I suggest the loss of individuality causes us to act like a superorganism:

[originalpckelly]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism

There may be areas where it is beneficial, but in many areas it is not. War is probably one of the examples of this. The worth of individuals in a superorganism is diminished so much that they can be killed and it doesn't matter, so long as so many aren't killed that the population decreases significantly. Doesn't that explain war? Send people off to die, they don't ask questions, just do it blindly.

Why do we spend decades deciding whether or not a single person should receive the death penalty and whether it should be carried out when they've been convicted of a heinous act, but then spend a few months debating whether to send thousands of people off to battle in a war who haven't, where at least some of them will probably die?

Why is it that we would never allow one person to tell another to kill themselves, and it actually happen in normal society without the person being told to do it to go fuck themselves, but in the military orders for people to end their lives like that is so normal, and in fact viewed as absolutely necessary for the working of a military?

This international craziness of war must be stopped, and perhaps if people understand that they are being treated like worthless worker ants, they'll do something about it.

I think if true, this means we should never stop asking questions, never stop being selfish, because when you do, you turn yourself over to this superorganism behavior of our species. Never stop valuing who you are, that's obviously your greatest protection against destruction.

Just think of cults and the mob. They act like this too. You can't prosecute just one member or a small group of members for crimes, because the part that's left over, will just regenerate what's been lost, if the damage is not large enough to cause the whole organization to die off.

It's like fighting the fucking Borg from Star Trek. That's probably why we need to have prosecution of groups to bring them down.

And can you think about corporations or dictatorships with cults of personality like this? Think about Apple Computers, in the name of thinking different you are told to buy the same exact thing that everyone else has, an iPod. In the name of individuality you are being told that you must buy something that makes you like everyone else.

Now the thing that's weird here, is that I think it would be only really accurate to say that things with collective decision making act like a superorganism. However, in dictatorships, I allege that the will of the person or the small group of people in charge replaces the will of the people who blindly follow them.

This I suggest is the danger of JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS, even "lawful" orders. Fuck that shit. Think freely. Be yourself, and don't let any asshole tell you any differently. To do so, I suggest, is to invite your own destruction, your own devaluation as a human being.

[Deja Q]

1. Does all that come with a free superorgy?

:evilgrin:

Actually, I'm not keen on iPods (I'll never give up Windows Mobile) but their computer line is somewhat underrated... (I'd still like to see the OS opened up for all, but if people knew why their branded hardware is worth its cost (e.g. the 24" iMac has a display quality bar none thanks to a high end H-IPS panel) they'd be less inclined to be cynical...

[originalpckelly]

7. You get what I'm saying though.

I always knew Star Trek rocked ass.

Perhaps we should view collectivism that causes destruction as maladaptive, while collectivism that encourages growth as adaptive. Like we would with any other evolutionary trait.

[Skidmore]

2. Funny, I see it the other way around--our pursuit of individuality

turns us into people herds. Let one of us change directions in the stampede of humanity and watch the whole people herd turn.

[originalpckelly]

5. Well, perhaps that's what society is, and that dictatorships and corporations...

just turn that instinct against itself, and make it serve only a small group of people.

It's just an idea. It's really a side issue, I was thinking about the mob and comparing it to the lawlessness of something like Scientology.

[cali]

3. sigh. it's not that simple.

but some here really, really crave simple answers to complex issues. some here live in a black/white world.

[originalpckelly]

4. Oh really, then explain explain war.

I was just writing for myself about the problem with Scientology and the mob, and that's the reason I thought about this. It just kind of dawned on me it's like the fucking Borg. You hit one of their spaceships and they just grow it back. You can investigate/arrest/prosecute/convict members of the mob, but unless you get the whole organization prosecuted, it's just going to replace the people it lost, even the people at the top.

Maybe that explains why terrorism is so hard to fight. We can't kill off anyone, because it'll just grow that person back.

[JVS]

6. What's this about superorgasms?

[originalpckelly]

8. I know, maybe if we all like get naked, smoke some pot...

turn on some Barry White we could end world hunger or something.

[lazer47]

23. Not Barry White,, Jimi Hendrix,, Steppenwolf,,Cream,,and a Little Jonie

[annabanana]

9. I get you.. There ARE plusses & minuses to this tendency.

[originalpckelly]

10. Think of the Scandinavian social democracies.

They're socialist, but not in the bad way.

