...who is society?

 "...who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first… There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate..."

Margaret Thatcher

More on society ...

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Does “society” even exist?

 

Mish Mash for busy minds

There is no such thing as "society” just an useful invention of sociopaths to exploit the gullible.

Society as something opposed to the individual is a travesty. The only useful use of the term is if it serves me.

There is no such thing as “society” apart from the personal interests if its members and only in the sense those members understand them – not as some other people or group will try to impose on them.

Any claims of primacy of the common good over personal interests betray either personal confusion and a repulsive “holler than you” self-righteous ignorant attitude or exploitative hypocrisy  in a brazen attempt to shame you into submission.

As with the wise Emperor of China who was the wisest person in the land because he was able to learn something even from the dumbest person so everyone of me and you is an emperor of our individual destiny. Free to set up our own goals and devise the means to achieve those goals. Free to succeed and free to fail including free to learn from that or ignore the lesson.

Mish Mash for busy minds

What You See Is What You Get

What you see is what you get in live. If you know more you will get it easier. Understanding how the world works is critical to achieve ones goals easier. That knowledge comes from reflection on personal and others' experience. By reflection I mean both creating assumptions on cause and effect relationships and analyzing the result of testing these assumptions in real life. Personal experience is the most expensive but most reliable method of testing these assumptions and it relates them to our personal goals, interests or desires more closely than others. An experiment or in other words an artificial model of reality to test our theories is cheaper than real life experience but can be inaccurate or misleading due to the necessary simplification of that reality. The danger of self deception is even greater when applied to complex phenomena like society, business and especially politics.

But if personal experience leads to better knowledge wouldn't that also mean that personal theories of happiness, ethics, economics and politics are better than general ones. And indeed that is the logical conclusion. General theories are always weaker and less informative than personal ones. That doesn't meant that the are unnecessary – we need them to establish understanding between us so we can get other to help us achieve our goals which would be difficult (if not impossible unless one resorts to coercion) if we don't have a shared system of values, meanings and beliefs on the projected results of certain actions. Coercion is bad not because of some obscure commandment but because it can only achieve short lived results deceptively easy. The results will be short lived and the whole coercive enterprise a waste of resources because anything that does not develop is bound to die out. The only way to improve the results from coercion is by more coercion thus inevitably causing more resistance until the balance tips over against the perpetrator of coercive practices. It's a futile exercise and that makes it bad policy to pursue.

Philosophy – a journey to the other world

(a quest for wisdom, love and freedom)

This world is the world we know and understand. The other world is the world of the unknown. Philosophy is the name of the ship that can take us on a voyage of exploration of that world. The controls of this ship are easy to master because the only indispensable qualification is love for wisdom. Easy as it seems it must be handled with care like any tool that can harm you or those around you if it is not applied with care and forethought especially its sharp edge called doubt. This ship will use faith as the wind that will propel it on its way and dreams to serve as stars to guide it towards the its goal.

Faith that if you work hard all your emotional, intellectual, political and economic needs will be fulfilled and the best way to do that is if you think deep, love with abandon, work hard and sincerely believe.

Democracy is the way to fully appreciate the individual thus setting them on their path to develop their full potential for a their own and consequently everyone's benefit. Though it is the most natural way for organising a society it doesn't come naturally. Humanity's inherent complexity demands the ultimate intellectual, emotional and spiritual effort to make society work. The problems often seem insurmountable but the alternative is “nasty, brutish” and deadly. Power comes from working together chasing personal happiness.

Ethics, Rights, Identities and Interests

Ethics, Rights, Identities and Interests
Ethical considerations have no meaning if they do not lead to better life for the participants in a social interaction. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (Dante). Due the complexity of modern life, though, it is often difficult to foresee the consequences of a certain action. That calls for the creation of rules of behaviour based on a concept of universal rights. It could be that in a disconnected world people can attempt to create a particular concept of rights applicable only to their group (that is what sects do) but that is impractical if impossible in an interconnected world. Rights are there to protect interests which on their part are how people perceive their need and that perception can be right or wrong. As this process itself is complicated and human beings are inherently lazy and bound to look for an easier way out we look for group identities in addition to our individual one to help us comprehend the world around us and the pursuit of our goals in it. (Additionally choosing a group identity can help us discover our true individual identity or further obscure it and destroy our personality.)
These ideas of ethics, rights, identities, and interests are constantly constructed , remodeled and abandoned in society and the more they correspond to material reality the more successful the societies and individuals employing them are. Also the fact that ideas are socially constructed does not mean that they are not real or arbitrary. The fact that they people use them to guide their actions makes ideas a powerful material force worth studying even as for most people social relations are much more important for the quality of their lives than interaction with nature. And the dependence of success and failure of any human endeavor on the relevance of ideas to reality consisting of nature and other ideas makes arbitrary choice of ideas a dangerous path to follow and therefore it is not so common.
People and communities chose ideas of ethical behavior, rights and identities based on their understanding of their interests. Therefore the study of interests seems like a good starting point for any inquiry into society and politics.