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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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I'll grant you that I kinda lost the plot of our conversation by delving into material conditions, which are after all off topic given my caveat. This entire question of food access is a red herring. But I felt it necessary to at least give some context.

Now, consider the average lumpenprole of today. I'm quite familiar with that life since I've lived among them for a quite some time and arguably been one at some point.

He doesn't work, properly speaking. His sustenance is guaranteed by the state through "benefits" and "social insurance", and actually working is in fact discouraged since he would lose these safety nets. Drugs and crime are among his main activities, and he is so plainly excluded from social institutions that he can only muster contempt for them, and the occasional violent riot, despite being ostensibly dependent on the dole to exist and generally benefiting from heroic budgetary efforts to make his misery comfortable.

Now such a person, in my view, is maintained by this free material comfort in a state of profound spiritual disease. His life is even more pointless and abject that the average modern life. All he exists to do is pad some statistics.

The sentiment this situation evokes and the behaviors it engenders are best explained by Kassovitz's film La Haine. It exposes very clearly the profound incomfort and unnatural sense of atomization and exclusion you get out of being stuck in this nonsense position of subsidized mediocrity. And predictably ends in autodestruction.

In comparison, the Roman slave is the victim of a much more tangible form of authoritarianism, but he is not outside society. He is an integrated part that the whole thing relies on and has both a spiritual and a functional place in some metaphysical order. Again it's not particularly a kind of order I like, but it is still some order. He belongs. His suffering has a point, even a tangible value.

He is not pure wastes. And while you could successfully argue that escape from his condition is a lot harder (though not impossible) than escape from the lumpenprole's, it is a lot better to be a slave than to be an unsocialized nothing. In all ways but material.

This is why I predicted (accurately I might add) that UBI experiments would fail and result is more miserable people. Unemployment is legitimately harder on people than forced labor in these ways. People need to do things and to participate in their society, and this is not subsidiary but coequal to the need to eat, sleep and drink.

The sense of belonging is material. What isn't material is imagining that Roman slaves on average had it better based on your own yearning for "a point" you had or do feel. I can just as well imagine a modern lumpenprole taking satisfaction from leeching off the society that failed to give him a dignified life, and finding that as low as his life is, it is at least better than coping with forced servitude.

My general impression is that people retreat to "spiritual value" when they don't feel any actual value and desperately need to.

My general impression is that materialists refuse to acknowledge anything that isn't quantifiable and therefore reneg on all the sentimental bonds that actually hold a society together because they have a misplaced faith in the sole power of material comfort.

We are having a metaphysical disagreement. Which is annoying because we can both just dismiss each other's position as nonsense. But that's not really useful.

So in

Some societies treated slaves with more decency than modern man commends in all areas that are not commodified material comfort.

by "modern man" you meant only not working lumpenproles on a dole?

I certainly do not mean "all modern men are treated worse than the worse of slaves in every way" if that's what you're reading.

But no, it's not just lumpenproles that are victimized by the tendency they exemplify.

Alienation permeates all strata of modern society, unfortunately.

I read it as a claim that includes at least typical modern men.

I'll stand by that, servitude was a lot more human and thick a relationship than the way capital uses common people today.

And yes, I do consider the fact that being literally owned by another person is dehumanizing to a pretty extreme degree. But still less so than being a number on a spreadsheet discarded at will.

There's also an argument to be made about the higher levels of control modernity allows, and that common man is essentially as controlled as a slave without the need for explicit shackles. But that's off topic.

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