A Victoria man has gone two decades without money
capitaldaily.ca
capitaldaily.ca
Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans
The one thing you can't do without money, without an economy, is take care of anyone else. You can give them things that other people gave you - castaways of castaways. But you can't produce anything new to help anyone. So what claims to be cooperative and egalitarian is really just parasitic.
Maybe it's not surprising that the largest effort made on behalf of parasitism is its attempt to disguise itself as something moral.
Extending this logic, I would also like to posit that jumping off a cliff is flight.
You may as well say that taking any water out of the ocean is immoral because if all water was removed, the fish would die.
People have different values. Long ago we forgot that if it's not shown on mtv as something to aspire towards it's not the best pursuit of our time.
All the best chasing that lambo you'll never afford whilst looking over your shoulder at others smart enough not to get into that game.
In 99.99% of the cases, they weren't homeless by choice, or ideology.
But yes--most of them thought they were there by choice.
It must be some ego defense mechanism?
For some reason a disproportionate amount were former Programmers? I knew Jim Fox. He was a cocreator of Wordstar, but got zero credit. I watched him slip from employment to wearing a Penguin outfit playing a ukleee begging for change. We used to talk tech, and he would notice someone walking towards us. He would jump out, and do his dance. He was always positive. He once got a job. He went to Goodwill to buy a suit. (He thought he needed a suit for a startup.) He was fired a few days in. That whole cultural fit. He always used to tell me, I just hope I don't die of pneumonia in an alley. Well he didn't get his wish. He died homeless.
There is a saying amoung homeless, and it's this, "Homeless for a year, homeless for life."
Meaning the mind is gone after living like they do. I have watched our local police departments make there guys life more miserable for 30 years.
I'm glad you weren't an entrenched homeless person.
The homeless we have need help. Most are not their by choice if you get them to let their guard down.
I do have some hope in CA. The government might actually do something besides jaw boning about what needs to be done.
Besides long term shelter, I hear talk of safe places to park, and sleep, without getting a ticket, or worse?
Homeless in Dunphy Park, got tickets for not obeying a rule. The ticket was $500. The issuing officer told the IJ, fee is high because we know they won't ever pay it.
I just threw up my hands.
How is issuing a ticket that can eventually turn into a warrant helping out anyone?
I done. I'm starting to get angry. Homelessness has always been a sore spot for myself.
Our society needs more people willing to take on that challenge instead of allowing their own insecurities to drive them into contempt.
>I have every right
>I always worked. I didn't do drugs regularly. And I never begged. I wasn't a parasite, like so many
>Where are they now? Lying in ditches, muttering to themselves.
Dude, you're a narcissist. You're free to change your values over time but no one else is? Maybe the next person squatting in your town square is a former you.
Once again, people have different values. Maybe that leads them to your hypothetical ditch, maybe it gives them motivation to be like yourself. Or maybe they find happyness some other way.
That’s for sure. The values of the poster you’re replying to are better than the values of a professional parasite.
It’s simply a question of leverage, even something as seemingly pleasant as Disney World causes significant direct and indirect ecological harm in ways a homeless person doesn’t. And frankly you can find plenty of far worse examples than Disney World.
In my home country we actually still have people living off their land and animals, off hand dug wells and cut down trees, using no money.
That's rather extreme, though, most villages have electricity at least.
Supporting the odd philosopher poet is the exact function of society, in my opinion.
Some good things come out of having them that do not come out of having another corporate drone.
Have you considered that society should also be the natural predator of the odd philosopher poet so that their numbers do not become problematic for their environment?
That means things like corporations, and working hard for your money, but also means things like "meaningless art", and allowing people with permanent disabilities to still live a normal life, where the fruits of society get to be enjoyed by everyone in society, skewed towards different demographics based on your favourite -ism. And it doesn't matter which -ism you subscribe to: the whole point of society is that we don't need this ridiculous "natural" nonsense. We beat it. It can stay outside. We replaced it with society.
When the silent part is said out loud. "We" didn't beat anything, and "we" certainly aren't gods that managed to counter natural law, despite the current zeitgeist that likes to pretend it is so.
Humans are predators, and to pretend otherwise will be the folly of our species. One need not look any further than the political, corporate, or social elite to see what predators look like in so-called civilized society.
Next time though, don't make the classic mistake of talking about the group by talking about individuals in the group. Society is, and this one's confusing if no one taught you this before, not the same as the sum of the behaviour of individuals in that society. They're entirely different rungs on the ladder of abstraction.
Look at our teeth. We're actually omnivorous.
If society preys on philosopher poets, we don't get philosophy or poetry, our ethics never develops, and the fundamental principles of society don't improve, limiting how much technological progress can raise the standard of living. I personally call that a bad outcome.
On the other hand there is such a thing as a statist parasite (think politicians, bureaucrats, crony capitalists, etc.), and hobos with a belief they're superior to others and love to do virtue signaling as making a life decision to live until the end of their lives supported by others, directly or indirectly, is something very, very wise.
False dichotomy much?
Name one odd philosopher poet that has brought anything to the table
This guy has amused me for, say half an hour of reading the article, and for a bunch more while replying to the comments.
It’s possible I would have been as amused by a corporate drone’s story, but it’s doubtful. I read enough of those, so the marginal utility of one extra story is very low.
That said, I’ve met philosopher poets on the street before, and the encounters are always memorable.
The various “legends” around him like meeting Alexander the Great and dying at the same time are also suspect as hell.
And for all of that, what we have is what exactly? A philosophical justification for being an asshole I guess? The world would have been pretty much the same if he had not existed.
He was wealthy, he participated in society, he even went to war.
It is easy to radically underestimate how much food a human needs every day and how hard it is to acquire, especially when living a non-sedentary life as a hunter/gatherer.
Trying to accumulate 2000+ calories per day growing food requires a rather significant farm and skill (and weather); doing so with meat requires daily hunting, or a permanent storage facility with refrigeration (unless you like salt and pickled meat).
Doing this while trying not to die from exposure or injury is even more challenging.
It is amazingly nontrivial.
Re daily hunting, meat actually keeps for quite a while when hung in cooler temps (heat is not your friend when hunting). This is routinely done with eg deer. And it is easy to dry meat of all sorts, or even smoke it as that has the same effect and also makes it even more delicious.
There's a lot of plant and mushroom-based food to be had during the end of the summer, though, and one would have to forage for plants first thing when spring came in order to get a nutritionally complete diet.
This is what I thought the article would be about. Instead it’s glorifying living on handouts and other people’s largesse.
Having addressed the question of legality of rogue individuals... And if an individual exploiting the wild is illegal, so is the group. Humans are social animals. Going it alone at length in the arboreal breast of mother nature would be extraordinarily taxing mentally for most people. That alone is a crucial disincentive, and with the legal disincentive it atomizes people and forces even the highest aspirants to dissolution of the ideal. And that's before the process is even allowed to occur. The impacts of each added person to a group of rogues would compound, and I'd posit exponentially. And with that impact the footprint naturally grows, and with the footprint the risk of detection. At the end of the day the risk assessment points to certain failure.
