The myth of unity: a parable
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The point of my counter-parable was to illustrate that where competition is inevitable - and recall, Scrotie is a huge fan of competition - so, also, is the event of multiple people with mutually compatible/desirable goals banding together to pool their abilities and resources to outcompete smaller entities. The original Myth of Unity story states that when two men want the same thing, of which there's only enough for one man, then they are miserable until they stop wanting the same thing, or until they generate enough physical distance between themselves for their mutual desires to avoid interfering with each other.
When this is impossible, either through sheer lack of space because we're all still stuck on this horrible space rock or through a universally desirable limited resources (such as food, in my stab at a Story Lesson), then competition will determine who gets it, and one extremely effective way to win a competition is to band with someone else, thus reducing the number of competitors you have to beat and increasing your ability to beat the remaining competitors simultaneously. If there are two-and-only-two competitors for a Thing, this banding-up is impossible of course - but there are never Just Two people competing for something in the real world, are there? She/Her
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" No you don't. The group of three won't compete with each other unless another condition to the scenario is added. There will most likely be zero trust between their alliance, but as long as there's no clear benefit involved (and the only benefit involved in said scenario would be teaming up with the loser to take down one guy in the alliance for X reason) nothing will happen. And no such benefits exist. " Except that there's no benefits to go in war. The scenario says they're imprisoned; infighting would lessen their chances of eventually breaking out. Whoever starts infighting will draw the ire of the two others in the three-man alliance; unless it's a 2v1 in which case the loser will team up with the one who's solo. But again, no BENEFITS are involved. Wars aren't started out of the blue, there are always benefits that one side is looking to get from them. You're completely ignoring this and claiming that these people would start infighting in a situation there's absolutely no benefits to gain from it. This makes very little sense. " Have you heard of the prisoner's dilemma? A very similar thing would happen in this scenario, the 'logically best option' would be ignored for the sake of personal benefits. Yes I'm overusing the word "benefits", but that's literally the crux of any thought experiment like this. What are the benefits for party A if they do thing X? No, they don't just start infighting because 'human nature', there needs to be external benefits worth said infighting. Last edited by Anonymous1749704#5648 on May 11, 2018, 12:55:35 AM
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" Kinda my point and it isn't so illogical. The prisoners probably wouldn't just fight over their "fair" share of food but fight for more food than they need. Probably as a leverage over other prisoners or fear and preparation when they might not get enough food for the next day. |
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"The point is that as the number of parties with claim to one specific set of resources increases, the number of potential disagreements about how to divide those resources increases. If three people apply democracy to a resource allocation problem, there's two winners and one loser. In contrast, in the 2016 US Presidential election, about 20% of the US population voted for Donald Trump, with about 60% either unwilling or unable to vote... and consider how many people voted for Trump not because they actually wanted him but simply because they didn't want Clinton (who received less than 1% more popular vote in terms of total US population). On a large enough scale, calling first-past-the-post democracy the tyranny of the majority is giving it credit it isn't due; when applied to millions of people, such a system is tyranny of the most vocal minority. Not that systems like instant runoff voting are a magic panacea. Coalitions of multiple parties still form a majority under which a large minority lose out and the coalition members must accept compromises with the other parties of the coalition. Nobody gets exactly what they wanted, and many don't even get a voice. As Malcolm Gladwell explains, the solution is division. When a large group votes on how they like their coffee, the resulting brew gets mediocre reviews; when people are split up into three smaller groups and then vote, satisfaction increases significantly. Democracy works best when one's vote has weight, when compromise is minimal if not nonexistent, and when significant dissent triggers reassignment to a different voting group; that is, democracy is best applied to small groups - the smaller, the better. To repurpose Gladwell's quote of Howard Moskowitz: when we look for universal principles in government, we do ourselves a massive disservice. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on May 12, 2018, 1:58:05 AM
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" That is the point, isn't it? Often you just can't run a country in different ways. If I can get what I want, why would I care what others didn't get? If you have to choose between winning and losing, who is gonna argue against winning? Even if there are more than two alternatives, forced dichotomies are a reality than not. I want my coffee to be brew my way, if you have to suffer for my choice, it is inconsequential to me. It is none of my concern. Sometime that is just how the world works. PS: For a vocal minority to be able to control the majority, they also has to control POWER. If I control all the coffee, I get to decide how the coffee is brewed, don't I? Last edited by deathflower#0444 on May 12, 2018, 2:23:57 AM
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Just take a look at what happens in nature when there is that inevitable competition and lack of resources. Brutatility, slavery and abuse is built in the laws of nature. If you don't have religion or morality present which allows one to sacrifice for others (being the one that gets less meal) and just take "greed" or survival as the only factor brutality is inevitable. If two of the men unite their "greed" together against other instead of an equality system or a sacrificial system it will imply death, slavery or brutatility in other form against the third.
People these days simply forgot that life ain't that easy without a sacrificial or equality system present. "In this game you're just a cow being milked, not a human being entertained" - Kiss_Me_Quick Last edited by IIPheXII#5639 on May 12, 2018, 8:26:38 AM
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