You can tell that broad alignment between people is natural just by looking at the effort that corporations and governments make to undermine it. Alignment between people is perhaps not a state of nature, but it really is a pretty normal consequence of a fairly small amount of education and of middle-class existence that is left to itself (i.e. without brain-washing and deliberately working to create out-groups). If you're eating enough and have a few brain cells to rub together, then you definitely want that for your neighbors too because it promotes stability.

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JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> broad alignment between people is natural

Uh, what? People have been killing each other over values misalignments since there have been people. We invented civilization in part to protect our farms and granaries from people who disagreed with us on whose grain was in said granaries.

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bluefirebrand 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

We would never have even reached "farms and granaries" if alignment between people didn't happen pretty naturally

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JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent [-]

Fair enough. We are a social species. But those alignments occur in small groups. You don’t need effort by “corporations and governments” for nations of millions of people to schism. If anything, those large institutions drive broad-based alignment.

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uoaei 4 days ago | parent [-]

Methinks you've been sitting in your armchair too long.

Broad-based alignment doesn't come from nothing, but it is surprisingly easy to achieve when a population recognizes a shared stake. A synthesis between selfishness and altruism emerges when you consider who you can call a "neighbor".

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JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent [-]

> it is surprisingly easy to achieve when a population recognizes a shared stake

Sure. But it takes work for anything larger than a small, close-knit community. I’m pushing back on the notion that this comes naturally and is a default state. It’s not, at least not relative to people naturally forming in and out groups.

The armchair commenters are probably folks who have never organized a group of people before outside a commercial context.

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uoaei 3 days ago | parent [-]

You might be treating "neighbor" too literally. People understand the global nature of the limits on resources and by extension the world economy better every year. The boundary of who shares 'stake' grows likewise.

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JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent [-]

> boundary of who shares 'stake' grows likewise

But that shared stakeholding doesn’t naturally drive alignment. You need journalists, fiction writers, organizers and delegates. Travel and curiosity. These each take effort, resources and organization. It’s something we do well. But it isn’t spontaneous in the way small-group kinship is—it literally emerges if you put people in proximity.

	▲	uoaei 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'd say it's "typical" that one person witnessing another's plight will identify with them based on the similar conditions of struggle, oppression, etc. As you point out, the trick is to expose them to those scenes in the first place. But this is proximity just the same, in a social and experiential sense if not in a "my bed is within walking distance of yours" sense. So it is spontaneous given those caveats. The question, then, assuming camaraderie and kinship is the goal, is how do we expose people to each other's lives' conditions without the narrative spin machine altering the message to distance people from each other rather than bringing them closer together?

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robot-wrangler 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Couldn't read the next sentence before wading in, huh?

	▲	JumpCrisscross 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Couldn't read the next sentence before wading in, huh? Whatever the difference between naturalness and a state of nature, it has nothing to do with education or middle-class existence.

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dns_snek 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Critical bit:

> i.e. without brain-washing and deliberately working to create out-groups

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JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent [-]

And if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle. The process of creating an in group naturally creates out groups. The “brainwashing” OP describes is just as natural as social alignment through an innate drive for conformity.

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cwmoore 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Conformity I think follows the innate drive to coerce the nonconformant into compliance

	▲	JumpCrisscross 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure. Push and pull. The point is that needs effort to work at larger scales. We don’t “naturally” organize into nations of three hundred million or a billion. To the extent we do, we also “naturally” go to war.

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pineaux 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There is a pretty interesting study of a large group of chimps. I dont remember where exactly but they have been civil warring the last 15 years or so. Point is, it seems that there is some kind of innate group formation process.

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zozbot234 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> You can tell that broad alignment between people is natural

It really isn't. The whole point of the market system is to collectively align people's actions towards a shared target of "Pareto-optimized total welfare". And even then the alignment is approximate and heavily constrained due to a combination of transaction costs (which also account for e.g. externalities) and information asymmetries. But transaction costs and information asymmetries apply to any system of alignment, including non-market ones. The market (augmented with some pre-determined legal assignment of property rights, potentially including quite complex bundles of rules and regulations) is still your best bet.

