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.

> We as a society are going to have to figure out

What do you believe we are all suddenly going to figure out together? Society isn't some star trek utopia of perfect behavior. It's a complex beast that works or fails based on the regulations and modes of interaction available.

Sure enlightenment is a part of it - but to think thats the only part of the puzzle is incredibly naive.

That's not really true. I don't think there's any meaningful sense in which anybody chose this society. We don't have that level of control.

It accurately describes our society that is not sustainable, desirable or ethical.

Pretending that it is doesn't help us with evolving it towards some noble goals. To evolve the system you need to understand it.

For example you can't progress society untill you understand that the one we got after thousands of years of societal evolution is the one entirely based on the concept of monopoly for violence. Some people feel very offended about this. I have exactly zero hopes for their revolutionary attempts at transformation working out.

You know, I don't think they do think that?

I think they think that's what society should be, though.

Your example is also about a bubble. It's not social context but your own personal sense of happiness that you're talking about as I see it. You can have clean streets and little crime but be a dystopian society. Singapore and Japan come to mind. Muslim refugees in France would see society very differently than a native french person. Talking about others living in bubbles seems to me to be just a way to makes oneself feel better about the bubble one lives in themselves.

I agree in this case, but only because I think marriage is an institution that we’ve learned needs (sometimes strong) active endorsement and it’s pro-social.

My view is that cultural norms are at worst tyrannical and at best the essence of being human.

> Social iconoclasts dismiss organized religion, marriage, sexual norms, social duty, gender roles, and cultural traditions.

This is just true. But this is all of us: we all have a relationship with society around us and dismiss parts of it. As we should.

Yes, and perhaps this will be the perfectly stable system that will stand the test of time. Or maybe we're due a few more iterations yet.

Your previous comment suggested that modern society had demonstrated some kind of evolutionary fitness that means it's not worth trying anything else. My point is that I don't see much to support that.

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.

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'.

[0]: http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/100561778176/safe-spa...

[1]: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-m...

Why? Modern society is built on things that go against human nature: The national state, living till we're 80, flying, not killing people, monogamy.

I think you are making the classical moral mistake of assuming the natural state of things is the best state of things.

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.

I don't think it's "US society", as much as it is urban and suburban society which has become dominant over the last few decades. Traditionally in the US, people were a lot more communal--neighbors and families would share farm equipment, help each other through busy seasons, watch each other's farm while the other was away, help raise each other's kids, etc. Maybe the problem isn't our Americanism, but rather the lack of it, and maybe the solution is figuring out how to integrate more of it into our modern society rather than doubling down on our increasingly isolated, me-first sub/urban existences.

Well said.

The modern inclination to tear down tradition institution and then replace them with increasingly more damaging and convoluted schemes is an endless source of confusion to me. It's almost if we've become so arrogant that we assume if something has been done for generations that it must be wrong, which seems like the exact wrong assumption to make.

That's a massive leap in logic. Society isn't a simple one in, one out metric.

You find a lot of people who suffer from severe social maladjustment and view life as a zero-sum game all over the place (I blame the rise of using game theory to model real situations without a finite turn limit). It's very rare you'll be able to "argue" these people into conceptualizing other humans as unique individuals, it pretty much always comes from problematic upbringings

I don't believe your claim that your culture doesn't seem to understand the value of having a space in which you are not to be interfered. Not having one stunts the development of your culture in ways I am sure you are already well acquainted.

Just extend that concept to the individual a little further- your social growth is absolutely stunted when you have to worry about destabilizing yourself. As an example, you can't come out as gay if you have to (pretend to) be straight to keep a roof over your head, or invest in a new idea if you only get paid enough to cover needs and not wants.

And that success and failure are meaningful is what separates children from adults. If success is no longer possible because people can no longer get that experience and grow from it, that's a bad thing, especially in a society where only the already-well-off get to do it. Social progress slows down when humans can't fully mature, and drags innovation down with it.

Because every time someone tries this to create a world like this... it ends up a living nightmare. Creating equality usually ends up involving taking away freedom and oppressing people.

Maybe it's inherently not such a hot idea for some social reason we don't yet fully understand?

I don't know but I'm not sure we should keep trying as millions of people end up dead every time someone gives it another whirl.

This is not even an attempt to approximate what I said. I said that humans are composed of cells which cannot reproduce, colonies are composed of ants which cannot reproduce, and human societies -- unlike humans and ant colonies -- are composed of humans which reproduce independently of the society. When I specifically indicate that what distinguishes human societies from ant colonies is that ants can't reproduce and humans can, what else could that mean?

This makes nonsense of the idea that a human society could be viewed as a superorganism. They don't have the coherence; they are constantly subject to betrayal by the humans of which they are composed. There are historical processes which look like the reproduction of a society: in the wake of Alexander the Great, northern India received a bunch of Greek colonists who built theaters, spoke Greek, practiced Greco-paganism, and wrote a lot of history, which marked a big contrast with the existing societies which built stepwells, spoke Sanskrit, practiced Buddhism, and wrote almost no history. And then the Greeks took up Buddhism. And they started speaking Sanskrit. And they stopped writing history. And they stopped building theaters. But they didn't go anywhere.

If societies were superorganisms, that couldn't have happened. The loss of Greek culture in India would have simultaneously been the loss of all the Greeks.