People keep bringing up these "smaller communities," but I have to ask: what exactly are we talking about here? If you mean geographic borders, the whole conversation is pointless. Modern humanity doesn't live in small, isolated pockets anymore; we are an overwhelmingly urban species. Most people are packed into megacities with populations exceeding 10 million. Where is the "small community" in that? A single street? A neighborhood? My actual community—the people I actually know and interact with—is a scattered group spread across the entire country. In this era of seamless transport and instant digital connection, physical proximity isn't even a factor. On the flip side, I barely know the people living on my own block. I don't know their names or what they do for a living. Honestly, there might be neighbors I’ve never even laid eyes on. They could be right next door or a thousand miles away, and it wouldn't change a thing. Just because someone is physically near me doesn't mean they belong to my "community."
hiddeneagle98 said:I don't know what to tell you, but I’ve been sitting here staring at this thread for twenty minutes trying to wrap my head around how anyone could actually believe that nonsense. It’s like watching someone try to build a skyscraper on top of a foundation made of wet cardboard and then acting shocked when the whole thing collapses under its own weight. You see it all the time in these types of debates where people just grab onto whatever shiny, half-baked idea catches their eye without ever stopping to ask if it actually makes any sense in the real world. It reminds me of those old-school urban planning disasters back in the day, where some guy in an office decides a highway needs to cut right through a perfectly good neighborhood because he looked at a map once and thought it looked "efficient," ignoring the fact that he was essentially destroying the soul of the community just to shave five minutes off a commute. That’s exactly what we’re doing here. We're taking these complex, messy human issues and trying to force them into these rigid, little boxes that just don't fit, and then we act surprised when the reality of the situation refuses to cooperate with our neat little theories. Honestly, it's exhausting to watch.
Quincy I can't even begin to wrap my head around what was just said here. It’s like watching someone try to assemble an IKEA bookshelf without the instructions, except they’re also trying to use a hammer made of frozen yogurt. You see this all the time in these discussions—people throwing out half-baked ideas as if they’re gospel truth, completely ignoring how things actually function in the real world. It’s exhausting, honestly. It reminds me of those times when you’re driving down a highway in the Midwest and someone decides that stop signs are merely "suggestions" rather than actual laws; it creates this chaotic, nonsensical mess that leaves everyone else picking up the pieces. We need to get back to some semblance of logic if we want this conversation to go anywhere, because right now, we're just spinning our wheels in the mud. I wouldn't go so far as to say we're seeing the "formation of collective societal concepts" here. It’s not that deep. What’s actually happening is much more superficial; because of certain external pressures, people are just feeling a temporary surge in social cohesion within the framework of our existing status quo. It's like when a sudden storm hits a small town in the Midwest—everyone suddenly becomes neighbors and helps fix each other's roofs, but once the skies clear, everyone goes back to ignoring one another. We aren't building a new way of life; we're just huddled together for warmth because the weather turned cold.
If you look at the way mid-century American socialism tried to push collective ownership—that whole era where everyone thought we could just pool our resources and run things like one big family business—you have to ask yourself what actually drove that hunger for collectivism in the first place and why some of those ideas managed to stick around longer than they had any right to. It wasn't just some random whim; there were deep, systemic roots to why people started thinking that individual grit wasn't enough and that the group needed to hold the reins. You have to dig into the economic instability and the sheer exhaustion of the working class during those periods to understand why the idea of a shared pot seemed so much more attractive than the cutthroat competition we usually see. It’s like when a massive corporation fails and suddenly everyone starts looking toward community cooperatives as a safety net; the cause is always found in the failure of the existing structure to provide basic security. As for why certain elements of that mindset endure, it’s because once you introduce the concept of mutual reliance into a culture, you can't just unring that bell. Even after the formal systems collapse, that instinctual drive to lean on the collective remains embedded in the social fabric, acting like a ghost in the machine that keeps resurfacing whenever the individualistic model hits a wall.