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jasonwatkinspdx 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Please read David Graeber.

What you describe is factually not how human society formed.

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zozbot234 4 days ago | parent [-]

AIUI David Graeber famously pointed out that people in small groups can form the equivalent of a "market" simply by exchanging favours ("I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine") in an informal gift economy, without any money-like token or external unit of account. That's quite in line with what I said.

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jasonwatkinspdx 4 days ago | parent [-]

You understanding is mistaken. Graeber's "everyday communism" is not a market, and his whole larger point is that contorting everything to the lens of markets is simply ahistorical and unempirical.

I'd strongly suggest reading his books. They profoundly changed my understanding of how human institutions and society form.

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zozbot234 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Unless it's some sort of complete post-scarcity, it has to be understandable in market terms. What happens if people try to free-ride on the whole "communist" system? If they get excluded from its benefits, that's equivalent to enforcing some bundle of property rights.

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jasonwatkinspdx 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Unless it's some sort of complete post-scarcity, it has to be understandable in market terms.

No, it does not, and that's Graeber's whole point.

"Markets" are not some sort of physical law of the universe.

A simple example of this is it's the norm in hunter gatherer societies to take care of people who never will make an equal contribution back in the transactional sense.

Because the social ties in those societies are not simply transactions.

If your model fails to accurately describe empirical reality, time to improve/expand the model.

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zozbot234 4 days ago | parent [-]

These social ties are real (they are a kind of wealth, or social capital, for the persons involved) but they're also limited to very small social groups, the equivalent of a modern small village neighborhood or HOA. The point of the market is that it scales well beyond those.

	▲	mcmcmc 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Translating every aspect of human existence into some kind of “capital” is deeply unhealthy.

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robot-wrangler 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it has to be understandable in market terms

I like economics and math too, but the whole discussion of markets is a terrible starting place for deriving results in ethics/psychology. If you insist though, notice that unions will happen unless some other organization is working to prevent them. What do you suppose this means? People are aligned with each other exactly because they've noticed their coworkers are not corporations or governments.

Although the two are entangled, politics is a more relevant framing than economics here. If people weren't broadly aligned on basic stuff, then autocrats, theocrats, kleptocrats and so on would simply not be interested in dismantling democracies. They make that effort because they must.

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zozbot234 3 days ago | parent [-]

> the whole discussion of markets is a terrible starting place for deriving results in ethics/psychology.

Historically, we did essentially the opposite. We figured out many aspects of human ethics and psychology first, and deduced from them how and why markets work as they do.

> ... If people weren't broadly aligned on basic stuff, then autocrats, theocrats, kleptocrats and so on would simply not be interested in dismantling democracies. They make that effort because they must.

This implies that people are only weakly aligned in the first place, otherwise no such attempt at dismantling could ever succeed. That's not a very interesting claim; it does not refute the usefulness of some external mechanism to more directly foster aligned action. Markets do this with a maximum of decentralized power and a minimum of institutional mechanism.

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jasonwatkinspdx 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Historically

This is not the history, it is a mythology in opposition to the empirical evidence.

Which is why you should read Graeber.

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zozbot234 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's history of ideas. What Graeber says is ultimately aligned to this, as I pointed out in a sibling thread.

	▲	jasonwatkinspdx 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, and your comment makes clear you haven't actually read Graeber and mischaracterized his work. Anyhow, replying is clearly past the point of utility here.

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sdenton4 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You're not even wrong, as they say... I'm tempted to add 'seeing like a state' to your reading list.

"Understandable in market terms" doesn't mean the thing is actually understood, and in fact may be dangerously misunderstood.

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jpfromlondon 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Reddit is over there ->

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dns_snek 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Broad alignment =/= Wealth maximization.

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_DeadFred_ 4 days ago | parent [-]

The market aligned us with children working in sweat shops after we outlawed it by convincing us it was OK if it was foreign kids and we got to share in pocketing the savings not just the evil factory owner.

	▲	dns_snek 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes I'm well aware. Of course that's not how things are advertised to people, and they absolutely hate it when this is pointed out to them. This tells me that deep down they don't actually agree with how the system operates.