So the next best thing is urbanized scavenging, not because it's the idyllic means, but because it's the only certainty. If you offered these people license to fuck off, I suspect they would do just that, perhaps not all, but most. I know if I was given license, alongside my friends, to get out of dodge we might just take up that offer. But the whole concept of real liberty, real autonomy, real independence - that's an existential threat to the status quo, to the system, and to the policy makers and corporations that own them, and to the very few of those who pull the strings.
How many people have ever existed with real liberty, autonomy and independence?
Maybe the concepts simply aren't achievable for your regular human
Or among the last, being used to it by now. Beggars have existed under all regimes and all kinds of economic collapse. Cushioned middle class people however, didn't do as well under the latter...
I really doubt he'd be able to maintain that lifestyle anywhere else. Definitely wouldn.t be able to live like that in Vancouver.
You used to be able to enjoy nice parks with your kids without worrying about junkies living in nearby tents taking up what used to be sports fields throwing used needles into the playground. Now they put up warning signs for parents to sweep around to make sure that this isn't a problem.
https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/victoria-posts-warning-si...
I'm never going back, it's gotten that bad. I know so many people who have died from overdoses. It would have been a nice place around 12 years ago but after around the Vancouver olympics, the region has turned into some kind of black hole of misery and misambition outside of the wealthy condo social bubble and being on the wrong end of the ensuing wealth disparity. Unchecked money laundering on the housing market was a huge problem leading to this kind of scenario as well. Almost none of my friends who stayed there are the successful and happy ones. Even if you have like two decent blue collar jobs you may still end up living on a friend's couch for long periods of time just for a lack of affordable housing where your neighbors aren't doing shit like moving a stove at 4am because they dropped their flap of fent-adulterated heroin behind it (my own experience in the last apartment I rented before it really went to shit out that way -- that still cost me like 1000/mo)
Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live in the only region where they don't get found frozen to death in bus stops. They do this in the USA, too, quite sadly.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-ho...
>Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live
Sounds like what's happened in the town I live in over the last 2 years or so. The problem's gotten bad. Though it's not so much drunks but fentynyl and meth addicts.
Even the large monasteries over time became less favored by the populace in Europe, since they had acquired enough land through donations over the centuries that they often began to act more like landlords.
In summary, those who wish to live outside of normal society, particularly economically, should strive to avoid being parasites, and, failing that, should not move from host to host.
Jeff Bezos, the Walton family, and many peers also live off taxpayer money and impoverish poor communities by siphoning money from them, plenty of regulatory capture.
Even the landlords. I don’t know any landlords who are on the street because of the rent forbearance and eviction moratorium - and I don’t even agree with those policies.
Here is a chart: https://imgur.com/a/eOXF0UO
Note that there has been a shift in bargaining power since 1980 that is closing. That gap is not the result of inflation because inflation alone doesn't give employers bargaining power. If anything it increases bargaining power of employees vs the old job because the new job always pays more in nominal terms.
If only that option were realistically available to all, rather than just an entitled few.
A lot of the inflation I saw in the pandemic was perishable products where the supply was cut in some way or another. As long as people that want it badly can afford more they'll pay more for it. This is inflation, but it's not clear whether the money supply or the supply chains are the reason. The money supply was high in the preceding years as well, not leading to such high inflation.
Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses.
The alternative is for the leaders to have some type of power to compel people to do the dishes, and some type of punishment to mete out.
There are certain tasks in society that no one wants to do. In order to get them done, you have to choose the carrot or the stick. Money or punishment.
If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on. It can work in theory, but in practice, a society based on punishment tends to snowball out of control, with the people in charge of punishment going too far. The people in charge make a small mistake in the size of punishment relative to the transgression. With money, small mistakes like this happen constantly, and they are constantly being adjusted by changing prices and salaries. The garbage man makes a higher salary than other manual laborers. But without money, the process has more steps, and is harder to get right. People protest, the leaders listen to the protests, go through the rule changing process, and eventually adjust the punishment to fit the transgression. Without money, more people are involved in the process. Some are removed from the actual issue. It takes longer for the adjustment to be made. With only the tool of punishment available, it's more difficult to fine tune every mismatch. In practice, it's really, really hard to get a punishment based society just right.
I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke.
It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects.
Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?
You’ve hit the crux of the issue. Most people who push for these types of social changes have rarely been involved in the hard work.
They’re the “ideas” person. Same people who wanna give you 5% of their amazing idea so you can implement it.
I don’t really know anyone who hates their line of work or lacks interest in their field (plenty in their job, but not their field).
That’s probably because I only know salaried professionals/soon to be professionals (interns).I suspect many others are in the same boat.
Motivating them is the key word. Right now we depend on people being forced into stressful, precarious or life threatening situations in order to coerce them into doing jobs those of us in more stable circumstances would never do voluntarily. As a result, desperate people are paid far less than the work is actually worth. Personally I find the approach morally repugnant, we should instead guarantee a decent standard of living and allow wages for undesirable jobs to rise to their correct price. The crowd that thinks they're above cleaning their own toilet might be a bit put out but fuck them.
Toilet cleaners, garbage men and fruit pickers should not just be paid well for the important work they do; they should be given respect for it as well.
Taking advantage of their desperation is absolutely unjust.
Is that a bad thing?
One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week? Instead we have saddle young adults with student loads, the cost of housing has been inflated by greedy investors, having a car is just about mandatory, a century of very materialistic consumer culture, regulatory penalties for being poor, etc. I'm shocked that people don't question more of this stuff.
(Speaking of motivating people, governors of many states recently cut unemployment benefits to get people back to those low status jobs, instead of giving them more money. Funny how many people objected to those handouts but are fine with all the tax breaks that investors get on empty properties.)
Easy, look at US's GDP ($68k) and compare it against a country that's proportionately lower (to 15 hours). That gets you around $25k, around the GDP of Bulgaria and Chile.
Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.
Money has made it possible for us to build impersonal systems at gigantic scale. It seems to have paved the way for more stuff, but it does come with some downsides.
Debt, The First 5,000 Years [0] by David Graeber talks about this stuff.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...
People did something before money was invented, right? Parent's raised kids, kids helped parent's when they were older, families banded together, items were traded between villages, across continents, etc.
80,000 year old grave goods have been discovered, consisting of shells of a consistent size, with holes drilled in them, a few hundred kilometers from the ocean. We know from ethnography of societies which existed until very recently that these collectibles served the same purpose as money.
A good complement to Graeber's book is the work of Nick Szabo, I would start here:
https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shelling-out-the-origins-of-mon...
You can find most of the rest of his writing on the subject on his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com
Has some information relating to Australian Aborigines.
