Conversation

Imagine humanism as a zero-sum scarcity game. What if in a group of 3 people, there is only room for 2 full recognitions as "human"? You can have 1 superhuman and 2 subhumans 2 humans and 1 subhuman Or 3 0.67 humans.
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Actually, it's the lump of humanism fallacy (there's a fixed number of ways to be human). Like the lump of labor fallacy (there's a fixed number of jobs).
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The number of types of jobs grows as the material economy evolves and complexifies The number of types of human grows as the social economy evolves and complexifies
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If feeling fully human yourself requires you to systematically dehumanize another, you're basically doing it wrong
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Certain culture war fights remind me of things like SUVs being invented as a category to take advantage of looser emissions requirements of light trucks while essentially being passenger cars (the loophole was closed in 2004 in the US, but not before the category became a thing)
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Replying to
When you only have cars and light trucks, you can only have 2 emissions standards. But once you have a third established, you can have 3.
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Same with full-time employees vs. contractors. Gigworkers are a genuine new category that people want to fit into one of the 2 old ones for zero-sum power reasons.
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It's not the whole story, but basically every identity-based conflict can be reduced to "I want to be treated as X for tax/regulatory purposes" Except the tax/regulation is soft-cultural rather than hard-state-based.
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This is probably the way out of the culture wars. For everybody to take identity integration be an entirely private matter, and treat presentation/performance as a matter of "for X purposes."
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Having everybody you meet see you as a whole person in a way that is in harmony with how you see yourself... that's a luxury of psychosocial coddling that was essentially lost with globalization. If you need it, you're gonna have a bad time.
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