Will Mankind's Future Be Advanced or Primitive? - Page 5 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Polls on politics, news, current affairs and history.

Will Mankind's Future Be Advanced or Primitive?

1. Mankind's Future Will Be Advanced and Egalitarian.
9
29%
2. Mankind's Future Will Be Primitive and Egalitarian.
No votes
0%
3. Mankind's Future Will Be Advanced and Hierarchical.
8
26%
4. Mankind's Future Will Be Primitive and Hierarchical.
7
23%
5. Other.
7
23%
#14897931
fuser wrote:It seems that all human societies have collectively worked towards one common goal i.e. to increase the human capacity of production, ergo if there is a meaning of life set up by God, its to keep increasing our production capabilities....

No, that's backwards. The ultimate purpose of all economic activity is to enable consumption.
Capitalism has exhausted its potential to do so,

That's just self-evidently false. Capitalism is heading towards creation of superhuman artificial intelligence (SAI), which will mean effectively unlimited production and consumption.
only communism can do so now as Prophet Marx (pbuh) demonstrated.

Are you trolling? Communism (Marxism) is the stupid, anti-economic, anti-rational, anti-scientific, anti-human garbage that minimizes production. We've already seen ample proof of that.
Hence God wants communism.......QED.

There is certainly something to be said for the malevolent God hypothesis. Maybe Marx was his prophet.
#14897943
No, that's backwards. The ultimate purpose of all economic activity is to enable consumption.

For once, I agree with you. For most of human history, the forces of production have been expanded either by a negligible amount, or not at all. And not even Marx claimed that the expansion of the forces of production is the purpose of capitalism. Most capitalists don't care if the forces of production expand or contract, so long as they make a profit. There is no conscious teleology in capitalism. It's just a happy by-product of the capitalist mode of production, in fact a necessary by-product, if the system is not to collapse. But being necessary and being purposive are two different things.

That's just self-evidently false. Capitalism is heading towards creation of superhuman artificial intelligence (SAI), which will mean effectively unlimited production and consumption.

The forces of production are still expanding, for now. However, there is currently a series of systemic crises affecting the capitalist mode of production which may indicate that its potential to expand the forces of production is coming to an end. But it's still too early to say for definite yet.

Are you trolling? Communism (Marxism) is the stupid, anti-economic, anti-rational, anti-scientific, anti-human garbage that minimizes production. We've already seen ample proof of that.

As Churchill once said, Stalin found Russia with the wooden plough, and left it with the atomic bomb. It was communism which achieved that. Stalin presided over possibly the fastest expansion of the means of production in a single society in human history.

There is certainly something to be said for the malevolent God hypothesis. Maybe Marx was his prophet.

You mean the Medea Hypothesis?
#14897953
Truth To Power wrote:The ultimate purpose of all biological activity is to enable consumption.

Human thought is heading towards creation of superhuman artificial intelligence (SAI), which will mean effectively unlimited production and consumption.
I fixed some of your words. ;) Furthermore, all of this 'progress' depends upon the biosphere. The biosphere is a perpetual motion scheme. Human thought is merely a reflection of this process.

There is no conscious teleology in capitalism.
Debatable, because all processes found within the capitalist program are abstracted from nature. Isn't capitalism an extension of nature? If capitalism is a system of organization created through human thought, and if human thought is merely a reflection/compilation of information present in nature, couldn't a teleological argument be made? Does a caterpillar tell you it's going to be a butterfly?


Marx would be the worse prophet. He actively discouraged religion.
Thoughts become religion, technology, ideology, etc. Marx actively discouraged thinking, and that's why he used efficient cause to explain materialism (ignoring the rest of reality). Humans actively discourage thinking once they formulate a theory or religion. Knowledge creates ignorance, because once you know something, you believe you know something. Truth doesn't belong to one person, because thought itself is a fragmentation process. Hence why this whole thread is speculation and a waste of energy. As biological organisms, we're evolving away from binary logic. Fragmentation got us this 'far,' and now we should put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

PoFo should be a think-tank, not a debate forum. We hold within us fragments of the whole. :)
I tell ya right now, as an individual, I know nothing!
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 20 Mar 2018 02:54, edited 1 time in total.
#14897964
Potemkin wrote:You got that right, at least.
This is true for every living thing, Potemkin. :lol: You're bursting with other people's thoughts. Go figure you gotta belittle honest thoughts. Nonetheless, one love!
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 19 Mar 2018 21:31, edited 3 times in total.
#14898091
Of course I was trolling, any belief in a pre-planned destination is nonsense to me. But I will like to clarify i.e. I am not saying capitalist or any other historical class were expanding the production capabilities consciously, consciously thinking it off as some sort of purpose of life and working towards it, as Potemkin said it was the necessary by-product.

