In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product’s and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in general.
Why? Did COVID made this happen? How?
Thing is most people on earth would do the same if given the opportunity to become ultra wealthy.
The issue is the system allows people to become ultra wealthy
The issue with the system is that we are locked within it. You can’t escape capitalism. It has superseded law. We are just tumbling around in the algorithm.
No, most people would not.
Most people would share, or hit a point and think “OK, that’s enough for anything I really want personally… I’m gonna try and help out now…”
Nobody in their right mind should want a world where they are privately wealthy, but publically impoverished.
Because then, you have no security.
Someone will always be gunning for you.
You can stave it off by layering brute force, and laws, but there is no such thing as 100% secure. Eventually something will make it through, and wreak havoc. And because all you now care about, over everything, is whatever paltry “wealth” you’ve managed to secure, the catastrophe is magnified orders of magnitude. You have no real friends or community to turn to, nobody who would support you if you didn’t have the most, and the rules didn’t make you “king” because of it.
It’s a sickness.
We live in the materialistic era of wanting more. Given minimal effort, the overwhelming majority of people would not stop until they have tens or hundreds of millions of net worth.
No matter what you say you’re just wrong
Nah, only about 5% of the population have antisocial personality disorders. That’s a lot of people, but not “most.”
But is it possible that extreme wealth breeds antisocial disorders? Think about it–how does a normal person justify having more money than they could ever spend? You have to separate yourself from the average person, or otherwise think you somehow deserve it (while others suffer).
Extreme wealth is poison, both for the wealthy and for the exploited.
I think of it like the Stanford Prison Experiment. As a human, we are meant to play roles in a hierarchical structure.
So if I put you in a role, certain parts of your personality are going to come out subconsciously. You become the right person to fit the role.
Pretty much like you said- if you are given wild amounts of money you start to justify it and become someone else.
Yeah, I agree. Our economic system and some of our culture encourages and rewards antisocial behavior.
If Jeff bezoz offered you his position in Amazon along with his entire net worth, do you think you (or 19/20 people) would disband that privileged position down to a point where no one would think you’re ultra rich poison?
No, most would give away some but continue to live a overly luxurious lifestyle. My point is proven because it’s the same reason why people enter the lottery, for extreme wealth
Eh, I’m not sure what position Bezos has now. If I ran Amazon, I’d probably covertly support unionization of the entire workforce. I don’t really care about a luxurious lifestyle, and don’t plan on having kids to give an inheritance to, so yeah, I’d probably just give almost all away and buy a small farm to garden in and work on open source projects or something. Like, that’s my dream. It would actually be really hard to figure out how to give all that money away. Could provide the initial funding to like 100,000 decently sized worker-coops I guess.
Edit: I should say, I don’t think most people care so little about luxury and money as I do. My problem is not so much about people having wealth (though wealth is a limited resources, so that does mean others will not have it), but my problem is what people do to get such wealth. It usually involves deceiving your network of associates and exploiting your employees. I do not think most people would be ok with forcing their employees to shit in bags.