A better society

[Kriminal99]

The purpose of this thread is to examine some ways a society can be improved upon and to better understand techniques that have already been succesful.

 

Cleanliness

 

Consider that a person is attracted to a member of the opposite sex, but the person you are attracted to is priviledged whereas you are not. Anotherwords they have grown up with lots of money around and you are low or middle class.

 

Let us compare two different dwellings to try and determine what difference their might be that would cause someone to reject a potential mate of limited means.

 

On one hand you have a downtrodden littered neighborhood and on the other hand you have a well manicured high middle class neighborhood that is everything one thinks of when they imagine the american dream. imagine a lower income neighborhood that looks in every way similar to the high middle class neighborhood, but smaller.

 

Now comparing the two clean neighborhoods is there anything that would cause someone to reject living in the smaller one given that they loved the person who lived there?

 

Perhaps it is understood that size is not as much of an issue but maybe location is. And what could be different about two different locations? Consider the most popular and trendy places to go to do things like shopping or eating out, and the least popular. What is the difference between the two? Perhaps one is is run down, has dirty parking lots etc, and the other one is designed well and is relatively new and clean.

 

What if all neighborhoods and all shopping centers were clean? Would the difference in size of a house alone make such a big deal between one dwelling and the next? Or is it rather that low income neighborhoods are associated with litter, depression, crime etc?

 

The point here is if the differences between a low income neighborhood and a high income neighborhood are lessened to just differences in size then a more socialistic society will result. There will be less signifigant difference in the lifestyle of a well off person as compared to that of a not so well off person. Jealousy of one another will be less enforced as people would care less about differneces in income.

 

Competition

 

People learn from an early age that one way to gain respect and admiration from those around you is to be the best at something. While sometimes this can be beneficial as it motivates someone to excel at whatever they do, it often results in excessive use of straw man fallacy as people try to force others to respect them in such a way.

 

There are several problems with attempting to be the best at something as a way to achieve admiration from others.

 

1) There is always someone better.

 

People tend to localize such comparisons of power in a particular endeavor to whoever is right in front of them. People fancy themselves the best at something until someone comes along and proves them wrong. For example a neighborhood full of kids might play basketball for fun and there might be one kid there who is a much better player than the rest of them. If a new kid skilled at basketball came on the block, there might be some kind of competition to see which of the two was better. Then whoever won might be considered the best at basketball...

 

However this interpretation on the part of the neighborhood kids is quite naive. They realize that a new person to the block may be good at basketball, which seems to imply recognition that there could be better players out there. Yet they still treat their best basketball player as if he were "the best". In fact many times they know that person is not the best - for instance they might not expect this kid to be able to defeat a NBA star. So one might ask, what is the signifigance of being the best of a small neighborhood?

 

Suppose someone "earned" the affection of the most attractive lady of the neighborhood through their basketball skills. Then tommorow a better basketball player came along. Would this lady then leave the previous player for the better one? And then the next better one that came along after that? Should she then just refrain from dating until she met the best basketball star she was likely to ever meet? And then what if that person was unexpectedly defeated?

 

2) How do you determine "the best"?

 

Suppose that you had 2 basketball players who would trade games with each other, that is each one would win against the other sometimes. How would one determine the best of the two?

 

One answer is to claim that the best is whoever has won most recently. However this seems to imply that said person could defeat the previous player in subsequent trials, however it could be that some external or random factors played a part in this victory. We all know that upon loss, people sometimes claim that it was unfair in some way.

 

Perhaps a basketball player is not used to, and trips over the cracks in the asphalt at a particular neighborhood, whereas the people who live there know the court like the back of their hand. Does it make sense to call him an inferior basketball player because of his lack of familiarity with these court imperfections?

 

Once one becomes willing to recognize that the outcome of such an event might be more dependent on external factors than on the actual participants, one must then attempt to find one factor for which the winning participant can be credited for.