Neil Oliver going down the "Us vs Them" or "Social vs Individual" drain

Definitely forming an opinion here. Had issue with this video.

It seems there is this growing naïve view of individuals which ignores the way they interact. Most "individuals" for example in the West think and construct their thoughts in English. So does English belong to any individual or is it a community property that is shared by all? To even think that is to go beyond being an individual - who are you thinking it for? If you went to an alien planet and found just one person speaking you would know already there must be other people for them to talk to (this is the essence of the Private Language arguments).

Just as a wall is made of bricks, if a society had no use for walls then it wouldn't make bricks. Many societies don't. If no one ever wanted a wall then no one would ever have invented or made a brick, indeed the mother of invention is not the individual but the community need. I'm pretty sure some Neanderthal put some clay in a fire and saw it harden, but with no use for it, it was over looked. That was not yet a "brick". Bricks need walls as much as walls need bricks. They cannot exist without each other. If you landed on a distant planet and found a single brick you would already know they had walls! You find a single "individual" and you already know they came from the society.

And so it goes for individuals in societies. Most obviously without parents--to give birth to us--and our family--to give birth to them--we physically would not exist, but there are all the other people whose work makes our life possible - food producers, organisers, fuel producers. We are fundamentally connected as "One, but we are not the same" as Bono sings. Its neither Individual vs Society, nor as Americans like to argue Collectivism vs Individualism - they go together as different sides of the same coin. Americans (as a society!) like to think a coin has either a Head or a Tail side; for some reason they cannot see that it must have both at the same time. A society without individuals is nothing, and individuals without a society are nothing. You have Americans like Ayn Rand literally not understanding this, or is it that only in American Society would she have risen to prominence? She felt she was not taken seriously in her home country of Russia so she moved to America. In other parts of the world that do understand this she has not been taken seriously, much to the chagrin of Americans.

Ah ha say the Survivalists. But I can live on my own off nature without anyone. Well really? You just used English to express that. You got that from a society. So you must stop thinking in English. How did you find out what to eat? Forget all that knowledge you were given by society. You need to go around trying to eat everything again to find out what is good and not good. You need forget about fire, not just how to make it, but that it even exists. That was shown to you by other people. Forget about cooking and recipes, you are back to eating raw food until you discover it for yourself. Forget about clothes, they were invented and shown to you by other people. You need to get a bang over the head so you forget literally everything and wake up naked on a beach, dumb and clueless. You will survive a few days longer than a baby, just because you have more body mass which, note, you amassed from your society. This is how we are fundamentally linked to a society and unable to survive without it just as a fish without water or us without air. But then you owe your parents for giving birth to you, so you vanish anyway and never existed without a family, other people and society.

I spent many months in a tent thinking about this. The problem with "going it alone" in a tent, is the tent. What a remarkable object that is, combining centuries of knowledge about materials and design. Consider even the process of weaving fibres that goes back millennia. And even the "tent" idea is inspired by a culture going all the way back to Mesolithic when people first started living in makeshift animal skin shelters. And even if we did scrap the modern tent and go back to mesolithic living, even they lived in societies with knowledge on how to do all this stuff handed down generation to generation. Survivalists find it hard enough to exist on their own with all the materials and knowledge of a huge industrial society like guns and explosives. How much harder with just sticks and stones. That requires real skill and knowledge that has largely been forgotten today because that society has gone!

There is an ancient distinction between Logos and Mythos. You can read logos in a book. But cycling a bicycle is handed down in a culture, it is like mythos. No one learned riding a bicycle from a book. Many people from different cultures don't even know what a bicycle is. Some cultures don't even have the idea of a wheel, or the culture and practice to make one. So when we find books from ancient cultures, its actually impossible to make sense of all the symbols without a continuous transmission of the mythos to us as readers which gives us a chance of decoding them. We assume for example that the texts will contain references to food and food production, using what we know of that to help us interpret it.

So a human individual cannot live without a society. But there is no single society, they are all different with subcultures. So it means that "society" is not one thing, any more than an individual is one thing. You pick an individual at random and you can pretty much tell which type of society they came from.

So once we see how individuals form society, and society forms individuals then we see how leaders and the led are fundamentally linked. And now my favourite graphic:

Anyway my comment to Neil Oliver is here...

"Not sure I completely agree.

