Additionally, the US has now been engaged in Afghanistan longer than they were in Vietnam. There's a whole generation of Americans who know all about war. In the US, the generation who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, then lived through the Great Recession are about to go into politics.
My prediction is that if we ain't seen nuthin' yet.
During the Vietnam war, the US still had the draft. The numbers deployed to Afghanistan are insignificant compared to Vietnam. There's a tiny fraction of a generation in the US who know all about war.
And a whole nation, in Afghanistan, who grew up and lives in war. Eih, so easy to overlook when it just some news headline.
Have people already forgotten that?
[1] With the utterly incompetent Sen Clinton running the State Department no less.
The decline of agriculture as a proportion of the economy of advanced nations means that territory no longer has the value that it once did. Population is not as important as it used to be for military power. Physical capital (factories, labour, land) is now less valuable, certainly in the developed world, than human capital (education, skills, networks). This means the gains of conquest have reduced drastically.
Meanwhile, the costs of war have increased markedly. Only a small group of states can afford to build technologically competitive militaries. Nuclear war has made the cost of great power war mutual annihalation. Modern low intensity warfare, on the other hand, makes it extremely difficult for great powers to permanently occupy even small powers (e.g. the US in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan). This means that the costs far outweigh the benefits in almost all circumstances. Add to this that in the counterfactual, states can gain most of the economic benefits of war through peaceful means, i.e. trade, at a far lower cost. There's also simply a greater spread of uncertainty in war: it's a dictum of war studies that war is inherently unpredictable.
If international war breaks out in the near future, it will be a fight over global hegemony (US-China), regional hegemony (Iran-Saudi Arabia), revanchism (Russia, Taiwan), or most likely - by accident.
It's the population of one part of one country democratically deciding on a referendum they don't want to live in a country that is violating their basic human rights and threatening their existence, and decided to join a country that can guarantee peace and their well-being.
Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price?
This is disgusting to see at the top of the comment thread. Anyone who upvoted that comment needs to engage in some serious introspection.
This tactic, of identifying a problem that may have some real validity, but then making logical leaps into absurdity, is typical of postmodern types like Bannon. How exactly does war solve the problem identified? Who are we to watch against?
It's not always about the words that are said. There's a subtext or more than one. The given justification isn't always the real justification, it just has to be plausible enough to get the real message out, seen in that last line. The overton window opens, and those on the sidelines who might have kept similar thoughts to themselves can now be drawn in and engaged. And that last sentence creeps closer to becoming real.
Oppose these ideas and these tactics, HN.
War is horrific in the short term, but everyone on this site has benefited from it in some form. Much of the internet came out of military research, as did flight, as did satellites, as did many nautical advances, the list goes on.
Whether those benefits are worth it and on what scale could be the subject of a dissertation, but we don't want to become the Eloi any more than we want to be the Morlocks.
Just because the concept can be twisted into pointless war mongering by fascists doesn't make it less true. For my part I think climate change alone is going to provide enough national challenges.
That's because nobody on this site has died from it.
My point was that war is not always entirely negative if you zoom out far enough. It can be entirely negative or partially positive, just like many other things. Would you rather the British to have surrendered to Hitler and the Americans refuse to fight in WWII?
And therefore your claim that everyone here has benefited from it suffers from significant survivor bias.
> It can be entirely negative or partially positive, just like many other things.
Sure. But we've seen way too many examples of people selling how wonderful a war would be (and you're flirting dangerously close to that). War's not wonderful. It's horrible. Only fight it when the alternative is even more horrible (which is not never).
Things that are wonderful aren't sad to imagine. Nor am I saying anything resembling calling a war "wonderful". I hear a lot of accusations and assumptions of intent with few real arguments other than "war bad".
From where I sit the conversation appears to go like:
Person 1: War bad.
Person 2: War sometimes good in certain contexts...
