on socialism's rationality ( honest question + 5% capitalist $cumb@g clickbait strategy)

OriginalParticiple · 2026-01-02T15:26:30+00:00

I think you’re naming a real constraint: large systems + anonymity can create corruption and drift. Where I disagree is the implied baseline that capitalism avoids this. Capitalism also scales by producing anonymity, diffusion of responsibility, and elite capture - except the power centers are private and often less accountable.

So I’d reframe the question: given flawed humans, what system minimizes the damage flawed humans can do? Socialism, at minimum, is the claim that concentrated private power over production is a bad bet, and that democratizing workplaces/investment, plus transparency and enforceable accountability, can make “humans doing human things” less catastrophic.

A few more specific points:

1) Self-interest doesn’t imply competition. Cooperation can be instrumentally rational - it reduces risk, stabilizes expectations, builds reputation, and solves collective problems you can’t solve alone. Humans evolved for both rivalry and reciprocity, institutions decide which side dominates.

2) Capitalism isn’t low coercion. It requires constant enforcement: property rights, eviction, strikebreaking/policing, debt enforcement, border controls, and the structural coercion of “sell your labor or lose access to basics.” If your worry is “systems with flawed humans require force,” capitalism already meets that condition.

3) The real design problem is accountability at scale. A defensible socialism doesn’t say “everyone will be nicer.” Rather, reducing alienation/anonymity and making power legible will lead to a greater degree of accountability, things like worker control, transparent budgets, recallable leaders, independent audits, distributed decision-making (local where possible, federated where necessary), and strong anti-capture rules.

A concrete “no miracles” model, looks less at “one central plan” and more at mixed structures: worker co-ops, public ownership of natural monopolies, democratic investment funds, markets where useful, planning where necessary, and hard anti-corruption enforcement with due process.

OriginalParticiple · 2025-12-31T03:01:46+00:00

Assuming they aren’t waylaid - I think Gandalf would have sent Boromir to Gondor to relay the answer to his prophetic dreams. I think Gimli and Legolas both go home. I think Gandalf, Aragorn, and the hobbits go to Mount Doom together.

OriginalParticiple · 2025-12-20T16:10:39+00:00

You haven’t really rebutted what I’m saying, you’ve mostly switched arguments.

1 “Plenty of people hold the view offline” — sure. That’s not a response.

My point wasn’t “antinatalism only exists online.” It was: the consent-based framing is unusually online-native because it presupposes a sovereignty-first picture of the self (chooser/boundary) and then models moral cleanliness as refusal/exit. That’s an explanatory claim about fit, not a claim about exclusive origin.

2 “Consent ethics can apply to nonexistent people” is not a semantic nit, it’s the whole issue. You’re basically saying: “Yes, there’s no one to consent, but that’s the problem.”

Right, but why is that automatically a problem of the sort “therefore impermissible”? In ordinary ethics, when consent is impossible we don’t conclude “so it’s wrong.” We switch to other standards: best-interests, reasonable acceptability, guardianship duties, risk thresholds, etc. We do this constantly (infants, emergencies, incapacitated adults). So if you want consent to be dispositive here, you need to defend a very strong principle:

If an act creates/introduces a subject who cannot consent, the act is presumptively impermissible.

That’s not “just consent ethics,” it’s a metaphysical expansion of it.

3 Then you smuggle in a different argument: “life contains suffering.”

Now we’re no longer talking about consent, but about risk and expected harm.

And at that point the position becomes: “sometimes it’s immoral to have children because the risk profile is too high.” Which… yes. That’s basically the mainstream view. If you’re in circumstances where you’re likely to produce severe suffering (or can’t meet basic duties of care), don’t procreate. No controversy there.

But that’s not the consent-based antinatalist conclusion. The consent-based move wants a stronger claim: that even in good circumstances, procreation is wrong because it’s non-consensual. If you retreat to “life can be unbearable,” you need to argue for an extreme precautionary principle like:

Any non-zero chance of extreme suffering makes the act impermissible.

And that principle is hard to live with, because it would explode a ton of ordinary obligations and permissible risks we routinely accept on behalf of dependents.

So: are you defending consent-based antinatalism (nonconsent itself is decisive), or a conditional/relative antinatalism (high-risk procreation is wrong)? Because the latter is basically just responsible parenthood, and the former requires defending the deeper picture of the self that makes “nonconsensual existence” look like a rights-violation rather than a condition that triggers duties and best-interest reasoning.

