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Owning or Using--Transcript

Page history last edited by Angela 9 years, 11 months ago

Participants: gen, david, ram, adele, angela

 

Egalia's daughter structure and grammar is similar.

 

As you were reading the book, how did you feel about the way people spoke?

When she says something like 'the mother', it feels disconnected, how close can you be to them.  It feels like, i don't know indifferent.  Because clearly they're close, but it feels that way to me.   Maybe i'm just used to our language

One of the ways people are conditioned to non-property tendencies, is they're conditioned to share, and parents can take children out of the communal centre

Yeah, but it's frowned upon

So is that…?

You know, is it that at a deep level they love each other?  I haven't yet gotten a sense of how that is.   Based on language it seemed a bit cold, but in how they live, the environment is very conductive to sharing, not just things, but thoughts, there's a lot of love between them

People in general, you mean, beyond the family?

Yes.  It reminds me of a book i read a while ago, conversations with god.

Oh!

You've read it.   It's a non-fiction book about new-age philosophy, a guy askes questions he wanted to ask god, and the answer appears in his mind.  In the third book, he asks about aliens.  Yes.  More advanced? Yet?  How do they?  In that one, the grandparents take care of the kids, because the parents are working

Sounds like taiwan

Because the grandparents are the wisest, they had the most experiences

That's not true of taiwan.

 i'm wondering what's the experience you mentioned just above, what did you mean because the grandparents don't have enough experience in taiwan

Do you think they're not the wisest?

It's not just taiwan, technically the longer the life, the more wise.

I agree it's not true.

People are shaped by the knowledge or believes they have, and that's limited by the limited information they've been exposed to?  And basically i was thinking of martial law, and how limited people got in their thinking under it.   And also i was thinking of how modern people with internet and everything have so much more opportunity for broad understanding then when people first came to taiwan and their concerns were so much narrower, just about immigrating and surviving.

 

 

Do you see any benefits in speaking like the anaresti?  Any drawbacks?

If you could choose, would you live in a world where people spoke about 'using' or where people spoke about 'having'?

 

I think this book might challenge our ideas because of the language? If i could choose, i'm willing to live in a world where not conditioned, i'm willing to try different new things.  So when you ask, to not use possessive terms, it's more like daoist things, everything is existing, you're part of it, you don't own anything. 

Everything has their own natural rules, and no one can manage that.

It's lie the song in pocahontas, the colour of the wind. 

Or this book by barbara kingsolver, where a native american character was complaining about how white settlers in the us were like basically pissing in a corner of the living room, where the living room was the land, and pissing was the destruction that white poeple brought in 'developing' the land.

...

It sounds like a partial approach to using vs. Owning, you own less things as a native american, you have your family.

When i spoke about daoism, wu wei er zhi,

Doesn't it mean more like you're not the ruler, not doing nothing?

Does this novel somehow challenge the notion, in terms of christianity or this history of america, or maybe starting from israel or europe, when they colonise other countries, or identify themselves in terms.

Our whole legal system based on property law, so based on the concept of owning things.

So we don't possess people, but we possess houses and stuff, so that's better?   If you don't own, there's no guarantee that you can keep what you own.  You get to put your name on it.  It's the basis of the capitalist economy.   You have physical property, now you have patents, copyrights.  There's a huge discussion on software patenting.   In the us you get 14 years.   Today you get 70 years plus the lifetime of the author. 

In china it's 50 years.   I do translation.   Copyright you have to look at each country.   Here it's 50 years plus life of author, so there might be out of copyright here sooner than there.

So they don't do it by country of origin!   Like a us work has to go by us rules.

Originally it was, let it go into the public domain after 14 years, so it could benefit everyone.   But once money gets involved, you know.

I'm thinking about communist countries, in taiwan, you can buy a little space for your ashes in a crematorium tower.  In china, you can only rent it.  There's no concept of owning it, you can only lease.  Some places you can't own the land, you can only lease.

In britain that's true.   The land could be taken back at any time

Actually true of all gvt, if you don't pay your taxes, gvt can repossess.

In france, some books are understood to be under perpetual copyright.  Like the little prince.

And then there's creative commons.  Cc.    That was extension of copyright terms.  It's a pushback against long term ownership of ideas.  Actually in software, there's a thing called open source, if something's licensed as an open source project, anyone can take it and improve it, and depending on the licence the don't have to or maybe must share it.

I'm interested in open source, and collaborating with people across the world.  There's a lot of talk about taking that model and using it in other areas.  Like coca cola, someone released the recipe, and sib could released a better version.  Or 3d printing, to release ideas, and people could build the designs. 

 

 

Are human beings inherently competitive? Y/n

Y 3

N 2

 

Does theft inhibit trust between people?

Y 4

N  1

 

Why not?

There's no direct relationship between people.  

If you trust a person, it's nothing to do if they steal something from you?

Like they guy who stole the candlestick from the bishop, but the bishop trusted him again and again.

