How The Barter Myth Harms Us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-gdHrINyMU&ab_channel=Andrewism

Let’s dive right into the debate on the origins of money, the reality of pre-money exchange, the actual uses of barter through history, and how all of this has affected our imagination of the present and the future.

#andrewism #capitalism #mythology #barter #harmful #dominationnarrative #limiting #socialevolution

Laws don't work for the ruling class without discretion in when they're enforced. They're only enforceable by violence and the consequences of mistakes are too high. If the law calls for the immediate arrest of a powerful person the cops need legal cover for not doing it. This discretion stabilizes capitalism, it's not humane, but it can be spun that way.

The ruling class also needs discretion in how violations are punished. In slavery times laws often specified physical punishments for Blacks and fines for whites. After abolition they gave the judge a race-free choice between jail time and fines and no explanation to judges of who got which was necessary. This is our current system, which also stabilizes capitalism, and which also obviously isn't humane. The ultimate goal is stability, not humanity.

But cops are individuals and they have their own personal purposes as well as the purposes they're hired to serve. Like all people cops will use every capability available to further these purposes, including enforcement discretion. Cops have a culture and new uses for old tools will spread. So for instance individual cops can use discretion for extortion, sexual ("you know I'm not required to write this ticket, ma'am, but I don't have any reason not to") or otherwise.

Maybe the rulers didn't intend some of these uses when they set up the system, but they're adaptable and may incorporate them. They might not have specifically designed the system to facilitate rape, but if it stabilizes they'll keep it. Rapist cops are happier with a steady supply of victims and if enforcement discretion supplies this without destabilizing the system cops protect then why would the rulers change it? Probably the rapes themselves stabilize the system in some monstrous way I don't understand.

Now imagine 600 years of this developmental evolution of violent control to promote stability, of incorporating selected adaptations, new uses for the tools. Doesn't our current system, relatively self-maintaining compared to slavery or other more obviously horrific capitalist systems, seem like a plausible product of such a Darwinian process?

One consequence of this idea is that complex social tools like the police don't have a single purpose they're meant to effect. As a tool a police force has various capabilities, which are used by anyone who has the power to use them in order to further their own purposes, including individual cops. These uses change as new capabilities are understood and integrated into the system and this process changes the system itself. Systems don't have purposes. People have purposes and systems, like all tools, have only capabilities

This idea has been useful to me as an explanation for how social systems function. It has been tempting for me to be distracted by ultimately fruitless discussions about the true or the original purposes of social systems, like the purpose of the cops is public safety or social control, or the purpose of public schools is education. Then the discussion turns to how they've deviated from the true purpose and how can we get them back to that? Well, in practice we can't, and I think the reason for that is that the original purposes don't control any aspect of the present uses. These are determined by the current users, whose purposes are the only relevant purposes. This is how I understand the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it's supposed by anyone to do.

#Systems
#SystemTheory
#Abolition
#Anarchism
#Police
#StateViolence
#SocialSystems
#Cops
#SocialEvolution

@netshrink near the 38th minute onward, the word is heard. #SuicidePreventionAwareness in this form is unusually desirable. What may you think?
https://youtu.be/ZFUM7pPDbjY
#judiciary #india #socialevolution

c/ @revengeCat@twitter.com @frankforu@twitter.com

RT @RSocPublishing@twitter.com

How accurate is it that humans can maintain 150 meaningful relationships? ‘Dunbar’s number’ is deconstructed in #BiologyLetters paper http://ow.ly/P3gh50EPAxq #brainevolution #socialevolution #primates

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/RSocPublishing/status/1474817409055875073