heydaralon wrote: ↑Tue Nov 13, 2018 1:30 pm
How individual are we going here? You were probably raised by at least one parent right? Outside the family, you probably had friends whose parents watched you when you visited. You might have had teachers that helped you with your work, and steered you toward a career or hobby that you were interested in. If you played sports, your team mates and coach probably had a large influence on your life. Many people on here went to church, and the churchgoers often help each other out when shit gets tough. Is that not a "village" of sorts? If it isn't, then why would you describe the distant government as a village, but not the people in your local life?
To determine individualism vs collectivism, this question is poorly phrased.
Even leaving out governments for a second, markets are also a sort of collectivist enterprise. The collective decisions of people determine how much they pay, how much they can sell for, where they can live, and their wants and desires.
Holy shit! A coherent, no trolling, response from H that I agree with 100%. The notion that a community is by it's nature collectivist is the false premise here. It's a non-monetary transactional system, not unlike barter. It's "I'll keep an eye on your kids, and bring you soup when you're sick, if you do the same for me". The problems with this come when the community exceeds Dunbar's number, the number of people you can actually know, often put at around 150, the size of a village or an army company. Thats when people say "why should I give that guy I don't know soup, or pull him wounded into a foxhole under fire". It takes a broader sense of identity to put yourself out. Sometimes that's just the flag patch on his shoulder, a religious belief, or the knowledge that it could be you if things take a really crap turn.
Every community has it's small cadre of would be crooks and tyrants. It's the majority that enable them by being lazy, gullible or both. I've seen this in operation in small nonprofits I've been on the board of. You get a new person full of piss and vinegar, and it's great for a while that they're willing to do so much for the cause, while the rest of you have lots of other distractions in your life, but they don't. It's only later when you try and reign them in that you realize what monsters they really are. We had woman like that on our Neighborhood Assn board who ended up in a mental hospital after causing us much conflict and chaos.
We are only accustomed to dealing with like twenty online personas at a time so when we only have about ten people some people have to be strawmanned in order to advance our same relative go nowhere nonsense positions. -TheReal_ND