I just can't see the correlation between the two things.   I think there's no direct relationship.  

So what does trust mean?   

It means you can believe in them, and they won't betray you.   Trust is more like we have a base, we have some common values.   But theft is like you want something and you cannot gain it, or you're in a situation that forces you to do that.  It's a motivation, and you push yourself to do that.

So if someone stole things from you, would it change your trust in them?

I don't think so, because i think you wouldn't take my stuff without letting me know.   It's one of the values of trust.  Maybe you can say these things are not exactly equal.  

Why does theft inhibit trust between people?

For me, fundamentally, even if i really know the person, and i really care about them, it’s the fact that, it's unpredictable.   For me to trust anything, it has to be predictable, so if someone is going to steal,, well, i will trust someone to steal if they're going to consistently steal.

So you…

You can trust their behaviour

So you don't trust anything that's not predictable.

So that's the slightly wider statement.  But you're pretty close.  It's not that i can't put faith in it.   There's trust and faith

So faith is more like xingren.

Faith in sb, even 

You can still have faith in their humanity, but you won't let them near your stuff

For me, the way my wife and i run our relationship, we are totally honest with each other.   We both of this came to the conclusion even before we got together, that this was how to do it.   So in the context of this beleif, i feel that something like stealing, what's wrong is partly that it's hidden, it's about not communicating what you want to do, i mean, why not ask for the thing?  So stealing in that sense breaks the faith of the relationship.

Stealing can be hidden, but also be visible, like one country annexing part of another country.   There's power involved, stealing is also an imbalance of power.

 

 

Does owning property therefore automatically inhibit trust between people?  

Yes all property 3

Yes if it's land and resources 1

Yes private property

No  1

 

Is it real estate or private property, because it's different for me.

He wants to be the iconoclast

No i have reasons! It's no for every single one.  I'm thinking a few things.  People steal when they're desperate, when they want something they don't think they can get for themselves.  If that wasn't the case, there's no evidence in my mind to suggest that people will automatically resort to stealing other people’s stuff.   In taiwan here, people steal far less than india or malaysia, because they have  a better quality of life here.   So it doesn't automatically inhibit trust.  And this might not be a correct analysis, but we all own property, but we all come to trust other people enough to leave our stuff around them.  If you start from a position where there is no trust but build trust…but maybe it's a decent point.   In terms of types of property, but if there's something like, say intellectual property, it's an even stronger no, because it's much easier to protect

Why is protection an issue.  

If you're arguing it automatically inhibits trust, it implies that it's even harder to protect. I like it's easy to carry information in a memory card in your wallet.  Encryption, etc.

 

Anarchism and communism, is communism about not owning things?

Kropotkin talks about anarcho-communism, but that's not communism, as it's practiced by certain countries, and also not communism, as discussed by marx and lenin.  But as a basic definition, i understand communism is about ownership of resources and state control, and anarcho-communism is about people sharing ownership of resources without a state

 

So if what we know to be true is the opposite, is that plausible for human life?   If there's no private property, is there trust?

So what would you say?

I would say that leguin, as expressed in her novel, she paints a very plausible picture, as a mixed metaphor.   And she does recognise that the system is getting broken down, that the property, in the sense of rights, is encroaching.  But it's plausible in my mind.  But we need to ask some questions to tease out the issues.

I have an interesting opinion:  just try to think: i think trust is more complicated than owning something.  So, we try to think, if there's only one cup on this table, and we have five people, is there any possibility we will get five equal drinks of this cup?    Will we fight over this cup?  Is this about trust?

So the issue is about scarcity.

Property is about buying something by money, or buying something by right.   But if it's about using, not having, it can also cause some fights.

Okay so, in this world that we live in right now, there's limited resources, and property, and therefore i presume ownership is in force, because not everyone can get something.  Besides ownership, there's imbalances, some people have a lot, and some don't.  Property ownership creates scarcity.  If there is no scarcity, or everyone has enough, then if private property isn't necessary, is this society plausible, what would be the characteristics.

I think it's about manipulation, about how it's distributed.  The rules are the key.  If you didn't follow the rule, we could have a fight and lose the trust.

I agree.   I think something unsaid in our discussion so far, is that we do have a framework in our world, and that's the law, and that regulates with each other vis a vis property.  Is it possible if the society has little or no regulation.

My answer would be custom.

But there's also new things, too.  If a society or a group is good at encountering everything…. What i'm hoping for discussion is, we've critiqued the society we're living in, but we're not critiquing the society le guinn proposed.

It's hard because some people haven't read it much yet.

How do we move towards that?   A closer examination?

I find it extremely interesting.  Reading the book so far, that's all i’m thinking.   

What?

The idea if this is possible.   As you've been talking i’ve been thinking about it.  I think it's not a stable state.  You can do it, but it won't last.   I don't mean state as in 'thestate' , i mean as a liquid or gas, there's no equilibrium.