Person 1: NO! WAR ALWAYS BAD YOU FASCIST COWARD!!!
the people blabbering about war as a means of national rejuvenation are usually the ones not planning on bleeding out in a muddy ditch. 30 million people died in WWI and not much was rejuvenated
And military research is a result of war or potential war. And if you want to deny the lack of the military's influence in human flight, I'm not even sure what to say to that. Aircraft were adopted by militaries around the world as soon as they were viable. And military observation balloons go back to the 18th century. The military may not have invented human flight, but they funded a crap ton of it.
Yes, and the same happens in other posts on HN. This says a lot about HN's Overton window.
Depends on two things:
1) One's priorities. Some might view the aggregate (the country) as bigger thing than individual people. Under this view, the importance of the lives (or worse, the importance of having comfortable lives) for a present generation can be deemed worth it to the freedom, prosperity, etc. of generations to come (and to the continuance of the country itself and its state and way of life etc., which in some cases might be totally obliterated by decline, e.g. Rome).
2) The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things.
Sure; if you can convince me that any given war will avert more harm than it causes, I'll (intellectually at least) agree that it's justified. But at large temporal and geographical scales, with insanely complicated and only vaguely understood systems at work, you need an extremely strong argument to justify an action that will definitely lead to terrible consequences in the near term.
The comment we're discussing falls far short of such an argument. In fact it doesn't even seem to aim at making one -- and not just in the sense that it's (understandably) very abstract and lacking any kind of detail. As far as I can tell it is motivated by nationalism, and certainly not by any desire to prevent greater suffering. Its idea of failure sounds more like a (relatively) peaceful transition:
> You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries.
> And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old".
Emphasis on "as sad as it is to imagine". That doesn't sound all that nationalistic to me in the traditional sense. More like admitting that terrible sacrifices are sometimes necessary to preserve a country's strength. You may see a technically "peaceful" (without open war) transition as preferable, but it's an equally coherent opinion that in such a transition the violence simply takes different forms and in aggregate is no less destructive, and perhaps even more damaging.
Essentially it's the age-old argument of what's worse? Negative/unjust peace or war? Automatically calling arguments for the latter "nationalist" sounds like an attempt at dismissive guilt-by-association, depending on how specifically you define the word.
It's a natural assumption, I think in the aftermath of the excesses of 20th century warfare Western society (assuming you live in the west) at large overcompensated with an "all physical violence is bad, anyone who suggests using it is wrong" message permeating everything, particularly the educational systems, which has produced a broad cultural bias that should be accounted for in discussions like this.
Not sure.
First, the US did invade a lot of places in the last decades, and while they didn't officially turned the countries into US colonies, they still do have massive political and economical influence there, and benefit from the local resources.
But even if you discard this, it's assuming the future will be the same as today, which is unlikely. In the entire human history we never had a single day without a war somewhere on earth. The possibility that our countries will __never__ be at war again on their on soil is slim: we have many tomorrows to create situations where it can happen.
We massively consume limited resources in a close system. We destroy systems that regerate resources we need, a destabilize the balance our organisms a based on, and we have hugely powerful weapons. Conquerying one another is still a tempting solution to many problems.
E.G: India has more than 1 billion people, almost no water, extremly strong social tensions, hot borders, pollution in mass and the nuclear bomb. Anything triggering here can easily creep on to the entire world.
It sure would.
If I wanted to design a system to throw society into abject chaos, basically permanently, I can’t think of a better way than a rule of “make it impossible to build something for your children”.
That idea is anti-family, it’s anti-civil-society, and it’s anti-civilization.
- Warren Buffett
I think progressive wealth transfer taxes are a perfectly good middle ground.
I fundamentally, emphatically disagree with this. I think it's a weird rewriting of history to think that "Civilization was built by trying to stop wealth transfers within powerful families".
Do I think a lot of wealth is trapped within a few families, and that might be a problem? Sure. Do I think that the ability to destroy generational wealth transfers is what made Civilization? No, and I think it's absolutely crazy to think so. It ignores every great family in history that did everything from win wars to build railroads.
Civilization experiments with policy. At the extreme, there is a push towards consolidation and monopolies and this is counterbalanced by the rule of a unhappy mob. This causes policy to shift over time.
