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Capitalism is an unrealistic death cult.
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
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- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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I don't think there's a conclusion that's "far more likely" than other; multiple explanations explain the data equally well.
My preference for the great filter is just based on my pessimism on how not only power works, but how the human mind works. Since life is everywhere and always competitive, short-term survival is what life will always be programmed for; and beyond biology, we have systems. Greedy systems--systems that seek power at the expense of everything else--will be advantaged over systems that seek equilibrium.
Humans, in small enough numbers (ie, Dunbar's Number), play reasonably well together for extended periods of time. Environmental limitations and other social resource limits can cause conflicts. But humans have presented a fairly advanced skillset for mitigating violence between larger communities, equitably sharing resources across areas as large as continents, and both budgeting limited resources over time as well as expanding the accessible volume with advances in technology.
The human mind takes a lot of undeserved shit. But I'm in a room with dozens of other people right now. None of them are trying to crack my head open with a rock and feast on the delicious goo inside.
I don't know how you look at a modern day metropolis and see a system that has failed to achieve some high level of equilibrium.
I didn't get into my problems with the way the mind works, but the root of it is the mind prefers comfort to truth. That's how we get the just world fallacy. And you'll also see how people oppressed by systems are often the ones who defend it the most fiercely.
I do like cities, and they are, on the whole, remarkably stable. I will consider this.
Everything has its limits, and you need to burn a lot of calories to hunt for Big-T Truths. So people spend some of their time in introspection, but they don't explore forever. Eventually, they want to exploit their understanding to some benefit.
This is an experiment that's played out iteratively across billions of people and thousands of generations. Minds aren't static or perfectly elastic, they do amazing work over a 20-40 year period, and then they fall into a more stable pattern of survival and preservation.
Individuals don't all value abstract notions of justices equally highly. And systems of oppression tend to be layered. Also, the same guy who vocally defends the System of Oppression when he's getting the Good News on TV will decide actually, he hates oppression, and wants it overthrown when the TV (or his boss or his credit card company) tells him the Bad News instead.
But, even more broadly, when you go looking for the Big Truths, sometimes you don't find Liberal Progressive Egalitarianism. Sometimes you find an enduring history of bigotry and a real material advantage to exploitation and a certain cosmic understanding of your own insignificance that washes away personal guilt for global phenomena.
Sometimes you need to be a bit naive, delusional, and straight up stupid to do the Right Thing or to blaze a trail into the wilderness or to go down a rabbit hole of scientific inquiry that - 9 times out of 10 - wastes a career when it terminates at a dead end.
Sometimes you're playing a very strategic game of chess on a board that stretches to infinity. And other times, you're just one of the rungs on a Plinko board that other people are bouncing off of. And that's not a consequence of the human mind or the nature of evolution or reality, beyond the simple fact that we're not Gods. We have a certain limited scope of action and opportunity, a certain limited amount of information to act on, and thousands - perhaps millions or billions - of years to try things and fail and let our successors know what we found out as a result.
This makes me think we're talking about different things. I'm talking about existential truths, truths that threaten our sense of meaning and belonging and purpose. Truths like we are all going to die or that we live in a fundamentally unjust world. The only caloric cost of "discovering" these truths is the increase in anxiety.
Yup. And we have no control over what our values are, and its good to know when your difference of opinion with someone is based on values or facts. But the reality is most people value group loyalty, belonging, and existential comfort over everything else. People who value truth over existential comfort are relatively rarer. And maybe this is necessarily so.
Do you have an example?
I don't think we're disagreeing. Do you think we're disagreeing? I think you're trying to argue me out of a pessimistic frame of mind, but that is based on averages and you're discussing exceptions; like I'm saying, "on a long enough time line, the average of 2d6 rolls is 7" and you're saying, "but you can get a bunch of 12s in a row!"
None of that is immediately intuitive. It takes a long time for an individual to have a full sense of the world and a coherent view of Justice as a concept. And there's no firm consensus on any of it, anyway. Sitting around and pondering the clockwork mechanisms of the world and how to improve upon them is a luxury at the best of times.
These things are real, tangible, and approachable by the vast majority of people. Even past that, I think there's a certain nihilism in dismissing the fate of an entire species, because you look around in disgust at a lot of young people who desire something as crass and fleeting as Love. Much less older people who still cling to or covet it. "Ah, well, fuck all of you! Lazing around naked in bed with a full belly and another warm body and a bit of free time?! Don't you realize death still exists? Don't you realize that someone, somewhere is being treated unjustily?! You'll doom us all!" Its just a bleak attitude to carry as you go through your life.
Any college student who aspires to be a daycare teacher rather than an office manager or a civil engineer rather than a petroleum engineer, just for starters. Anyone who studies Pure Math, without an eye towards joining the Quant pool at a hedge fund. Or a physical therapist instead of a supplements salesperson. Or a mechanic rather than a used car salesman. Or a plumber rather than a real estate agent. Anyone who chooses to be a parent and to give it their full time and attention.
That's just career level. You can find a thousand examples of individuals who sacrifice their own personal comfort or future prosperity for some higher goal or passion or personal sense of duty. We're not all just getting dragged around life by our genitals when we're young and our aching backs when we get older.
No, it is immediately intuitive. That's exactly the problem. We have to run from it constantly lest the light break through. Go to a Christian funeral for some horribly murdered victim and see how much of the time is spent talking about a loving God.
Listen to anyone who has gone through religious deprogramming. The energy isn't spent accepting the truth, it's spent desperately clinging to beliefs one-by-one, coming up with rationalizations and logical backstops until finally they are untenable.
If your argument is that discovering the truth burns too many calories, I think the evidence shows us the opposite--that we burn very many more calories to hiding the truth from ourselves.
I'm kinda scratching me head here. Did I do that?
Or that? Because if you have have love, a full belly, and a warm body, and a bit of free time, I'm certainly not going to begrudge you that. Those are all things you can enjoy in this life, which is a difference from the material utopia of the future that will never come.
Yes, those people exist. (And a quibble: I don't think people CHOOSE any of that so much as their values choose those things, and people do not, as I stated before, choose their values. Jeff Bezos could no more choose to be a day care teacher than darling Mrs. Lewandowski from my Montesori could choose to be a ruthless capitalist.) And if I were Q, judging the human race, they would sway me to save it.
But there is no Q and I am not here to judge the human race. The human Mrs. Lewandowski's of the world are teaching day care and the human Jeff Bezos are running companies and governments. Both exist, but only one will consistently take and accumulate power. Psychopaths are concentrated at the top of the org chart.
And I have seen with my own eyes that people--seemingly good people--will support and defend evil in institutions to preserve and advance their status... and it is fealty to those self-serving systems, systems large enough to encompass the globe and last centuries, that will be our filter.
Just a going theory, anyway.