up with people

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down with hierarchies.

for example, why should the nt's make decisions for the neurodiverse?

Ah... but therein lies the rub.

If you want to give "power to the people" then it's "majority rules". And at 98 percent of the population NTs are a beyond a majority (theyre beyond a super majority). So NTs would rule!

But if you want the autistic minority to have some kind of equal power with NTs then.. that would take enforcement from above. It would take an elite - a "hierarchy" to force the NT mob to respect the rights of the autistic minority.

i can deal with rotating leadership for the sake of efficiency such as occurs in many 12-step groups. and who says nt's are going to vote that we neurodiverse have a lesser say?

Not sure if neurodiverse are actually in the minority.

What is up with people?

They are groupy from thousands upon thousands of years of evolving in Cults. The answer is to use decentralized trust networks (e.g. cryptocurrencies and the like). The decentalization allows for leaderless representation, thus mitigating the detrimental effects of letting NT's continue to rule as they have been.

I mean, how long did it take to discover the Scientific Method? Why so long? Because of the groupiness of NT's is my answer. Don't get me wrong, the groupyness is amazing at times in its products, but it is not ever principled; it is about replacing the hard work of thinking with gut intuition and fallible feelings based on what the next person thinks. Yuck.

That is my take.

While there are some advantages to decentralisation, you still need decision makers. Look at how cryptocurrencies fork between different standards, with the "winners" not always being the "best" (e.g. Bitcoin beating out Litecoin because of brand recognition rather than superior technology).

I think your philosophy of science may be a little suspect, but I'm not super hot on philosophy of science. But your history of science strikes me as a poor interpretation. I would argue that the development of science requires the development of a class of people who can either afford to do science, or who society can pay to do science. That's only possible once productivity in primary and secondary sectors reaches a certain point.

Of course we were making scientific discoveries before we had formalised the "scientific method", but the industry of science is only possible once your food supply is secure without everyone working on it, you're sure you're not going to be attacked and killed, you have a reliable way of transferring information, you have a reliable supply of necessary resources, etc. Proto-science helps you get that far (war is famously great for innovation) but full-time pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake is only possible in a wealthy society.

For whatever can be said about hierarchies I'd leave it at this - there are healthy hierarchies and unhealthy ones, benign/positive as well as malignant ones. No hierarchies though is an impossibility, they're an emergent pattern that accrue from individual variances. One can say they want no 'official' hierarchies but that either leaves a power vacuum for new hierarchies to fill or clandestine hierarchies which you'd really rather not have.

I won't bring up any names since this gets inflammatory, I'll just say a famous Canadian professor makes a very good point on this - when they're doing the right thing they're hierarchies of competence and those we value because the quality of everything in our society unravels quickly without them. The problem comes when you have these just turning into caricatures of competence hierarchies, ie. really what you might call dominance hierarchies, and a great example of this is the sort of thing people like Aaron Clarey often say about the business and finance world these days - ie. they aren't selecting for competence anymore nearly as much as they're selecting for social climbers and the whose-who of popular kids in high school (part of how you end up with wonderful things like Enron, Arthur Anderson, the 2008 crisis, etc).

If there was anything I think I would tell people that might revolutionize the world for the better - throw out your TV. There's so much people need to know to make the world work and unfortunately we're in a situation where people take up the time where they really need to be educating themselves on what's important and they should be reading at least one critical non-fiction book for every one or two fiction books they read (at least if they're avid readers). We have a bit of a culture of escapism - at least in the US - and it's not helpful to the situations we find ourselves in.

up with people.

And ...the only way to organize "people" is with hierarchies!

I would have thought profound books would help clear up misunderstandings like these.

but hierarchies can be temporary and "with the consent of the governed." example: trudy, an accomplished hunter, is put in charge of today's hunting trip. in 12-step groups, leadership rotates and "leaders are but trusted servants. they do not govern."

and it's NOT the only way to organize people. i was in a group project for a class. no one was in charge and we all had equal say. i wasn't happy with all of the goings-on, but we finished the project and got an "A."

Last edited by cathylynn on 07 Sep 2019, 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I thought this was going to be about a hippie-like organization that was popular in the 1970s-1980s. It was a national group or perhaps even international and it was called....Up With People. They would have groups based around playing music and motivational speaking and the groups would tour. One or two members of a touring group stayed at our house while they were playing in town because my parents offered to host them.

Sounds worlds better than the sham that is Communism et al where hierarchies become the ruling class. "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

How do you organize societies north of 10 or 15 million with this?

