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THREE METHODS OF CONTROL  AND THREE RULING CLASSES

The society of humans is based actually on methods of controlling people. There are three principal methods: 1. Brutal violence or the threat of violence. 2. Material interest, and the threat of poverty, including hunger. 3. Suggestion, including preaching and conscience.

Three methods of control mentioned above produced three ruling classes. 1. Control due to violence is the profession of bureaucracy, including army, police, law courts, etc. 2. Control due to material interest is the profession of reach people. 3. Control due to suggestion is the profession of mass media, religion, and other ideologies. So, we have three ruling classes, from the very beginning of the existence of human society.

Karl Marx underlined mostly material control of the bourgeoisie and underestimated the power of violence and suggestion.

The fact is, that in the course of the entire history of Humankind, there were three ruling classes: State (violence), rich (material interest), and ideologues (suggestion). Usually, the ideologues served the two strongest ruling classes, bureaucrats and rich. However, sometimes ideologues succeeded, temporarily, overpower two others.

Most of history witnessed the mutual struggle between "strong" ruling classes, that is bureaucracy and rich. At the same time, both are mutually tied. It's a classic example of Hegel's "unity and struggle of opposites".

All three methods of control exploit different properties of human psychology, like fear of violence and hunger, the pursuit of happiness and pleasure, leaning toward belief and authority, conformism, etc.

 

SOCIAL STRUCTURE, STATES, AND IDEOLOGIES ARE BASED ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLE

An innate inclination towards an abstract idea (faith or any non-religious ideology) is inherent in most people, as Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his famous "Brief History of Humanity". According to Harari, it is this feature of Homo Sapiens that has provided our ability to create large collectives, from the state, army, church, and political parties, to corporations and sports societies.

Yuval Harari is right in many ways, but he often "goes too far" towards idealism, and then tries to get out of the vicious circle into which he drove himself. Since different forms of organization of society, based on the ability of people to abstract ideas, are stable and move large masses of people over long periods of time, Harari singled out the class of "pseudo-imaginary entities" as an intermediate between imaginary and material.

I prefer the name "materialized idea" instead. Previously, this phenomenon was described, saying that ideas have material power. Nations, social classes, states, etc. can be attributed to these "pseudo-imaginary entities", or materialized ideas.

……………….

The "myths" that Harari attaches decisive importance are ideas that emerge according to the principle of the "butterfly effect", and then take over entire nations and the world. Yet these ideas are not accidental. but based on the innate psychological properties of people that Freud spoke about.

More precisely, out of a huge number of ideas, only those are disseminated that, on the one hand, correspond to the peculiarities of human psychology, and on the other hand, meet their needs, both material spiritual and biological.

The society of people and its collective consciousness are linked dialectically. Society generates ideas, and ideas shape this society.

This is the classic chicken and egg case. Karl Marx declared that "social being determines social consciousness." Today Yuval Harari told us exactly the opposite. Which one is right? Both are right, but only partially. As is often the case, the truth is dialectical.

Contrary to Marx, we cannot consider that "social being" is primary and "social consciousness" is secondary. According to Harari and our own experience, ideas, together with other factors, form "social being." Marx ignored the biological and spiritual needs of people as part of "social existence", reducing everything to monetary and social interests.

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However, when Harari, in defiance of Marx, declared the supremacy of the ideas shaping society, he missed Freud, that is, the psychology of people. Marx, naturally, did not know about Freud, otherwise, he would have created a completely different theory.

The ideas that hold us are not accidental. They are based on the individual and mass psychology of people. In fact, we have a triangle: Freud, Harari, and Marx set forth thoughts that, taken together, accurately describe the phenomenon, provided that we accept all three phenomena as interacting.

Marx's social ideas are actually abstract ideas that have materialized in the form of political movements, parties, and states.

Material (monetary) calculations, according to Marx, are a common idea of both the rich, fearing ruin, and the poor, living in fear of hunger and destruction.

As the coronavirus crisis has shown us, temporary material well-being is very fragile. Everyone wants to hide their fear from other's eyes, putting forward various ideas-pretexts like "liberalism", "communism", God, etc. This is what Marx was talking about.

But the human is not a simple "social machine", as Karl Marx believed. We are also biological individuals who want not only to eat, but also to love (reproduce), be lazy, and have fun. There are individuals for whom power over other people is more important than wealth, and there are those who understand that big money gives power.