Then some country like North Korea is such a shitty place.

Because the collective will has been turned to serve a small group of people or one man.

I'd bet now that I'm thinking about this, that you really cannot have a nation without collectivism, you can only choose who the collectivism serves. The people or a small group of people.

Love is a collectivist behavior, it will make you value the people you love and take care of them. Taking care of people, God that sounds like such a commie bullshit idea. On the other hand, if you look at someone who goes on one of these mass murdering sprees, like the kids at Columbine, they hate everyone. It's a hate of everyone, which is like a collectivist thing in reverse.

[originalpckelly]

11. Socialized medicine.

Socialized education.

Then compare that to for profit medicine or for profit education. Someone owns the shares, probably a small group of people. It's turning the collective will against the collective by making it serve a small group of people.

[The2ndWheel]

12. "This international craziness of war must be stopped"

You know what the most effective way of doing that might be? A superorganism of nations.

[originalpckelly]

16. That's SOOOO what I just thought too. That's got to be the UN.

It's like we're doing this stuff, but we don't really realize it because we're a part of it.

[The2ndWheel]

28. As long as there are a few hundred regional governments

around the world, all acting in their own interests, privatizing the profits and socializing the costs, then war will be an option. Especially when it comes to the US, because we have the only military that has any global capability(however limited it is), we're the only country paying for that global capability(however limited it is), and so no country or entity can actually stop the US Government from bombing whoever, or whatever, it wants to.

[pnutbutr]

13. yes, but to add more

Our individuality, differences in cultures etc... is what leads to war. The differences between nations gives us reason for war. Once that reason has been established it turns to the society of people to send the soldiers to the battlefield. It is the idea of a society, working together as a group that enables sending people to fight.

[originalpckelly]

15. I think we should divide it into malcollectivism and eucollectivism.

Then on top of that, you have a world in which multiple superorganisms exist. That's probably another reason for war too. Maybe the point of something like the UN, though we may not have seen it, is to create a single superorganism for all humanity, so that we can eliminate the fighting between them.

It looks to have worked, just look at all the cooperation out there, the real trouble makers are the countries who don't uphold democratic values. You might say that's us at this time, under the reign of Cheney. Which he was so in charge.

[conscious evolution]

14. The herd instinct

Herds,when stampeeded,are extremely dangerous.

The PTB know this and use it to their advantage.Why do you think that the religion they use to control the masses uses the shepard as one of the descriptions of their god??

[originalpckelly]

18. Follow the first animal in the herd, versus the blob of ants who've got scouts.

In one of these dictatorships, everyone follows the leader, despite the innate fallibility of every individual human and the innate fallibility of that leader's decision making capability, due to the innately limited information of one person. It's like a situation with a herd.

Entrepreneurs and scientists and perhaps good leaders see something off in the distance and can prove how good it will be for the rest. They use logic and reason to prove to the rest what's out there is good, and the rest of the people go out and do it. It's like when the scouts of an ant colony go out and look for food and they find it, they leave a little chemical trail from the food back to the ant colony, a bunch of ants follow the trail back to the food and break it up into little pieces and carry it back to the colony to feed the others.

Ants probably don't lie to each other about where food is, like human beings lie to each other about what's best for us. The ants don't know they can take over the colony with deception, and they wouldn't want to, because then they couldn't eat. It's this damn human brain, it's capable of thinking some weird and unnatural shit. It's like a computer, I can play games about things that don't really exist. "WHAT DO YOU WANT, I'M TRYING TO PLAY WOW? Die you brutal Horde! Magic potion coming up!***" I bet you could lure the ants into a trap by putting out false scent trails, it would be like people luring each other into blowing the shit out of one another.

Think about emergency powers. "OMG! The fucking world is going to end, we've got to give power to one person to make real decisions for us! OMG! HERD MENTALITY DUDE! RUN! FOLLOW THE LEADER! EVEN IF IT'S OFF THE CLIFF! GET AWAY FROM DANGER! FEAR SHIT!"

On the other hand, think about checked powers. "Um, no, I think the only way the world will end is if we hand unchecked powers over to a single person or small group of people, I believe the term for this is 'fuck you.' I will not accept that a single person or small group of people can truly know what's best for the whole, better than the whole itself. WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL..."

