stem from various roots (rape victimization, perhaps certain Abrahamic religious practices... etc) but none of which seem progressive or relevant to human nature.
With the sex-negative topic out of the way, I want to go back to my understanding of feminism. One of the major issues regarding feminism is the idea of male privilege. Me, being someone who works for two female managers, I quickly laughed at that idea. "How can I (a white, middle class male) have some sort of set privilege within society if two illegitimate authority figures above me are both female?" The way I see it, society has made major strides in favor of female rights. That isn't to say that the human race hasn't been in a constant struggle since the beginning of our existence. I've read about the witchcraft hunts and the old indoctrinated belief that women are merely property. To this day, I would agree that there are still stigmas against women even in our own society.
Some of the lessons feminism has taught me were mostly the preconceived cultural notions many men hold. You know... the usual "women belong in the kitchen," "women should stay home and raise the kids," and those sort of gender roles that are unfairly given to women. It appears to me, however, that major financial institutions which dominate our society aren't as sexist as the people who privately hold on to these customs out of cultural indoctrination. For instance, women can usually apply to almost any capitalist institution a male can. Matter of fact, certain sex-target institutions (like strip clubs) discriminate in FAVOR of female employees.
Speaking of sex-target institutions, this was to me the absolute puzzling idea of all so far. There's a certain debate over whether females are naturally inclined (by development through evolution) to withhold sex or if they're culturally pressured into being less sexually liberated than males. There seems to be a big issue with how males perceive promiscuous behavior by females. Matter of fact, females will also throw around terms like "slut" and "whore." It's like there is an ingrained idea that women should keep celibate until they're married or at least have a boyfriend and casual sex is frowned upon.
So the question here is, "Is it morally wrong (with "emotional suffering" as the basis) for a woman to 'give herself' sexually to a male without being in a relationship with him?" Well, consider that society has set up a ridiculous standard for female sexuality. That standard is a male expectation that their future girlfriend/ and or wife will be pure and their only sexual experiences will have happened with them. At first glance, this would appear to be a sexist cultural notion that only hurts women. However, wouldn't this entire social arrangement also be unfortunate for males too? Males, on the other hand, can be the go-getter. So they're out hunting for "that pussy" in a world of women who've been taught to "save themselves" for the right one. Wouldn't this entire set-up be both frustrating to men and women? It's like there was a wall put up.
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Notice for example, the meme "forever alone." It usually always depicts a sexually deprived male. I had read (a few months ago or so) an online post where people were discussing how this image is an example of guys putting female sexuality on a pedestal. This is where sex with a female is hardly attainable, while a guy will stick his dick in any person who just so happens to have a vagina out of complete desperation. Ever been in a chat room before? It's comprised mostly of guys who will jerk off for anyone who'll watch their cam and a bunch of girls who refuse to watch because "they're not like that" or they claim to "not enjoy seeing a guy jack off."
Ultimately, I think the real solution is to embrace casual sex. The conclusion I've drawn here is that casual sex is desired by both males and females alike, but due to sex-negative cultural traditions, women withhold it out of "self respect." But can we really base a woman's worth by the number of guys she's slept with? Well, if the social arrangement glorifies what a woman does with her body, then yes... people will subconsciously measure a girl's worth by how sexually active she is. This, to me, is the real problem and it affects not only the females, but males also.
Truth be told, I do consider myself a feminist but not for reasons many people would probably automatically assume. Women, in my opinion, shouldn't have the default role of cleaning the house, raising the kids or taking the last name of their husband (and marriage is a whole other topic). Women shouldn't have their worth measured by their sexuality in any way. However, I'm not going to attack the patriarchy right away for the issue of judging women by their sexuality. Women themselves have to change their ways. Stop using the term "whore" as an insult to one another (men should do the same). Stop embracing the idea that your sexuality is to be glorified and given to you as the basis of your own worth. I see these real issues as part of a whole and it needs to be dealt with at once by everyone.
One last concern I had was the idea of political correctness. Yes, it'd be nice if people were more respectful in conversation, but our language isn't really the large issue. Language merely reflects attitude and stomping out sexist language would only be achieved through stomping out these preconceived notions. It saddens me when authoritarian leftists talk about smashing the patriarchy by eliminating the sexist language. Oppression is no way to deal with sexism. Only a cultural revolution for the people and by the people can really change anything.
To me, sex-negative ideas have always seemed regressive. How can one person say that our natural desires (which if done consensually) are a form of victimizing or directly relate in anyway to the patriarchal mindset? Sex-negativism may stem from various roots (rape victimization, perhaps certain Abrahamic religious practices... etc) but none of which seem progressive or relevant to human nature.
