We discussed "Competition".
This corresponds to how I think society should work.
How so?
People are supposedly natural-born communitarians, based on scientists studying how people arrange resources.
How do people arrange them?
People who major in economics tend to try to monopolize all the resources.
What were some of the proofs that people were communitarian by nature?
They gave children 100 dollars. They tended to equally divide into two parts.
And the economists were like here, give me all the money and I’ll invest it for you!
The economics students would take 98% instead of 50/50.
98?
Or 99.
Wow.
Two people had to collaborate on a task, and after that task, the subject has to decide how the reward is divided. Based on the opinion of the subject.
So he didn't have to deal with the opinion of the other person
I wonder, were the people that they were studying all men?
They didn't mention.
Because I think that would matter. In my experience, women are more likely to share resources. But maybe that's just my experience.
Maybe it's because the men are responsible for making money, and they have the pressure to compete.
I think the men try to make it their career, and the women are more practical, and have a back up plan.
Sir Ken Robinson mentioned this, that men can only do one thing at a time. He said his wife can do many things at one time, like cook, answer the phone and play with their child. But he would have to shut the door, turn off the phone, just to fry an egg
Women have more connections in their corpus callosum.
You know, your brain builds itself as you're trained. If you needed more connections, you’d have them
It's about the size, actually.
But I really think that this is a training issue. Women are expected to multitask from the beginning, and men are expected to focus from the beginning.
So we should see if over time the corpus collosum in women has gotten bigger and bigger, and men's stayed the same, and then you'd know.
But I think the study'd have to be done over like 11,000 years, not just the past 100, because that's how old patriarchy is.
No, but you'd just study a boy and a girl growing up together.
Oh an individual study, not a cohort study.
In different cultures, people do collectively, and so gender issues would be different.
But most cultures are patriarchal.
But patriarchal society doesn't mean they do things individually without cooperation.
Yes! So your point is...?
The more you collaborate with others, the more multitasking you do, the bigger your corpus callosum is.
Oh, I get what you're saying now. I bet even men's corpus callosums are much bigger now than in the 1950s, since we multitask so much more now than then. And things move so much faster now. And there's literally an exponentially greater amount of information that each person processes every day.
So I’ve started getting interested in World War I and WWII, because war is all about resources. Actually, in a novel by a Japanese author Yamasaki, she explains why japan had to expand its martial power to other areas, just like England and France.
I just think Japan was late to the colonialism game. Had they started earlier, they might have been more successful.
People who gain a vested interest can have the power to tell people how the world should work.
That's like a summary of the movie Wag the Dog.
Actually I got that sentence from a comic book called One Piece, it's a Japanese comic.
I think this idea is becoming more broadly understood around the world now.
And so I'm starting to want to be a hacker. There is an employee who works in antivirus, she spend a lot of time to research hackers, and it turns out that most hackers have their thoughts about things, meaning they like to spend a lot of time thinking about the meaning of life. And this article reminds me why I was unhappy, if you are in a better situation, you won't pay attention to this problem.
Modern political thinkers call this 'privileged' or 'more privileged' situation.
If you are privileged, all you think about is how to maintain the status quo, so this also reminds me of a book called, "The Art of Monarchy".
Before it baffled me why America keeps enforcing their power into other countries. But if war is all about resources then this puzzle makes sense. But the reasons they give us is bullshit.
The only reason you have to compete is if the resources can only be held by a small group of people. For example, we can only have one number one.
Yeah, number 3 is just as much a loser as number 30.
I used to judge people by numbers, when in school, by rank. Out of school, by money.
Well, you absorbed your cultural training well.
That's why he's in such pain now. If you can't reach the standards set by society, then she or he is a loser, then this causes a lot of pain. Given the condition that a lot of resources or so called money is not earned by the person himself, but inherited from their family or just gained it unfairly. And the ordinary people don't know this, and they work so hard to make the so-called number one, and they have no reward at all.
You know, a just society would mean that interest is outlawed. It would solve so many of these problems. It might create some, though, I don't know.
Interest: making money by investing money.
I think our society around the world is very very competitive. So competitive that even if somebody or anyone of us thinks that cooperation is important, that we still can't get rid of the value of competition. By this I mean, of any teamwork I have ever been involved in, there's just one case in graduate school that could be called cooperative work. All teamwork nowadays seems just to be breaking down a task to the different teammates, and each person does it individually. And after awhile, everyone just reviews the work by the others, with almost no discussion, and the job is done. This is not cooperation, it's just a division of work. No matter it's a school or a workplace, the work is this way. I'm really frustrated by this. None of us know how to work with each other. We are all taught in this way. The method, the methodology, we’re only taught competition ideology. We learn nothing about cooperation, and so we don't know how to cooperate with each other. And that is why maybe your school is so important.
You know, it occurs to me that the first real collaboration I've ever experienced is that Apple Discussion we had. That was amazing.
Yeah, but how did that collaboration really happen?
Wow, good question. Let's see. I had just gotten my facilitation training, and so I now had a full toolbox for developing trust in a group, and directing a group towards collaberation. But! The really important thing was that each and every member in that group was willing to invest themselves into the discussion. Maybe it was because economic issues had come to the forefront. And the other thing was that this group had been talking together for 2 years already, and they had experience with being vulnerable in front of each other and being rewarded for it, they already had experienced how being vulnerable with each other created trust, so they were willing to apply themselves to a discussion that we all felt we weren't smart enough to have. But it really blew my mind, how each of us just built on what the others said, and then suddenly all of us would go, WOW, when the realization hit. And then, even more amazing, was that then everyone gathered themselves and dove right back in, and we got another realization. And this happened like five times. Normally in a given meeting it'll happen once at best. Five times we sat around the table just stunned at what we had discovered, working together.
Notes:
Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon
The Dispossessed Ursula K. Leguin
Always Coming Home Ursula K. Leguin
"Ever since I can remember, I have lived in Yonghe."
To makes something up from whole cloth.
Versailles
Utopia
Dystopia
Kibbutz
Communitarian