Wealth transfer is income, so progressive income tax without exempting wealth transfer from income tax would seem the most direct solution.
We are past that now. Now we have advisors, funds, elite accountants, and all kinds of dead easy ways to invest and keep huge wealth long term, for even the most inane person. Plus those people are not accountable to anyone. It's not like a hated heir of a royal who has to tread lightly anymore, lest the senate or the people take them down...
In fact, inane people can even make a great fortune from scratch in this era, what with the various famous-for-being-famous celebrities...
1. Advisors and accountants do not own the wealth - you set the goals. If you want to spend it or mismanage it, they are not going to stop you.
2. The wealthier you are, the more difficult it is to maintain the real value of your wealth, in general.
3. If you have 3 children, they have 3 children and so on, and you split your wealth equally among your children, even a billion turns into only 5 million within 5 generations - and that is if they manage to maintain its real value over time.
And if they do manage it cleverly and get to keep the real value of the wealth? Great! Society is better off, because that means they allocated capital productively within our society, making the economy more efficient.
E.g. maintaining the "real value" is not as much of problem for people having tens of billions (as we increasingly see today). Even if the value drops, they're still multi-billionaires. And diversification strategies today span the globe.
And the "3 children inheritance diffusion" problem is easy to solve: rich people have less kids today than historically.
There's also that:
https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...
2. If, on the other hand, there is some survivorship bias going on there and wealth rotates a lot, and some members of wealthy families keep their wealth, that is not as good an outcome but it is still not so bad, as it suggests that as a family's culture degrades their wealth will likely degrade as well.
The opposite. Civilization invented laws so people could pass their wealth and power to their children, to the point that the absolute head of the state was determined by birth and not by skills.
In precivilized tribal cultures there was inheritance of weapons, tools, tents etc. to childrens and of course it played a role beeing born the chieftains son, but no ruler was born that way. They had to directly earn the respect of the tribe, by proving they are good leaders, before they were accepted. Direct democracy, long before the greek "invented" the concept.
I find it strikingly hard to believe that democracy, which is what I assume you’re referring to, is the actual imperative that caused this. If we had managed to avoid WWI it’s really difficult to imagine that we’d still be using a horse drawn buggy and a typewriter.
Most European countries have steep inheritance taxes to prevent going back to oligarchy.
Which has the problem of course, that the really rich have ways of not beeing affected by those laws too much. Which is not too hard, when the tax-laws are ridiciously complicated with many exceptions for good connected lawyers and many countries on this planet who welcome any people and money as long as they get a small share.
The notion of the “idle rich” spoiled offspring exists for a reason. Nothing kills ambition more than unearned wealth. Obviously there are many counter examples with many wealthy heirs contributing significantly to society. But I would argue that they would behave the same if they inherited less.
As Aristotle roughly said, the mean between extremes is often the right answer. You could completely eliminate any transfer of wealth without social collapse; just like you could have essentially unlimited transfer of wealth with out social collapse: you would just end up with an aristocratic system. The question is what do you want to create.
People might be happy to overlook this when things are going well for them personally, or when they feel hopeful about the future. When that is no longer the case for a majority, though, the status quo could be just as 'anti-civilization' as extreme redistribution.
As if family is not about loving and preparing your kids for life (and being good citizens etc), but padding their bank accounts so they don't have to work...
Personally, I would sooner accept 90% tax to the rich&living, than 100% tax upon death.
Both are theoretical of course - there is no way to enforce them really without hurting overall society. There is also no need I think. A better solution is to make sure that wealth doesn't give too much unfair privilege, and that basic living conditions are guaranteed to everyone - we are getting closer to this every decade.
You want a situation where wealthy people build a lot more wealth than they consume. The last thing you want is for them to consume their wealth, making themselves better off but the society overall much, much poorer.
Or, maybe... if there were less of an advantage to accumulating wealth, we wouldn't destroy ourselves and the environment quite so madly while doing so. Great fortunes would not be generated, because what would the point be?
