this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
204 points (98.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43989 readers
634 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, analogy is not a sufficient method of argumentation by itself, but I suppose things I'll write would be even more visible in Chinese villages 100 years ago.
In Russia the peasant commune as an institution was created artificially (so all those Russian narodniks glorifying it as something perfect and wonderful untouched by bureaucratic machine coming from the depth of ages were just stupid ; it's one thing one can't argue with Lenin about - they didn't have a bloody idea of what that "people" they considered inherently virtuous was) somewhere around Peter the Great's time. So it's had enough time to mature.
That commune had enormous families living together, with the patriarch (the oldest man still able to work and do things) being basically a despot. It was literally not so rare for him to casually sleep with wives of his sons and nephews, for example (if not daughters and nieces). Nobody could refuse him.
Again, that whole family would live in one bloody place, together. No personal space or individuality at all.
In such an environment, first, you don't act differently (either you'll seem weak or you'll cause envy, both are worse than any gained efficiency justifies), second, your value is so low, that nobody cares if you make it, third, in a despotic system your own attempts at planning usually don't work, so you don't learn to do it, and planning is what's needed for more honest behavior to be advantageous.
So yes, you are right.