13 Distribution and consumption
Fundamentals of distribution were also quite similar in the seven regions, especially in the contrast between the distribution of women’s product to their immediate camp and to certain other relatives such as sons and mothers, and of men’s product to the wider residence group and to wives’ and potential wives’ parents. Specific obligations to certain relatives, processes of ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993), and generalised reciprocity combined to determine patterns of distri- bution (see Keen, in press, chapter 11). In spite of the similarities, the study has revealed some variation in patterns of distribution. Kûnai and Ngarinyin men had specific obligations to provide meat to their parents as well as wife’s kin. Yuwaaliyaay and Pitjantjatjara men provided food to the prospective wife to ‘grow her up’. Obligations on the part of sister’s son to mother’s brother have been recorded in only in two cases (Kûnai and Yolngu); among Sandbeach people the senior of a MB-ZS pair did the giving (including senior sister’s son to junior mother’s brother). Kûnai and Pitjantjatjara husbands gave food to their wives indirectly through the wife’s parent. Consumption prohibitions according to age, gender, initiation and reproductive status were wide- spread, although the uneven data make comparisons difficult. Senior Yolngu men could impose ad hoc pro- hibitions by making production implements (such as canoes) or food itself sacred, and to make certain resources available only to them.
14 Exchange
People were able to produce various kinds of valued items which they exchanged for other valued items, according to gender, age, and structural position (such as birth order). In all regions ‘inalienable pos- sessions’ (Weiner 1992; Godelier 1999) included land, waters and related sacra. Inalienable posses- sions had a ‘sacred’ character which enhances their value, making them immune from exchange. In at least some regions inalienable possessions were related to ‘inalienable gifts’ in the forms of sacred objects and ceremonies. These are gifts that retain a connection with the donor such that the gift creates a relationship between donor and recipient (Gregory 1982; Godelier 1999). People exchange inalienable gifts for everyday objects, and in marriage exchange. Movement through the field of exchange relations varied between kinds of society and between individ- uals. Older brothers in the highly polygynous soci- eties had greater opportunities than their younger brothers to accrue control of resources associated with marriage. (see Keen, in press, chapter 12). Marriage exchange articulated both with produc- tion and distribution through marriage gifts and the reproduction of kin networks, and highlights the most obvious contrasts in exchange networks among the seven regions. In contrast to the shifting webs of Kûnai, Pitjantjatjara, and Sandbeach people, and reciprocal exchange among Yuwaaliyaay and Wiil/Minong people, the asymmetrical forms of mar- riage among Ngarinyin and their neighbours, and to an extent Yolngu people, reproduced very structured regional systems of exchange. In the wurnan exchange system of Ngarinyin people and their neighbours, marriage exchanges joined the exchange of foods, raw materials and sacred objects along ‘paths’ linking patri-groups in established sequences. Yolngu probably did not have quite such a neat and tidy system, but they did think in terms of paths of exchange, and items moved in customary directions. The high and very high levels of polygyny among Ngarinyin people and their neighbours and Yolngu people placed certain men at the nodes of exchange networks where they received gifts from intending and actual daughters’ and sisters’ husbands, and made gifts to intended and actual wives’ relatives. These same men (or some of them) led powerful and growing patri-groups, and controlled patri-group sacra.
2 chickens for a lamb would be bartering, but that doesn’t happen.
That’s one theory, and it’s not even the one Graeber preferred. According to him (and supporting evidence) money originated as a way to “keep score” of debts.
The question of the origin of money is an interesting one, but that will be probably be unsolvable, since some of the alternative theories (like barter) would leave little to no evidence.
The use of money drastically changed the scale in which goods and services could be traded.
Before money people kept track of who owed who a favor amongst the people they dealt with. Family, friends, and others learned who they could trust not to be a mooch.
Money made possible much larger scale projects, enabling the industrial revolution to proceed at breakneck speed, the ability to wage world wars, and a modern global finance system treating everyone and everything as fungible, with credit scores replacing personal bonds of trust, billionaire leveraged buyouts and market manipulations, consumer/debt culture, sanctions, etc.
The jobs "no one wants to do" is usually work people are happy to do for themselves or occasionally their friends and family. The idea that "no one wants to do them" embeds the presumption that you spend eight hours a day doing just that. Of course no one wants to do that!
Dishes is just one example. You may wash your own dishes, but did you buy those dishes from someone who was selling them as their job?
Do you grow all of your own food? Do you also sew your own clothes? Build your own shelter? Engineer your own transportation and manufacture your own iPhone?
The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society. Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange and people working in specialized roles in focused industries.
And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.
Modern society makes it look easy, but it's extremely challenging for a 'Dunbar's number' sized tribe to meet all its members' needs at anything resembling the quality of life we're all used to. The healthcare/pharmaceutical needs alone would be borderline impossible. You'd have to be willing to tolerate much lower life expectancy, much higher mortality for infants and mothers, etc. etc.
> The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society.
That much I agree with. I don't propose total self sufficiency. I just think that dishes is a very bad example of a job that wouldn't get done if we didn't pay someone to do it and, more constructively, that a lot of jobs fall into this category. There is an obvious incentive for me to wash my dishes: I want my dishes to be clean before I use them. No one has ever paid me to wash dishes. I've washed dishes for myself, for friends and for family.
Dishwashing is a good example of an ubiquitous chore that almost everyone does without any market incentive, which strikes me as the exact opposite of a job no one wants to do and which therefore has to be paid for.
Work that most people actually really don't want to do is usually well paid for this reason. If you'd said hyperbaric welding instead of dishwashing I might be more inclined to agree that it needs more of an incentive than the mere satisfaction of meaningful work.
> Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange
It should not be a surprise that money plays an important part in a society where the allocation of labor is governed by money and those that have it. It does not follow from this observation that there can't be other sources of incentives to innovate and produce.
It should also be mentioned in any discussion where the current state of production is touted as something we should aspire to that there are indications that the current mode and level of production is undustainable and harmful to the environment. It's perhaps something we should change, but the market evidently isn't creating effective incentives to do so.
> And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.
There's an important difference between jobs no one wants to do and jobs not everyone wants to do.
People will not do tasks merely because it's "fair". Otherwise crime would have evaporated, life would be harmonious, and judges would be bored.
I think that what would end up happening is that in even in a small group of people, it would naturally emerge that there are variations in quality, efficient, economies of scale, etc. Even in my immediate family, there are some menial jobs that my wife does 90-100% of and some menial jobs that I do 90-100% of. If we tried to make if 50-50 or have some type of rotation, we would both lose.
While I agree with most of what's said above, the proposition about "usually women, making the sacrifice" is dubious at best, if not untrue.
In any society or commune few will lead - the rest will be workers or followers. These will be both men and women, and they will both suffer from necessary sacrifices. Women are not a special class of people in those societies, and to claim that they suffer more prejudice is the usual sort of feminist-speak that has nothing to do with the reality of such communes.
Most communes and cults that give up money end up using some other form of control. NXIVM is a recent example, but most of these fringe movements discover women are more useful and less trouble than men.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-men-often-die-earlie...