I noticed you took my concept of "circumstances" and split it into two separate buckets—social circumstances and external circumstances—and now half this entire debate is spiraling because of that distinction. Just to be clear, I wasn't making that division in my original argument at all.
I've been sitting here thinking about what hiddeneagle98 said, and honestly, it’s one of those things that just gets under my skin because it feels like we're constantly circling the same drain without ever actually fixing the plumbing. It reminds me of how people react when a major corporation like Ford suddenly announces a massive recall—everyone loses their minds for forty-eight hours, there's a flurry of angry tweets and news segments, and then, by Tuesday, the collective memory of the nation has simply evaporated, even though the underlying issue that caused the defect is still sitting right there under the hood. We have this habit of treating systemic problems like they're temporary glitches rather than deep-seated flaws in the machinery itself. It's like watching someone try to patch a sinking boat with Scotch tape while ignoring the fact that the hull is practically disintegrating; you can celebrate the small win of staying afloat for another ten minutes, but you aren't actually solving the problem of why the water is coming in. We need to stop settling for these superficial fixes and start looking at the structural integrity of the whole situation if we ever want to see actual progress instead of just more frantic, short-lived damage control.
Think of it like those sudden, massive shifts you see in any complex, self-organizing dynamic system—where everything is moving along predictably until, out of nowhere, the whole structure flips into something entirely different.
Is this sudden wave of changes—and all that baggage we’ve been sweeping under the rug for years—actually a core part of our current social blueprint, or just a chaotic glitch in the system?
Actually, they aren’t just reacting to things; they are the literal engine driving these new social concepts forward, which is exactly why I think your argument doesn't quite hold water.
I honestly don't know how many times I can say this before it finally sinks in, but we need to stop pretending that these small, incremental shifts in policy are actually going to move the needle on the massive structural issues we’re facing. It’s like watching someone try to drain a flooded basement with a teaspoon while the water main is still wide open; you can admire the effort if you want to be polite, but let's be real—it's completely futile. We keep seeing these tiny adjustments from Washington, minor tweaks to regulations that barely scratch the surface, and everyone acts like we've reached some kind of milestone. It's exhausting. It reminds me of those endless committee meetings at a massive corporation like GE where people spend three hours debating the font size on a memo instead of addressing the fact that the entire production line is failing. We are looking for systemic overhaul, not just more cosmetic surgery on a broken system. If we aren't willing to tackle the root causes head-on, we're just spinning our wheels and wasting everyone's time.
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world actually functions, but people constantly get it backward: the underlying blueprint of a society is what dictates its circumstances, not the other way around. You can't just point to the chaos or the prosperity of a nation and claim that those conditions created the system; it's the core philosophy and the structural framework of the society itself that engineers those specific outcomes. Think of it like an architect designing a skyscraper—you don't build the foundation based on where the wind happens to be blowing that day; you design the structure to withstand the environment, and that very design determines exactly how much sway the building will have when the storm hits. If you want to change the reality of life for Americans, you don't just tweak the symptoms of our current situation; you have to address the foundational concept that built the house in the first place.
If you ask me, it’s not a case of one being the sole cause and the other being nothing more than a byproduct. It isn't that simple. Instead, I see them as two sides of the same coin, constantly cycling back and forth—maybe even feeding into each other in a dominant loop—to drive the entire process of evolving our collective consciousness.
Let’s look back at that whole communism debate again. It’s funny how people talk about it like it’s a one-size-fits-all blueprint, when clearly, the Chinese managed to "teach" it to their system in a way we never did. So, what’s the actual disconnect there? Why does the exact same theoretical framework for a society end up producing such wildly different social realities depending on where you plant the flag? It’s like trying to use the same recipe for sourdough in a humid Florida kitchen versus a dry Arizona desert—you can follow the instructions to the letter, but the environment is going to change the outcome every single time. You have to wonder why the same core concept results in such polar opposite social landscapes.
