Humans were giving away their service to the church for promises of forever life.
Mass delusions are easy to propagate as they require little emotional nuance; a salute, tattoo, incantation… those used to be enough to bind large groups.
Groups are out though. We’re leaning into enabling humans as atomic agents and automating away the utilitarian social obligations, and work of biological survival to get there.
I don’t really see the inequality of representation and taxation in capitalism as any less authoritarian.
If everything I do is being validated for value by management and bosses, and my buying power is managed by bankers who have inflationary powers to dilute my earnings, we’ve just made managed economy ephemeral. We’ve socially normalized grift and protection rackets.
Some estimates suggest up to 30% of inmates are innocent. And when plenty are in there for marijuana, that’s a bit more petty than a billionaire disrupting an entire society.
Rather than real prisons we let people die on the streets from preventable disease so we can say we didn’t force anyone into anything as if letting them rot is glass half full.
It’s a shame the “I am educated and worldly” community hasn’t put much though into the depth to which relativity applies to human existence.
If we’re going to intentionally avoid lifting people up at the cost of putting agency into propping up the already rich, well, the poor can never experience the alternative to form meta opinions.
This bantering in traditional political memes is patronizing and ignorant af given our scientific understanding of reality.
If you don’t see a difference, but millions of others do, it might be worth steel manning the opposite of your conclusions. It’s a useful rhetorical exercise at least.
I get the difference. It doesn’t absolve our culture of ignoring it’s deficiencies. But look what happens at a university in 2008 when students simply sit on the ground.
Is there a difference? Or have we just accepted our fate?
I don’t think I’m the one that needs to take tour advice.
I was not speaking to taxation. I’m speaking to private influence on wages, regressive taxation, privilege for the financial elite, the real health issues and costs of extreme inequality as being authoritarian.
Relativity; being poor isn’t a character flaw. Lack of experience means not knowing what one should be fighting for.
Relativity is a scientific fact yet in the free world we enable class-based suffering. Do we throw them in a gulag?
No, we let them rot in the open in tents under bridges, and complain about it. We’re far more civilized.
Even for engineers buying power is incredibly diminished by inflation to prop up Bloomberg’s and grandpa’s property portfolio he was able to afford starting in 1970.
Normalized agency in deference to political nostalgia not what communities need isn’t constrained to China and has real consequences on lives. Is it jackboots with machine guns? No. But the effects are just as measurable.
What do you suggest that will make a difference in yet another human era of aristocratic capture of our lives and agency.
They do not have an information advantage, just a political one.
And we can see how concerned the general public is with taking control of politics for its gain. It very clearly prefers to be hands off and let a minority manipulate public agency for their gain.
They don’t require a biological mutation but they do require a change in agency, social state.
Take society as an organism in the abstract and it definitely needs to mutate.
Crichton was a pop science author, right-wing believer in America. His idea small groups get things done was lost on this guy who watched entire corporations publish his books and movies. I’d take his philosophy and science creds with a grain of salt.
The masses were too busy collectively validating his banal artistic efforts, so of course he would balk at collectivism philosophically while ignoring it took a village to lift him up.
Those folks are scared that if everyone can have time to write mediocre sci fi they’d have to get real jobs.
No one thought “glass” because the outcome was predetermined.
Employees do not care about financial or literal waste.
They only meme in mind when they go to their job for “make money”.
I goto meetings with a vision and zero fucks about the implementation all the time. Why you expect that to be different otherwise in the same culture is beyond me.
Our biological sensibilities are too easily confused by concepts we don’t fully grasp, and come on; there is so much rubber stamping and favoritism (even now I know the founder of my company is invited to private sessions in DC to hammer out rules that favor us and we’ve proven nothing).
This forum seems to have too much of a naive and weirdly trusting belief in such subjective and hand wavy ideas when literal reality is offering plenty of evidence to the contrary in the political sections of a newspaper.
Houses will build themselves!
Food will magically fill your fridge!
Can we get over the old wives tales?
Scientifically people will work to support biological survival.
What they don’t want is a job for another human who has nothing more than artificial political advantage keeping them from real work.
They don’t want a job that elevates Bezos and Gates to ungodly levels of wealth, while their friends and family struggle to pay rent and buy insulin.
Our current economic reality has nothing to do with willingness to work.
It’s an emotional Ponzi scheme, properly groomed for TV and emotional manipulation: “Chase the dream.”
People will work to survive. They won’t work to help aristocrats who don’t work thrive.
Stop coddling the minority and the majority will snap to.