We really need the death of money more than we need the death of capitalism. Because you’re right, even before rampant capitalism, we still weren’t really great to each other.
What’s amazing to me is I’m perfectly content to live and let live. My neighbors, friends, family, all of us…ain’t got no beef with anybody. Why does this fail so badly when scaled up?
There’s a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.
Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.
Well that makes the problem even more blatantly obvious…the problem is social hierarchy. It’s impossible to have equality and hierarchy simultaneously…they are mutually exclusive.
They (the ruling classes) are vastly outnumbered, yet they manage to gain control over the masses below them, such that we must support them or the whole thing crumbles.
They’ve got the supporting class believing that we need them…but really that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The problem is, though, as soon as one ruler is gone, another replaces them, and that one is equally corrupt. And the cycle repeats.
But conversely, I don’t see how a non-hierarchal society could function, because that implies there must be some sort of order, mediation, and enforcement, which automatically means that some people will have authority over others, no matter how you slice it.
Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.
My neighbors, friends, family, all of us
That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.
We really need the death of money more than we need the death of capitalism. Because you’re right, even before rampant capitalism, we still weren’t really great to each other.
What’s amazing to me is I’m perfectly content to live and let live. My neighbors, friends, family, all of us…ain’t got no beef with anybody. Why does this fail so badly when scaled up?
There’s a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.
Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.
Or that’s how i see the problem.
Well that makes the problem even more blatantly obvious…the problem is social hierarchy. It’s impossible to have equality and hierarchy simultaneously…they are mutually exclusive.
They (the ruling classes) are vastly outnumbered, yet they manage to gain control over the masses below them, such that we must support them or the whole thing crumbles.
They’ve got the supporting class believing that we need them…but really that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The problem is, though, as soon as one ruler is gone, another replaces them, and that one is equally corrupt. And the cycle repeats.
But conversely, I don’t see how a non-hierarchal society could function, because that implies there must be some sort of order, mediation, and enforcement, which automatically means that some people will have authority over others, no matter how you slice it.
Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.
That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.