hexToday, the culturally set goal (via capitalism) for every human is to maximize their accumulation of capital. This goal is killing us all. If you could, somehow, set a different goal, what would it be?
This is perhaps a bit of a #SolarPunk question.
Imagine a world that we all control together, not controlled by oligarch or dictators, even indirectly. Imagine something truly collaborative. That world would be very different from our own. In some ways many of us could have a lot more opportunity. But in others, we would be restricted.
In such a world, we couldn't really have elite luxuries. Having such luxuries is only valuable so long as others do not.
> Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one.
- The Social Ideology of the Motorcar
Imagine a world in which we think about luxury in a radically different way, not as something that only has value via exclusivity but something that enriches the lives of the owners more as more people have them.
What would living in such a world be like? Can you describe a day in your life?
OK, now for the hard question. What would it be like to answer these questions together as a group?
If you asked these questions to the folks who follow you, could you work together to come up with an answer? Would you be willing to get a few friends together (maybe over a drink) to talk through these and try to come up with *one* answer that everyone could agree on?
I wonder if anyone would be willing to try it as an experiment and come back with results. :)
Jessi@Hex
Considering the idea of getting a bunch of people together to answer these: I would super like to try the experiment. I have one friends group that is not always of the same opinion as me, so it would be so interesting to see the discussion unfold!
Thank you for the thought provocing questions!
Considering the idea of getting a bunch of people together to answer these: I would super like to try the experiment. I have one friends group that is not always of the same opinion as me, so it would be so interesting to see the discussion unfold!
Thank you for the thought provocing questions!
@Jaylee_frye \o/
I'm super excited to find out how that goes! Glad you like the questions! :)
BaxWaNaFly@Hex
What is be being rich when it is not by money ?
Knowledge, experience, relations, social or technical skills are each already valuable in our world, even if always behind actual money.
Those are usually grown without removing something from others, so could be maximised without harm for the community. They also can be shared at little cost but the time it takes to do so.
Other values can be more problematic, like influence and dominance.Those remove liberty and free-will to others, but are seeked for in our society.
Now some values are easy to rule out, like money, and physical stuff hogging. Others are hard to separate...
@Hex
How to tell when too much social skills is influence, or too much relations is dominance ?
Yes finding another goal as money is vital for humanity right now. But the shift will be possible only when money is not the survival mean for the mass, and that it is allowed to pile it beyond sanity for a few.
What other goal can be used ? My guess is it should be a metric for the community, not the individual, like mean education level, health, low poverty... Funny as those are usually the politics goal, but rarely the results.
And remember, when a metric become a goal, it will be perverted ;)
JohnNowadays, "luxury" is defined by *quality*.
A finely built waterproof leather backpack. A pure wool, cotton-lined coat. Handmade shoes. Hand-hewn and shaped, dovetailed wooden chair. Hand-blown glass lamp. All are 100-1000% more expensive than the low quality industrially produced alternatives.
You'll note that, absent the depredations and warped influence of capitalism, this is how *all things* would be.
They wouldn't be "elite", though. That is true.
Villas by the sea are desirable and useful insofar as *merely existing and surviving* is not really the goal here, or at least it shouldn't be. Life is far more than merely meeting the material needs of every human animal. That's where you *start*.
But villas by the sea are pretty fucking great. Let's make sure we keep those.
@johnzajac There's a bit more context a bit later in the essay...
> This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratize the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips—or to squeeze the villas so tightly together—that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratization of access to the beaches point to only one solution—the collectivist one. And this solution is necessarily at war with the luxury of the private beach, which is a privilege that a small minority takes as their right at the expense of all.
Each individual having a villa can't possibly provide the value of fewer people having one. This restriction forces us to think about the limits of what we can have, and what we must share, if we choose not to use hierarchy to restrict access to some goods. So we don't need to bulldoze the villas, but, for the experiment, we would need to figure out how to share them.
ref: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-08-13/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/
It's all a moot point anyway: within a generation anything "seaside" will be too expensive to maintain due to increasingly extreme weather events and rising sea levels. "Seaside" will come to mean 500+ elevation on the landward side of coastal mountain ranges with quick access to the sea, thorough flood management engineering, and significant protection from typhoons and hurricanes.
Absent the system itself - designed to create a very small cohort of haves and a vast, benighted army of have-nots - I don't think we'd have much trouble "distributing" luxuries or whatever replaces "properties" (stewardships?)
So many people live without the means to survive that if we just fixed that - *just* that - we'd perforce live in a completely different society.
Part of me suspects that there's a proverbial thorn in the paw, and if we take that out, society will fix itself.
Drey
Johanna, CanCon varietywoooowwww... this: "Having such luxuries is only valuable so long as others do not. "
Is that ever a loaded observation about the realm of urban planning/urban futures.
Luxury is maximizing time I can spend pursuing each momentary strong desire, minimizing longer lengths of time I have to spend on others' motivations in order to have access to my own.
But that is only accessible to me if accessible to all, I cannot spend my days reading stories if writers cannot write.
@johannab The whole essay is *so good* if you haven't read it. I would definitely recommend it :)
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-08-13/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/
@Hex Thank you and I'm going to bounce that through to my current class, Mobility Futures. It's a bit late for our first module which was "Mobility Cultures" but so relevant!