[PLUG] social conventions - (was: You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie)

[Syeed Ali via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2022 14:36:55 -0400
Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

> I'd go a step further and say there are no inherent rights.  As with
> various types of ownership, they are conventions, and not even
> universally held ones.
> 
> Of course, they are conventions that have great ramifications for how
> a society will evolve.  The social conventions that exist today are
> just a small subset of all the ones that ever existed, and we are the
> children of the societies who absorbed, subjugated, or killed off the
> ones with different ideas, just as we bear the genes of the people and
> animals who outcompeted diverse others who were their contemporaries.
> Private property and copyright are just memes, albeit ones associated
> with societies that are capable of building abundant power, food
> sources, airliners, and stealth fighters.  Occasionally societies make
> the choice to try to figure out if the one has anything to do with the
> other...

Specifically replying to this portion:

> The social conventions that exist today are just a small subset of
> all the ones that ever existed, and we are the children of the
> societies who absorbed, subjugated, or killed off the ones with
> different ideas, just as we bear the genes of the people and animals
> who outcompeted diverse others who were their contemporaries.

I agree and want to refine this idea..

Social conventions come from somewhere.  There wasn't a divine source
from which all conventions became subsets.  While we certainly inherit
from the past, each individual has the opportunity to both modify and
invent convention.

For example, two spaces and a dash wasn't inherited from the Romans or
whatever but became a new convention in email taglines.

Specifically for "societal conventions" then those too don't have a
divine source but are occasionally both adjusted and added-to over
time.  It's just like philosophy and language, where there really are
(however rare) new ideas and words that are created anew.

The convention/genes is a good analogy, interestingly because genes also
have variation and occasional newness; like how identical twins look
different.

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