There used to be difference in terms of men drinking and smoking much more then women, but that is equalizing too.
Basically, even if men dont do anything dangerous, dont drink nor smoke more, they still tend to die sooner.
And if we are talking about past, it gets complicated too due to huge amount of childbirth deaths and poverty affecting women and men differently (in some periods, prostitution being only realistic employment for single women basically which comes with its own risks). Meaning, it was not always the idylic family situation people tend to imagine when making these comparisons.
Then how do they get metal?
What is yours?
More equality here would mean exactly that - women driving and being on the streets more, women working in late money handling shifts, women in combat positions.
Then there are hazards in occupations where physical force is an actual factor - construction and some farming jobs. Hazard here is mostly from overextending people. There, I dont see employers running for someone physically weaker. But then again, there is feminist push to promote technological/construction interests to girls.
Tho in the latter category of jobs, unionization and regulation would do a lot for safety on itself. Then again, same can be said about driving. Driving jobs often push people toward a lot of hours and risk, whether you are tired or not. More regulation about how much you can drive would do a lot.
Encouraging women to become, say, crab fisherwomen, would just result in more humans being maimed and killed. For the same reason that female soccer players tear their ACL at shockingly higher rates than male ones.
The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat.
There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. If you don't go out and get food, you don't eat, unless you are gifted food as the young, old and infirm are. There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach.
Of course in civilized society, there are a class of rentier heirs who do not work, who have a relationship with those who do work, of expropriating their surplus labor time. Obviously this is done with coercion and punishment.
Are you sure about this, or are you treating a "noble savage" fantasy as if it were fact?
I've read some early settler accounts of Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society (especially women) on a regular basis.
Sometimes the beatings would be followed up with rape, and the perpetrators would get away with it Scot free because they were high-status.
As I said, there are societies where women gather berries and men hunt. There aren't really "lower status members" of those societies. Including the Aboriginal Australians who lived this way. As the book Dark Emu shows, some Aboriginals lived as hunter-gatherers, some as farmers. The aboriginal farmers did not live this way, and certainly may have had lower status members who were mistreated.
I should point out some people have qualms over portions of Dark Emu, but generally not over this. Even a critic of this point like Ian Keen admits there was some form of farming by some Aboriginals.
This sounds like the classic punishment of being sent to your room without dinner, right? Removing the basic necessity of food is about as coercive as it gets. Even in civilized society we feed prisoners, give food to the hungry, etc.
It's easy to imagine paradise in cultures we don't understand but reality is rarely that pretty.
In the Amazon loggers and miners, often illegally, encroach on indigenous areas and kill members of the hunter-gatherer bands. Yes, the bands sometimes react in a "famously violent" response to these massacres.
I don't really see the connection in how these 50 person bands act together with their "famously violent" response to outsiders who are killing them.
Also the people I am speaking if are living in bands, not tribes.
So from the drawing of cave paintings in El Castillo onward through the next 30,000 years, all humans lived like this. You could say it is human nature. Then class-divided society spread - 2000 years ago the modern Stockholm area was a classed society, whereas 200km north were hunter-gather bands. By modern day, hunter-gatherer areas have dwindled to remote areas.
The urge to have large numbers of people all under one grouping seems to be the impetus of a ruling class or ruler, from Alexander the Great to modern times. There are signs of hunter-gatherer bands in relations of mutual aid with other bands, for marriage and other things. One of the earliest pieces of literature, instructions of shuruppak, instructs rulers to get new slaves from far away lands.
(To reiterate a point from before - there is no evidence of class societies before 10,000 years ago. It is possible some tried to be a non-working ruling class, but the methods of production of migratory hunter gather bands made this difficult, and over a span of time impossible. Whereas with the rise of agriculture 10000 years ago, we have a mass of evidence of class societies.)
I mean, isn't this "the invisible hand of the market" at play, just without the intermediate medium of exchange?
It is true, though, as the end of the article points out, living this way defies pretty much any kind of planning, and that can be scary for people.
https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-...
If referencing modern society in the west, who is fetching wood and water?!
Is this stat from 1870?
You’ll notice there’s a push to get women into comfy office jobs like programmer and not strenuous jobs like oil rig worker.
Someone can reply to me and cherry pick to show counter examples but for the most part it’s men doing these jobs.
And as much as I utterly fail to get spectator sports in general, footballers get their money specifically because people pay to watch their teams and the teams are more popular when they win and therefore the teams directly bid against each other for the best players. Similar logic for movies and their stars, and in both cases there are a lot of people at the bottom who do similar things for approximately nothing as it’s fun — but they’re not the best in the world at what they do, and only the best can compete with the best.
The connection in sports and media is a lot more direct than asking if (and how much) a corporation’s overall performance can be attributed to the skills of given fat cat acting as a multiplier on the work done by those under them.
And then you have the last question: what is the stuff which must be done? Most individuals could live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, yet no city (UK definition rather than USA) can survive everyone trying that at the same time, let alone the whole world. Is shipping in the “must have” list? If just shipping stopped, much of the UK would starve even if everyone turned their gardens into personal farms like in WW2. Who makes the ships? Who digs up the raw materials for the ship?
That sounds like modern retail workers who have spouses to supplement earnings to house & feed themselves.
Sounds quite not-evil to me.
Your thesis is non-sequitur, and speaking frankly, degenerate and extraordinarily cynical. Communes are experimental, experiments often fail, that's just the way shit works. Out of those failures, there are communes that have succeeded - you fail to mention them. You don't need gods, or leaders, or governance just the instinctual wanting for both community and self-preservation. Government is reactionary, not preventative,[1] and coercion is endemic to the human population it's tit-for-tat, and even more so in the modern era the great equalizer is among us and widely proliferated. It's not a question of genetic lottery anymore.
Money isn't actually the problem, it is disproportion and, duly, the concentration. That concentration equates to leverage, which is influence. Influence has been used to commit atrocities from times immemorial, it is, if not the foremost then among the foremost elements of human oppression. Historically this has been aceded to by the mass population through various modes of manipulation. It is actually exploitative predation which is founded on artifice, suppression and innate blind spots in social and economic cognition.[2] Worker owned cooperatives, at least superficially, seem to be the only structure that isn't human-perverse which promote both autonomy and community without being disruptively disproportionate in their allotment of power - Mondragon Corporation for example.
[1] Think of how often laws are violated despite the possible consequences: murder, neglect, speeding, embezzlement, bribery... [2] Artifice being the hard work fallacy, which is actually predominately luck with lottery ticket odds and personal delusions of exceptionalism. Suppression being the ceaseless toil the masses necessarily endeavor in to support their livelihood. Blind spots in being inherently biased towards trust, economic blind spots emerging out of ignorance promulgated by that status quo and the nigh-complete opacity presented to workers.
Who's going to pay to automate it?
Likely because many of those boring jobs have many more people qualified/capable to do them than there are spots to be filled. Even though we seem to need a lot of people to take goods out of totes and put them into cardboard boxes, there are a lot more people who are able to do that work than spots needed.