Or, if we’re being honest about how things actually work, there comes a point where the concept of private property loses its grip once it stops serving the interests of the majority. It’s pretty simple: social circumstances eventually force a shift in the entire societal framework. Think about it like this—when enough people are pushed into poverty under the current system, they hit a certain threshold where the old way of doing things just doesn't make sense anymore, making a completely different social structure feel much more viable. In the end, the circumstances themselves dictate which social model fits the moment; all society or the individual really has to do is wake up and recognize that reality.
To me, the whole point of raising social awareness is to get people—and society as a whole—to actually spot these patterns before they hit the fan. If we could recognize these circumstances in real time, we could implement calculated shifts in our social framework to buffer the impact. It’s about creating a sort of shock absorber to protect ourselves from those sudden, violent, qualitative shifts that happen when you have a complex, self-organizing dynamic system suddenly losing its balance. If we could just manage that kind of amortization, we might eventually be able to steady the pendulum. But looking at how things are going right now, it feels like we’re just gaining momentum, swinging harder and faster from one extreme ideology straight into its polar opposite.
And that’s exactly what happens when someone operates under the assumption that there's some sort of "static," perfect blueprint for how society should function. It’s like they believe there’s a single, unchangeable gold standard out there, which just makes it easy for them to convince anyone listening that their specific version is *the* one. Instead of actually trying to find middle ground or build something constructive, they just swing the pendulum violently toward their own side, turning every conversation into a zero-sum game where the only goal is to win the argument rather than actually resolve anything.
If we actually fall for the logic that picking the perfect social structure has nothing to do with the actual circumstances of a society—or even the environment surrounding it—and instead claim it’s all based on some supposed "universal values" or these timeless, abstract constructs, then we’re just doubling down on a fundamentally flawed premise. It’s like trying to design a one-size-fits-all suit for every body type on Earth and wondering why nobody fits comfortably. By leaning on those lofty, unchanging ideals, we’re essentially providing a convenient excuse for the misguided notion that there exists some static, flawless blueprint for society. It’s the kind of thinking that chases after a pipe dream, attempting to engineer a perfect utopia that ignores the messy, shifting realities of human life.
A static, ideal concept of society would only work under static, ideal conditions. Which obviously don't exist. In the real world, what works today won't necessarily work tomorrow.
Identifying dangerous trends and using smart, adaptive adjustments to buffer them should be the core job of politics. Look at how major Western nations adjusted during the 20th century specifically to prevent full-blown revolutions. But things are far more complicated now. The problem with modern democracy is that the average voter—and society at large—just can't keep up with recognizing these dangers because the systems have become too complex. I fear we won't see these issues coming, and even if we do, finding the right way to mitigate them will be nearly impossible.
Joseph Bailey41 said:People usually describe her as a passionate reader of Facebook. 🙂
I’m currently taking some time off to recharge, just enjoying a little break from the daily grind. It feels good to step away for a moment and clear my head. Looking forward to catching up with everyone once I'm back! kaže: Slowly but surely, independent thinkers are being turned into a mindless, irrational crowd—a mass of people who can no longer clearly identify their own best interests. I don't think we should be too hard on them, though. The world has become so incredibly complex that it's genuinely difficult for the average person to grasp how everything works or to predict where any given action might lead. Does anyone actually have a reliable handle on things anymore?
No way, they’re just laying low for now. I really hope they don't end up meeting the same fate as Socrates. 🤔
I honestly feel like everything needs to go completely to hell before anything truly new can actually happen. Radical democracy.I’m just keeping a close eye on how things unfold. At the end of the day, we can't predict how anything is going to turn out—we never could. I honestly don't know when uncertainty started feeling like this uncomfortable thing that everyone feels the need to avoid at all costs. 😉
Some have gone quiet, sure, but most are just too lost to even feel confused. If they were actually confused, they might at least bother looking for an answer.
