05-05-2015, 09:24 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Deference Issues!
Deference is actually an issue in the setting we are talking about, mainly through devices that seek to allow people a chance to know what others think of a person they've just met. (I must look up the right term in Toxic Memes).
However I'm thinking about deference in any realistic 2115AD period. Deference, being a thing no one gets on the nets, isn't something we talk about a great deal, but it is important. Deference is also something that has been changing and evolving over time. Compare 1715AD, 1815AD, 1915AD, and 2015AD, and you'll see deference mainly eroding, and also being differently distributed. Think how elites could treat working people in 1715. The elites spoke of the lower orders, as in their place in society was "God Ordained," and everybody except pirates and radicals bent the knee to the elites. "Condescension" was the Virtue of knowing how to treat the lower orders with proper respect. By 1815 Jane Austen has one of her characters use the term "condescension" as a complement, and this makes him look silly and bigoted. Only a few years earlier Imputence and Insolence had different meanings (Imputence was rudeness to those higher in the social order, insolence was rudeness to those lower in the social order). By 1815 dictionaries defined both words with the same meaning. In 1915 they looked back at 1815 with nostalgia as a time when the lower "classes" (no longer God Ordained orders) knew their place. Place was still an important idea even in America. The world of Dowton Abbey felt they lived in a time which was as egalitarian as humanly possible. In 2015 we think that we have arrived at the true destination of humanity. By 2115 will we be as quaint as Dowton Abby or old copies of the Tattler (circa 1715)? A world with radically reduced defference, and one were groups not previously defered to, like women, children, the poor, are defered to, would have very different dynamics. When power no longer carries social prestige, how does status work? Liberterianism on the political Right and Culture Studies types on the Left depend on deference because they use their political ideas as a badge of status. What happens if they lose that status? Could the terrorism of the THS setting come from bullies lacking status? Note: women in the past were said to be defered to. In practise they were given either condesencion or insolence disguised as politeness. The same for children.
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Per Ardua Per Astra! Ancora Imparo Last edited by Astromancer; 05-05-2015 at 09:41 AM. |
05-05-2015, 10:28 PM | #2 | |
Computer Scientist
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Dallas, Texas
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Re: Deference Issues!
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But how will this impact the game? By 2100, there's no particular cultural imperialism to promulgate anything like a common sense of deferential order, other than to the new classes of underpeople (bioroids, uplifts, and infomorphs). Some, like Japan, may actually elevate uploads as ancestors have been traditionally, but I want to know what kind of new sorts of deference could come about? / Role-based? meme-based? take turns? |
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05-06-2015, 09:05 AM | #3 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Deference Issues!
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Now in Cyberpunk this leads to corperate armies taking over America. But without a stable USA, American corperations are dead in the water, and many foriegn corperations are seriously slamed too. Corperations requier a certain defference from society to function. New systems of social legitimacy would be needed in THS. Or there will be truely radical social changes.
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05-07-2015, 02:32 AM | #4 |
Computer Scientist
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Dallas, Texas
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Re: Deference Issues!
This is not due to deference to or perceived legitimacy of monied interests by the people which has indeed fallen, but to "regulatory capture" of the government by the monied interests, which has only increased.
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05-07-2015, 09:34 AM | #5 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Deference Issues!
Regulatory Capture can only work if wealth gets you deference. If wealth doesn't enhance your status, regulatory capture requires straight forward bribery of an easily procecuted type.
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05-07-2015, 11:11 AM | #6 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Deference Issues
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I think you're trying to force a lot of varied types of relationships into this idea of "deference" and thereby distorting them. |
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05-08-2015, 09:03 AM | #7 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Deference Issues
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All this is to say that a major change in "deference" as a catagory changes all catagories "deference" interacts with. The Social Ecology is transformed if you transform a major factor in it. Loss of deference for some catagories while extending defference to new groups transforms all aspects of culture in at least small ways. And, like a small change in the biosphere, these small cultural changes create further unforseeable changes. Distortion is a valuble idea here, but so is liberation, or creative destruction. One order of society is fading away, it has been for centuries. Predicting that such changes are meaningless and unimportant won't work.
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05-10-2015, 02:37 PM | #8 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Deference Issues!
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05-11-2015, 09:17 AM | #9 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Deference Issues!
I might be being unfair to a comtemporary drama about the early 20th century. But many fine works from that period would seem quaint now. Just as many fine movies from earlier decades seem weird and warped because we no longer share many of the social assumptions vital to the film.
Most people don't get that the Margaret DuMont characters in the old Marx Brothers films were powerful and dangerous. Groucho is playing with fire, and sometimes gets burnt. Society is changing in ways that erode the barriers to radical change.
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05-12-2015, 12:49 AM | #10 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
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Re: Deference Issues!
Dude, you understand that we don't give wealthy people want they want out of classism right? We give it to them because they give us money. If a hobo won the lottery and asked to have my coat and offered me a thousand bucks for it, I've give it to him, not out of deference, but for the $1000. Likewise, a senator isn't rewriting the laws to benefit your company because he respects you, but because these wonderful birthday gifts and opportunities just keep magically finding their way to his family (amazing!)
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