Because most boring jobs require skills that everyone has. Specialization makes the other jobs have higher salaries, not because they are less boring, but because they can only be done by a smaller amount of people.
As you scale up, it gets harder and harder. You get a few people who are intentional free riders. The hard workers see the free riders sitting right next to them stop. Then more and more hard workers defect.
That system of emergency operations is a great counter example. You correctly point out that it's good to have a system with more than just monetary incentives. You have to have a mix of monetary incentives, punishments and other incentives such as just the feeling that you're helping out, or perhaps prestige.
I'm not arguing to get rid of all incentives except money. Those other levers are vital. I'm arguing against a system with no money.
> power to compel people to do the dishes... and some type of punishment to mete out.
Moneyed, Adam Smith style capitalist economies still had slaves, colonies, wars of plunder.
It's tough. I see from your other commenters you're rooting for the guy. The mainstream opinion that executives should be paid less, that the lowest wages should rise, these are freebies and could be implemented in an afternoon, with no consequences. All the changes in a person's day to day life would be for the better. Mainstream people advocate against inequality not the elimination of money, but yes, there is a transfer, a "handout," as part of those goals.
Presumably the person who dirtied them. So they can use clean dishes and not get sick from mold growing from the old food?
Science has given us plenty of evidence to do as we do in a number of contexts.
Deferring to the politically empowered is an unscientific basis for economic activity.
We need not rely on the superstitions of dead men who were less educated than us.
And people who want to eat will farm their own food? And people who want medicine will craft their own medications?
Self-sufficiency and moneyless societies are pure fantasy, unless they include giving up all modern amenities. I don’t think these people really want to return to the days of hunter gatherer lifestyles or even the days of homesteading.
It’s an extreme amount of work to be self-sufficient.
Some people do, but we pretty much made it illegal.
This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive. I relate to him in that I value money very little as a medium to facilitate my own happiness, but I still want to make a lot of it so I can give more.
He seems sweet though. I think I would get on with him were we to ever meet.
He's lucky he's in modern society where we at least take some care of people like him. Go back further in time and he'd have been ostracized from his hunter-gatherer community for not contributing, and would've lived a short life as a hermit.
Which isn't to say that self-advocacy is in some way dirty, we should all stand up for our self-interest insofar as it is otherwise ethical.
I mostly agree with what you write, but "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset that it draws for me the picture of you being a Gordon Gekko type.
I wonder if he'd agree to do some work like cleaning the city parks in exchange for some "gifted" groceries and a room. Obviously the city doesn't want to enter into customized barters with all its employees.
Hunter-gatherer societies would have an equivalent of money not literally notes and coins but trading their effort and time. It is literally a society, people gather in a group for mutual advantage. The advantage being I don't want to personally make, build, do everything to survive so you trade skills which is effort and time which is essentially money.
His refusal to use money is really a lampshade on a refusal to do anything useful period. Plenty of people don't interact with money yet still manage to provide useful goods and services in exchange for necessities. He's not doing any of that either.
> "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset that it draws for me the picture of you being a Gordon Gekko type.
You've got me pegged all wrong. This transcends affront to capitalism to affront to all forms of societal organization; guy is a mooch, pure and simple, unwilling to do anything to help others but perfectly willing to accept all help from others for his own benefit. No society would put up with him, capitalistic or otherwise. He's a deadbeat father who wouldn't even do anything to support his own kids.
> I wonder if he'd agree to do some work like cleaning the city parks in exchange [...]
Based on what I read in the article it doesn't seem like he's willing to do any work at all. No mentions of performing any work or services in exchange for essentials; it's all freely given to him by charitable people and organizations.
I like you recognize that capitalism and money are not the same as productivity and value add....he doesn't seem to do the latter but he benefits still from the former because as you said he is a mooch.
No it’s not. All socialist/communist societies required all able-bodied people to work, described themselves as worker-led, and idolized work in their propaganda.
It's really all societies that require capable people to pull their own weight, not just capitalism. Even money-free communes/kibbutzes have chore rotations and expect everyone to pull their own weight regarding necessary tasks like farming, cooking, cleaning, maintenance, child-raising, etc.
But I don't think everyone has to go as far as you, and give more than they take. I think we can find win-win situations where we both benefit. I cut your your hair and you paint me a picture. We both win. But it's hard to find good one to one barter like this. Money is the way to find more win-win situations. In a system with no money, you're back to only one to one, so there are less win-win exchanges, and everyone is poorer.
It's a great community where I think you'd fit in: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
Taking? It seemed pretty clear that he doesn't ask anyone for anything. People give him things of their own free will.
> This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive.
Give more money than you receive? There are other things that can be given, like time, companionship, love, etc.
The guy from the article is striving to make the world better for those who can't afford a home in Canada (Vancouver being ridiculously expensive, a separate conversation), and prompting an interesting conversation about how focused we are on money. I think those are valuable contributions to society.
Or should society force everyone onto the same page, and moralize against those who can't or don't want to keep up?
(These are questions that I think of, just throwing them out there...)
Noo! You can't do this. If everyone did this everyone would be better off!
This is mathematically impossible to apply universally. Can it be a moral code if it can't be universal?
Although this might be applicable if you live in a wealthy circle and there are poor circles.
The Sun provides the Earth with enormous amounts of syntropy (this is the inverse of entropy), and we can capture this through productive labor before it inevitably dissipates off into space.
As a toy example, it is certainly mathematically possible for everyone to grow more calories than they consume. We wouldn't want this, for the obvious reason that we don't need more calories than we consume, and this would be labor-intensive enough to leave many useful tasks unfilled.
But it proves you wrong: there's nothing preventing "give more than you receive" from being a categorical imperative. Certainly nothing "mathematical".
It's a fruitful way to live but not something you must expect of others because it's an unattainable goal.
It's obviously impossible but it is better than the inverse which is also impossible. The difference is that if you are below the potential that is actually possible you will approach the maximum potential of your society. You're failing, but you are failing upwards.
"taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral." is effectively trying to approach the minimum potential of your society i.e. zero.
We have a large upper class that does exactly this and not only do many people seem not to mind, they find membership of this class aspirational. It’s how capital income works and what capitalism is built on.
Uh, I'm not sure that's what I would have taken away from this.
Money is one of many solutions designed to allocate resources on a large scale. Of course, there are others, but he doesn't propose any alternative system. He's just a parasite. A pre-industrial society most likely wouldn't be able to support his existence so easily and he would either starve to death or start working.
He's less of a parasite than many rich people! I'm thinking of those who are nothing better than rentiers and/or running cartels, commandeering common resources for their own profits, accumulating money for themselves at the expense of society, who glamorize materialism and moralize hard work because that's what keeps the money rolling in from the plebes, and having the support of the government to keep them on top.
They seem to be have done, and are doing, way more harm to our society than this guy.