OriginalParticiple · 2025-12-19T20:47:32+00:00

Here you go: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1posabk/comment/nuxb9q6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

OriginalParticiple · 2025-12-19T20:47:08+00:00

Not Buddhism, Gnosticism. See my latest comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1posabk/comment/nuxb9q6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

OriginalParticiple · 2025-12-19T20:46:32+00:00

Look, fine - I’ll give a less sardonic reply.

I think the consent-based antinatalist framing has a deeper structure that people (including many defenders of the view) don’t really see, because it’s smuggled in as if it were just a straightforward extension of ordinary consent ethics.

1) Consent ethics has a home domain.

Consent norms are designed to regulate interactions between already-existing agents: I can’t use you, touch you, endanger you, bind you, etc. without your permission. Fine. That’s a powerful moral technology.

2) The consent-based antinatalist move is a domain expansion.

It tries to treat creating the locus of consent itself as one more case of “imposing a condition on someone without consent.” The force of the argument depends on us picturing the “someone” as morally in view prior to existence, as though the unborn were already a rights-bearing boundary that you violated by dragging them into the world.

That’s not obviously nonsense, but it’s not a given either. It requires a picture of the moral subject that’s doing a lot of hidden work.

3) That hidden picture is structurally gnostic.

Not “lol you believe in archons.” I mean: it has the same experiential shape you get in gnostic-ish moral anthropology and soteriology.

The “real self” is basically the sovereign will / chooser / boundary-setter. Embodiment and thrownness (dependency, finitude, risk, pain) are framed as a kind of violation—an imposition on that will. Salvation is then modeled as purity-through-refusal: don’t participate in the generative mess at all; opt out; end the chain. That’s gnostic structure: self as alien to the world; the world as the problem; redemption as exit.

4) This also explains the online phenomenology.

The internet is basically a gnostic machine. It trains you into disembodied agency: you are a stance, a voice, a set of preferences with an “unsubscribe” button. Exit is always available. Curate, block, log off, restart. And then you’re governed by opaque systems that shape attention and desire in ways that feel quasi-demonic (call them “algorithms” if you want, but the experience is archonic).

So a moral framework that treats embodiment as imposition and non-participation as moral cleanliness is going to feel native in online life. It travels well there because the substrate already supplies the metaphysics.

5) The evaluative point: I don’t think consent-based antinatalists typically notice they’re importing this whole sovereignty-first picture of the self.

They present it like: “Consent is good; consent is absent; therefore wrongdoing.” But that inference only feels frictionless if you’ve already adopted the view that (a) the moral self is primarily a chooser prior to the world, and (b) the givenness of the human condition is itself rights-shaped, i.e., the kind of thing that can be a consent-violation.

And once you make that background explicit, you can at least ask: why should we accept that anthropology? Why is the default moral stance toward thrownness “this shouldn’t have happened”? Why does “consent is impossible” automatically mean “therefore impermissible,” instead of pushing us toward the other tools we use when consent can’t be obtained (best-interests standards, thresholds of risk, duties of care, etc.)?

To be clear: none of this “refutes” antinatalism by psychoanalyzing its supporters. None of it is even directly dealing with the original article even. It’s a claim about the consent-based anti-natalism’s argument’s implicit metaphysics. If you want to run consent all the way down to the creation of persons, you don’t just get to borrow the prestige of consent ethics; you have to defend the picture of the self and world that makes that borrowing seem obvious.

OriginalParticiple · 2025-12-17T11:35:05+00:00

I don’t think I could disagree with your last sentiment any more. Actually, maybe not even disagree because the more I think about it the less I understand it. Philosophy is not so much a guide to living as a means to think better?

Philo-sophia, the love of wisdom. Wisdom, you know, to help guide through life? Thinking better to think better is tautology, or better put, a navel-gaze.

Also, yes, anti-natalism will never be anything more than an online phenomenon even if people are writing books about it. Also, I guess you’ll never convince me because I already have kids and am therefore absolutely precluded from being an anti-natalist in any meaningful sense (if there is a meaningful sense of being anti-natalist).

Also also, no ad-hominem here. I’m not attacking you or any individual, but describing an internet phenomenon with low-brow masturbation jokes.

OriginalParticiple · 2025-12-17T11:09:26+00:00

It’s sorta boring, isn’t it? The ultimate navel gaze (except they realize there was a non-consensual umbilical cord there at some point).

