People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages.
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.
People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages.
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.
>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...
Still I'm looking for quantitative data, not anecdotal. Things like energy usage measured in joules or Green house gas emissions by weight or climate change by temperature.
I want all the data we can get. Frankly a philosophy book or anecdotal musings about human behavior are not data. It's just a predictive conjecture about how a human will behave in a certain situation and is rarely accurate.
> People bitch and moan about how unfair everything is and while it is unfair the wealth the poorest individual has in the united states is light years ahead of what kings had in the middle ages.
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."
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.