 
ReSent-Message-ID: 
ReSent-Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 14:43:56 -0400 (EDT)
ReSent-From: "Jon C. Slenk" 
ReSent-To: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu
To: Bill Eichman 
Cc: angst+@CMU.EDU, Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU
Subject: Re: Keristan Future Fantasy 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 26 Apr 93 23:39:13 EDT."
             <3ZBN3B2w166w@hogbbs.scol.pa.us> 
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 93 14:15:11 -0400
Message-Id: <6173.736107311@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU>
From: Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU


>Negative,
>divisive trappings of old fashioned relationships like jealousy,
>possessiveness, or rivalry have been phased out, and a fantastic gestalt
>growth and communications process phased in, allowing individuals to
>develop their full potentials and to live in polyfidelitous families of
>best friends. It goes beyond the type of social system that exists today
>in the Israeli Kibbutz movement; it is what Fritz Perls, a pioneer of
>gestalt therapy, called the "Gestalt Kibbutz".

>If you think this sounds too good to be true, you're probably being
>shortsighted and a tad narrowminded.

I don't buy it. Human beings are stupid cowards, and just can't do things
like this on a voluntary basis as a group. When I read an account of some 
society which has optimized *everything* -- I can't even suspend my disbelief 
long enough to appreciate the fantasy. The FutureKeristans won't be able to 
organize the ecofactories because they'll fall apart over arguments about sex, 
or else their ideal families will be moving along just fine and then the 
architecture doesn't quite work out and the movement goes under.

The problem with fantasies like this is that they try to have effective
corporate action without autocracy -- an impossibility. Benevolent
autocracy is a good thing; so is communitarian anarchy -- but communitarian
anarchy cannot produce anything the system described above; its units
would of necessity be much smaller.

If the FutureKeristans were to describe some sort of cultural Bolshevism
which would produce the above, I'd buy it. If they were to describe a 
much less organized league of units smaller and less corporately ambitious
than the above (and fill in the ambition vacuum by describing the large
number of equisitely developed and educated human beings who would live
in such a system) I'd buy that too. I don't think they're being too
ambitious -- I just think they're being incoherent.


      Tom Price   |    tp0x@cs.cmu.edu   |   Free will? What free will? 
 *****************************************************************************
  plutoniumsurveillanceterroristCIAassassinationIranContrawirefraudcryptology



 prev message 
 next message