1984 ish

1.   A person, A, lives a normal life, basing it on their perception of the reality around them.

2.   A person, T, becomes famous and asserts their financial power.

3.   By using body gestures and verbal threats and taunts and bullying, T scares others into doing or giving what T wants.

4.   T bullies others into accepting that T's description of reality is, in fact, the truth, even though that is not so.

5.  T's description of reality is adopted as the official version of reality.

6.  People act as if T's reality is reality itself.

Justice: Right and Wrong v. Good and Bad

One definition of justice in a court of law is that justice is a decision which resulted from a case or trial in which all parties played by the rules -- determine how the law is to be interpreted and carried out; everybody plays by the rules, you have justice.  Implementing a law in a logically valid way, is operationally speaking, justice.

But, from this perspective, carrying out a law, by engaging in actions that hurt people in ways that are morally unjustified and repugnant, is justice.  A law that systematically privileges one party over another, still results in justice if the law is applied according to the rules.

In other words, a law cannot be just or unjust.  Justice is a function of applying a system of rules as they are applied to inputs to the judicial system; whereas using the law as an input or datum into the judicial system is self-referential or results in a paradox, no outcome can be reached -- the law cannot take itself to court.  In other words, you cannot call a law just or unjust.  But you can call a law good or bad, good or evil, foolish or wise, basically something that does or does not reflect the values of society.

And of course, a neutral law can be applied in a morally reprehensible way.

In other words, a law is not just or unjust, it can be good or bad or somewhere in between; or it can be applied, the result of which is something good or bad (or somewhere in between).

Some laws regulate interaction, such as traffic regulation -- "the rules of the road".  These regulations can also define the conditions and scope under which the law is applied; for instance, whether one subgroup of all the people to whom it applies is systematically selected for a specified outcome.

Power

The more power a person has, the less significant anyone becomes within the power's preview: if I command an army of 2, losing one person diminishes my power by 50%; but if I command an army of 1 million, the loss of one person diminishes my power by only one ten thousandth of a percent.

Unlike the limitations placed upon a person in the consumption of food, a person can never have too much power.  But like food, too much power will distort a person. 

Fragmentation

As mass media becomes bespoke media, so does society's understanding of the world become more fragmented.  It more difficult to stand around the water cooler and discuss a program that everyone has watched.

The diversity of ideas, the frequency at which they are promulgated, the rate at which they mutate and develop, the intensity of their presentation....

Consensus can only be achieved around power. 

HUMAN NATURE

1.  Humans have evolved to push the envelope:  This is the basis of competition; though competition has a hierarchical component.

2.  Humans are social

3.  Hierarchy is a type of social organization

4.  Competition is one way to organize society

5.  Competition tends to result in a hierarchy

6.  Humans will not choose to permanently discomfort themselves

7.  Humans will not give up what they have unless they must

8.   Ray Dalio argues, capitalism has broken that promise. The relentless pursuit of profit over people has created a structural flaw that threatens to bring the whole system down. [The Guardian, 2-10-20]

It's not the system, per se, it could be better; it's the people in the system, i.e. everybody, that make the system work the way it does.  The system is like the roads in a city, it's the drivers, the people, who choose to, or perhaps can't help but, drive like they do.  People in big powerful cars drive fast and intimidate other drivers because they can, and their nature rewards them for doing so.

So, perhaps it is the system, but it is a system created by human nature.  It is a system created by people to benefit those people at the expense of others.

Why should the people who benefit from a system want to change that system so that it no longer benefits them?

"Power concedes nothing without a struggle."

“All systems should evolve. We all need to evolve. We need to be reformed constantly,” says Dalio.
 
Again the problem of thinking that individuals "evolve".  Rather, species evolve in response to their environments, over a long time, from the standpoint of a human life span.  Ray will definitely not evolve; probably not even his grandchildren, and thus the system will not evolve much because there are many -- billions -- who benefit from the system as it is, or believe that they do; and they will oppose any system change.

The Church of Socialism

While Socialism may have fine goals, many socialists seem to think that those goals are not for real people, but rather, people in the abstract.