This Victoria man has another kind of power: The power that gets other people to take care of his needs for him without objecting or rejecting him.
In my experience, the answer is no like a solid 90-99% of the time. At least in America, the wealthy buy their kids into elite high schools, which feed into elite colleges, which feed into jobs at elite, increasingly monolithic institutions/corporations.
Junior gets to fail again and again until they succeed, and then the return on capital further institutionalizes their family's power.
It's just aristocracy, but with more steps.
Well, this may be bad but what is the alternative? It's not like the life of an average citizen is any different other than in degree. They also use money to go to a good school and good college to get good jobs at good companies. I don't see the injustice here as substantial. I see bigger flaws in the money system than our society maintaining itself.
Most people wouldn't be very interested in an interview with a Walton heir for instance, but Sam Walton himself would have no problem drawing an audience.
"Johnston’s feelings about money are inextricably bound up in his certainty that refusing to spend it is the only moral way to live."
It's ok for others to spend on his behalf, though. It sounds like he is applying an effective story to a nicely vulnerable population of marks.
While his philosophy is BS, I cynically admire his hustle.
Every time I read about communes, I get so excited. I always get inspired by the ideals they are trying to live by.
But then when I hear the details about the day to day logistics and governance, it always ends up sounding like a terrible place to live.
---
I can't tell. It looks more like an organic farm with a few caretakers living on the farm, and financially supported by the community. I like that.
> The Amish are subject to sales and property taxes. As they seldom own motor vehicles, they rarely have occasion to pay motor vehicle registration fees or spend money in the purchase of fuel for vehicles.[114] Under their beliefs and traditions, generally the Amish do not agree with the idea of Social Security benefits and have a religious objection to insurance.[115][116] On this basis, the United States Internal Revenue Service agreed in 1961 that they did not need to pay Social Security-related taxes. In 1965, this policy was codified into law.[117] Self-employed individuals in certain sects do not pay into or receive benefits from the United States Social Security system. This exemption applies to a religious group that is conscientiously opposed to accepting benefits of any private or public insurance, provides a reasonable level of living for its dependent members, and has existed continuously since December 31, 1950.[118] The U.S. Supreme Court clarified in 1982 that Amish employers are not exempt, but only those Amish individuals who are self-employed. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Life_in_the_modern_world
This quote was kinda funny to me, because the online text doesn't convey any sarcasm or tone.
But considering he's actually just a mooch I sort of implied the tone of that comment to be quite snarky. "Yeah, no money at all, he won't spend a dime" - this guy's poor friend.
And that is only if you consider throwing food in the trash charity.
Money isn't evil. How you utilise it is evil.
> Epiphany Two happened a few months after they met, on June 27, 2003, almost six years to the day after Epiphany One. Johnston’s father had sent him $50 for his birthday. With it, he bought beer, pot, and cigarettes, and then threw himself a small party at Beacon Hill Park. He overdid it and found himself lying on his side behind a bush. “I was just pukey drunk,” he says. “It was embarrassing. And then it just hit me. Like, I've had enough of this. I'm not playing this game anymore. And I was done. I had no use for money.”
The lesson here hasn't been learned. Simply don't exchange money for those things. Exchange them for something else, something healthy, and you'll be fine.
I feel like this kind of protest stems from a degree of immaturity with money; not knowing how-to utilise it, what its reasons for existing are.
This raises a point that article doesn't address: what is "money"?
If Johnson trades those cigarettes he makes from tossed butts for food, is he using money? Cigarettes have been used as currency in some special situations like war time.
Likewise, if Johnson accepts a product created through the use of money, isn't he in fact using money, if only indirectly?
Then there's the big question that never gets asked or answered: what happens if every single person on earth lived like Johnson? Money is fundamentally a way to fulfill future needs and wants. Abandoning money is really abandoning a path to build a future deliberately.
Storing grain, smoking meat, or building a shelter serve exactly the same purpose as money in this context. They are ways to make the future more predictable. They also have the interesting property that they can be traded for other ways to make the future more predictable. And that leads to the main problem that Johnson seems to be trying to solve: how to stop focusing on optimizing one's future through the accumulation of things that can make the future more certain.
What does a world of people who have abandoned the idea of making a future for themselves actually look like?
He talks about living without money, but basically mooches on his parents.
He's a con man and a mooch. Nothing special. He just mooches off other people's effort.
* The guy leeches off the goodwill of others. He doesn't internalize that the amenities offered to him as charity, are being bought with someone's money. Food & coffee doesn't grow on trees. Heaters in winters don't work on magic spells. He doesn't spend his money. It is someone else's. Public money mostly, and the charity of sympathetic Samaritans
The glamorous-pious/moral-homeless trope is BS. If he wants to do better, then live in one of the BC forests. Into the wild, all the way in. Seriously, if you take out these nutcase views/agenda, he is no different from garden variety homeless. Most people I have seen are destitute by their bad luck or lack of opportunity & education. This guy is a wreck by his parasitic fetishes.
> Food & coffee doesn't grow on trees.
Additionally, he's actively using resources designed to help people who are in situations where they cannot work or cannot find stable income.
What a jerk.
And don't forget about all the rich people that your tax monies subsidize [0]. Those are people who have money, and are being given more from your taxes.
How much different is this guy than those rich people getting tax breaks? Which begs the question why there is such a visceral reaction against this poor guy, but not all the rich who get propped up by the government. I guess we aspire to be one of those rich people who do nothing, and resent the people who choose not to play the game that most of us aren't winning.
[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/02/24/tax-loopholes-canad...
> And don't forget about all the rich people that your tax monies subsidize
This is What-about-ism.
I can be upset about both.
Anyways, back to the guy in the article, lots of other taxpayers are happy to support local food kitchens, that's why we have them. He didn't "take" the coffee, they gave it to him.
I understand that you disagree. Other people feel different. That's politics.
I think about this constantly. My parents and grandparents are so concerned about a situation where a single undeserving "poor" person is given support that they'd rather nobody be given that support. Drives me insane, especially considering my grandparents were all too happy to accept government support during the pandemic despite them not needing it (their words).
... I wouldn't consider it an opinion when I say that food kitchens are for the needy. This guy is not needy, he's want-y, maybe, or greedy. The needy are in situations they cannot or otherwise struggle to control. This guy is actively avoiding "fixing" his situation to a point where he is no longer in need of these services.
The situation on the West Coast here is pretty bad. The homeless population is quite large and there's very little being done to help them. I can't help but feel it's partially the result of the older population here being apathetic due to the above.
> He takes a drag on his cigarette. “Yeah, it would be a shitshow. But there's certain steps that need to be taken, and I'm sort of the disposable one that can't be bought. So I can make the horrifying decisions that no one else can make."
The guy says he doesn't believe in evil. The only time in history that money has been abolished was under the Khmer Rouge. They also had no concept of evil, and made a good many horrifying decisions in service of total economic equality through forced poverty and mass enslavement. Because of course the people who don't want to quit earning, spending, owning and trading their goods and services need to be forced to do so, or else be eliminated.