Well, aside from the fact that they wanted to limit the number of people making decisions to rich white dudes, they were fighting against another group of rich white dudes who were being bossed around by a single really rich white dude. So, I guess that makes sense. It's just they kind of soooo missed the forest for the trees, if the trees were white guys who had lots of money and lived on estates. Or maybe missed the ant colony for the ant, there's not just one ant is there? :P

***I don't play that game, just played Warcraft in the past in a half hearted attempt...just thought it'd make a good example.

[C_U_L8R]

17. I think we all know the republican organism

[rug]

19. Nevermind, I thought you typed superorgasm.

[originalpckelly]

20. Come again?

:rofl:

We should SOOOO get off this topic!

[rug]

21. I was further misled by your reference to fucking Borg.

[originalpckelly]

22. Man, talk about STDs and partying irresponsibly...

I went out one night and had fun, now I've lost all ability to think freely and I got all these weird implants all over the place! I really need to stop drinking and fucking Borg prostitutes.

[originalpckelly]

26. I'm going back to bed now...

this all started with me getting up to go to the bathroom, thinking as I was laying there trying to get back to sleep, and thinking that Scientology was a good example of how we'd lost the rule of law, because they get away with everything. So I just wanted to write that down, and it dawned on me while writing about it, that you could only bring down a wacko ass organization like Scientology if you went after it itself, because individuals will just be replaced or re-assimilated once they get out of prison. It's like the way they went after the mob. You can take down one or two guys, hell, you can even take down the leaders, but that just means the rest of the people will take over what they wanted anyway.

It's also like al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. Then I started thinking Borg and ants and flocks of birds and shit. Then I thought of ants and termites duking it out. Then it made sense with humanity and war.

I remember when I was a kid when I got my first computer, it had this cool little game that looked like a piece of graph paper. You could fill in the squares with this blue color, and then hit this play button and they would do all kinds of weird shit.

It wasn't until much later that I learned what this thing, called "Life" on my computer was. It was a version of Conway's Game of Life, which is basically this game in which simple rules produce complex behaviors that look kind of like living things.

I bet the laws of a society act like the rules in that game, and all the events that happen due to those laws are like the various different shapes that you see on the computer graph paper.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_game_of_life

The thing with Conway's game of life is that there are some extremely simple rules to produce all those cool shapes:
1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
2. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

I bet we can come up with some simple laws, like those, that will produce good situations for all of us. After all, how can someone be expected to follow laws they don't understand? Just try to read this shit, this is just the statutory code of our country:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/

I'm willing to bet that few average people actually understand any of those laws. It's OK for laws that are malum in se or that govern crimes that are wrong in themselves, like murder or torture, because only a few people know those aren't inherently wrong. However, for malum prohibitum crimes, crimes that are only wrong because the laws says so, because at various times in various societies the laws aren't the same for that particular thing, then malum prohibitum laws are completely unjust because no one knows precisely what the fuck is going on. How can you be expected to follow a law that you simply don't understand, even if you were totally interested in being law abiding?

Laws really are natural truths, I suggest, because they should be the result of a study of the data (history) and the conclusion of what way we are so fucked up, that if we don't have laws, we'll do terrible things like torture human beings. Lawmaking is really a study of human behavior.

Lawmakers, at least ones who don't make pleas to irrational emotions like fear or hatred, are like researchers developing a new medicine to treat/cure a disease.

Oh well, it's just an idea.

Malum prohibitum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malum_prohibitum

Malum in se:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malum_in_se

Arguing that we shouldn't all be a part of the decision making process, or the debate is like arguing for dictatorship. I could be wrong, but my right to talk about this, just like anyone else's, is not up for debate here. To do so is to create an environment of collectivism that serves the will of a small group or single person.

[originalpckelly]

27. Just a little more about how I suggest this relates to torturegate...

The fact that we have such complex laws that govern things based on our internal moral compass like torture, I suggest the vast majority of us doubt whether or not such an immoral thing like torture is actually illegal, if put up to it by people playing on our irrational herd instincts.

We just assume the people who are lawyers know more about right and wrong than the rest of us do, but the fact is that our sense of right and wrong probably evolved in all of us, not just a few of us, so we all know.

