It is the natural state of fire to burn. It is the natural state of life to live. Humans are programmed genetically to do so, and to go to (and suffer) extremes to continue to do so. While there might be situations where suicide is (judged to be) the best bad alternative, it is literally the most unnatural thing a human can do to themselves. And poverty (vs. scarcity) is not a natural concept; is a wild rabbit with enough to eat "poor" (only if their neighbor rabbits have a larger burrow!)? This is the projection of human concepts about how the universe should be arranged (right/wrong, wealth/poverty, culturally-oriented logic) onto a physical universe which has no such concepts built into it.

Your argument strongly depends on a narrow view of the word "natural". Could you explain why your definition of natural is useful in this context?

Suicide isn't new or specific to humans, so calling it "unnatural" seems unnecessarily silly to me.

By "natural", I mean according to the laws of physics, and all higher-order laws or principles which arise from them (basically, everything else). So, yes, narrow, but no, not. What we call "nature" is largely a fiction, a story that we impose on the universe (the "natural world") to help us navigate our place in it and understand it in abstract ways. Humans occupy a strange place, in that we are manifestations of "natural laws" (physics, chemistry, biology, psychology), but at the same time, able to understand and rationalize about our own existence and place in that world in ways that most (all?) other animals are not. I think suicide (vs. self-sacrifice, which is an entirely different thing) is a very human (or human-like) phenomenon, and can only arise from a high-level consciousness which can rationally/emotionally think in terms of "Is living my life worth the cost I am paying (in emotional or physical terms)?". No "less conscious" living thing would ever make that kind of calculation, because they will always follow their instincts to survive as a default (again, differentiating between sacrificing oneself for a goal vs. ending ones' own suffering on purpose). Not saying that it's impossible that "nature" has enabled such a mechanism in a species (though it would violate the "selfish gene" principle), but I don't see it.

> Suicide isn't new or specific to humans

Self-destruction is found in non-humans, but mostly as a reaction to acute circumstances. I'm assume you are widening the scope of what is suicide to include these examples, but they seem different than relieve of existential suffering that is human suicide.

Most people don't like having suicidal urges, and given the choice of ending life vs making life more enjoyable (without the urge to die), would probably pick the latter.

The natural state of living organisms is to remain alive and reproduce (or help their progeny), this is such a basic concept of life that I have no idea what else I could say to support it... Life's natural state is to remain alive and make more life

A philosophical conversation on the meaning of life is good.

People attempting suicide due to suffering caused by (treatable) mental illness is an entirely different thing.

While an impartial outs view may be able to say that living is the less optimal path, the desire to keep living is the basic principal of life as we know it. Culture views these ideations as something that needs to be treated as they are either a sign that some part of you is malfunctioning, or an evolutionary relic that now does more harm to society than good.

> Culture views these ideations as something that needs to be treated as they are either a sign that some part of you is malfunctioning, or an evolutionary relic that now does more harm to society than good.

Culture might want to look at itself for the answer to the question of why severe mental illness is on the rise.

But that's a separate problem. Figuring out how to prevent mental illness is obviously important, but figuring out how to help cure it when it does happen is important, too.

Suicidal ideation is by definition not healthy. You can argue the ethics of suicide (particularly assisted suicide, which I'm opposed to), but there is no situation where it's a good outcome. It can only ever be seen as the least worst outcome, and if we ever change our collective opinions on that I think we are far down a dark path to great evil.

There's a huge difference between considering suicide if you're terminally ill and in a lot of pain, vs. considering suicide because your life is not going well and you're really depressed, which is something that may be treatable, and I expect the vast majority of suicides are the latter and not the former. I personally know one such example.

As someone whose life has been affected by suicide, and almost affected much more seriously by a close call, I see suicide as the ultimate failure, and think we should be doing everything we can to help people escape from these ideas (and yes, I've done hard work to help someone who had these problems, and that person is definitely doing better, and enriching his own life and the lives of others because of it).

Our world is making us crazy and sick more than it should, so attack the problem at both ends. Figure out the causes and the cures and try to stop the first and accomplish the second.

You're saying suicidal ideation is "the natural state"?

I think he's saying non-existence is the natural state and the decision to live and expend energy gathering resources just to survive needs to be justified, rather than be expected to justify your wish to stop existing.

I think the counter to that is the idea that human life is inherently valuable and doesn't need to be justified.

You shouldn't make this argument without supporting it in any way. Why does it have inherent value? Life doesn't have inherent value to us as a collective society. Look at livestock. We've had countless pointless wars where people die horrible deaths. Abortion is legal in many parts of the world. Humans have made tons of negative impacts on our planet like tossing literal tons of plastic in the ocean.

I agree that human life is valuable, but you have to support your claim in some way. If you can't find a way to support it, then maybe the claim is wrong.

Because people start off with nothing essentially. And the statement on abundance is the same exact fallacy as Marx. Although to be fair it predated him in far /worse/ forms like many "thinkers" in Ancient Greece thinking conquest was the only way to obtain more wealth. They thought that if someone managed to conquer and enslave the entire world they wouldn't build any more wealth over time. Medieval economic philosophy had a denialism that merchants could be generating value without fraud because they presumed universal values of good. While exploitation may be real presuming that management and capital contribute nothing is just plain not anchored in reality.

