[black_knight]

Dreams and hopes are powerful weapons of suppression. Everyone is a millionaire just down on their luck at the moment…

In our advanced society, with incredible automation, we should _all_ have vastly more freedom and control over our time.

[tempestn]

That attitude is the weapon of suppression. Yes, it's true that life isn't fair. But it's also true that people have agency and can make material improvements to their own quality of life through smart decisions and dedication. Of course most of us won't start the next Google, but that doesn't mean dreams and hope are bad in general.

[vidarh]

We have no evidence that people have meanginful agency, or even agency at all. It is an assumption that to start with requires that the universe is not largely or entirely deterministic beyond what we can measure, but even in the case of some "hidden variable" that provides agency (try to even define it in a way that doesn't make it either deterministic, random, or a combination that implies no actual control) we have plenty of evidence that events outside our control ("life isn't fair") means that the vast majority of people, while they may make decisions - with or without agency - that will make material improvements - still are not able to get anywhere near a position that makes it meaningful in this context.

Dreams and hopes are great - I believe we have zero actual agency, but that doesn't mean I lie in bed despairing, because not doing the work and trying will still have negative effects whether I have agency over that decision or not.

But the point is that dreams and hopes are also often used to play up the idea that "anyone" can achieve something everyone clearly can't, and so for most people, their most ambitious dreams will never be reached, and so a better gamble for most people would be to work for a society that improves everyones odds at reaching at least some of them.

[jama211]

The attitude that we should all have access to more freedoms and that inequality has reached extreme levels is suppression? Then sign me up to be suppressed.

[black_knight]

I am not saying we should be defeatist! I making the argument that it does not, and morally should not, have to be so that we all have to toil when we have such a wealth of technology.

How we go about changing this, I do not know, but everyone just playing along nicely in hope of one day being the one who strikes gold seems not to be working!

“Life isn’t fair, suck it up and get good!” is another form of suppression/delusion. Well, if life isn’t it fair, let us at least try to counteract that with cooperation. It seems to me that we have all the tools and technologies we need to make it a lot better.

[aatd86]

This is very true but the path to that seems to require a weird optimization where it is concentrated among a few before being being widespread. Technologic improvements should help. Help decouple time and money.

[black_knight]

Why though?

And when does this start being for everyone? We have had agricultural machines for ages, but I still have to pay an ever increasing part of my salary (and hence time here on earth) not to starve.