What Is The Morality Of Communism?

I think that is what I meant by 'incentive' toward obedience. When we see (and they are rapidly negotiating something more amicable between us and them) China and the US tariffs on trade as part of the HTS (Harmonized Tariff Schedule) of 2025, we see a big barrier without incentive to do anything differently, just not to do that.

But the benefit to domestic GDP isn't effective - we would need to incentivize in a significant way a provision to hire Americans and put manufacture here and nowhere else. We don't need to tariff that high to accomplish our goals. If we want corporations and companies and LLCs and business to be domestic, we would tariff and also offer subsidy, taxwise or other, to anyone hiring and manufacturing elsewhere; and especially those who have offshored and outsourced.

There is an offset though. Our trade deficit is not insignificant. What does that mean? What does it do? I don't know...

Each person can change themselves. Why should they?

That is the obedience conundrum. Why should they?

In 12-step there is a similar concept. You could say, "You gotta wanna".

What it means is an addict won't change if they don't want to. Negative incentive may just create one more negative in the tapestry or collage.

When there is nothing else the continued existence of the negative force counters any remaining denial or 'needing to want to'; in theory the person does now want to, as there has been nothing but trauma for about however many years.

For me, I realized that a 'dry alcoholism' is what is normal for me; not sobriety, not change. For recovered, this revokes their recovery, right? Doesn't that invalidate it? No and neither, but I often find there are those around me (more of them than any other kind) who associate my 'normal' with dry alcoholism. It's a non-starter and it's old but it isn't going anywhere. And I won't change; you might as well tell North Korea to adopt democracy. I would rather go to a rave than let someone's defining accomplishment of recovery (which is admirable) dictate my trajectory.

Incentive is important for making a domestic economy more palatable. But on the balance sheet of the GDP as well as that of my business (and not dissimilar to the sober comparison...), there is a problem; one works better than the other.

And as such, just as with my 'dry alcoholism', one is more practical than the other, which may be very objective and depend on the person, or business,

or in this case, it depends on the country.

 

Sorry, I have been very busy and haven't been able to continue-----but your response, I believe, gets to the same thing I was going to touch on----what it provides for meaning of life. You speak of incentive, where I refer to meaning. Because it is the meaning it gives us that provides our satisfaction, which is the whole incentive.

Not to say that financial rewards etc. are not important---they are a part of it. If we define life in terms of late stage capitalism, for example, we get meaning out of what we have. So we seek the corner office, the bigger car, the bigger house, and it is not just that these things are bigger, but that they are bigger than that of our friends and neighbors, so our lives have meaning because we are better than them. Then we find ourselves in a buying spiral of trying to fill the emptiness within our lives because the meaning we are seeking is actually shallow, and ultimately meaningless. So this becomes another problem.

But I will try to continue with my post.

 

It's a good post!

I think about incentive in lofty intangibles, but really we could see this in more practical terms.

In a job, there are components in play.

The biggest factor for me is whether it provides a mechanism for turning work done into a valued accomplishment.

Does that come down to only one or two things?

I believe it requires emotional factors in the work environment that aren't all up to you.

What if you work remotely? Fewer factors.

The bottom line has to be quality of life.

Money isn't the only part of that.

People are the other part.

Beyond that, aesthetically does the place look like anyone cares about it; and again, if remote less of that.

Is some of that negotiable? Yes.

The office can be completely defunct. I'll trudge through in boots to boot up the desktop PC and hammer out a few paragraphs or something.

But there is a dismal little piece of that factor. Do the other people in the office have the same work ethic? For them, would it be nicer to have flowers on a well-lit table?

My log-in password is a USB drive. They don't use a password with their MacBook Air.

There are nuances to that, and if someone isn't willing to negotiate on MacBook aesthetic, I'm looking for a new job.

 

Let me try to continue where I left off in Post #20.

As these Romanticist philosophers looked at these tribal peoples, they realized how racist they had been to consider them as savages. JUST KIDDING---their objectivism which objectified these people into mere objects, gave rise to a new form of racism, that of the Noble Savage. But they reasoned that if these so-called savages could live such an idyllic and natural life, that it must be natural for man to do so, and that their innocence meant that they were living as God had intended. Cartesian philosophy (i.e. philosophy as it originated with Descartes) had demonstrated that God was most good, rational, and objective. Take this reasoning through the arguments of mechanical emperialism, then Kant and then Hegel and we arrive at the conclusion that nature is incredibly rational and therefore this natural tribal lifestyle must be a superior way of rational living that we as an advanced (civilized) form of man (as Hegel would say, after we have gone through many stages of historicity, which is the physically manifested will of what we call God) must surely be moving towards. It is simply a rational mechanized progress of thesis versus antithesis resulting in a synthesis which becomes the new thesis. This is what Marx would call, dialectical materialism. The final conclusion is that, because we are a superior stage of mankind, surely we can understand this rational process in order to manufacture this utopian style of life that our ancestors once lived in. That it is, objectively, our rational destiny.

