Separately, speaking as someone that spends a lot of time with optimizers, it seems silly to not have _some_ form of regularization. That doesn't mean zero inequality (that doesn't seem good either) but we should be wary of unchecked inequality.
because there's civil unrest otherwise.
If you imagine a scale from [0, 1] where 0 is no redistributive mechanisms at all and 1 is perfect, daily rebalancing to exact equality of outcome, it's fairly obvious to me that neither extreme of 0 nor 1 is "the very idea of goodness itself".
Civil unrest led to women's suffrage, racial equality, and countless other things that are indeed good. Good things sometimes come from bad situations.
There's very little to support your argument that "Why can't there just be civil unrest?" is arguing against the idea of goodness itself.
The phrase "civil unrest" is far too tame; it doesn't even begin to conjure the horrors that people are capable of when they get angry enough.
Anyway, if death is the price you have to pay for living a life true to yourself, in accordance with your values, in accordance with what you think is right and not what you think will appease some hypothetical angry mob, then so be it. Surely it's better to live a short life true to what you believe, than a slightly longer life lacking any sense of integrity.
And that's why pure self interest is something to be avoided even by people who only care about themselves.
Some elites might imagine that they can remain on top forever, unaffected by the violence and oppression they inflict on others. History suggests otherwise.
We even had the cycle of elite-formation and power-accumulation into civil unrest and collapse happen in the Soviet union, which was literally engineered to prevent this exact thing from happening, complete with profound socialist indoctrination of the population. They weren't supposed to be self-interested, yet when it came down to it, they were.
Overall I'm fairly skeptical toward the notion that societies can be designed at all, to a meaningful degree.
What fundamentally shapes the human societies is human nature which is self-interested and largely immutable. You can try to force it, to artificially make societies that contradict human nature through the imposition of rules, but that's if anything even more volatile, because that makes all their citizens unhappy, like animals in a zoo.
As you said: the "cycle of elites climbing to the top and being overthrown...sucks for those involved".
Having acknowledged that it sucks, why not try to improve it?
The problem is that while you can convince someone briefly that your new utopia is a good idea, as the years go by, people start having other ideas, they start wanting things. Self-interest never really went away. So you need to stop them from thinking wrong and wanting the wrong things and having the wrong ideas, and the only way to do that is through oppressive totalitarianism.
Human institutions ossify and start to serve the ends of their own power accumulation, no matter how noble their initial ideals and goals were.
> If you have the benefit of this inequality, you should use it to ensure the availability of life’s necessities
That's an individual decision, not an oppressive dystopian institution.
In fact, one way we could start working on reducing inequality is to reduce the oppressive dystopian elements of our current institutions.
And toward that end, we should note that any elite privileges you may enjoy ultimately rest on the ability to call on the government to use force on your behalf.
My personal worldview is quiet bleak and I'm very glad to already be in the middle of my thirties, because I struggle to find a reason which would matter to them.
I don't think there is any chance we'll avoid mass murder on the average people at this point, and I doubt the average software developer will escape unharmed either long term. Hopefully after I'm dead though.
I'm playing devil's advocate, but indeed there are those who agree with that statement. Who gets to decide which is right?
Maybe you saw another post?
The question is why would you prefer there being civil unrest to there not being civil unrest?
And if you prefer the latter why would you not exercise whatever power you have to realize your preference?
When you think about that, there is no way declared to be free markets are actually free.
Is there any compelling reason not to make the life of other people better? Is there any reason we should leave people work countless hours, suffer, and likely dying due to diseases that manifest out of stress (e.g. cancer)?
Imagine for a moment a society such that there's no need for the proles to steal or hurt people. Criminality drops to near zero, world is safer, we all get to thrive.
Edit:
Kind reminder to argue for the position instead of downvoting out of disagreement.
[0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/coping/feelings/stress-f...
Definition of a zero sum game:
A situation in which one person or group can win something only by causing another person or group to lose it
And myriads of instances where helping others makes your life better. In-fact, not to help other people is unequivocally a horrible and myopic decision. For starters, we need exponential number of scientists to keep making linear progress. Furthermore, paying taxes which are used to fund education results in lower criminality [1]. Furthermore, we have that investing in education can give back a 5x ROI [2].
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4901649_The_Effect_...
> For example, it is now generally acknowledged that for heart disease—the nation’s leading cause of death—emotional stress is a major risk factor, equal in importance to other such recognized risk factors as hypertension, cigarette smoking, elevated serum cholesterol level, obesity, and diabetes. Stress also has been recognized as an important risk factor in high blood pressure, ulcers, colitis, asthma, pain syndromes (e.g., migraine, cluster, and tension headaches; backaches), skin diseases, insomnia, and various psychological disorders. Most standard medical textbooks attribute anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of all disease to stress-related origins.
https://med.stanford.edu/survivingcancer/cancer-and-stress/s...
At least in the United States:
No one ‘has to’ crime. People commit crime primarily because they have poor impulse control and lack long term thinking.
Or because they just really don’t like school and don’t like working a job, and don’t have any other ideas.
We aren’t living in medieval France where peasants are stealing loaves of bread. People aren’t committing crimes because they are poor. Lots of incredibly poor people commit no crime at all. Statistically it is a small subset of people.
Right, but I'm a human being, I am not humanity itself. Humanity is just an idea, it has no agency or conscience. It cannot suffer, it does not want.
As a human being, my primary responsibility is toward myself, to make myself happy, and to arrange the world according to the principles that resonate with my soul.
Toiling to make other people happy at my own expense doesn't make me happy. Even if that was the way it worked, surely the best action would be to line up to work at an Amazon warehouse and bask in opportunity to contribute to the incandescence of Jeff Bezos' prosperity.
> If that is not appealing to you, you should probably off yourself right now.
I don't really see how that follows. I'll die regardless whether it's by my own hands right now or at the hands of external circumstance some years later.
What are the principles that resonate with your soul?
There are certain vile things that when you see them or even think about them you shudder to the very foundation. It may be murder, rape, kidnapping, grievous torture, helplessness, and so forth. Nobody needs to be told this is not the way things should be.
On the other hand, there are other things, when you see them, they bring you a sense that the world is as it should be. It may be things that are awesome, beautiful, or sublime. It may be good craftsmanship, self-sufficiency, human flourishing. It may be small things or large things.
The former are such things I do not want to exist in the world, and the latter are such things I want to exist in the world.
Sounds good to me. Why not exercise whatever talents you have to encourage and promote such things?
If you disagree with me you should definitely continue to decide to live.
Well let me be the devil's advocate here and ask why.