What makes a good society?

Post Reply New Topic

Good fences make good neighhbours is the one part of Frost I appreciate.

Frost, while more intelligible than most of the establishment endorsed poets, and much less objectionable than Whitman, Thoreau or Emerson, does not speak to my condition and it is amazing I can find one line I can use.

Frost I put pretty much in the same box as Carter - I can appreciate his apparent sincerity and respect intentions and efforts, but when the dust settles both strike me as helpless hapless.

As the poem indicates quite clearly, "Good fences make good neighbors" is ridiculed and attacked as the thought of an unthinking person. To not catch that meaning reveals an astounding lack of reading comprehension.

Speculation. Potatoes, not subject to speculation, did not have their prices bid up and as such the price of potatoes remained stable. A food bubble was created for Goldman to make money. The play on the futures markets.

A good society exists when people of the tribe see everyone else as part of their own extended family and have compassion for them.

As a wise man once said: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer".

And the Jews were not part of everyone else?

No, they weren't in Germany but they are now in Israel. Is there any difference between then and now?

You can hardly call a society that chooses to exterminate large groups of it's own or anyone else's population a "good society"

A good society looks for the value in others and takes responsibility for itself.

Awsomelyglorious, I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this issue.

I suppose my essential argument can be simplified to this:

Take a kid and teach him well, help him learn skills that will be useful in life and he will do better than if you lock him in a closet and teach him nothing.

I think anyone looking at this argument would say "well, duh!" or something to that effect. My arguments above were perhaps a little more sophisticated, but essentially said the same thing.

Yes, and your arguments all missed the mark completely. You don't seem to have a conception of an actual education system. Without that, your point is just dead in the water.

Only individual people can do that. Society is a collective.

ruveyn

Thanks for providing the full poem. I had never read it before, but I really like the idea behind it. It seems to me that it's saying that we build walls because it's what we've always done, but we forget to question why. There are times when walls are useful, like for keeping cows out of gardens, but there are other times when walls are nothing more than a habit, a protection against an imagined problem.

I think it makes a point about good societes. We often take a position of distrust first and build defenses against imagined enemies. I think if we start out with more trust and we make the assumption that the other person is probably going to behave honorably, they probably will.

A purely anecdotal example is my own situation where I live. I often take walks through downtown Los Angeles at night. There are a few people who live in my apartment building who ask "aren't you frightened?" There are many homeless people and some people with very obvious psychological issues. I don't tend to be frightened because I have never, in the 12 years I've lived here, felt threatened. I think this is because when I interact with people I nod or smile or otherwise treat them as if they were decent human beings. Also a person who doesn't appear fearful, who feels confident to treat others as possible friends rather than possible enemies, comes across as someone who knows he can take care of himself it a problem comes up.

I was walking once and a huge guy yelled at me "I'm bigger than you!" Now that may have been his idea of a joke, but I suspected he was sizing me up to see if he could mug me. I just yelled back, "Yup. You sure are" as I continued to walk toward him. I smiled, passed him up and nothing further happened. If I had cringed or turned and walked away, he might have taken offence or seen a weakness in me that he could exploit.

By not building a wall, by not turning and running away, we both could continue on our way and no one was any less for it. Boundries are useful, but I think there are times when we are too quick to build walls when perhaps we should be assuming our neighbors are just as decent as we are.

I see your point, of course.

Myself, in parts of major and even minor cities I know I walk at speed and only in daylight, and I will always agree with Frost's neigghbour. When I drive along an American street and see unbroken if not always uniformly maintained expanses of lawn, with no fences or walls or hedges, it bothers me.

For me, better a London semidetached with a good stone wall around a small and scraggle garden than an American suburban "home" with a front and back yard I cannot use because there are no borders.

There are concepts such as memes - ideas that pass through groups of people and take on a kind of life of their own. Individuals within a group talk and share ideas and attitudes. Often people seek others for validation of their opinions and they may end up segregating into groups who all agree with some fundemental points. A meme might be Group A is the cause of this great depression. They are taking our jobs and infecting our culture with moral degeneracy. This can become a popular idea shared amongst members of Group B because it validates a shared fear.

Each individual within Group B has their own responsibility to think for themselves and to make choices based on evidence and reason. But a network of memes passed from one person to another can create a mob mentality that no one individual would endorse, but may feel right when the whole group seems to endorse it.

If it is reasonable to suggest that there is a valid concept of mob mentality, then it seems reasonable to say there might be a valid concept of mob responsibility. I once worked as a tape duplicator in a video post production facility. The machine room was located directly above one of the audio mixing rooms. The sound mixer would complain when we stomped around too much and eventually this decended into all the tape guys complaining about how terrible a person this audio guy was. This bothered me because I could sympathize with the audio guy's complaint. One day, as an experiment, I started making positive comments about the audio guy. I found, within a week, much of the negative attitudes had softened and some of the guys even started reminding other guys not to stomp too much.

Given the proper memes spreading through a group, a collection of individual responsibility becomes societal responsibility. While you can say that it is still just each individual taking responsibility, and I would agree that you are correct, I think that attitudes can spread through a group to influence each individual's sense of the repsonsibility they ought to take. One person, or a small segment of the group can provide direction through good examples and influence the tide of opinion. In the end, the responsibility taken by the group, while being built up from each individual's sense of honor, becomes a thing in and of itself and can have significant effects on events.

Anyway, that's what I think.

I am not convinced of the meme which I have elsewhere said is a stupid name, though that in itself would not invalidate the concept.

When you say "I am not convinced of the meme" are you saying you do not believe "memes" are a valid concept?

If it's just the word iself, feel free to suggest a better word that adequately communicates the concept of an idea that spreads and evolves similarly to a gene and I'll happily use it.

I don't use the word much because I feel the concept is a bit too ephemeral for my tastes, but here I felt it suited the discussion. I tend to think of a meme as an idea that starts out not tightly fixed in an individual's mind and is easily influenced by the feedback of other people. Over time it may become a more concrete idea in certain individual's minds, but on the whole is a fluid constellation of ideas that pass back and forth between individuals, evolving as it spreads.

I suppose I'd like a clearer definition, but for now, I'll have to live with that. If you can help clarify I'd appreciate it.