Comment on Just 2 people.

• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  So there’s nothing other than a master with a whip and a fucking wizard?

  Kind of, yeah. The way I see it it’s a human limitation; we need a certain level of indirection to pull off anything bigger than a band of hunter-gatherers. Some systems are more whippy than others, though.

  Youve never been in a disaster, or started digging a hole at the beach, have you?

  Actually, yes I have, but never have I seen more than a handful of people get involved at once, and I never heard from that dude who started directing traffic again. I’ve also seen the bystander effect. Never in history. Maybe on the beach, but not in history.

  You’ve never tried to organise any kind of activism, have you?

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  • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So, the beach thing. Why does it happen, and why does it ‘not happen anywhere else’?

    Have you read ‘a paradise built in hell’?

    Did you read my point about believing in the existence of, but not favoring spontaneous organization. A deliberate but headless structure is possible! They’re actually really cool! Good thing too, because strict hierarchies are wildly inefficient and trend towards flattening the territory to match the map, which tends to lead to fascism.

    And if I believed it was only a fuhrer or a grand wizard, I’d fucking kill myself and take as many as I could with me. Thankfully I’ve seen (and executed) proof to the contrary.

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    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      As far as I can tell, being in a novel enough situation emergency puts people in a different headspace. After a while, normality creeps back in, and if the emergency continues it looks less like a community pulling together and more like Haiti or parts of Myanmar. Mostly, though, it’s an empirical observation. Besides what we’ve covered, it’s hard as shit to get people to show up or care about activism, and if a meeting gets big enough it stops working, so you have to appoint someone to head whatever thing. This proves true over and over again.

      I don’t think that automatically means Hitler, though. Representative democracy seems to work if set up just right. Hopefully it’s here to stay.

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      • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Theres this tendency to completely ignore the effects of peer pressure and habituation and culture and very scary men with guns pointing them at you in these arguments, and its deeply bullshit.

        We tend to treat a hyper-competitive hyper-alienating authoritarian context as some sort of fundamental trait of humanity, rather than some shit we work very very hard to maintain.

        And its nonsense? And I can prove it. I prefer deliberate rhizomatoc organization; its more efficient long term, but I can prove spontaneous organizing happens anywhere it isnt actively shut down, and I’ll show you, in a totally non-ideological context: go to any beach, and dig a hole. Just pick a spot and start digging. Watch what happens. Nothings wrong, nobody’s in trouble, its not even really for anything, and you’ll have more help than you can use.

        I could theorize why (being on a team feels good. Doing things is a primal joy. People generally want things to get done, etc) but the fact is; it happens, and tryimg to find reasons why it can’t be the basis of a social order, or at least disaster response; seems very unnecessarily pessimistic.

        representative democracy seems to work if its set up right

        Real representative democracy has never been tried? No true Scotsman?

        hopefully its here to stay

        Oh honey. I… Maybe some acid would help this go down easier.

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