As you have touched upon, and I mentioned in my last post, this sounds great if the 18th century scientific manipulation of society can actually create a utopia, but obviously it cannot if mankind is not incented, as you said, or find meaning in it, as I said. This brings us back to the problem that Descartes shoved under the rug---the individual self. Marx did not believe in a self within the people that walked the streets of his time. There is that objectivism at work---they were not sentient subjective beings, but simply objects. He believed that the self in a human being could not emerge until he was liberated---until communism liberated him.

This idea of self not developing until after liberation has a basis in the idea of individuation. Philosophers and psychologists alike have argued that this is the ultimate goal of mankind, to achieve individuation. If you were to ask Carl Jung examples of fully individuated people he would mention Jesus, Lao Tsu, the Buddha and others like that as the prime examples.

The thinking on human nature at this time was largely influenced by Hobbes, and his belief that humans were evil by nature and needed control to prevent destruction of society and each other. So it would have made sense that individuation could not occur without not only political but some kind of moral liberation. One would need freedom to be him or her self, to be free to act our what the self wills and to express itself freely. And many nations at this time were more authoritarian, including through the control of religion. (It might be interesting to note that in this context, the political structure of a fascist state (whether liberal or conservative or Nationalist or Socialist) is such that there is only one individual, that is, the fascist leader, as only his voice, decisions and will matters. He alone decides what is right and what is wrong, and the direction of the society, Everyone else must follow his demands. Though this does not mean he is fully individuated as he is trapped within the demons and impulses of his own mind----as it is a pathological obsession with power that puts him into that position, as opposed to a fully individuated person that has dealt with his demons and is fully matured and liberated in terms of his psyche.)

I will continue in my next post.

 

If we take this 16th - 18th century view of humankind (that is the period of time of the philosophical environment of Marx, Hegel, and other Utopian thinkers) and throw in Hobbes, and look at it from the perspective of Cartesian objectivism, then the peasants and laborers and the hordes of humanity were viewed as little more than automatons moving around with the drives erupting from animal instincts such that it is only the level of education, the benefit of religion and the slapping of the runoffs of culture and civilization onto the uncultured masses, that separated them from the savages.

All it would take is a catastrophe, or even a Malthusian event, for them all to turn on each other like rats in a cage. And while the Romanticists observed that this was not the case among the so-called uncivilized people, their own racism would not allow them to see that, 1.) Human nature was not actually evil and prone to animal-like savagery, and 2.) that the secret was that their culture allowed them to be themselves and become individuated--something that Western man assumed was only possible upon some transcendent liberation that would free the individual. The only thing that made sense to them was that the noble savage was a product of the mechanics of tribalism, thus placing the group ethic they observed in more civilized agrarian societies as dominant in a tribal society, and that it was not the people that made tribes work, but the actual structure that mechanically forced it to work.

But as Descartes stated, I think therefore I am. If you take this First Principle as it stands on its own without the Cartesian objectivist conclusion, you should realize that everyone thinks, therefore everyone is. The implication is that we are all individuals, and therefore in some sense, we all have achieved some level of individuation. In fact, I would argue that our very birth is an implicated 'I am!' (I could put this earlier in the womb, but obviously a clump of cells is not a sentient human being, and then we get into all that pro-life garbage...). To be honest, I argue that every point within the universe is radically subjective and that this is one of the deeper implications of Einstein's theories of Relativity----but that's another point.

In fact, we have seen over and over in catastrophic situations that people band together and do actually help each other. That it does not become a free for all and every man for himself, even if there are those among them who would follow that path. When the hurricane hit Louisiana and New Orleans flooded years ago, there was a lot of propaganda and hateful disinformation that supported a Hobbesian turn of events. But it has been well documented how the people actually got together and helped and protected each other, and the violence that did occur was perpetrated by outside bad actors---primarily racists who wanted to create the narrative that the black people were terrible criminal types.

To be continued