ISTM that a rich person who doesn't want her estate to be confiscated upon her death could just divide it among many heirs? If the progressive tax is not levied on the heir rather than the estate, then maybe it should be. Intentional division would destroy dynastic family wealth without wasting it on the frivolous spending of the state.
2. If the world is poorer, it will be able to afford to protect the environment less, not more. The wealthier a nation, or a neighbourhood is, the more it cares about protecting its local environment. For example, as China gets wealthier, it cares more about having cleaner air.
3. Wealth concentration in the right hands is not necessarily a bad thing. Increasing taxation is just concentrating more wealth in the hands of parliaments/governments, which they are unlikely to spend too effectively given that they are spending someone else's money, but yet which still results in some great outcomes (scientific advancements, until recently space flight etc.). Wealth concentration means that great leaps forward can happen in areas that at first are going to be very expensive (medical/longevity research, grand projects like SpaceX, even originally mobile phones etc.)
If you want to tax anything, it is probably better to tax (frivolous) consumption, i.e. wealth destruction, instead of wealth creation.
Sure, I agree, but we're talking about estate tax ITT.
It's nice to imagine that switching from income taxes to VAT (with appropriate progressive adjustments for the poor) would allow the merely hardworking rather than just the lucky and unscrupulous to accumulate wealth, but it's not clear that would be the case.
No, it would encourage people to conceal wealth transfers as consumptive spending. (Just like existing dedicated wealth transfer taxes—gift and estate taxes—do, but more strongly, and we've seen what people dedicated to transferring wealth, like Fred Trump, already do.)
That doesn't mean increasing the overall tax burden, either - it could be introduced to offset income tax reductions. It seems much "fairer" to me.
One of the most attractive features of a death tax is that it applies to everybody. After all, nobody escapes death.
Of course, that doesn't mean it'll be loved universally. Some people just hate taxes. Others don't like the idea of not being able to pass on their life's work to their children.
But most reasonable people understand the need for taxation. It's a lot easier to stomach the tax man dipping into your wallet after you're gone than before.
The death tax doesn't apply to everybody, as hardly everybody leave behind a significant estate. Lots of people die with a negative net worth.
The death tax is also often sold as "only affecting estates worth over $xx million", so it safely doesn't apply to the vast majority of voters, it only applies to those they are envious of.
People only value the capacity to transfer wealth inter-generationally to such a degree so long as its required to guarantee your children don't live a life of endless toil for meager subsistence wages.
You generally get wealthy by providing goods and services to others. The more you satisfy people's wants and needs, the wealthier you get. The wealth means that these people now owe you.
If you accumulate wealth instead of consuming it, you never take them up on it. You are basically acting altruistically - instead you use their IOUs to provide even more goods and services for others (not yourself) by managing your wealth instead of consuming!
I think it is actually an amazing feature of our civilisation. Wealthy people generally don't use their wealth to build massive monuments to themselves - they tend to invest it into economically productive enterprises that make society wealthier overall.
2. I suspect that no one in this discussion (even those whose words suggest otherwise) want it to be so that you literally can't leave anything to your children. So there's some point in accumulating whatever amount you can leave to them.
3. By and large, I think people accumulate wealth mostly in order to have it. I'd rather have $3M in the bank and know that barring really major upheavals I never have to worry about being poor, than have $0 in the bank and live precariously from one payday to the next. This would be true even if I had no children and no prospect of ever having any. It would be true even with a decent "safety net" ensuring that even if I completely ran out of my own money I'd never be, e.g., at risk of starvation or homelessness.
[EDITED to add:] Wait, there's more.
4. You might accumulate wealth in order to use it for some expensive enterprise. Consider e.g. Elon Musk, who (at least the way he tells it) got rich in order to save the environment and give us the ability to escape to Mars if we need to. I don't know what Warren Buffett's original motivation for getting rich was, but his present alleged intention is to give away almost everything he has for charitable purposes, and he explicitly says he doesn't want to give his children too much. (Though it may well be that "too much" in his sense is much more than 99% of parents could possibly give their children.) The advantage of this sort of use of wealth is that it doesn't suffer from diminishing returns as much as spending the money on yourself does. There's not much I could do with $2B that I couldn't do with $1B, but $2B will save approximately twice the number of lives that $1B will.