Joseph Bailey41 said:That said, individuals *do* stay loyal to a society because of what it does for them. It’s like when someone crashes your workspace, spends the whole day making a massive racket with a power tool, and then tries to make amends by offering you a blanket and a cup of artisanal cocoa in the evening. ☕
In those situations, feeling some sense of loyalty is totally normal—especially if you show up to work with a ham sandwich while your coworkers are stuck with moldy bread.
Socrates could afford to joke around with a young democracy or even play fair, mostly because in Greece, you can pretty much walk around naked. Meanwhile, the clauses of the social contract have been multiplying like rodents. No sane person would sign something like that with a clear head. But if they shove it into your hands before you even know your own name, you might just take it.
Under those circumstances, manufacturing consent for just about anything isn't hard. In my humble opinion, we aren't looking at a conscious union of thinking individuals; we're looking at a global hostage crisis. Sure, there's another side to this, but that's still largely experimental and happening under conditions that are nowhere near a controlled lab setting.
Slowly but surely, independent thinkers are being molded into an irrational, manipulated mass that can no longer identify its own best interests. We shouldn't be too hard on them; the world has become so incredibly complex that the average person can barely grasp how things work or what the consequences of any given action might be. Does anyone actually know for certain anymore?
Joseph Bailey41 said:I’m only willing to step up if there is a genuine desire on your end, rather than just some superficial need created by the media. With respect,
Joseph Bailey41 said:When you take a system apart through literary fetishism, focusing only on specific fragments, you end up reconstructing it through sheer citation. Hypertext allows for this Frankenstein-style integration of idealized concepts, much like how a shepherd gathers his flock. This new organism—composed of bonsai cats, the cacophonous howling of a deaf choir, the scent of camphor from car wrecks, and various other scavenged "creative commons" objects—is more than just mere fiction. A distorted image of life replaces an objective, mathematically recognizable reality, yet this newly created simulacrum is uninhabitable because it lacks a functional permit. Squatting temporarily in this post-capitalist ruin gives the author a chance to emerge both alive and dead at once. Like Schrödinger's cat, they become a living witness to actual absurdity and a Barthesian "dead author," replaced by a mob of anonymous users sharing their own takes on Nietzsche or leaving troll comments under unsigned articles in The New York Times. In this transformation, the author becomes someone with nothing left to lose, granting them a kind of absolute literary freedom.
(Since we're all just messing around anyway. 😁 )
Ladies, I’m not looking for a fight, but if things get ugly, I won't hesitate to defend myself.
I don't have anything better to do right now, so I might as well write a little essay. 🧐 😁
The tension between the individual and the collective has never been more convoluted than it is today. We are caught between forces driving homogenization and those fueling social decomposition. Sometimes these forces clash head-on; other times, they operate in separate spheres without ever directly colliding. As a result, the big picture of how they interact is becoming increasingly messy and opaque.
Modern social organization doesn't give a damn about grand philosophical inquiries; it’s purely pragmatic. The goal is simple: maximize efficiency and maintain constant growth, because if that stops, the entire global paradigm collapses. It's a technical requirement. Whether a society is homogeneous or not is irrelevant—what matters is that it functions efficiently. Societies achieve homogeneity through normalization, a process that has become practically global. People everywhere buy the same brands, follow the same regulations (like traffic laws), study the same subjects, watch the same movies, and generally engage in a vast amount of "sameness." Human beings (the subjects) have been turned into objects through intense marketing processing, making it nearly impossible to distinguish genuine individual thought from the mere echo of a marketing matrix. Even they can't tell the difference themselves.
So, where does the decomposition come in? That's also facilitated by technology—specifically, the absolute novelty of information overload. Information is no longer a scarce resource that's hard to come by; it's a flood that people are drowning in. From an seemingly endless supply, an individual can only absorb a tiny fraction, so different people pick and choose different pieces that fit their specific personalities. Communication is no longer a hurdle either; you can find a niche circle of people with identical interests regardless of how rare or obscure those interests might be. And you won't just find them—you can live entirely within that bubble. You could live next door to a neighbor and never understand a single thing about them, and neither of you would care.
