@reasoning logic,
Quote:I guess that I will know how many people are afraid to answer this question by the count of all who did not answer it!
That's a classic rl. If we don't answer you count us on the side of your choice.
It isn't relevant really. What I take okie to be on about is the level of institutional manipulation, by a professional class, of institutions we build for social use and which drift, in the interests of the professional class, towards compulsion. Schools, prisons and asylums are at the deep end. Roads for example are at the shallow end in the sense that people need not use them.
What okie is concerned about, I assume, is the general drift towards professional manipulation in all institutions. Socialism can just as easily mean the drift towards the shallow end. That's what Marx meant by the withering away of the State. The reliance for information on internet sites and mobile phones rather than on Media represents a drift, a lurch even, towards less professional manipulation of the institution of information sharing.
That okie thinks that socialism is responsible for a drift towards the deep end of manipulative control of institutions is due to it usually being true that socialism is so responsible. But the concept of socialism is the wrong tool for analysing the process. The right tool is the level of manipulative control by a professional class. The demand to teach evolution in compulsory schools is an example of a professional class, or coalition of them, seeking to extend its capacity to manipulate at the expense of other classes of manipulators which may well manipulate less in the sense of religion not being compulsory.
It is the very high level of manipulative control that John, the savage, rejects in the last chapters of Brave New World where everything is manipulated by experts.
Communist regimes show that extension of manipulative control to all areas of life ceases to have utility beyond a certain point for anyone else besides the class doing the manipulating. The horror of 1984 is that the manipulating class does not care about those outside its membership. It manipulates them for no other reason than the manipulation.
I saw for myself a few years ago when there was a gas tanker driver's strike how many manipulating bureaucracies appeared, as if out of the woodwork, with clipboards and steely glints in their control freakery eyes. They ended up battling each other with the poor motorists in the role of spectators.
Obviously we are a social species and that does imply a degree of socialism but a low level of manipulation in certain institutions, such as road use or small shops, is for general convenience and has utility whereas high levels of manipulation by a professional class has utility, finally, for only the class of professionals.
So you can put me down rl as someone not afraid to answer your simplistic question which I presume was aimed at those with less intelligence than yourself.
