Let's say you are a cart pusher in a free market. After ten years of cart pushing, you land on a trading opportunity and capitalize on it. Then you hire more cart pushers.
Now you have a responsibility. Either keep the business going, or everyone loses their job.
Then others smell profit and eat up your market share. Now you have to stay afloat and the workers suffer.
As the emergent properties build up, we end up with a modern free market society with all the romanticized "class wars" worker abuse and peeing in a bottle drama all because the job market exists.
It is like an ouroboros ironically nibbling on its tail while winking.
No. Greed is inherent to humans. No social order can eliminate greed. They can, however, mitigate the harmful effects of greed on society.
In a democracy, elected leaders are not as empowered to satisfy their greed as monarchs are in monarchies. Socialism extends this logic to businesses: An elected business leader would not be able to satisfy their greed to the same extent that a capitalist business owner can.
You can get rid of money and have communism if you want and guarantee that all have what they need. But somewhere beyond need there is want, and the line is awfully fuzzy.
You can have a barter society if you want, where people trade pineapples for shoes, but you are always going to have people who want more shoes or more pineapples than what others have.
Don't start, I've started a playthrough again with the new expansion and just landed on the first planet after overbuilding my home base with grids and trains and stuff.
It's more like society factorio, but unlike factorio it's not fun and you're forced to play against people with much more resources and talent than you.
No one is really validating me for learning new things. I think the value of learning has more to do with whether you can leverage your learning in a socially positive way. It's hard to know whether learning about a particular topic will create opportunities to help anyone. I'm pretty sure no one but me will get anything from my recent interest in astrophysics beyond a little entertainment value. I consider it hedonic learning, but less so than stuff like pop culture trivia.
Happiness is only one meta-value, and at the level of "what the right meta" is, I'm somewhere between a nihilist and an aristotleian-sort-of-biologist:
I only think that the people who are screaming when they are about to die are living like a healthy animal. And in the absence of any objective meta-values, it kinda seems like we might well just be what we are.
Denying's one's instincts is an interesting exercise, and no doubt improves self-control -- but it isnt "above being an animal" -- its, at best, a different way of being an animal. One I think, taken to a stocial extreme, seems an injury.
People who readily accept death (as, no doubt, I do) seem injured, and trying to get to this state seems like a kind of self-injury to me -- a means of poking out the eye because the brain doesnt like what it sees.
People screaming when a plane is crashing seem to have their eyes open.
A crashing plane has roughly two possibilities, screaming wildly seems like the least useful and least pleasant option for either:
- You are going down in a way that might be survivable - If you want to live, you want to shut up and prepare yourself and your peers as best you can. If you're completely prepared and have time to kill, see below as long as it doesn't impair being ready when the time comes.
- You are going down in a way that obviously isn't going to be survivable - Your remaining lifespan has been suddenly reduced to minutes or seconds and there's no solving it. The only choice you have left is how to spend that time. Accepting the hand you've been dealt quickly and doing the best you can with the choices available to you rather than panicking or raging about things out of your control, is....sensible. Taking a last view of the world out the window, listening to a favorite song, a conversation with a loved one or even a stranger, etc, all seem like far more satisfying ways to spend your final moments than screaming like it's going to do anything.
> I only think that the people who are screaming when they are about to die are living like a healthy animal.
I'm not much of a biologist, but there seem to be plenty of animals, especially more intelligent ones, that pretty much calm down and await death when they recognize they are not long for the world for reasons they can't control and have no hope of escaping. (age, illness, etc).
I think what youd ultimately agree with is that it's healthy to be aligned with your emotional, instinctual reactions.
Though I am not totally sure one cannot fully accept snd fully align their being with the absurdity of life - celebrating their life/death rather than wallowing in it.
I wasn't aware of this exact plan either, but to the defense of my history teacher / curriculum:
It was made very clear that millions of civilians died (even when not counting the concentration camps) due to the war of extermination (Vernichtungskrieg)
