Society wasn't created in a vacuum to create a way of life you feel most accustomed to, that then becomes immutable. It changes all the time. and you don't notice it until it's too late because it happens so gradually.
So it will now. Society could shift to accommodating these other people and you wouldn't notice it, because you already do the thing it is shifting towards, which is maintaining better boundaries for yourself.
> I get where you’re coming from, but it seems any proposal that requires every single person to change to be protected from some harm is destined to failure, or would at least be incomplete and take decades to establish itself. Judging by how populism is tearing our societies apart, we may not have that time.
Perhaps we may not have the time, but I'm unconvinced it is so. There is also no need for every single person to change, just a critical mass and not necessarily drastically either. I propose that even some awareness of this issue in the majority would be enough.
It is also not unprecedented that the overall stance of society changes on some issue drastically over time. I'm thinking of ideas such as the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, the acceptance of non-white people as equal members of society (yes, the change is not complete, but it is drastically different compared to a hundred years ago), the awareness of sexually transmitted diseases and so forth.
The awareness of the danger of letting any single corporation have too much power seems like a good addition to this class of ideas.
> Did you read the article? Not everyone wants to go back to how things were before? Simple things like not having people stand on top of me in line. There was a year of no social pressure to do anything and it was nice. No need to feel like you needed to socialize because everyone else is. That's what this article was about.
I read the article, but I will admit it doesn't really "make sense" to me. If I don't like something I don't do it or I try and change it, so it becomes something that doesn't bother me. If you don't want to be involved in certain social settings then don't go. I don't get why "Society" needs to change because some people prefer not to be around people. Its perfectly fine that you prefer less social interaction but many people are the complete opposite and that's also okay.
>Nowadays it seems to be more about behavioral engineering and how we can coerce people to behave in a manner which matches our definition of a perfect society.
I haven't noticed this, are you sure it's not your attitude that's changed, not society?
> I worry that we're now viewing all of society's interactions through a prism of demographics and privilege.
I don't see why this is something to worry about. Perhaps you mean that you worry we're now viewing all of society's interactions exclusively through a prism of demographics and privilege. That would indeed be a problem, but I don't see any reason to believe that it is actually happening. It seems to me that that make-your-own-destiny, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative is still alive and well.
Ideally we would want to keep both things in mind: people can make their own destinies but we need to respond to social dynamics that make it harder for some people to self determine than others. It's not about different rulesets, its trying to build a ruleset that achieves a certain equilibrium between giving everyone equal, unearned, social advantages and trying to maximize the aggregate social advantages conferred.
> If the purpose of society is not for propagation into the future, I’m not sure what is.
that doesn't involve living together in a million dollar house and it hasn't happened for 99% of the time humans have been on this planet. mating and living under the same roof are two different concepts.
you're conflating two concepts that are completely orthogonal.
Anyway: society is the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.
In no way society means "propagation into the future" and "propagation into the future" in no way means "housing should be affordable only if you are married and live together with children".
It would also otherwise mean that society in the past focused on the "mating thing" while it is clear they did not, priests, priestess, warriors, chastity rules embedded into religious or social norms, it looks to me that the most important trait of the society was to make it prosper, protect it from outside and share the labour that needed to be done in the most productive or the most "please the gods" way on the inside.
Moreover since people living alone or not in a commitment are nowadays the relative majority, it's nearly 30% in the US and in my country is an overwhelming 33.2%, there are more singles than couples here, maybe it's time society adapts to the new paradigm, society wasn't invented by some superior entity that set the rules on how we should live, comply or die style, society reflects the way people already live, unless you live in Afghanistan under the rules of the Talibans.
It means we are living in societies whose mechanics don't align with how people live, that's why it is not working for the people living in it and people cannot afford or are unhappy living in it.