Just because he doesn't touch the money, what does that have to do with anything. If someone like Queen Elizabeth never touches the money herself, mean that she does not spend money? If Jeff Bezos has a person following behind him 24/7 and never touches money, does that mean he has no money and doesn't spend? Of course not.
If someone gives the dude food for free, the homeless guy still paid money for it. Maybe not cash, but he paid some form of money. The person purchasing the sandwich loaned or gave the homeless dude money, and then paid for the sandwich on behalf of the homeless guy.
The homeless guy spends money living in the guy's house.
Not only that, the sandwich he received for free is taxable by the IRS. It's like on those game shows where you win a car for free, you still have to pay taxes on it. That is because it is legit income, as in money to you. The gameshow gave you money for the car, but the gameshow then bought it for you, hid it behind a wall, and made you work for it.
If the guy needs healthcare and goes to the hospital for free, he's not going for free. The doctors and nurses and rent and utilities and tools all cost money that someone pays. Nobody is working for free. The homeless guy is getting money from everyone, he just doesn't touch the actual cash, but it is all the same thing. He is spending $10,000 or $50,000 or $150,000 or whatever the medical care may cost, in value.
It’s easy for a lone person to ride on the backs of others, who are actually, you know, working for money, but if tomorrow we got rid of money society would collapse.
With the way NYC is, I could quit my job tomorrow and mooch off others (SO many do).
I’d be uncomfortable, but I’d live. If everyone did this there wouldn’t be a NYC anymore.
Tangential, but I tend to feel this way about a segment of van life philosophy, it's sort of the next level. People want to escape the drudgery of conventional society, so try to be a van life influencer, and have your life hinge on a large (van/bus) vehicle running on refined petroleum, probably the avatar of global industrialization. It relies exclusively on people who specifically do what you won't.
Ah, I know what you mean. I've thought about this myself. One of those "it wouldn't work if everyone did it" kind of things. You could do van life while working for an oil company, there's people with all kinds of van life jobs, it's a way to cut expenses and have more time outside of work. But things would need to be quite different if everyone did it.
But then again, if everyone wanted to escape the drudgery of conventional society we would end up with different conventions.
I don't think it's any wrong for this guy to do what he does, or van life people. It seems like it would be wrong to expect/force everyone to adhere to our current conventions when they don't want to. At least ideally. And he's no more of a mooch than the rentier rich and corporations who plunder the common good for profit.
I found it interesting how money and productivity are such trigger issues for many people. Perhaps because we all work a lot more than we'd like to, and aren't rich, and resent those who don't buy into the same rules.
Rejecting money as some moralistic endeavor while living in a city is to me, bluntly, pretty dishonest. I feel like that is what is arguably wrong with what he does, especially in the context of his own framework. It really is like Diogenes, if he hates society so much, why is he still here? I'm not a fan of half measures, especially when one wants to be a modern day philosopher.
This man is just taking, and not giving anything back. That makes him a mooch, and little more.
I was waiting for that part since I started reading the article. Isn’t this what the hippies in the 60’s figured out as well?
Usually youth, who then in their 30s decide they'd rather like money.
> ..Refusing to spend money is the only moral way to live.
> ..Not only did money enable what he deemed insane behaviour on a grand scale, the dependence on it, the fear of losing it, the focus on acquiring it wrecked people’s lives and drove them to be dishonest with themselves and others.
> ..People are putting themselves through hell, living in situations that are just making them nuts to avoid being homeless.
> Every taxpayer is an indentured servant until this debt is paid.
> Only one solution appears just and good, and that is a society without money.
Money is not evil, but the abstraction of “value” in modern life does cause the problems he blames money for.
Perhaps the jungle/forest tribes way of life is the best and simple way we can be happy. Yet tent communes like Johnston’s seem to be setup in the middle of a town square or within close proximity of a city, and not in nature somewhere actually sustaining themselves.
In the end if we blew it all up we would arrive back to same evolution of living we find ourselves in today.
Last week, I heard a message about investment, which said that the 3 ways to store wealth are stocks in companies, bonds in governments, and property (owned by banks or rich people). A few days later, I read about GitLab making it their policy to help people get visas (shouldn't that be a government choice?). Privatisation is also taking over police departments, prisons, bus services, etc. I don't trust that the shareholders' best interests are the same as the needs of the people. War helps private companies, at the expense of governments & property. I'm not hopeful for peace in the next 50 years.
What about investing in people? Not saving wealth, but giving it away!
People will try hard to save their own lives in a war (and if I die, I don't need the return on investment anyway). It's a personal contact, so I think it's highly resistant to inflation. Building community is, in my opinion, more important than storing up wealth. I guess this view is similar to 關係 guanxi. It's democratic: if I do something silly and lose face, then it has consequences. I don't think it's authoritarian communism, where 單位 dictate who you can marry or what kind of job you can do, but a community-focussed lifestyle where newcomers are welcome, and share freely within the group. I'm still trying to figure this concept out though, so other suggestions of philosophical readings are welcome :)
Companies pretend that it's true for them, but actually are at the mercy of business cycles. Governments have linear growth at best. Property has had exponential growth because of increasing population, but that's plateauing.
Can social connectedness be exponential, for the benefit of society? Not just more people, but people who are more connected to each other? How can that growth be incentivised? (I'm thinking out loud)
Of course it's the government choice to grant the visa or not. It's the company choice as to how much support (financial, HR/legal advice, other) to extend to their employees [and their household].
Being pedantic, but governments aren't the only entities which issue bonds. Private bonds exist as well.
Why? Just why? Why the hell can't I be free to move freely to a place where other people accept me? Why is it that a parasitic entity (the state) has to say whether they allow me in or not? Why should I be barred to enter a continental region of the world without convincing a bunch of bureaucrats that I'll be there just for a few days?
> Privatisation is also taking over police departments, prisons, bus services, etc. I don't trust that the shareholders' best interests are the same as the needs of the people.
And you trust state actors responsible for most murders in history (example: compare how many hundreds of millions were murdered in wars vs. by private actors in the last century), how come?
> War helps private companies, at the expense of governments & property. I'm not hopeful for peace in the next 50 years.
No. It's not at the expense of governments. This is pure brainwash propaganda. Governments, or states, are responsible for most of the destructive behavior we see in human history. They're not victims but perpetrators of wars. It's silly to think otherwise. You're not hopeful "for peace in the next 50 years" because of your prejudices and misconceptions.
Society has never been so peaceful as today. Thanks to the private sector, communication is more and more accessible to everyone. Some day (not sure if 50 years or 500), poverty will be over, except due to acts of state-sponsored terrorism, and people will be able to denounce it whenever it happens and on a global scale. This is starting to happen today already.
Most private entities (companies or the third sector) do good for the people and benefit nothing from the misery caused by state actors and their wars. Just a thin fraction, such as defense contractors, does.