Allowing ourselves to be demeaned by people who claim to know more about common sense things like the morality of torture, allows us to fork over our moral compass to these people, and allows them to make the judgments, instead of all of us. This unchecks the powers of the collective will, and gets us to support these moronic and sick ideas. Things that redefine human suffering in cold bureaucratic legalese. Like this reasoning in the new Bybee memo:

"As we understand it, when the waterboard is used, the subject's body responds as if the subject were drowning -- even though the subject may be well aware that he is in fact not drowning. You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm. Thus, although the subject may experience the fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning, the waterboard does not inflict physical pain. as we explained in the Section 2340A Memorandum, "pain and suffering" as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of "pain" as distinguished from "suffering".... The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view, inflict "severe pain and suffering". Even if one were to parse the stature more "finely" to attempt to treat suffering as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering."

In simpler terms:
"We're going to do shit like torturing people, because we think we're right all the time, so we can redefine a malum in se crime like committing torture to not be illegal. As we all know, people are not capable of saying just about anything when in pain, like when they stub their toes they shout fuck as loud as possible in front of the kids. In no way can you get people to do the same exact thing when being tortured. So anything we get will be just sparkling clear information. Thanks for your collective power, we really like how it tastes, do you have anymore for us? If you don't give us it, the boogeyman man* will come and EAT YOU ALIVE! GIVE IT THE FUCK UP NOW! I WANT! THEY'RE GOING TO KILL YOU AND YOUR FAMILY WITH NUKES!"

We need to make lawmaking the domain of all, and laws need to be simple enough for average people to understand. They should be so simple that everyone can remember then, even though they may specialize in other areas. To not do this, I argue, is to leave ourselves open to people playing on the doubt of malum in se crimes being criminal based upon the overcomplexity of laws that describe them, and our ignorance of those laws, to get us to do crazy ass shit like torturing people, so that we can protect ourselves, and we can remain the good guys while doing it.

*I will note that there are several variations on the undefined thing that's GOING TO KILL YOU NOW HAND OVER EVERYTHING!

"bogeyman, boogyman, bogyman, boogieman, boogey monster, or boogeyman" as per wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogeyman

Maybe that says something. Everything in else in our language has a fairly strict spelling, but that's so undefined. It's the unknown, perhaps it's like an onomatopoeia only instead of when being said, it's what it feels like when you spell it.

[siligut]

24. Certainly we can see the loss of individuality amongst cult members.

In order to be organized a group will create a hive mind, in cults it is a strong charismatic leader who sets the tone for the group.

[wuvuj]

25. The interesting thing is how the military....

...deals with this dilemma.

"Why do we spend decades deciding whether or not a single person should receive the death penalty and whether it should be carried out when they've been convicted of a heinous act, but then spend a few months debating whether to send thousands of people off to battle in a war who haven't, where at least some of them will probably die?

Why is it that we would never allow one person to tell another to kill themselves, and it actually happen in normal society without the person being told to do it to go fuck themselves, but in the military orders for people to end their lives like that is so normal, and in fact viewed as absolutely necessary for the working of a military?"

The real problem in the US is that military service has become a kind of religion....and a rite of passage. Expected when said country has the largest military in the world...by far?

Sort of an emotional combination of service and sacrifice. They've been led to believe that they should expect respect and that they are "heroes".

But if you look at the bigger picture...those individuals in the military are also "enablers" of those in power...and in the US currently...I'd call those in power...."fascist"....i. e., using the military in support of corporate goals.

So the recent theme has been to "support the troops"....I'd say in recognition of the false pretenses involved in starting the war(s).

The irony to me is this.....that they are asking citizens in general to "look up" to those who have enabled those in power to conduct wars of aggression....and to constrict and reduce the general population's civil rights in the US. They use fear of "terrorists" and protecting the rights of women and children as levers to do this.

Our police forces and the ever increasing number of private security types very likely derive primarily from those with former military service experience.

To me it seems that 9/11 and many of the social/justice problems in the US derive directly from the use of the military overseas in support of corps (oil,defense,wall street...etc)...and the outsourcing of jobs to other countries.

So I'd have to say that the general trend is for those in power to treat US citizens more and more like they treat people in other countries.....using the same people to do it. All the while conditioning the general population in the US to accept this...and to get all excited and happy when there are similar "victories" overseas....espec when it involves using high tech to kill from a distance.

Sort of like expecting people to shoot themselves in the foot.....and really like it? Yet few will be able to make these connections?