[In answer to the claim that Utopian ideologies are responsible for the greatest massacres]

1st off the greatest loss of life has been the Imperial wars of Capitalism which include WW1, WW2, Vietnam and the British Empire and the land clearances and genocides of native peoples throughout the New World to make way for Capitalist farming, including more recently for example the 1943 Bengal Famine not incomparable with the Holocaust and occurring at the same time (and perhaps for the same reasons.) And of course the 300 years of Capitalist Atlantic Slave Trade to supply slaves to build America. Capitalism has killed 100s of millions. And that ignores the impact of unscrupulous marketing for profit of harmful products like cigarettes which are responsible for a billion deaths, and cars whose pollution is responsible for millions of deaths a year. In Capitalism profit is always put before welfare. Plus worth noting that the figures banded around regarding opponents of Imperialism like Russian and Chinese Revolutions and completely made up by Washington. How did the Pentagon come up with 20 million and 45 million, or even 6 million for the Holocaust? Even the Jews realise that the full figure of 11 million was just double the 6 million minus one. All these figures are literally plucked from a hat for political propaganda. If we are playing that game then the US genocide of Native Indians was 10 million, and WW1 and 2 was 100 million. I posted a few days ago the odd fact that the Chinese population was exploding at the time of these supposed famines and mass starvation. In the world of propaganda nothing is reliable (especially Imperialist propaganda)! It can be seen here clues that Neil Oliver is not waking up to a truth, but rather has finally swapped truth for the efforts of Washington at brainwashing and whitewashing their Empire.

[In answer to incredulity about sacrifice]

Regarding sacrifice there is a pattern. I was told by a Malaysian quantity surveyor that traditionally in Malaysia they would sacrifice a builder when building a bridge and bury the head in the foundations to appease the water spirits (that is Sandy from Monkey). Obviously I enquired whether she still acquired heads for her construction projects! These head hunting spirits are blood thirsty and regularly drown people, so it makes sense if you want to control the world, you give them what they want ahead of time to protect yourself. So bridges had sacrifices built in to them to make them safer. Ancient construction safety regulations. Perfectly logical.

In a world of crippling infant mortality you might for example sacrifice your 1st born to appease the blood thirsty gods and protect your future children as was the practice in the Middle East. So child sacrifice to Baal was actually quite logical. And even in harmless Buddhism, Tibetan monks would sacrifice themselves to protect communities - perhaps to appease spirits or perhaps to become spirits or perhaps to take karma on oneself. Most famously Jesus made a self-sacrifice taking the sins of the world on his shoulders. And today we have soldiers committing self sacrifice, and leaders committing sacrifice of soldiers supposedly to protect people in the exact same way. So sacrifice makes perfect sense even within modern thinking as a way of protecting the community. Which leads to the next bit.

Communities are much more holistic than Neil Oliver suggests. For example Master/Slave Dialectic from Hegel. Kings need subjects and subjects need kings - they work together. No kings and then the subjects are in disarray, no subjects and the king does not exist. So the reason subjects adopt kings is usually like the Restoration of the Monarchy. The Nash Equilibrium, or Social Contract, where everyone gives up a bit of freedom to a king in order to stop in-fighting amongst themselves. When civil wars break out, people eventually solve it by agreeing on a leader - this is exactly how the Inca would have occurred in the 1st place. We look at violent leaders and wish they were not there, we don't see the violence that would be transferred to us if those leaders were not there

Often like with 1066 in England we see the oppression of vanquished by an invading force. Or much more famously we see a tribe like the Jews get taken into captivity as happened with the Babylonians or the Egyptians or as happened with the Africans and the Capitalists during the 300 years of Atlantic Slave Trade (which incidentally is how the US grew to be a super power, nothing to do with Adam Smith's economics). But this is all very one sided, because dig a little deeper and the boundaries blur. The Saxon invasion of Britain was actually started by a Celtic tribe enlisting the help of Saxons fighters against a neighbouring tribe. Divide & Rule is not oppressive, it works within existing fractures within society. Native conflicts and desires simple become enveloped within the culture of the invading people. Its unfair to say that colonised countries want to be rules from overseas, but the arising of powerful overseas leaders is a spontaneous product of the same forces that led to them having kings in the first place. Modern Capitalist US ideas of "freedom" really are a naïve nonsense.   

It may look brutal, but to be a stable system it can't be more brutal than the violence that would break out without a leader. We just need look at the violence that broke out in Iraq after its ruling class was brutally executed by the Americans. 1000x worse than Saddam Hussein. This is why people tolerate strong leaders. But if the leaders are more brutal than the violence of civil war then people would spontaneously just abandon their kings and the kings would not even exist, until Restoration anyway as always seems to happen when people realise that a strong leaders is preferable to civil war and mafias.

As King Cnut illustrated: he had no divine power over the waves, it was ALL invested in him by his subjects. So while individuals (particularly modern capitalist individuals) like to see everything as coming from inside themselves, they overlook how much is given to them from outside by history and culture. When we find ourselves born into a world of Inca we forget how it all started, and why we all work together to create a society structured like this.

As a hypothesis it would make sense that tribal warfare in South America must have been brutal for their societies to evolve like they did. But "brutal" also means something else because mortality rates, and the brutal side of random nature would have been much more apparent to these people. A leader making a sacrifice every week would have made perfect sense when you had already lost half your family through infant mortality and disease caused--so you can best fathom--by the harsh and angry beings of nature.

So anyway think there might be other ways to see all this?"