5. You might want to turn your wealth into power. Lots of lobbying. Carefully targetted political donations. Make yourself a household name and run for president of the US. Give funds to academics and other potential public intellectuals who happen to have views you want to be more widely heard. With a couple of billion used carefully you can have a big impact on your country, or even on the world as a whole.
[1] Or, of course, it might not; it could be, for instance, that the smooth running of a modern economy depends on a level of acquisitiveness that could never exist if people were getting money only for their own use and not their children's. (As it happens, I think that's unlikely.)
I had all this, thankfully, even without my parents being rich. They grew up in a time and area where they could still buy a decently sized house and have children on a single income. They struggled, but they made it.
Thanks to living in a (more) socialist country, taxpayer money paid for my education, allowing me higher social mobility than my parents. Ten or so years into my career, I've paid what was invested in me by the other tax payers a few times over already.
And how do you prevent people from giving gifts? Parents giving their children a gift of money?
And trusts are a thing, so gift tax would not help as much as you would think.
Do you have a reason to suspect GP is in fact maliciously trying to push fascist ideology? Because that's what your comment implies, and does not hide it well.
Maybe that doesn't fill a political scientist's checklist for fascism, but you don't need to look very hard to see some unsettling parallels.
(a) is not an uncommon sentiment, but usually leads either to to the "fully automated luxury communism" argument that everyone should lead lives of luxury, or that nobody should live in luxury (which is more Pol Pot Maoist). This post leaves it rather ambiguous where the luxury should go. I would accept the argument that the post is Maoist rather than fascist if it came with some elaboration.
(b) is the dead giveaway. The idea of war as stiffener of moral fiber, or renewal of the "people", is the core of Nietsche / Mein Kampf / Triumph of the Will kinds of ideological material. Someone writing that before WW1 could be naive. Someone writing it after WW2, when it became apparent what all this actually meant in practice, is effectively saying that mass murder is better than "indifference and lethargy" or "2nd homes and retirement plans". It's one thing to want to die before you get old, quite another to want to abolish retirement for everyone else through war.
(c) The word "sacrifice" appears twice in the original post, loosely linked to (b). At no point is it clear who is expected to sacrifice what, to whom, and for what purpose. This makes me suspicious that the intended (human?) sacrifice might be ... whom exactly?
(A quick scan of the OP's comment history does not reveal any other comments that look even slightly fascist, so I'm willing to assume this was simply poor taste rather than active malice)
And you know, the reason for me writing was sparked merely by yet another story about the mundane problem of America's inability to build new infrastructure, or even maintain existing infrastructure.
Maybe I shouldn't have added the last sentence, some took that too seriously.
Really? That is at least not what I saw happens in the US, most of the old people could be impoverished by unexpected disease. What you described isn't like 5% of the whole population really...
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129068...
I wonder. The most charitable, or most people that are charitable? According to this[1] (which references a paywalled report), middle-class Americans account for nearly two-thirds of charitable giving. That doesn't necessarily mean the rest is from upper class giving, but I think it's a fairly safe assumption (especially given some of the other points in the article). And if the rich are giving, it might be less of an empathy, and more of a sympathy (or even guilt).
Then again, perhaps you meant the most charitable as in giving the largest percentage of their income. Or maybe of their disposable income, in which case, maybe the poor would actually be the most charitable in some areas.
In any case, I think charitable giving is actually a fairly complex topic that might not be accurately summed up as easily as your comment implies.
1: https://www.philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Di...
Given that we are supposedly past the age of aggression and conquering, do you think a peaceful society that keeps to itself is capable of surviving on its own, with a level of happiness that is high by their own (if not world) standards?
I can think of few that were truly destroyed by unstoppable external forces (maybe the Byzantine Empire being attacked by Muslims?). Most of them seem to have rotted from the inside and were easily knocked over by opportunists (Rome). That said I'm no historian so examples would be interesting.