With the sex-negative topic out of the way, I want to go back to my understanding of feminism. One of the major issues regarding feminism is the idea of male privilege. Me, being someone who works for two female managers, I quickly laughed at that idea. "How can I (a white, middle class male) have some sort of set privilege within society if two illegitimate authority figures above me are both female?" The way I see it, society has made major strides in favor of female rights. That isn't to say that the human race hasn't been in a constant struggle since the beginning of our existence. I've read about the witchcraft hunts and the old indoctrinated belief that women are merely property. To this day, I would agree that there are still stigmas against women even in our own society.
Some of the lessons feminism has taught me were mostly the preconceived cultural notions many men hold. You know... the usual "women belong in the kitchen," "women should stay home and raise the kids," and those sort of gender roles that are unfairly given to women. It appears to me, however, that major financial institutions which dominate our society aren't as sexist as the people who privately hold on to these customs out of cultural indoctrination. For instance, women can usually apply to almost any capitalist institution a male can. Matter of fact, certain sex-target institutions (like strip clubs) discriminate in FAVOR of female employees.
Speaking of sex-target institutions, this was to me the absolute puzzling idea of all so far. There's a certain debate over whether females are naturally inclined (by development through evolution) to withhold sex or if they're culturally pressured into being less sexually liberated than males. There seems to be a big issue with how males perceive promiscuous behavior by females. Matter of fact, females will also throw around terms like "slut" and "whore." It's like there is an ingrained idea that women should keep celibate until they're married or at least have a boyfriend and casual sex is frowned upon.
So the question here is, "Is it morally wrong (with "emotional suffering" as the basis) for a woman to 'give herself' sexually to a male without being in a relationship with him?" Well, consider that society has set up a ridiculous standard for female sexuality. That standard is a male expectation that their future girlfriend/ and or wife will be pure and their only sexual experiences will have happened with them. At first glance, this would appear to be a sexist cultural notion that only hurts women. However, wouldn't this entire social arrangement also be unfortunate for males too? Males, on the other hand, can be the go-getter. So they're out hunting for "that pussy" in a world of women who've been taught to "save themselves" for the right one. Wouldn't this entire set-up be both frustrating to men and women? It's like there was a wall put up.
Notice for example, the meme "forever alone." It usually always depicts a sexually deprived male. I had read (a few months ago or so) an online post where people were discussing how this image is an example of guys putting female sexuality on a pedestal. This is where sex with a female is hardly attainable, while a guy will stick his dick in any person who just so happens to have a vagina out of complete desperation. Ever been in a chat room before? It's comprised mostly of guys who will jerk off for anyone who'll watch their cam and a bunch of girls who refuse to watch because "they're not like that" or they claim to "not enjoy seeing a guy jack off."
Ultimately, I think the real solution is to embrace casual sex. The conclusion I've drawn here is that casual sex is desired by both males and females alike, but due to sex-negative cultural traditions, women withhold it out of "self respect." But can we really base a woman's worth by the number of guys she's slept with? Well, if the social arrangement glorifies what a woman does with her body, then yes... people will subconsciously measure a girl's worth by how sexually active she is. This, to me, is the real problem and it affects not only the females, but males also.
Truth be told, I do consider myself a feminist but not for reasons many people would probably automatically assume. Women, in my opinion, shouldn't have the default role of cleaning the house, raising the kids or taking the last name of their husband (and marriage is a whole other topic). Women shouldn't have their worth measured by their sexuality in any way. However, I'm not going to attack the patriarchy right away for the issue of judging women by their sexuality. Women themselves have to change their ways. Stop using the term "whore" as an insult to one another (men should do the same). Stop embracing the idea that your sexuality is to be glorified and given to you as the basis of your own worth. I see these real issues as part of a whole and it needs to be dealt with at once by everyone.
One last concern I had was the idea of political correctness. Yes, it'd be nice if people were more respectful in conversation, but our language isn't really the large issue. Language merely reflects attitude and stomping out sexist language would only be achieved through stomping out these preconceived notions. It saddens me when authoritarian leftists talk about smashing the patriarchy by eliminating the sexist language. Oppression is no way to deal with sexism. Only a cultural revolution for the people and by the people can really change anything.
Friday, December 17, 2010
True Selfishness Will Lead To a Collective Conscious
Selfishness is a word that has unjustly received a negative connotation. Without selfishness (our personal quest to satisfy ourselves) life would hold no real purpose. There would be no purpose to find love, better ourselves, seek knowledge or really do anything. Matter of fact, even eating wouldn't be worth it. However, selfishness also has it to where it's in our best interest to look out for our fellow sisters and brothers.
