From: Ian Goddard (igoddard@erols.com)
Date: Thu Mar 12 1998 - 16:04:51 MST
>James Daugherty (daugh@home.msen.com) wrote:
>
>Collectives are real entities, conscious beings. They subsume individuals
>to the extent that individuals are unconscious. Memes are to collectives
>as genes are to biological organisms.
IAN: I think that the words of James above
are beautiful! I think that they are so true
they reach to levels much more profoundly
deep that the surface upon which they rest.
BUT, even as I except them as true, in the
interest of truth inquiry, I have to question
if what they refer to is "bad." Why should we
not be subsumed into a collective entity? OK,
I can think of some reasons, but there may also
be a lot of reasons on the other side, such that
it may not be a 100% "bad" thing, but, like most
things, may be a fuzzy "good/bad" thing.
If we hold that the subsummation James posits is
100% bad, and thus individual entities should not
be unconsciously subsumed into larger entities,
then we individuals would not even exist, for the
individual ameba and primary cells should not have
been subsumed into the large collective entities
that each of us as human beings are.
So the subsuming of individuals into a collective
entity cannot be more frightful or "wrong" than our
existence as individual entities! So why then should
this admittedly "good thing" not extend on and on
to higher levels of collective entities?
I'm not advocating that "it should" or that "it
should not," I'm just asking the questions that
are necessary to the process of truth inquiry.
We might also ponder, the meanings of "being sub-
summed." I have a very collectivist view of the
free market. I think that the "invisible hand" is
the true collective entity. That the modulation
of commodity pricing by supply and demand is the
true form of socialism and what we call "socialism"
is properly defined as "anti-socialism." The true
collective entity is the sum of all the people,
which is the collective sum of consumer demand,
NOT the whim of a central planing office im-
possed by threat of violence onto society.
Such is the rape of the social entity!
Free-market capitalism = real socialism
Central planning = pseudo-socialism
So in that paradigm, the true collective is
voluntary, and the involuntary just a prison.
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