But yet we as species did expanded our productive capabilities to exponential degree from our humble background of hunter-gatherer and this expansion didn't happened constantly or there was any sort of constant increment, but rather abruptly, in fact most of the time we were stagnant and yet there were always the seeds of major changes.
#14898259
Potemkin wrote:It's just a happy by-product of the capitalist mode of production, in fact a necessary by-product, if the system is not to collapse.

No, it's natural but not necessary. Marx fundamentally misunderstood capitalism because he thought profit was a kind of rent.
But being necessary and being purposive are two different things.

And both are different from being natural.
The forces of production are still expanding, for now. However, there is currently a series of systemic crises affecting the capitalist mode of production which may indicate that its potential to expand the forces of production is coming to an end. But it's still too early to say for definite yet.

No, the crises of modern finance capitalism are financial, and result from the growing ascendency of the rentier sectors, not the capitalist mode of production. The forces of production will continue to expand exponentially, but the rentier sectors will focus more and more on limiting or preventing production in order to raise prices and rents. A pervasive and increasingly onerous example is government refusal of permission to use land as productively as producers would like. This shovels money into the pockets of those who can secure the required permissions, but at the expense of reducing production overall. IP monopolies have similar effects. Finance capitalism understands that scarcity is in the interest of the greedy, evil, privileged, parasitic rich, while abundant wealth production is not. A man who is at liberty to feed himself and his family will not sell his daughter to amuse the greedy, evil, privileged rich at any price; but a man who has been deprived of his liberty to feed himself, and is thus being systematically starved to death, will sell her to them for the price of a meal.
As Churchill once said, Stalin found Russia with the wooden plough, and left it with the atomic bomb.

But Churchill was speaking without knowledge of the actual condition of the Russian economy. In the decade up to 1914, Russia had enjoyed the fastest economic growth ever recorded by a major power. War, civil war and communism had reduced that economy to ashes by 1923 when Stalin came to power, so he was starting from a low base, like Roosevelt in 1933. The actual conditions of production and life in Russia were very little different in 1954 than they had been 40 years earlier, in 1914.
It was communism which achieved that.

Nonsense. It was wholesale theft of Western science, technology and capital. After WW II the Soviets dismantled whole eastern European cities full of factories and took them back to Russia. Stalin kidnapped and enslaved German and east European scientists because he had killed off all the best Russian ones. The atomic bomb was American, and the Soviets couldn't have come close to developing it on their own: their spies stole all the science and technology from the USA.
Stalin presided over possibly the fastest expansion of the means of production in a single society in human history.

Definitely false. In the decade before 1914, the German colony of Kiaochow grew an order of magnitude faster than the USSR ever managed. In absolute terms, post-socialist China has far outstripped anything ever achieved by any socialist society.
#14934016
I voted advanced and hierarchical.

On the one hand, social liberalism as we know it is seemingly on an irreversible path to extinction. On the other hand, this doesn't mean that technologies that people have invented and widely dispersed onto the internet and so-on will disappear. We'll see some kind of socially conservative, technologically advanced yet not strictly traditional world emerge.

One interesting thing is that differences in people in different regions are clearly heavily influenced by what kinds of crops grow in those regions (e.g., rice in east Asia, wheat in other parts of the world, spices in India, etc.). Yet even these differences will disappear due to the growing prevalence of hydroponic vegetables resulting in the same-ing of nutrition for everyone, a thorough global spice trade and the possibility of lab-grown stem cell meats that would sort of be like the hydroponic version of meat. So ultimately these nutritional differences will significantly decrease as well. It'll be a very interesting thing to see how these elements progress!
#14934271
5. Other. Mankind's future will be (technologically) advanced and somewhere inbetween egalitarian and hierarchical.
I don't know if it will be culturally advanced. People may read less then they do now and I fear right-wing governments will shut down public television stations and museums to further their evil anti-civilizational cause.
#14934277
Other. The future will consist of everything we have had in the past. 7 billion people will not all react the same. Large metro areas in the West are definitely headed for a period of anarchy in the near future. It remains to be seen if smaller communities unite or also fall into a period of anarchy.
#14934278
I like how no one thinks the future will be primitive and egalitarian. :lol:

So much for the back-to-nature hippy crowd and the Anarcho-environmentalist and lefty primitivists.

They must have died out on this forum from trading in contaminated blankets. :lol:
#14934279
Victoribus Spolia wrote:I like how no one thinks the future will be primitive and egalitarian. :lol:


I think that depends on how you define the terms. ‘Primitive’ on an individual level has no need of ‘egalitarianism’. That requires a community. A community without modern technology can be egalitarian. An individual without community restraint will not be.
#14934281
Victoribus Spolia wrote:I like how no one thinks the future will be primitive and egalitarian. :lol:


I'm sure I voiced this actually. But perhaps I voted other. I can't remember now. I know I can't see how humanity could ever become hierarchical should it become primitive again due to education. Not in the sense of Kings, Queens and land owners. Everyone would be truely equal as there be no rules to segregate individuals.
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