From: "Luke Weiger" <lweiger at umich.edu>
----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" <cbrown at michiganlegal.org>
> Communism seeks to reaffirm the original principle - communalism - that
> differentiated humans from other species.
As I've said before, I believe there are species that better exemplify communalism than humans (e.g. ant colonies--and it's no coincidence that the workers who selflessly serve and defend the queen share nearly all her DNA).
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CB: Yes, to be more precise, it's something like humans differentiated themselves from other mammals and other land genera,other primates, who would be of comparable size and closer in ecological niches, groups with more immediate predator and prey relationships with humans among them. I'm not so much talking about differentiation from insects. Primates could eat ants, and not so much vica versa, despite ants' communalism.
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In human societies, we find that a high degree of kin altruism is a universal, and we also find that reciprocal altruism is a universal. However, the inclination to defect is also a universal. And so is competition. Does such a sketch (without further elaboration and support) show that communism is impossible? Not really. (To see why, one could misguidedly argue that the urge to defect would make capitalism impossible--which might've been true, if we hadn't created social institutions to punish cheats.)
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I don't quite follow your meaning of "defect". Defect from the group ? Yes. It would be wrong for me to claim that human society has been absolutely sociable and communally harmonious. Clearly wrong. This is a relative claim. In fact, in a sense it is best made in contrast with what ever homo genuses were missing links from earlier primate forms. The first humans were more social than the other hominids. _Much_ more social.
We can also say that the altruism I tout might lead to exploiting classes. Because people got so into taking care of other people, that eventually, some people started to take advantage of it. That would be a dialectic.
Actually, I read your original statement too quickly, and it was kind of a nice framing of a thought experiment, of one of my favorite topics, so I went off .
Now I see you were trying to demonstrate the elementary rational , in the sense of leading to survival fitness, of unambiguous, self-consistent or non-contradictory statements.
I would agree with that, but add that the ambiguous and contradictory aspect of " There both is and is not a tiger near our cave " can be thought of as a crude, but rational way of expressing change of position. "The tiger is moving toward our cave." This is the way in which statements self-contradictory in a sense, might yet be rational in the same sense of aiding adaptation.