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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45595 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Have you never socialized with other people as a group, for the purpose of socialization and wondering how you can make it better next time?

I'm not positive what "for the purpose of socialization" means so I'm going to assume it just means "for fun" correct me if I'm interpreting this wrong. Yes, when something doesn't go well at a party I try to improve that aspect with the next party. I do not think of this as a ~"struggle or competition", I think viewing it that way is a path straight down sociopathy.

Replace partying with hanging out with friends if you want to quibble with the choice of words. The point is that in a utopia what it means to compete can be entirely different and much more pro-social than what it means to compete in other societies.

I don't think framing this as a competition works at all. I think you're trying to combine two things, friendship/kinship and the only status hierarchy that remains when you remove all other meaningful competitions. I don't think kinship survives this merge. Competitions are gamed, when there is only one competition all energy is put into optimizing that competition. I've been to social events that are thinly veiled status competitions, they are soulless affairs but they're still good at raising status if used right but tiling over the social landscape with them would be a true loss.

My basic point is this, replacing myriad discrete status games with one central status game raises the stakes of that game to a maximum height. socialization based hierarchies are popularity contests and the real world example of heightened and globalized popularity contests isn't who throws the best board game night, it's politics. It's the Clintons, Trumps, Stalins and Maos of the world that win. Socialist don't eliminate all hierarchy, they make it so that only one hierarchy matters and it's perhaps the most brutal and illegible hierarchy that exists.

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