Out of idleness and for the sake of entertainment, different ideas come to our minds, we want to create, draw, write immortal poems ... This is called creativity.

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The psychology of the individual is built dialectically, that is, on combinations of opposite properties inherent in the same person. Each property of our psychology is opposed by at least one opposite property. Yet there are separate "unconditioned" instincts, such as hunger and sexual instinct, not balanced by the opposite instinct.

When the material needs of the people are satisfied, ideas related to the biological needs of people, including the pursuit of pleasure, laziness and the antipode of laziness, creativity, take a more important place. Social ideologies and parties based on them (socialists, communists) are becoming a thing of the past.

http://aaronblog.co/2021/03/three-ruling-classes/

 

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8 hours ago, HouseKnight1 said:

I prefer the name "materialized idea" instead. Previously, this phenomenon was described, saying that ideas have material power. Nations, social classes, states, etc. can be attributed to these "pseudo-imaginary entities", or materialized ideas.

I am not quite sure how to fit this in but reading the above these alternate non-competitive symbiotic societies came to mind.

The honeybee has been around for some 135 million years and their symbiotic relationship with flowering plants has created the incredible variety of shape and color in pollinating plants by natural selection and the most healthy and genetically impressive food production by bees. 

shutterstock_1751432864.jpg

Instead of one class ruling another, a symbiotic relationship offers complete equality to the point that if one species dies, the symbiont species also suffers hardship.  Each species is needed to support the other.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-beguiling-history-of-bees-excerpt/#

 

p.s.Of course humans as the ruling species, instead of learning symbiotic lifestyle with nature,  is busy killing this  remarkable and IMO, divine (informal) insect species.

p.p.s. There is that problem of drones having only limited use as procreators, after which they are expelled from the hive and die. 

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The herder-ant practised husbandry for million of years

antz1.jpg

Leafcutter ants are industrious creatures known for expertly carving up foliage and then carrying it back in pieces to their colony, creating neat lines of undulating green armies. They use the leaves to farm fungus which they eat – they are essentially mushroom farmers. Herder ants, as their name suggest, tend to aphids – the little green bugs that drink plants’ nutrients and are considered pests by every farmer on earth, except for their own six-legged keepers. Ants love the sugary substance aphids exert and treat the bugs as their dairy cows.

https://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/meet-earths-oldest-farmers-ants/#

It appears to me that not every society needs to rule or be ruled. Competition eventually yields a zero sum gain. 

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In A Discourse on Inequality, 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously sketched out what is now called the stag-hunt problem. In Rousseau’s tale, a group of hunters go out in search of food and are immediately confronted by a challenge. If they want to maximize their hunt, they can wait for a large deer to trot by, and kill it. But that might involve hours of waiting, hidden in the bushes, with no certainty that a stag will appear. Meanwhile, rabbits are happily bouncing through the underbrush. Any of the hunters could leave the group and its hiding place to bag a rabbit, but that might scare off a shy stag. In short, an individual hunter could provide food for himself but the rest of the group would go hungry

Today, in the field of game theory, Rousseau’s tale has been modeled and explored for what it reveals about individuals and social cooperation.

 

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Hunters have a free choice, not informed by what anyone else is thinking. The odds of bagging a rabbit are greater for individuals but potentially destructive of the group. (British philosopher David Hume, a Rousseau contemporary, reimagined this situation as two people in a small boat that both must row to move ahead; if one stops, there’s no reason for the other to continue. Hume used the story to explain how people learn what he called the convention of cooperation.) At the heart of the stag hunt is an elemental decision that everyone must make: Should the individual hunter give in to hunger or impatience, break ranks and satisfy his own needs at the cost of everyone else’s? The decision to opt for the easy rabbit is what’s known as a zero-sum game, in which one person’s gain is another’s loss.

https://www.weareworldquant.com/en/thought-leadership/zero-sum-and-other-statistical-games/

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Introduced Asian carp in North America pose a major threat to the ecology, environment, economy, and way of life in the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada. Asian carp are a group of fish species, which include several known to be invasive, and represent the most urgent potential danger to the ecology of the Great Lakes. The United States Department of the Interior and United States Fish and Wildlife Service presented their first annual report to Congress on the issue in December 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_carp_in_North_America

 

It is clear that humans are an invasive species, busily killing the host. How can we learn to "get along" instead of "using it up" 

Edited by write4u
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