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epochemagazine OP t1_irw37cn wrote

From the essay:

"As we move towards the future, a relational ontology that envisions persons as persons-in-community is crucial, because a person can never be without being in relation to other terms and persons in the world. If I live in a city that makes it illegal for a tent city to be on public land (as my city of Baton Rouge recently did here in Louisiana), then the city is trying to make poverty illegal. Poverty is an ever-present result of designing social and economic hierarchies as we do, and so it becomes a performative contradiction to make the result of our economic relations illegal (in the form of tent encampments in parks and under highway overpasses, in this example) despite the processes and relations sorting a spectrum of haves from have-nots. We design and participate and thereby renew practices that result in degrees of wealth and poverty. And yet if we acknowledge that this is how we envision these social and economic institutions, should we renew, participate, and reconstitute this as our vision for what economies should do? For these institutions deflect any talk of reform under the guise of individual freedom, and that freedom is never reflected in the relational way we experience our world, but in the interpretation of human beings that emphasizes the atomic individual only—the atomic individual devoid of standing in relation to any one person. According to James, the individual is merely a reification of a set of unfolding relations at a specific time."

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Otherwise_Carob_4057 t1_irwgsy2 wrote

Too be fair we literally couldn’t exist without each other, and yet are repelled by each other.

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ShalmaneserIII t1_irxwmh3 wrote

You start to see the point of why Socrates and others debate how a society should operate- in no small part, to produce citizens who are not repugnant nor deserving of scorn from others.

It's not inconceivable that you could look around yourself in a crowd and go "these are good people- I am glad to be among them."

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Otherwise_Carob_4057 t1_iryp3t0 wrote

My ethics professor wrote his thesis on the theory that Socrates wanted a society in which citizens were the best possible members of society because they were well educated. That would be sweet but I think he also wanted schooling to last all the way to age 30.

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PuerhRichard t1_irysco9 wrote

Well only do many people were citizens of Rome originally to my understanding. Not sure how it was in Greece at the time. I assume he was in Athens.

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ShalmaneserIII t1_irzdm85 wrote

Not the worst idea. If you consider how much education it takes to be a trained doctor in charge of a few lives, how much harder is it to be making decisions for all the lives in your polity?

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