Also interestingly, America is 243 years old - 93 years to go! Sounds reasonable.
This is exactly the problem we need to solve as well if we ever manage to increase the human lifespan. Instead of society advancing one funeral at a time (c.f. Max Planck on science) as in the past, permanent change would have to come from every individual at a much higher rate than now.
That's the case for now, sure.
But that's also exactly what got ancient Athens and Sparta, Rome, Byzantium, and other empires of the past. Outsiders wouldn't do scratch if those empires weren't already rotting from inside for reasons such as those that you've mentioned.
In Rome and Byzantium, for example, such a decline is more or less the established historical narrative.
“War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war."
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his 1878 book that was one of the inspirations for WW1, WW2 and all that. Not one of humanities best times. Though you could have a more positive take on war as in war on poverty and the like rather than the shooting people stuff.
Also voting for politicians who pass laws that hamstring the house buying ability of the next generations.
And, what we’ve empirically learned is that that thread of ideology in an industrialized world (to say nothing of a nuclear armed world) leads to slaughter.
I realize this is HN but even so I feel it’s poor form inveighing with a well worn warmongering trope on the course of world history.
I don't think getting old is the cause, not in the physical sense anyway. The problem to me is that we've been delivered from the "work to survive" in the 1900s, now most people are getting out of the "work to live", which is promptly replaced by the "work to consume", and this is no place for fulfillment, happiness or will to do things bigger than ourselves.
I'll probably get blasted because a lot of HN readers see everything through the lens of software engineering, living comfortably with 2-20 times the minimum wage of their countries. Let's not forget that we're part of the lucky ones.
> Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives
Too many middle class people barely making a living and spending all their effort/time to keep up on the social ladder. They're so blinded by the repetitiveness of their life that they don't even think there could be more to it. Past generations were at least fighting for their rights, somehow it got lost somewhere in the last century, now we're left with parodies of social movements that were once making a dent (black panthers vs blm, first wave feminism vs current feminism, &c.). People are fed up just as much, but instead of acting on it they rant on twitter and feel like they did their part.
---
"It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything outside the bars. it would have been abnormal — impossible in fact — to escape into something which had neither reality nor importance. Absolutely impossible. For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real"
"The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology."
"No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? let nobody say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze."
"While it was placing happiness and freedom on the order of the day, technological civilization was inventing the ideology of happiness and freedom. Thus it condemned itself to creating no more than the freedom of apathy, happiness in passivity. But at least this invention, perverted though it was, had denied that suffering is inherent in the human condition, that such an inhuman condition could last forever."
"People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them."
"And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say “We will breathe later”, and most do not die, because they are already dead."
In the past they had poems about death, sung death, created legends.
Dying in the battlefield in an honorable way was seen as a good way to leave this place and go to the next one.
The world needs to renew itself, or else there won't be enough resources to feed one another.
We are at peaceful times but one thing history can show us is our future, and in history there have been times of peace, although they only lasted for a few years.
Do you really not see that this was sick propaganda, propagated by evil dictators in need of cannon (sword?) fodder?
There's nothing honorable about war or battlefields. It's the worst of the human condition, distilled to the highest concentration. War is repugnant, evil, and unnecessary. We humans should move to rid ourselves of it, not spread fucked up fairy tales about it on the internet.
Honorable, pff. Say that again when you're slowly bleeding out in a ditch somewhere fighting someone else's battle.
If this is only propaganda of dictators, how do you explain the existence of these views within the ancient republics and democracies? Or within the earlier pre-settled tribes? (not sure if this was the case everywhere, but I know the attitude was quite prevalent within the tribes of europe)
War is something that comes to us by default. Its in our nature, as its in every animals nature for survival. Its not something pushed to us by dictators and what not.
Also I don't agree with your sentence of removing poems, legends and whatever from the internet. Let each person decide for himself whats to be filtered in his head or not. The internet should be free, accessible and non filtered.
Your argument is well formulated, however, and while I disagree with it I appreciate the way you bring it. Thanks for that.