> When it comes to who you are or how you choose to express your individuality
I’m from an Asian society and I’ve seen the pain the strict social framework can cause people who biologically cannot conform to social expectations. However, I feel like your phraseology sweeps more broadly than necessary. Society should think very hard about what would be good social norms, and evolve them as appropriate. (For example, the social norms against women on the front lines may need to be re-evaluated in the age of fly-by-wire F22.) And society should accommodate people who for biological reasons are different.
But that does not require unstructured, wholesale accommodation of how people “choose to express their individuality.” You can accommodate people without abandoning the rule that, “in general, society expects you to be a certain way and do certain things.” Abandoning that rule is a recipe for unhappy, directionless people and a disharmonious society. The fact of the matter is that (1) society is better and more well functioning when people conform; and (2) most people are pretty similar and will be made happy by the same things. The stunning irony of millennials is that they were raised to “follow their bliss.” But they grew up, and what’s their number one complaint? That they can’t find steady work that will let them afford a house in the suburbs and a couple of kids.
> Under this line of reasoning, any level of societal participation is tantamount to slavery. I understand the what you're angling at and I agree to some extent; however, can you provide a viable alternative?
I understand why you ask this. I will respond in a way that I know will be unsatisfactory to you.
The way I see it, is all the actions that we are expected to take that are in service to self (i.e. getting yours). Society is geared up to make that seem perfectly natural. In fact, you/we all need to get acquainted with morality. The first step of that is to understand the world for oneself, to take no one's word for it but instead to apply the scientific method personally. Accept that you do not 'know' much, very little is proven. What you have are beliefs masquerading as knowledge - this is to say you have negative knowledge (aka crap).
What I'm really trying to get at, is that social change is an effect of the actions of all of us in aggregate. To make the world better, one can only attempt to makes oneself better. Be the change you want to see. And that is done by following one's heart/conscience/spirit or whatever you want to term it.
> Society in and of itself is a hierarchy. Anything that contributes to society is therefore something that enforces the 'hierarchical system.'
> You don't have to participate in society if you wish otherwise. The world could always use more mountaintop hermits.
Its not as easy as you might think to not participate in society! To get away from it completely is impossible. People I have never voted for, or agree with, demand, by force if necessary, that I contribute to and support their system.
Right now, you can see the next generation system that has been in design for us. Citizen scores, UBI (carrot), access (or not) to 'social' goods eg public transport, loans (stick), free movement, limited use of energy, water, etc without the 'administrators' say so. Smart water meters, electricity, 5g is the backbone to that.
Still, I don't discount the mountaintop - but I don't think there will be peace there either!
> People can be both ends and means and be quite content. Personally, I think there is too much emphasis on people being ends unto themselves in the current culture.
That's because society is really nothing but a lot of people working together in an alliance. If we didn't make people themselves the end they would have no reason to participate in society.
Do you have a source for this? I feel like peoples beliefs change all the time.
> Today LGBT rights and acceptance have won (and will keep winning)!
This is true. But in contrast racism and sexism is increasing, in the western world at least.
> In a world of immortals, only violent uprisings could challenge the status quo. The world would have no incentive to change.
I don't buy this at all. The world has even more incentive to change. You are not making the world better for anyone else in the future. You are doing it for YOURSELF. Because you will most likely still be around in 200 years.
> Would the world of today have still invented punk rock?
Maybe, Maybe not. Hard to say. But the world would have invented something new.
> And if you can’t agree to what those values are, there definitely is a problem
I don't see how that's the case. The only way we could agree entirely on those common values is to be entirely homogenous as a group, and that is not the case and in my view, deeply undesirable. (I suppose another way we could agree entirely is to be entirely conformist, but that doesn't seem very attractive either).
> Times have changed, there’s too much lazy tolerance now, and people do need to organize around some common values that isn’t just what is the progressive de jour.
Well that comes across as "I want more of my values in society, not yours because they are wrong". If you gave some reasons for why yours are correct and mine aren't, I'd be interested.
> If I sat down and tried to design a set of social norms for discouraging people from being their best selves, I honestly don't think I could have done a better job than this.