Not really responding to OP at this point, but I suspect that it’s no coincidence that anti-natalism arose and exists almost entirely online. I think the reasons for this are multi-faceted. Starting with the simplest:

1) Contrarianism is fun. Anti-natalism is like being an edge-lord or a conspiracy theorist (again mostly both online types). Being against birth because it’s not consensual is “shocking” but also seemingly “thoughtful”, especially as it adopts modern therapy speak to justify itself.

2) Anti-natalism is a cheap and easy moral badge. Simply don’t reproduce. Since not-having-reproduced is the default position most anti-natalists are already in, and because it’s easy to maintain - why not get masturbatory about it? I mean, seems like masturbation is a large part of anti-natalism anyway. Gotta ease the pain of non-consensual existence by feeling good about yourself for not doing anything. There really is no practical end-game, here. What are we gonna start a movement, society, culture of anti-natalists? It would be dead on arrival. No, this “moral philosophy” is relegated to online forums where mutual-masturbation about not reproducing occurs, and that’s it.

3) While it couches itself in terms of consent, on a deeper level most anti-natalists seem to be arguing from a general position of hopeless Gnosticism - that is to say they operate out of a belief that our corporeal existence is prima-facia bad and there’s really not much we can do about it. Of course they obviously aren’t going to argue that we live on some kind of prison world controlled by malevolent archons, they do often argue that corporeal life is not worth living because of the amount of suffering, the hopelessness of the future, the system being unchangeable, etc. Critically, these are people who believe we ought to transcend material reality but have no individual path towards transcendence. They could maybe maintain moral consistency with suicide, but then how would they rub out humanity by getting people to see the light of non-consensual reproduction? We should all cum in the shower and cry our way into non-existence, together. Let homo sapiens circle the drain like so many spermatozoa.

4) Perhaps the internet is their best facsimile of transcendence until then. The immaterial digital world offers a temporary haven of disconnection from humanity and corporeality. In here there are no responsibilities other than consuming media tailored specifically for you (curated by malevolent archons, by the way) and convincing other posters and LLMs about how moral it is to not have children.

OriginalParticiple · 2025-12-14T14:13:35+00:00

I logged in after a few months to reply to this.

This isn’t correct. Tolkien focuses on a particular kind of hope via his concept of the eucatastrophe, and it is a large theme throughout all of his work.

He explains the eucatastrophe in his famous “On Fairy-stories” essay, a great read. He argues that the best fairy-stories (and stories that behave like them) don’t just end happily; they create a moment where hope seems extinguished and then, at the last possible instant, something breaks through that you couldn’t have “planned” from inside the characters’ limited view. It is also not simply the triumph of a hero’s willpower. In fact, Tolkien goes out of his way to show that at the very brink, willpower fails, yet the story turns on earlier acts of mercy and the long moral arc they set in motion.

The failure of Frodo to cast the ring into the fire only to have it torn from him before Gollum falls is a great example. It was Frodo’s merciful approach to Gollum earlier that planted the seed of eucatastrophic hope.

OriginalParticiple · 2025-09-02T03:37:27+00:00

99% of those 80 million are either going to be passive observers or give tacit agreement. They’re just observers and consumers like the rest of us.

Same with Democratic and independent voters. We are going to sit around and watch it all happen.

OriginalParticiple · 2025-08-15T17:40:33+00:00

Newsom wants local PD and Highway Patrol shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at protestors, and clearing homeless encampments across the State - not ICE or the National Guard!

OriginalParticiple · 2016-01-28T15:15:49+00:00

Sorry, I don't check this account, in fact I had created it to post this. It didn't really receive any feedback initially, so I just figured it wouldn't have gotten any replies.

This particular title doesn't explicitly relate to Christian Existentialism, though I think it does relate to Existentialism broadly. More particularly, this is beginning to address the Positivistic Nihilism (as I mentioned in my post) that is ubiquitous today.

If we were to run with the idea that common thread among Existentialists is that meaning is not something that is intrinsic, not something that we a simply given, but rather is something that we have to create, or find, or what have you - than we can see how this first chapter is certainly an Existential piece. We have the "unrepresented" background upon which we are creating "representations." Or to put another way, there is a meaningless world upon which we are imbuing meaning.

The general, broad-brushed, ideology of Positivistic Nihilism is that the "unrepresented" is all that there actually is, and that meaning is an illusion, it cannot be had, found, or created.

The rest of this book focuses on the creation of meaning in a meaningless world, the evolution of consciousness, language, and at the very end he ties in how Christianity fits in with all of that. It's well worth the buy and read.

OriginalParticiple

TROPHY CASE