Amanda Jackson5 said:So if that's the case, why wouldn't a "contract" be possible at all?
So I guess you're saying we shouldn't touch the pendulum.
Ideals still exist, though. I actually touched on this recently in another thread (under "Is there a positive role for diversity?", post #4): Quincy:
...there’s no such thing as a perfect society, or any truly "perfect" entity in reality, because anything that actually exists is inherently finite, flawed, and full of contradictions. Back in the Romantic era, the social ideal was the Greek polis, which represented that perfect sweet spot where individual liberty and deep communal connection lived in balance. Every citizen could see themselves in that polis. But once the polis was replaced by class rule, people stopped seeing the state as a reflection of themselves. Of course, the polis eventually collapsed under its own internal weight.
The pendulum is constantly swinging, and social contracts—whether they look like this one or that one—are almost always present. Occasionally, we hit periods of total chaos where nearly every agreement falls apart. There is no such thing as an "ideal" (or immutable) state when you consider the relationship between the individual and society.
In your previous post, you mentioned alignment with universal values. I didn't comment on it then because it leads down a rabbit hole, but I have to now. There is no such thing as a universal value. Values are relationships tied to a subject (some biological entity); outside of that context, mentioning them is meaningless. Something is "valuable" only if it holds value for someone. And that biological individual—that "someone"—is in constant flux, just like the community they belong to. The pendulum swings, and as it does, certain values gain weight while others lose it. What holds value today might be worthless tomorrow.
Amanda Jackson5 said:I think there's a bit of a contradiction in your argument, specifically between this atomistic view of society and your concern about losing social cohesion. The Enlightenment handed us this mechanistic, atomistic way of looking at humans as mere objects in nature, subject to random whims. That seems to be your perspective—and Hume's, for that matter. In those atomistic versions of liberalism, the individual and their specific goals are treated as the ultimate priority, while the community itself is reduced to nothing more than a tool used to coordinate and satisfy those private interests. However, if you look at society through that lens, you end up with individuals who aren't truly ethical or even truly free, and you completely ignore the rational nature of society and the autonomous, rational nature of the person. After all, a person isn't actually free unless they are autonomous, rational, and ethical—meaning they are aligned with universal values or, ultimately, with the Absolute. In these atomistic social models, there is no concept of "the Good," which means you can't have a meaningful human community. In any meaningful—or even "good"—community, nothing exists that isn't clearly defined by reason. It’s not some mystical force looming "above" humanity that we are forced to bow down to; rather, it’s something that flows directly from our own nature as rational beings. I am free only when I am governed by a law that originates from within myself, from my very essence. And that law is rational. Rationality is universal, not isolated or atomistic, and it certainly doesn't exist in opposition to the community. Ethics can only have substance when viewed from the perspective of society as a whole, never from the isolated perspective of the individual. From that narrow viewpoint, the individual is just an animal, or a creature stuck in a "state of nature."
I’m not denying that society is rational, nor am I denying the autonomy and rationality of the individual. But the moment we claim to have both an autonomous individual and a society (which is their destiny), conflict becomes inevitable. This tension is baked into the relationship; it's irreconcilable. There is no such thing as a final, perfectly rational "social contract" because neither the individual nor society is purely rational—we are both irrational and constantly shifting. Any attempt to swing the pendulum too far in either direction leads to disastrous, even tragic, results. Consequently, an individual can never be absolutely free while also being absolutely ethical, even though the drive for maximum liberty is just as constant as the need to maintain a moral society.
That is the world we actually live in. The idealized world you’re describing—where a perfectly rational individual is in total harmony with universal values—simply doesn't exist. Since I'm no Marx and I'm just trying to make sense of the world I found myself in, I'll pass on handing out recipes for achieving universal bliss.
placidhawk21 said:I have to disagree with that take. Living among others isn't actually a requirement for survival.
