Max Borders

פורסם: 22.03.12, 5:47 am

Field of reference: Sociology, Ecology, Politics

Description: Building society as a balanced ecosystem.

“What rises up above the ecosystem metaphor to glow distinctly about human society is human subjectivity itself, with all its unmet desires and Sisyphean searches for happiness. It is in the teaming associations among millions of subjectivities in search of an ever-changing pluralism of human values that we find something unique to human society, something not fully captured in any of our metaphors. As we attempt to limn something like the laws and limits of human organization, we must be struck by the understanding that something so lifeless as a rule can animate a holistic system of seekers, strivers and their subjectivities. As Hobbes teaches and Mises channels, inter-subjective agreement on these lifeless rules makes for the bases of society, and such agreement, too, is contingent: Not every interhuman relation is a social relation. When groups of men rush upon one another in a war of outright extermination, when men fight against men as mercilessly as they crush pernicious animals and plants, there is, between the fighting parties, reciprocal effect and mutual relation, but no society. Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner’s success as a means for the attainment of his own.  Internal to our species, we must seek peace through free association, or more specifically, the rules of free association.  In the human ecosystem, however, one finds all the mystery, beauty, prosperity and happiness that institutions make possible. Whereas natural institutions rely as much on predation and parasitism as mutualism, human ecosystems flourish where predation and parasitism are in decline. When informal  norms of mutual respect and trust are built atop those formal rules, an invisible scaffolding of toleration gets built into our culture, too. In other words, we don’t simply obey the rules, we internalize them. And the more we internalize them, the less we have need for those enforcement apparatuses that can so quickly be captured by those for whom power is an end.”

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שייך לנושאים: 1-13 - חינוך אינטגרלי, -מקורות מדעיים, הטבע, 1. רמת קשר

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