They come to people as if those people have no history, no up-bringing, as if they were a tabula rasa.   They seem to forget that those people were raised in Capitalism, and so mostly know how to understand the world in terms of Capitalism. d so hey become frustrated when those people respond to their message conditioned by what they understand, thus fail to build a relationship with them that will enable them to understand the world in a different way.

What If ....

What if the rest of the world treated the US; the way the US treated Cuba?

What if Israel was known as the Switzerland of the Middle East?

Sexuality

1.  Some women want to have babies -- feel compelled, driven, even -- and so they will seek intercourse with a male for this reason, to accomplish this.

2.  Some women, for their own reasons, like or enjoy intercourse with a male of their choosing.

3.  Some women will engage in sexual intercourse with a male for various other reasons -- reasons other than their own pleasure or desire.

 4.  Some women do not want or desire sexual intercourse with any man, at any time, and therefore avoid it.  This does not mean that they do not want or enjoy the company of men, just no sex.

As  this relates to a specific relationship between a man and woman, this constitutes a very small proportion of their lives, perhaps 1.5%. [Minutes in a year = 525,600 min/yr.  Duration of average sexual encounter = 60 min.  Duration of encounters per year = 5x52x30 min = 7,800.  % engaged = 7,800/525,600 < 1.5%]  The rest of the time (98.5%) is spent making a life together or not.

For those who believe that sex is only for procreation, 30 minutes in a 40-year marriage is 0.00015% (fifteen one hundred thousandths of a percent; 30 minutes out of 21,024,000 minutes).

The duration of the act (here, 30 min.) depends on how it is measured:  Commencement to male orgasm.  Commencement to female "orgasm".  Commencement to when both decide it is done.

Perhaps the issue is that males have a too-restricted notion of their sexuality, primarily centered around female manipulation of their penis; which suggests that it is males who have a impoverished or limited or unimaginative understanding of their sexuality.

The Guardian 2/2/20:

The new class war: did a liberal elite pave the way for rise of Trump?

Michael Lind, the author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, has a theory. Today’s political villain, he argues, is a phenomenon he calls “technocratic neoliberalism”....

Lind’s analysis is reminiscent of the one espoused by philosopher Richard Rorty, who in 1998’s Achieving Our Country predicted the working class would eventually be seduced into supporting a demagogic populist after being abandoned by the middle class....

But was the working class "abandoned" by the middle class? 

Financially, the working class in the 1970s, because of its union membership, was well on its way to joining or even surpassing the middle class.  And then the working class began abandoning the unions. 

Perhaps some of the disillusionment of the working class with unions had to do with the failure of union democracy to keep some of its leaders from becoming power mad, but, the most important factor was the working class' seduction by the neoliberal argument that seeking individual advancement over collective advancement was the sure road to individual wealth and freedom. 

At least in the West, this seems to be an accelerating trend since the Renaissance with the advent of humanism, which drew attention to the internal experiencing individual and thus away from a collective and external god.

Everybody's a sovereign now, king or queen of one's own castle, fief, domain; answerable to none but him or herself.  But as has been noted by actual sovereigns, it is a lonely position.  In a world of sovereigns, it is every man for himself in a state of all against all, each against everyone else.  This goes against the human condition since before humans became human and became conscious that they were living in a society of other humans.

Since the beginning of human existence, from before the invention of writing (and thus the beginning of history), humans have been social animals, dependent on each other for sustenance, protection, comfort.

But human being are also separate and unique individuals; perhaps aggravated or augmented by reflective self-consciousness and the invention of writing, which facilitates the externalization of the the internal world.  One no longer simply talks to oneself, but by writing, creates a separate and external consciousness.

Perhaps members of the working class feel the effects of individualism more poignantly than the so-called middle class because, while members of the middle class, more specifically the professional class spend more time in their heads, living in a kind of fantasy world of theories and algorithms and procedures and laws, are less likely to realize their alienation from human society; unlike the working class whose lives are more centered around dealing with the problems of the physical world, and maybe are therefore more profoundly affected by the fact they are are left to deal with these problems alone.