top | item 30699588

(no title)

bairrd | 4 years ago

"I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not." Can you back that claim up? "Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior." Is the financial realities of scarcity, and the distribution of wealth resulting in potentially avoidable scarcities, that we all live under, not something that could be optimized? Are you not judging with your heart and blinding your brain to political/financial realities that are capital H Hard problems?

discuss

order

hans1729|4 years ago

>Can you back that claim up?

Yes-ish. Since we could theoretically just culturally change how we look at wealth, the current distribution of resources is a symptom of our cultural and societal systems design. People don't know how to have conversations, which leads to isolation, which leads to dispair. If we'd fix the root cause (teach them how to have conversations, i.e. finally fix the education systems), leading to an open and actually progressive culture, we'd realize that at least in the rich countries, we have more than enough resources to be able to afford a couple super rich people that just go wild. Lets say you'd take all the money from the US's billionaires and give it to the US government. Are you truly convinced that the world would be a better place? 10 years later? 20? Who is to be truly trusted with the distribution? How?

The resource-distribution problem is only the core problem when the majority of people actually lack resources. My impression is a different one - everyone wants more, regardless of if they have enough. That, according to my model of the world, is our core problem. We're building a culture of material greed and constant comparisons with peers, thus we are breeding insecurity, fear, hate, etc. - its much easier to just point at billionaires and claim that they are the root problem.

Don't get me wrong, hoarding wealth out of greed is disgusting and I have zero sympathy for these people. But I don't see how someone being able to fund a space company (which simply would never happen otherwise) is the problem when the vast majority of people have food on their plates and a roof over the head but fail to be happy with just that. And, if we learned the latter, maybe the super-rich wouldn't be as shit as they largely are, either.