Hunter gatherers have little social stratification but no real wealth inequality because they are limited to what they can carry personally and cooperative health is what keeps them alive. It takes a /lot/ of skill and knowledge to live on one's own in the wilderness without advanced tools like say a steel knife.

Productivity is what creates wealth in a meaningful sense. It can improve and boost living standards per person without a specialized pyramid scheme of labor. Proof? The fact that industrialized societies aren't over 90% farmers and haven't starved to death!

While raw inputs may come from land processing it is where the bulk of value actually comes from. If I gave you a claim to all of the gold in Antarctica it would be of very little value because of the extraction expenses.

"Because people start off with nothing essentially"

I do not believe this. In a world without private property, everyone is entitled to the world's land. Everyone has everything available to them. People survive off the land. Eventually these people don't want to just survive, so they begin to do a single thing all day (hunting, gathering, eventually farming) They trade the output of their labor (their wages of berries, food) for other peoples output.

The introduction of private property allows for some people to collect rent on productivity, without actually being productive. Private property is a tax on productivity and rent will always consume any excess production value.

Progress drives poverty, as well as any inequality in wealth only increasing as time goes on in a positive feedback loop.

"While exploitation may be real presuming that management and capital contribute nothing is just plain not anchored in reality."

I don't believe this either. I believe any rent-seeking is adverse to progress towards eliminating poverty. I see it as a failure of society to allow for the upper class to enjoy greater pleasures as time goes on at the expense of those born poor.

We are all guests on a floating spaceship rocketing through space. The idea of inheritance has no place in a free market in my opinion, it should be taxed as income for the recipient. Inheritance is the vessel through which wage equality is growing larger, in my opinion.

>Because people start off with nothing essentially.

This is disputed by figures as diverse as Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel and Rousseau. It is not fact at least as presented here without discussion.

>While exploitation may be real presuming that management and capital contribute nothing is just plain not anchored in reality.

The theory of exploitation in Marx or post-Marx (even without the LTV) does not depend on the assumption that capitalists cannot add value. I'd suggest looking at the work of John Roemer and his work on PECP and CECP.

>It can improve and boost living standards per person without a specialized pyramid scheme of labor.

Was this ever cast in doubt? I'd also caution the application of a historical example to the society of today, since the applicability of the principle has not been proven.

>While raw inputs may come from land processing it is where the bulk of value actually comes from.

This is textbook Marx.

Without private property, you'd be subsistence farming and fighting off anyone stronger than you that wanted your land (since it wouldn't be privately owned).

How is labor being misappropriated if it's creating productivity?

"Humans have never made a single new thing, at least as far as I know. "

You're typing this on a phone or computer connected to the internet.

"The purchasing of people for labor has long been out of style"

What is the alternative to this that you think is in style?

The phone I (could) be typing this on, was made out of the earth, not from anything humans created. Anything with value is land that had labor applied to it.

The alternative to purchasing people for labor has been wages, which is giving back to a laborer the portion of their labor which is not stolen from them.

Marx of course came up with these ideas, and much of the 20th century was filled with the unimaginable horror that the people of the world suffered as leaders such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol-Pot, to name of few, implemented them on a national scale.

I am totally unconvinced that any leader seduced by Marx would ever be someone I would care to live under.

Please keep generic ideological tangents off HN. They're predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

He didn't come up with it on his own - it was based on previous fallacies which also caused millennia of suffering. Bad economics taken seriously does that in general - many wars were fought under the gold standard to boost the effective economic cap imposed by deflation.

Falling for a model of thinking is certainly a sign of a poor leader.

I'm totally convinced that any leader seduced by Marx would be someone I would not care to live under.

Marx's ideas, aside from being wholly unrealistic, inevitably result in tyranny and misery because man cannot be perfected. If your worldview cannot survive the fact that a lot of people are assholes, it will always fail when you try to put it in practice.

If you look at the Acts of the Apostles, how they are describing the early Christian community sounds an awful lot like what communists are trying to achieve. And it worked, for a time, but this was a small group of zealous believers banding together because of both their beliefs and persecution from without. While this may be the ideal of Christian life, you have not seen any large-scale Christian societies working this way, outside of places like monasteries, where life is very strongly regulated, or other similar small groups (and those often go poorly as well), because it simply doesn't scale.

So we have to create a society that accounts for the fact that a lot of people are greedy and won't work for the common good. We counter that by first teaching that they should, but also allowing for something like capitalism where people's energies can be focused on something that at least has the potential to make others' lives better along with their own (the mythical "enlightened self-interest", which is possible).

The only other alternative is absolute totalitarianism, which is the worst condition humans can inflict on each other.

"because it simply doesn't scale."

How do you decide to believe that it is because of lack of scaling and not another factor? I believe wage inequality exists because private property is allowed to be held by citizens and rent taken for the lands productive use.

I think people should be able to own buildings, but the land should all be the governments. A Land Value Tax would be something I would be ecstatic to see. There should be no incentive to hold land and wait for it's value to rise. To do so is unproductive to society and incredibly productive for a single person's return on investment. But their investment is stolen from society at large. (of course theft is a matter of opinion, I don't mean to misconstrue what I believe is fact vs belief)