Take certain indigenous tribes in the American West, for instance. To truly master solitude, one might undergo twenty-five years of isolation just to bond deeply enough with the wilderness to eventually pass down ancestral wisdom through nature itself.
There are plenty of other cases where people manage quite well on their own. You see folks living in remote caves or deep in the backcountry, surviving for hundreds of years in total seclusion, left entirely to their own devices and their own consciousness without any community at all...
Those are extreme outliers that only exist to prove the rule. A lone wolf might have a slim chance of making it, but those odds are incredibly low. It’s the exact same story for humans.
The tension between the individual and society is an endless, frustrating cycle. Sometimes it’s blatant; other times, it’s buried under the surface. As social animals, we need community to survive—it's an inescapable framework. But here’s the catch: one person's interests almost always clash with everyone else's. We use politics—in its broadest sense—to manage this mess, essentially suppressing the friction to keep it at a manageable level. This dynamic plays out everywhere, from small families to the entire United States. When there's a push for tighter social integration, you start seeing more bullying, marginalization, and outright aggression. On the flip side, individual resistance builds up until the whole thing threatens to boil over, forcing leaders to "vent the steam." Conversely, during prosperous times, that pressure drops because people actually have the luxury to walk away from mandatory, frustrating social ties (like you might see in Scandinavia, for instance). While this makes for a low-conflict society, it creates a different kind of danger: social bonds become loose and fragile, leaving us vulnerable and lacking the cohesion needed to withstand external shocks.
Quote : as British philosopher Martin Cohen Has put IT
At first glance, these two paragraphs seemed to contradict one another to me—I mean, how could a society that actually values reason end up executing Socrates? And honestly, what’s the connection between using logic and having faith in Jesus? I decided to do a little digging online. The first thing that caught my eye while scrolling through Wikipedia was this:
As British philosopher Martin Cohen Has put IT, "Plato, the idealist, offers an idol, a master figure, for philosophy. A Saint, a prophet of 'the Sun-God', a teacher condemned for his teachings as a heretic."
So, there’s definitely a link between Jesus and Socrates (at least the version we get from Plato), but honestly, it feels purely symbolic. From a Catholic theological standpoint, Jesus is God. And if you believe God is all-powerful, then walking around the Earth, dying, and heading back to heaven isn't exactly a massive sacrifice—it's more like a stroll. There's nothing truly "heroic" about it in that sense. It just feels like one of those twisted paradoxes that I can't quite wrap my head around.
So, I ended up diving into some history regarding Socrates, and honestly, from what I can gather, he was a much more complex figure than I originally thought. It’s a more complex personality.
I found a really interesting summary of the book *Why Socrates Died: Dispelling The Myths* over on Quora:
I. F. Ston argues that Socrates himself deliberately put on a bad defense as he was interested in a really good show trial and (if it came to that) a really dramatic death. Honestly, looking back, it seems like Socrates—at seventy years old—was basically a performance artist and a total public attention troll.
To be honest, spending more time with old Socrates just makes me like him even more. But at the same time, it really makes me second-guess that whole idea that when a free thinker tries to push their vision onto society, it almost always ends in tragedy. It feels like there's this recurring pattern where the individual is violently sacrificed just to fuel an idea that’s bigger than they are—an idea that ultimately ends up benefiting the very society that turned its back on them.
I honestly feel like we’re dealing with a kind of mythology baked right into our collective consciousness. It seems designed to stop anyone from actually questioning the social contract we live under today. It’s basically a built-in warning system: "Don't rock the boat, or you'll end up like Socrates or Jesus."
I’ve always had a soft spot for that old socialist mantra: "individual happiness is the collective's success." 😁
People spin all sorts of fairy tales about the conflict between the individual and the collective. It’s mostly just an attempt to sugarcoat reality—to make something ugly or tragic look palatable when it’s actually just plain grim.