Human societies are in a constant game of evolution against each other, since time immemorial. The ones that are incapable of defending themselves militarily are invaded and subdued by those who can. This unpleasant fact of life doesn't care about our ideology.
Just because both X and Hitler say y, X doesn’t become a Nazi sympathizer. It is only possible if y is only derivable from the Nazi theory but not derivable from any other theory. Next time, when both X and Hitler are found to be said that Berlin is capital of Germany or that sum of three angles in a triangle is 180 degrees or that putting hands in hot water burns hands, start proclaiming that these claims are derivable from the Nazi theory or X is a Nazi sympathizer.
Hitler said a lot of common sense, otherwise the masses wouldn't agree with him. You mix common sense with common nonsense and you get convincing nonsense.
Well that might be the case but I am not sure why that would preclude designing your society for human flourishing rather than siphoning resources to an unelected few.
Society isn't to blame. It's more like society is a multi-cellular organism. The reason it exists in the first place, is because individuals find that working together is typically better than not, but at times, it's possible for cancer to happen. Functionally, cancerous cells are those which take more from the society/organism than they give back to support it. If it gets too bad, there's not enough resources going to those who support the society/organism, and so those that support it die off, along with the cancer/society.
> Functionally, cancerous cells are those which take more from the society/organism than they give back to support it
That definition encompasses significantly more than half of the population, at least measured in terms of lifelong taxes paid vs social services received.
For example, minimum wage workers, stay-at-home parents, etc. They receive social services, such as roads and education, that are substantially more costly than what could be supported with the taxes they will pay in their life. Those services are paid by a small percentage of workers, something like the top quintile or the top decile.
That said, I would argue that e.g. the work performed by stay at home parents is on the whole positive to society, since at the very least older generations (retirees) need the goods and services provided by the younger generation of workers, and somebody needs to have raised them. But it is still interesting to think about how our societies economically rest on the shoulders of a snall fraction of the population.
it is interesting to think about, but this analysis leaves out too much useful work to draw any meaningful conclusions from. as you point out, raising and caring for children is important work that is mostly uncompensated. the quality of care is also important (doing a bad job at it can easily be a net negative contribution) and hard to measure.
there's also the issue that compensation doesn't actually track contributions to society very well. I build things at huge scale that are at least somewhat useful. I now make about 10x what I made heating up $2 slices of pizza, which seems about right. but I could get paid the same or possibly more to optimize ad clickthrough, which doesn't seem quite right. a lot of money gets spent on trying to win red queen races. I don't really fault the individuals involved for following the local incentive gradient, but they're essentially getting paid to break each other's windows and then fix them. there's no net value there.
But that is my point: societies are not as much "designed" as they have evolved through the natural selection process of war. What you see is not the outcome of a design process, but an evolutionary process that maximizes survivability of the society, not "flourishing" of the individual.
From the perspective of our skin cells, which constantly live and die to protect the rest of the organism from outside threats, our own biological evolutionary process has not led to their flourishing. And yet here we are hunans, a society of cells, rather fit to survive yet abother day in the real-world evolutionary environment.
Human flourishing works as long as it solely depends on the individual. However if flourishing depends on others, selfishness of others becomes the first priority. Question: is it possible to flourish without depending on others?