> Why don't we want people to be good at things?
Historically most people were peasants or serfs. The only thing they were expected to be good at was that, and were actively discouraged from doing anything else.
We have gone from "Civilization and Its Discontents" to the Human Potential Movement in the blink of an eye.
>Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside?
Because millions of years of evolutionary biology tells us that people outside our community are dangerous. There are rituals an outsider must undergo in order to join the community and become safe.
This kind of evolutionary baggage can't be undone by just waving a magic wand and wishing it away. I think we are trying to direct our evolution towards not having communities, but this kind of things take a long time (and by a long time I'm thinking on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years).
> You feel weird socially because you weren't wired to interact in the modern way (fast, tenuous, no strings).
I feel a lot of the issues in our society boil down to this. Logically we should feel more secure in a modern economy because of the sheer material wealth, and yet so many of us suffer depression, anxiety, and a raft of other chronic health issues. I suspect this is at least partly because we are evolved to find security in close communal relationships with people around us, but these relationships have become more shallow in modern society.
>The real problem is are people growing up in a society where they are being subconsciously funnelled towards a particular choice (to the point where they don't see other options as valid choices due to subconscious biases).
Mechanisms like this exist in large part to defeat a sort of social entropy that would arise if everybody made their own descisions. It is desirable to be able to have expectations about others behavior and a larger shared social game like 'Nuclear families and husband/wife'. Pretty much necessarily you're going to get something like a competing access need[0] where some people are going to be really hurt by these games because they don't want to play or can't play[1]. We only have a select few remedies to this which aren't 'destroy all the social rules and let anarchy reign', and while some people think that option would result in good outcomes I have a hard time finding faith that it would.
A position likes yours worries me massively because it seems to be something like 'systematic coercion to maintain social norms is never okay unless it's explicitly part of the law and then it's still not okay because the intent is to maintain a social norm rather than keep the peace'.
It's called society. If most people didn't follow other people (or demand it!) we would not have societies at all. We'd be individualistic animals, or at best small tribes.
>It's also dehumanizing
You're completely wrong. People copying and following the path of others is one of the reasons we've dominated earth. Only a very small portion of us are risk takers that make new trends that others follow.
> The conformity is kind of the point and makes it better for the rest of us
So when you say "rest of us" here you're coming from a society that's on the edge of survival?
That's a context I definitely wasn't thinking. I'd assumed based on the conversation we were talking about cities vs small towns in relatively well established countries.
Honestly, I'm not sure I buy your hypothesis though, even if I think of struggling countries, feel you'd have to back it up with more reasoning and data. I don't really see how conformity would help. It still seems to me like it's just an obstacle, all innovation or attempts at change or trying new or different ways are shut down and repressed. If the current way of life isn't yielding the kind of outcome needed to lift them above that edge of survival, continuing to strictly enforce and being against anyone trying to go against it seems counterproductive to me.
I'm not saying you get rid of law and order. But I don't see the benefits of say banning certain type of medicine, foods, dances, music, art, social interactions, love making, natural selection of a mate, methods of trade, methods of construction, etc.
> there is a reason individual choice is emphasized almost solely in societies rich enough to afford letting people make mistakes
I feel you might have the cause and effect reversed. It could just as well be that there is a reason societies that emphasize individual choice are often the ones to become prosperous and rich.
> And to push for individualistic behavior when you think that your society is disintegrating seems to just accelerate any problems that may exists.
I don't think individualism and participation in community are necessarily at odds with one another. Communities of choice can be really powerful and meaningful in peoples' lives. I think the tricky part is figuring out how to equip young people to find and build communities in a society that no longer provides it by default.
Society wasn't created in a vacuum to create a way of life you feel most accustomed to, that then becomes immutable. It changes all the time. and you don't notice it until it's too late because it happens so gradually.
So it will now. Society could shift to accommodating these other people and you wouldn't notice it, because you already do the thing it is shifting towards, which is maintaining better boundaries for yourself.
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