Are you talking about how in uk you have to pay gas and electricity by yourself?

No, i'm talking about if this is plausible in our society

He's saying it's really likely to get out of balance.

I think it’s interesting, because it relates to the academic work i do, which is social structure.   Is the state of any society stable?  Isn't it always shifting?  Is it more or less stable than others

I'm arguing that it's less stable.   It won't last as long as what we have has lasted.  Adam smith, wealth of nations, 18th century.   It's the cornerstone of how markets work.  His motivation was to help people get out of poverty.   Reading that, he's simply taking what he observes as natural human behaviour, and codifies it.   Like the part of the book where they're teaching children to be communal against natural human behaviour.  When i think about how humans developed up to this point.  But society progressively becomes more specialised, i have to give sb something for the clothes i wear, which eventually becomes money, so money has been around for a long long time, and as soon as you have prices, which is supply and demand.  So markets seem to be natural.  So if you have a market, then you have competition.  

I don't disagree about the qualities of society.  But i would make a distinction about longevity and stability.   Society has been doing markets a long time, but it's not stable.   The more and who have less can be manifested in violence, and also state violence, and so in the us, the stability there is based on massive acquisition of others resources, so it creates unbalance in other places like destabilising the gulf so we can have stable oil

Commodities and abstract valuations in money is a new thing, it's not a historical thing,  historically we've had credit, not cash money.

We reflect popular cultures, and ours reflects european imperialism of 19th century.   

...

I just want to say that the way we practice now, cannot say 'natural'

We could say 'dominant'

We could say 'normal', 'realisable possibilities'

I teach my students to analyse and interpret based on what they can understand.   

That's teaching the individual to liberalise their own life.   

But individuals making choices to have collective change?  To make it on their own without awareness of what other choices people are making.

It's not the singular, i want to do this thing because of me

But for collective change people need to work together

They have to make the best choices based on circumstance, which means in terms of the needs of the other people around them. 

If we took other people into account like you're saying, change can come, but it will take a long time.  The way i see it, the structures that run the system create the change.  So you just have to change the people running the structure.   

I’m not a proponent of the system, but a slim proportion of students at a slim proportion of elite colleges are the ones who'll be in a position to be the people in power.  

 

 

Freedom of speech, movement, economy.   Gvts trying to control these things.   We value freedom of speech, obviously there's limits, but it's mostly there.  Freedom of economy is what no one has, is why bitcoin is so dangerous.   People use it as currency, but what it is, is a way for people to agree on who owns what, without gvt control.   Without a bank control.  The currency is based on mathematics, on encryption.   If i pay you a bicoin, everyone knows about this transaction.  Imagine you having a copy of every transaction that everyone has ever done in the us dollar, or someting

Bitcoins are mined though, right? Through mathematics? Where are they mined from ?  Who controls those servers?

So: mining is about how the network verifies transactions.   So i tell the network i’m paying.

So everyone knows i have the bit coin. 

They will.

And that's the purpose

And that *i* no longer have it.   So people use their computing power to verify the transaction.  It takes about an hour to verify.  Once verified, no one can undo it.   No-one can forge it, because the mathematics can’t be duplicated 

So when someone runs that calculation, they get rewarded with a coin

So that's how the currency expands

So someone has to spend energy to 'mine' the coins.   And it still takes an hour, because the calculations get more complicated each time.  It gets more complicated because more people get involved, so there's more computer power is involved.   It's constantly measuring how long it will take.

What is measuring and controlling?

The algorithm and the software.   

Who is controlling that?

It's open source, and it works as long as the majority of the network is honest, over 50% of people are honest.

So what happened when it was stolen?

As people started grouping together, some of the mining groups were mining over 50% of the transactions. 

So bit coin has the potential for freedom of economy.  Because gvts are about guaranteeing the scarcity of the  ...

 

Concluding statements

I have two things to say:

1.  I didn’t realise: i saw the book as being about property first and power second, but now i see it's more about power

2.  This is related to what i do professionally,  but does it work for the book?   Is it about the preservation or not of property, but can it be about the conservation of property and rights? 

I have another question, the people here, what is your feeling towards shevek as a character?  Or any other character?

 

I think the, even though i haven't yet read the book, i'm just thinking that this book makes me reflect on current systems in societies, like communism, and how political and financial systems have failed us, like the crash of 2008, or political systems like recently, so it's like the end of power? After the protests and uprising, is there a new way our society can go towards?   I really need to do the reading, so i can get more from the book.

 

I'm slightly less sceptical now about the society presented in the book, but still very sceptical if it would work.

You're less skeptical now why?

Because of today's discussion.

How so?

Because i realize there's areas i don't understand well enough.

 

I'm just happy to hear all the different perspectives from the different professions.  And i think these concepts can reflect our real life.

 

Wait, you have to go too!  

Oh, wow, okay, let me think.  Today's discussion went differently than i expected, and it was very interesting, i definitely got some ideas expanded, and that was very good for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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