> Why the hell can't I be free to move freely to a place where other people accept me? Why is it that a parasitic entity (the state) has to say whether they allow me in or not?
Because when a community decides to provides services to a people it must now have standards to decide who to provide services too. There are only 2 possible ways to solve this.
1: provide services to everyone. naturally this doesn't work.
2: provide services to nobody.
> Governments, or states, are responsible for most of the destructive behavior we see in human history.
This is a consequence of the state's monopoly on violence. By joining a society you voluntarily give up power to the government in exchange for services and protections.
Wars occur as a consequence of this exchange of power when states look out for their own interests, which include the interests of its people.
> Society has never been so peaceful as today.
Because the state has a monopoly on violence and has gotten more effective at enforcing that monopoly?
> Most private entities (companies or the third sector) do good for the people and benefit nothing from the misery caused by state actors and their wars.
I'm not sure if you are aware of the other functions that states provide but some of the functions you may find beneficial are ways to resolve conflict without violence, protections to people, and a standard of living. These are again, enforced with violence. Seeing as you moved from Brazil to the Netherlands I'm sure you are aware of the benefits you are granted.
All three words matter: state, monopoly, and legitimate.
That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is tyranny or unaccountable power.
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
So, if you're a spoiled brat lucky to be born in a developed country with socialist tendencies, you're fine. However, suppose you're unlucky and were born in a poor country and now want to migrate somewhere to improve your quality of life. In that case, spoiled brats will do everything they can (including kidnapping you if you try) to stop you from doing so because you're the wrong race|social group|whatever.
You hold such awful vision and wonder if I am being sarcastic? What the heck. If you want to provide services to people, do it with proper and just means. Not by sacking people and pretending you want to give back to them whatever you deem essential services.
> This is a consequence of the state's monopoly on violence. By joining a society you voluntarily give up power to the government in exchange for services and protections.
No. I never did so. You were brainwashed with this stupid idea.
> Wars occur as a consequence of this exchange of power when states look out for their own interests, which include the interests of its people.
No. You're being incredibly silly. How come it was in the German people's interest to do what they did? How come is in North Korea's people's interest to do what they do? How come is in US citizens interest to invade other country and spend a trillion doing war overseas? Sure, some people will benefit from such arrangements. However, most everyone loses.
Besides, you demonstrate a lack of knowledge regarding the positive aspects foreigners usually bring to a territory. For example, most of them come in peace, and the net result is positive. I'm sorry you don't get something as basic as that.
> I'm not sure if you are aware of the other functions that states provide but some of the functions you may find beneficial are ways to resolve conflict without violence, protections to people, and a standard of living. These are again, enforced with violence. Seeing as you moved from Brazil to the Netherlands I'm sure you are aware of the benefits you are granted.
I'd be a fool if I believed in your stupid idea that I benefit from having most of my paycheck extorted from me here or most of my consumer power extorted from me back when I lived in Brazil.
No, most of my money I (or anyone else for that matter) pay doesn't come back as nice services from the public sector but go to harmful programs, intrinsically evil agendas, are used without any accountability, and so on. If I get back 5% in good services that I really need or want, I'd be surprised.
The poorest ones are even more negatively impacted than me by the state, and you probably believe that they get a lot of benefits. Your ideas about what the states do are incredibly out of sync with reality.
link?
For example, at some point the article notes he didn't get to the truth until two epiphanies that obliterated his self-image.
Then there's literally 9 paragraphs of other text. Then it follows with the 10th paragraph: "Then came the Epiphanies."
Long-form is great, but it feels as if each page is just loaded with stuff other than the point of the article. If it's written in poetic form, contains beautiful photography, or actually interesting anecdotes, sure. But none of it was there and the larger point never did arrive, either.
As for the Victoria man... completely misguided. Every street he walks on, every piece of cloth he wears, the coffee he drinks, the food he eats, the phone he uses, the internet he uses, was produced or maintained by someone else. Money is merely a medium of exchange to allow people to exchange their contribution to society, for other contributions, in a feasible (i.e. not barter-based) manner. There's tons of legitimate criticisms on capitalism, on our economic structures, on unequal opportunity/ability, monopolies, corruption, concentration of wealth etc etc, which makes our socioeconomic system imperfect. But the idea that money (as an invention/tool) is the root of the problem is entirely misguided and frankly, entirely unfounded. Nothing in this article really substantiates this wild claim he makes, and nowhere does the interviewer even remotely challenge him on it. Unfortunate that I had to read the whole thing to find that out.
Money is the most basic social contract everyone agrees with. The problem of money today is that it overrides politics, so it shifts problems from one place to another side of the planet. Tax evasion or dodging, social darwinism and social inequality, money laundering, etc, money have always posed great problems...
People will call money a great and indispensable evolution of human civilization, while arguing that socialism leads directly to gulags and famine (which is the worst strawman argument of people who will defend market essentialism).
Money is a tool, but honestly, it's not very good at what it does. Governments and institutions already achieve most of what human needs, by allocating resources through political decisions and law. Banks are always privatized for some weird reasons and never do anything right and never improve the interest of the public.
Doomists will say "we don't want to be hunters and gatherers again", yet cannot prove that capitalism allowed the apparition of science, technology and industry.
I do fear the coming resource scarcity and slowing tech adaption rate.
All of modern society joining a monastery or becoming enlightened is perhaps an even bigger ask.
Forgive me for getting defensive, but as someone who lives here, you don't know what you're talking about. The days of the "home of the newlywed and nearly-dead" stereotype are over (maybe except for in Oak Bay). We're a solidly medium-sized city, the capital of BC, with multiple universities, significant naval presence, a booming population, and strong tourism industry. And also one of the most expensive and desirable housing markets in the country.
And FWIW, I'm not sure how going for decades without money is more feasible in a cultural hobbit village, whatever that means, than anywhere else. No, it makes sense that he can do this in Victoria because we have the best year-round weather in the country and lots of support available for the homeless.
Well, if he teaches others what he know and they emulate him, while the general populace tolerate and support them, a new ascetic movement would be made easily.
Still, my heart is with his estranged SO and their children. Ascetics can't support others that well after all.
(No, the ends don't always justify the means. In the case of community and the greater good, my moral expectations on others are much lower than the strictness with which I judge myself, and I will break my own rules if it means being a better guest/host).
This reminded me of that- though it doesn't seem that Johnston is doing any bartoring.
Homeless, jobless people prove otherwise. You can live without money, but the standard seems quite low.
I hear it is possible to survive without society too. But the standard seems even lower.
We have a word for this: fried.
Stuff like that “happens constantly,” he tells me."
There's a second interpretation of this interaction. I'd like to hear it from the other side.
Ultimately his lifestyle is supported by the community around him and the hard work of others.
If he was living off the land that would be cool but that's not what's going on here.
I don't understand this. The idea of economic collapse? Did people miss the biggest economic collapse that just happened last year? It's already over. What could possibly be worse for an economy than a permanent lockdown? It's absurd how people are scared of full employment.