Firstly, let's look at the human drive to survive and our abundance of personal needs. Greater things can be achieved through cooperation rather than individual and isolated labor. If everyone just decided to make their own things and grow their own food (not hating on the concept of DIY) but never agreed to work with others, then we would have no divided labor and probably no advanced technology. This of course is obvious, but the lesser talked about subject matter is how we divide labor versus the powers that be. Our selfishness is obstructed by coercion and its inefficiency. In other words, workers who don't run their work place collectively end up serving their managers' selfish needs rather than their own selfish needs which is a problem with hierarchical structures.
Are we driven by a motive to make money? Technically speaking, yes, but it's only the value of it which drives us, not the paper material itself. Besides for a new TV screen, car payments, mortgages and a trip to the doctor's office (if we can afford it), what else does money give us? It gives us inequality which gives us many-a-bad thing. It's surely not selfish to put each other in separate social classes and grant certain people privilege over another nor is it selfish to set up a society which breeds theft and degradation. If people reached a level of collective consciousness, they could end up selfishly reaping the benefits of economic equality and its societal safety net.
Lastly, the struggle to meet our own sexual satisfaction and conquer our own lonely hearts is yet another selfish goal we all mostly strive for. Very often (depending on one's own sex drive) we get horny. We don't get horny once in our life and think, "Ok! Time to reproduce!" It's something we constantly crave. Unfortunately, the selfish act of sexual conduct has been demonized to the point of deprivation and frustration. Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired (and your 10 hour work shift is over) and play games when you're bored. Just don't have protected sex in an orgy because that would make you a whore/ slut. Oh... and gay sex... NEVER! If you're gay... just NEVER have sex... EVER! Things like monogamy, homophobia and the idea that someone can be a "whore" are all cultural values which condemn our perfectly reasonable (yet selfishly proclaimed) desires. Free love anyone?
So the entire point of this post was to make two claims. One is that hierarchical power stifles efficiency and productivity and the other is that cultural traditions may sometimes leave negative connotations about perfectly natural desires in our heads to the point where we would see our own sexuality as a shameful behavior. This is the core of how our evolutionary nature works. Animals survive through their own selfish wit. People, with their more complex brains, should overcome their anti-selfish tendencies by breaking down hierarchies and cooperating with one another so that they too can be a surviving species.
Firstly, let's look at the human drive to survive and our abundance of personal needs. Greater things can be achieved through cooperation rather than individual and isolated labor. If everyone just decided to make their own things and grow their own food (not hating on the concept of DIY) but never agreed to work with others, then we would have no divided labor and probably no advanced technology. This of course is obvious, but the lesser talked about subject matter is how we divide labor versus the powers that be. Our selfishness is obstructed by coercion and its inefficiency. In other words, workers who don't run their work place collectively end up serving their managers' selfish needs rather than their own selfish needs which is a problem with hierarchical structures.
Are we driven by a motive to make money? Technically speaking, yes, but it's only the value of it which drives us, not the paper material itself. Besides for a new TV screen, car payments, mortgages and a trip to the doctor's office (if we can afford it), what else does money give us? It gives us inequality which gives us many-a-bad thing. It's surely not selfish to put each other in separate social classes and grant certain people privilege over another nor is it selfish to set up a society which breeds theft and degradation. If people reached a level of collective consciousness, they could end up selfishly reaping the benefits of economic equality and its societal safety net.
Lastly, the struggle to meet our own sexual satisfaction and conquer our own lonely hearts is yet another selfish goal we all mostly strive for. Very often (depending on one's own sex drive) we get horny. We don't get horny once in our life and think, "Ok! Time to reproduce!" It's something we constantly crave. Unfortunately, the selfish act of sexual conduct has been demonized to the point of deprivation and frustration. Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired (and your 10 hour work shift is over) and play games when you're bored. Just don't have protected sex in an orgy because that would make you a whore/ slut. Oh... and gay sex... NEVER! If you're gay... just NEVER have sex... EVER! Things like monogamy, homophobia and the idea that someone can be a "whore" are all cultural values which condemn our perfectly reasonable (yet selfishly proclaimed) desires. Free love anyone?
So the entire point of this post was to make two claims. One is that hierarchical power stifles efficiency and productivity and the other is that cultural traditions may sometimes leave negative connotations about perfectly natural desires in our heads to the point where we would see our own sexuality as a shameful behavior. This is the core of how our evolutionary nature works. Animals survive through their own selfish wit. People, with their more complex brains, should overcome their anti-selfish tendencies by breaking down hierarchies and cooperating with one another so that they too can be a surviving species.
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