[Saya]

Originally Posted by x-deviant-x

Tribes are the very basic root of socialism; small groups of people living and working together for the prosperity of their community. (also known as gangs, or guilds). The key word is small. There is little need or desire for competition in small groups of people like that, because for the most part, they all get along and help each other, so competition would be more of a hindrance than a help. But as time goes on and a tribe grows in numbers (either by allying or merging with other tribes or simply by procreating within their own tribe), its people begin forming their own ideas and opinions about how things should be, which gives birth to conflict within the community. More time passes and tribes break apart due to those conflicts of interest, giving birth to competition. Eventually, as resources become more scarce, those two groups will struggle for dominance over available land and resources because each believe, for whatever various reasons or combination of reasons, they have more right to them than the other, laying the groundwork for feudalism.

Actually there's plenty of tribes that do not have much aggression within the tribe, even in times of want. Tribes tend to become aggressive when resources are scarce, but against each other, not within. Even then a lot of battles aren't what we would consider aggressive, like in New Guinea they might meet in a field, fight a bit, then go home if someone gets hurt. Usually when tribes go to "war", its not like anything we do, they might pick one or two of the other tribe a year, and maybe, MAYBE if the other tribe is weak enough, they'll risk a full out attack, or the weak tribe with be absorbed by other tribes. The culture of many tribes like the !Kung centers around social responsibility, so even when things are desperate, and in the !Kung's world, its a harsher existance, there is very little aggression. They are raised to value sharing. I can't remember the name of the tribe for the life of me but when I did aggression in Anthropology, there was this tribe that considered hoarding and not sharing an act of aggression that is terrible. Children who display aggressiveness, even assertiveness, are mocked and scolded by their parents. So they grow up to be more passive and accept that things need to be shared among a group, not hoarded. Even in agrarian cultures like Vietnam where some amount of feudalism existed, even the poorest landless peasant was able to rent farmland on a sliding scale, because the villages would own collective farmland exactly for the purpose of making sure the poorest didn't go hungry. When the French tried to introduce competitive capitalism, a million people died in a famine. And the Vietnamese were understandably very outraged and you might know what happened after that. And this is part of the reason why capitalism doesn't work; a lot of times when people die in a famine, like in the Bangladesh famine in the 70s, there was more than enough food to go around and feed everyone, its just that no one could afford it since they had no harvest to sell that year.

Humans are competitive by nature. It doesn’t matter what environment they exist in, they are instinctually competitive. All living species are, even plants. For humans, it is the principle, or concept, of fight or flight - a basic instinct, also known as survival, and it exists in every conceivable human relationship scenario. It does not always mean literally “saving one’s life from death”, it can also mean winning an argument.

Of course there are plenty of people who can co-exist peacefully and work together, but you will never get 100% of the people to work together peacefully 100% of the time, unless you are somehow able to control what they are able to think, feel, do and react to. If you allow for individual expression (thinking, feeling or doing), then you allow the groundwork to be laid for competition.

So, if the goal is to remove the desire for competition, I don't see how it is possible without removing human emotion and response to those emotions. That is control, there is no other term for it.

Personally I don't believe that any government works for large groups of people. There will always be conflict and struggle, which leads to segregation, which leads to competition and even greater power struggles. It doesn't matter what model of government you have in place, there will always be groups of people who disagree with that model of government and who will ultimately break away and form their own.

People are different, but people are also raised to be certain ways. We are raised to be competitive and individualistic because we are raised to value capitalism and economic aggression, other people in other cultures are not. We are social animals above all else. A person is most mentally healthy when they have a social network to support them, just yesterday I attended a presentation by a psychologist that talked about signs of suicide, and one of them is that they have no support system. Men are far more likely to be depressed single as well because women are raised to rely on their friends for emotional support, and become intimate with them, while men are not. Psychologically we are much happier cooperating than competing and being misanthropic. Likewise, an individual trying to make it alone in the wilderness would never do as well as a person in a tribe, and for a tribe to work you need cooperation. We need other people, we need cooperation, or few profit while many starve.

orld who are so filthy rich they are able to shit in solid gold toilets and their world of sheep swoons as they watch their billion-dollar wedding which the public is FORCED to pay for, (and not even ALLOWED to know how much they’re actually paying), while children in other countries starve to death. There is nothing more evil or twisted than that. Sending their troops in to slaughter the starving would be FAR more humane, because at least then, at the very least, they wouldn’t be suffering.

You know, people aren't animals that can be humanely slaughtered. A lot of the children starve to death in the world because colonialism destroyed their country's economy, the current famine in the horn of Africa wouldn't be so drastic if we didn't force a switch to monoculture farming. Our convenience and lifestyles depends on the lives and blood of the third world. And the US and other countries have totally supported genocide to keep the rich in other countries happy, like East Timor, or participated directly like in Vietnam, was that humane of them?