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RichardKennaway comments on Proportional Giving - Less Wrong Discussion
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Which makes it all the stranger that you propose, without seeming to have given it any thought, a totalitarian state that will somehow just work. Can you imagine no other way the world could work than as a totalitarian state somewhere on a spectrum of bad to good?
Which one, by the way?
I haven't proposed a totalitarian state. This is something that you inferred from what I've wrote.
I was talking about a society with certain characteristics.
I was thinking more about a StarTrek kind of thing than an old soviet republic.
One practical, slow way in which I see this happening is by shifting the focus on cooperation in education and slowly limiting the massive accumulation of wealth together with strong regulations regarding ecological impact and labour compensation.
One very fine idea I found was in a Howard Gardner interview for BigThink (scroll down to " What is the US getting wrong?" )
Another interesting approach was an initiative called 1:12 proposed in Switzerland. Unfortunately, that initiative got hit massively with FUD from the competition which was able to outspend it in terms of advertising 40:1.
Marx didn't propose a totalitarian state either. His ideas still lead to a totalitarian state. Ideas have consequences. If you don't know how the alternative will work to the status quo you want to destroy, than it makes sense to assume a bad outcome.
Marx's ideas were perverted by Lenin and the totalitarian mess we saw last century derived from that.
Also, I'm not advocating the destruction of the status quo but its transformation, its transcendence. I'm non-violent and I don't believe in forced societies. My hope is that we will outgrow the old ways.
That doesn't change that Marx carries some responsibility for what happened.
Terry Pratchett wrote somewhere that one person writes an innocent book about political philosophy and then the people who read the book don't get the jokes and other people have to pay for it in blood.
People payed in blood for the revolution in Egypt and now the freedom of speech in Egypt is less than it was before the revolution.
This is like accusing a blacksmith for a murder someone did with a knife he created.
Responsibility lies with the ones who act in a destructive way or the ones who coerce others to act destructively.
Marx wasn't at all reticent about the necessity of dictatorship and terror.
If that's the reigning philosophy I don't think humanity survives the next 200 years.
What do you think would happen?
Basically technology provides too much power to do things. If people don't act responsibility with the increased amount of power that humans accidents will happen.
It might be an UFAI that destroys human civilization or it might be another thread which we understand even less. The important point is that the cost of mistakes and not acting fully responsible rise.
You are talking about a state that takes everything from everyone beyond what they "need". When I asked how my desire for a bigger house than I "need" would be met, this was the exchange:
"Totalitarian" is exactly the right word for this. This is a vision of the state giving and the state taking away, where all belongs to the state and personal property is to be justified by a plea of need.
I don't agree with caps on individual wealth, and were I Swiss, I'd have voted against 1:12 even without seeing any of the so-called FUD. (You don't think it possible that any of the opposition was from people who simply judged it to be a bad idea for the society?) But something Gardner says later on I find worth quoting:
Compare this succinct statement of why capitalism works so well, from a recent comment here:
That brake on failure is really important. When someone decides to Do Something and commits their resources to it, if it doesn't work out, they have to stop. A government's ability to carry on regardless is in comparison almost unlimited. The government of the day have their jobs at risk, but nothing more.
There might be some terminological confusion here. To expand on what you've written, totalitarianism doesn't necessarily describe repressive or ultra-nationalist governments, though historically totalitarian governments have often been highly nationalist and have almost always been repressive. Instead, it describes governments which claim total identity of state with society; or, to put it another way, where citizens' behavior is accepted as legitimate by the government to the extent that it's directed toward state goals and ideology.
I can think of some (more or less stable or scalable) societies which don't include notions of private property as generally accepted in the modern First World, but which are not totalitarian. But if some state-defined utility function is governing resource allocations, that's pretty hard to square with any other alternative.
What do you have in mind besides kibbutzim?
A highly relevant issue here is the freedom to exit. Many small communities (e.g. religious cults) can be quite totalitarian but as long as there is freedom to exit we don't consider them horribly repressive. On the other hand I can't imagine how a totalitarian society without the freedom to exit can be anything but repressive.
Most of the best examples are historical, although kibbutzim and certain other religious or social communities do seem to qualify. Feudal systems of property rights for example often held all property to ultimately belong to the monarch, but didn't allow for enough centralized control to qualify as totalitarian.