The Socialist Dream Crumbles in Venezuela

[The Dharma Bum]

The supposition that coercion is an essential dynamic to the workings of human society is based on the cultural assumption that each individual is a lone competitor that will have to be coerced into acting for the greater good.

However the truth is human beings are naturally cooperative, social animals.

Human behavior is largely due to socialization, so if dysfunction is common in a society it is because the individuals are not socialized properly.

You can't punish the lack of social skills or opportunity out of a person, you have to show them what to do. This is why sociological studies of societies that feature little of no coercive element show that mental illness is extremely rare in those cultures and social coercion is shown to be the causative factor. The overwhelming cognitive dissonance that is an effect of our social structure isn't present in theirs.

[exploited]

What is there to deal with? Prior to the Great Peace was hundreds if not thousands of years of inter-tribe warfare. Coercion was the name of the game - whole tribes were exterminated and their children assimilated into the conquerors culture. So lol at your pathetic, racist attempt to cast indigenous culture as some sort of innocence lost bullshit, where men lived in harmony with people of different beliefs, when the historical record is quite clear that was never the case. They were as brutal, imperialistic and forceful as the Europeans.

[exploited]

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

[exploited]

The mind f**k it takes to argue that there is no human nature while arguing that humans are "naturally cooperative, social animals..."

Some people are cooperative. Some are competitive. Most are both.

Also, your hilarious argument that how you treat your enemies isn't relevant... lol... "They were a consensus based society, accommodating to all beliefs, except for the ones that differed from their own." A society that literally propagated itself from assimilating the children of their enemies, lol.

Total nonsense, over and over again.

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Comrade]

[The Dharma Bum]

Yes, yes, as I stated previously I understand all of that and my argument has really nothing to do with whether or not some individuals were occasionally expelled from a social group or not.

I said it wasn't institutionalized as a normal part of their society, in other words, something that every individual of a class is subjected to as a matter of recourse such as public education, or a military draft. That falls under the rubric of interpersonal relations rather than collective social relation as in the relationship between a ruling class and working class..

You are talking about a very rare occurrence that only happened under extenuating circumstances to a few intractable individuals or in unusual circumstances dealing with outsiders. Another point to consider is that there is considerably more social cohesion to be found in non-coercive societies that there is in authoritarian societies. For one thing there is no element of class struggle to disrupt their social relations. Not to mention the resulting lesser incidence of many social afflictions such as poverty or mental illness.