Comment by bsanr2
5 years ago
>The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group.
The entire purpose of a society is to harness the potential of the group in order to enrich each individual life within it.
Stow that scarcity mindset.
You are being small minded to what I'm saying. You say harness the potential of the group. How do you do that? It necessarily requires stifling the motivations of individuals so that they can work together. I'm making 0 moral judgements on whether the motivations of an individual are or are not valid.
Notice I specifically said > for a much bigger benefit of working with other individuals in society.
So, you might want to re-evaluate your bias towards what I said.
>It necessarily requires stifling the motivations of individuals so that they can work together.
This assumes that people are naturally and totally individualistic, which is untrue even at a biological level. People work together instinctually, and they also decide, rationally, to work together. Individual and collective motivations are often the same; and while collective motivations sometimes stifle individual motivations, the former often (if not more often) replaces a LACK of motivation. In fact, the appeal to engaging in collective action in order to fill in a hole of individual meaning (motivation) underpins some of humanity's strongest and most common institutions: military service, volunteer service, protest, religion, work. That is society: individuals working in concert, by each's determination.
>I'm making 0 moral judgements on whether the motivations of an individual are or are not valid.
You're making a moral judgment privileging individual motivation, separating it from collective motivation.
Your argument is simply wrong on its face. It tries to generalize a solipsistic perspective to the rest of humanity, to which it very clearly does not apply. Perhaps only in this thought are you truly as much an individual as you seem to think people must necessarily be.
You're putting words in my mouth at this point so I don't know what else I can contribute to this discussion to move it forward.
I share the same argument David Graeber was making in Utopia of Rules, you should give it a read.
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But people ARE naturally and totally individualistic. Even when they cooperate, they do it for their own individual interest. It's due to the nature of our evolution.
Read "The Selfish Gene".
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