They competed with the Cowsills to make wholesome rock! That's I was reminded of too!

i remember some of the uplifting, upbeat songs: up, up with people. you meet 'em wherever you go. up, up with people. they're the best kind of folks we know. if more people were for people, all people everywhere, there'd be a lot less people to worry about and a lot more people who care.

I don't think my interpretation of history is off in the slightest. It is true that you need agrarian advances and some other advances for there to be a leisure class that might consider the grand questions of reality, leading to a Scientific class becoming innaugurated, by the time of the Sumerians, H. Sapiens had all it needed to do that, and then some. The priestly class did not have to work, and there were significant advances that occured in Summer to allow for this practically speaking. If such a class wanted to, it would have had the tools needed to engage in organized social pursuit of natural philosophy. In fact, it did engage in many successful social enterprises that would have helped any budding scientific club: invented beer; writing; sexigesimal number system; surveying; bicameral legislature; etc...

The problem is not time and accumulation, the problem is philisophical outlook based upon biology and the feed-back loop that is cultural coevolution. NT's project minds everywhere. I mean, not that I would know, because I am not an NT (I have it on strong authority from my bf), but if you want me to prove it, why are there so many kids shows with anthropomorphized objects? Toys, dogs, planets, planes, trains and even automobiles, all of those and more have been given a human voice for the purpose of telling a story. Has it ever occured to anyone, "why?"

I'll tell you why, it is because NT's promiscuously project their brains into everything is why. By the way, I may be abnormally affected by scary music, but dark rooms do not scare me in the slightest. Darkness is soothing to me. Only the internal voice remains, resonant beacon of abstract thought to go with the fleeting images and musical score of my own choosing. Side topic!

Here is the thing. Cults work. You are in a cult right now because you have been en'cult'urated with all sorts of things from your birth on. We still use language riddled with phrases from earlier cults, Egyptian ones for instance. Most of all though, your acquiescence to the system is not optional and is socially reinforced using propaganda and social pressure, just like a cult. Academics will tell you this is the end of history and we are not savages any more. Don't listen to them. Evolution of our species is far from over. We still act pretty bruitish over all, having definite room for improvement in outcomes alone.

The other thing is, humans have been in hard-core Cults for longer than they haven't been in them. If you consider a modern enlightened democratic democracy with practical liberal values that has a high degree of life satisfaction evenly spread throughout the population in an automated cloud pleasure city (unless you consider that the beta cuk liberal version of a dystopia to come because of your privileged white nationalism knowledge, then I am not talking to you becuase your kind are bad people, parenthetically speaking, read clauses to make sure if applies to you!) as one end of the spectrum, the other end being an evil totalitarian dictatorship that employs every cult-like method known to get compliance, then we are all somewhere in the middle.

To get along in a Cult you have to be able to say one thing, and mean another. You must be able to finely read between the lines to the point of obsession. Your life depends upon it. The Cult leaders are madmen after all. As people became more culty, the cults work better by enhancing coordination. The cults work better, the selection pressure is for better cult followers. Rinse and repeat. Push a selection pressure too hard and you will get outliers pushing back, or, AS? Another theory that would take crap loads of work and might end up not even being wrong.

This cultishness could have happened long ago, too. Might have been the deciding factor in the winning out of H. Sapiens over the other hominen groups they encountered and subsequently mostly wiped out. Better groupiness allows for better hunting and war. I say mostly, because we all have hybrid Neanderthalensis genes in us. Sometimes I wonder how those genes express differently in a greater social context.

Yes, I have no doubt that for the foreseeable future many conventional structures will have to carry on. That still does not negate in any way the fact that Sumerian Priests could have written and enacted the same philisophical attitude as Bacon's philisophic heirs. Instead they practiced what today would be called the dark arts, used Zodiacs filled with animal characters, all so that their NT brains could get a wrap on it. There is also the fact that they often tripped balls on all sorts of hallucinogenic compounds that lead people to report seeing therianthropic entities, so maybe that influenced things too? Who knows!

A clear minded autist priest majority living then would have found the direction that the priestcraft was deciding to go as decidedly bizarre. They would want to experience things for themself, sure, but the mind projection mumbo-jumbo aspects would be a turn off. The magical thinking that goes at the foundations of religion, totemic, mystic, etc... that probably would not be recieved too well is my take, because it requires rampant mind projection.

Hard to say. All very conjectural. It is, at the very least, a well educated guess. If you think not, please let me know where I may have strayed.

Hail Cthuhlu, ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

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