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Reminds me of this famous quote from Stephen Jay Gould:
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
And Einstein himself might have been one of those, seeing as he was a Jew that emigrated from Germany right around the time as the nazis took power
I keep saying this to friends whenever we debate capitalism and socialism.
If every human on the planet was given enough food, shelter, health care, and a full education for the first 20 years of their lives … we’d probably cure most diseases, eliminate most or all cancers, bring global warming under control, build entirely new technologies for just about everything and start inhabiting space.
Instead we have about 2,000 billionaires who use their wealth and power to not allow anyone to do anything, about a billion people barely getting by and seven billion with hardly anything at all. And we wonder why our world is falling apart.
When people tell me that capitalism breeds innovation and socialism doesn’t because the only motivation people have is money i just remind them that Open-source software exists
There are so many people out there that do things because they like helping, and they like joy, and they like other people.
Fundamentally humans are social creatures, and we have an inherent tendency towards pro-social behaviour (with some exceptions due to mental health issues). We like doing things. We like doing things for other people. And doing something for the greater good/greater community instills us with a sense of pride and accomplishment
Hell, I want to do things for the benefit of society, and my biggest barriers to that are a society that pushes me past my limits leading to burnout, and then I’m useless and feel useless. If I just got the support I needed when I needed it, it would be better for everyone in the long run
I think that might be a bit too optimistic re: cancer. Cancer can happen just through normal cellular division in your body, and the older you get the likelier it is that it just happens randomly. This is independent of environmental factors, which certainly don’t help but aren’t the cause of all cancers.
You’re thinking about it like cancer ceases to exist, but it’s more likely that we discover super early detection and non-invasive elimination.
Let’s use use the metaphor of a lawn that becomes overgrown by weeds. It’s difficult to control the entire ecosystem that contributes to the lawn, but if we’re able to detect a single invasive seed as it takes root, we could pluck it before it sprouts, let alone spreads. The lawn will quickly recover from a few blades of grass being removed. The longer it goes unmanaged, the more drastic measures and larger swaths must be killed to stop the weeds from overtaking the lawn.
You’re right … there are many forms of cancer that might be more harder to ‘cure’ or manage. Age also plays a role and it is generally agreed that as we age, the body inevitably just breaks down and eventually will start developing cancers no matter what we do in very advanced age. But the majority of all cancers we now live with are mostly all preventable and many of the ones that aren’t preventable could be treated. In a utopian world, we would manage all the food intake, environmental factors and genetics that all contribute to cancers in most people.
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Buddy learn the damn term, it’s not really not that complicated
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You understand that this response is why people disregard your opinions on things, right? If you’re ignorant and unwilling to learn, no one is going to pay attention to anything that falls out of your mouth, because it’s worth less than bullshit, cuz that’s at least useful as fertilizer.
Go learn what words mean, or go back to reddit where your attitude will be welcomed with open arms.
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“It never works”.
It never materializes (apart from short periods of time before bureaucratic deformation) for very long because it is shot down by the oligarchy. There is tremendous motive in keeping the social status quo (system of classes), and socialism is vilified precisely because it is such a danger to the ruling class.
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Look no further than the US’s intervention in Cuba to try to quash its socialist efforts
Usually when people talk about socialism now, they’re referring to a semi-planned economy. That’s how. They’re not talking about authoritarianism of the soviet-era (like forced collectivization which is very hard to get people on board with). Their intentions are generally around people being provided necessities through subsidization, not controlling people. Some government intervention is necessary to keep those with unnecessary wealth(power) at bay.
Literally as simple as necessities are nationalized: Healthcare, housing, food, education, that type of thing. (Ie. None of these should be profit-making institutions, along with prisons, but i can explain why in another comment if you’re curious.)
If you’d like, I can explain economically why the free market cannot allocate resources effectively for necessities like this, and therefore my reasoning behind nationalization.
We really shouldn’t be encouraging endless accumulation of wealth, because it slows down the velocity of money when people hoard it, and it becomes a burden on our economy, especially when the class divide gets as wide as it currently is.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Stephen Jay Gould
I was literally going to comment this quote, I’m glad you beat me to it :)
Same
Capitalist systems, by design are built for this exact thing. The only people allowed to be creative and pursue works that do not directly generate profit are the elites and their progeny.
Everyone else is on the express train to exploitation. You earn just enough to feed and shelter yourself… Generally by paying others to provide those things for you as a service, and you have just enough left over to give you hope, that is then robbed from you either by service fees or repairs or maintenance…
You stay on this treadmill of basically funneling one companies money to other companies, and if you get sick or injured, unable to work, you’re kicked off that treadmill to the curb and left to starve and die, so they can put someone else on the same treadmill you were just using.
We as the employee’s are simply a transport mechanism for one rich person to indirectly give money to another rich person and vice versa. All while you barely scrape by, and if you’re particularly unlucky, slowly drown in debts you cannot possibly pay back.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is any better or worse than any other system of government; anything inherently communal is usually authoritarian, and with anyone being the absolute authority on all the ins and outs of who gets/deserves what, there will be an elite class, and then everyone else.
The more people realize this, the greater the momentum we will get towards a full on class war, and bluntly, there’s more of us than there are of them.
This is why they’re constantly trying to defund public schools and make university unaffordable. Why should rich people’s kids have to compete with poors for good paying jobs? Better to just remove any access to education from the lower classes, then they won’t get so uppity all the time.
When someone has nothing they get uppity.
Was just thinking about this… And then I see this image first thing in feed… 😓
I just want to approach higher education without someone talking to me about career paths or cost effective credits.
I have seen a pro immigrant argument that goes something like “what if the person you’re denying immigration to could cure cancer”?
It’s a bit transactional but it has a point.
What if Jesus was aborted?
He’s obligated to crawl back in within 3 holy businesses days
Mary could have studied law and become Empress.
Could she have though?
The world would certainly be different. Not going to comment further on that though… 😶🌫️
That’s the real crime of shitty governments and economies: you never get to hear who would have been your favorite singer.
That and the mass killing, I guess.
It has ever been so.
How many people who could have changed the world were too tired, poor, hungry, or ill.
I think that is the point. society can be run such that more get the chance or less and if its less then society gets less.
Even if they didn’t need to work hard to survive (it they have social securitu) we probably won’t hear from them because getting out if the hole is pretty hard.
All these subscriptions, misinformations about prices, lack of transparant tax structures, creditcards and loans for things people could really buy without don’t help and this is the same basically across the globe
I work to live. My kid asked me to write down the fanfic I’d been making up in my head. It’s nice to just be creative
Oh, we don’t need you any more … if it was up to “them”, AI will remove all the talented and creative people from society entirely.
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Give people an opportunity and you might be pleasantly surprised.
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