> Also I don't agree with your sentence of removing poems, legends and whatever from the internet.
But I didn't suggest anything of the sort. You didn't cite these poems as a matter of historical fact, you referred to them in mild agreement to make a point. There's a major difference. I'm surprised that you interpret an attack on your argument as an attempt to censor history. Not every pacifist is a marxist.
In fact, I suspect that we strongly agree that ideas that people used to support but most Westerners now think of as barbarian (eg "homosexuals are evil", "black people are animals but they can harvest cotton pretty well" and IMO also "dying for your warlord is honorable") should remain accessible in history books, online and offline.
In my opinion, property and money, which someone amassed during his lifetime, should automatically be devoted to the common good after that person's gone. In my opinion it's insane, that someone lucky can inherit a fortune by basically doing nothing. There are things which make sense to inherit, like family enterprises, but there should be a limit.
I also believe, that as an individual, there should be an upper bound to how rich you can be. Does it really make sense, that an individual person can have more than a seven-digit pool of money on his bank? Is there a way to limit the crazy strive for individual richness? If there would be a limit, we could basically invest the free money collectively into old and new enterprises which would not simply act as money printers for a few individuals, but actually profit society as a whole... Just a crazy idea...
According to all observations the most likely end to modern civilization is over exploitation and over usage of natural resources.
The amount of resources available and the amount we use point to a trend that has one conclusion.
The irony is that even with the knowledge of our impending doom we are still unable to see it despite the obviousness of it. The original poster makes a chancy prediction on how wealth inequality will take us to our ends while all trendlines and data point to the real way our civilization will end.
One day there will not be enough oil in the world for you to drive to work or fly to another state.
Technology is not our savior. The trendlines in tech are far too slow do make any meaningful difference. What you're actually observing with technology like the tesla is the trendline in hype.
Throughout history poor people were happy because they believed they were born to that life so they didn't have the stress or jealousy of believing life was unfair to them. If you read any old philosophy book it's all lessons about being happy with what you have.
Believing you can raise yourself up and improve your life is a relatively new phenomenon, and society stopping people doing that leads to unhappiness.
Such a speculative statement. You cannot predict the behavior of a group of people anymore than you can predict a stock. I would say a more realistic statement to your topic is:
People can be happy with what they have and be unhappy with what they have and throughout history many people have felt either way. It is not a new phenomenon. Whether these feelings lead to revolution in the future is impossible to determine.
You need to look at trendlines, data points and evidence.
When I said "relatively new" I meant "in the past 300 years or so". When I said "any old philosophy book" I meant "one written 1500 years ago". I didn't make my frame of reference clear; that was obviously a mistake on my part. Saying things like "new" on a tech forum has a very different meaning compared to "new" in terms of history and philosophy. 300 years ago people were born in to a strata of society and couldn't work their way out even if they wanted to. Social mobility in the middle ages didn't exist (with a few notable exceptions like demonstrating valour in warfare.)
More recently (in the past 50 years) there have been some quite extensive studies of happiness, and envy is almost always found to be a confounding factor. Why that is seems to be the case is an interesting evolutionary question - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0161...
A philosophy book offers conjecture not evidence.
I have better medicine, better comfort (bed, electricity, running water ..), &c. than the richest emperor of 2000 years ago. Does it invalidate any critics I can make ?
As far as I can tell capitalism didn't sell mere survival as a goal, yet we're telling an ever growing part of the population that they'll have to deal with it.
"The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically."
"The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive."
- Raoul Vaneigem
And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old".
"Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the goals and priorities of a nation, and it loses its drive to be scrappy, make sacrifices, and do the innovative things when one does when young and poor. You have generations who want to extract the gains put in by past generations. Or it costs too much to change people's behavior.
That's what I think is happening to western Europe and the US. Too many rich, old, soft people who now have settled and moneyed lives, and don't want to make the same sacrifices that the generation previously were forced to, by unfortunate circumstance. Too happy with their 2nd homes and retirement plans.
Unless you have a really conscious and socially adept mechanism to force a people to renew themselves, this sets in. Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country...