▲ | essnine 4 days ago | |
There are two things bothering me here. The first bit where you're talking about motivations and income driving it seems either very reductive or implying of something that ought to be profoundly upsetting: - that intelligent people will see that the work they do is pointless if they're paid enough to survive and care for themselves, and not see work as another source of income for better financial security - that most intelligent people will see it as exploitation and then choose to focus on dismantling the system that levels the playing field Which sort of doesn't add up. So there are intelligent people who are working right now because they need money and don't have it, while the other intelligent people who are working and employing other people are only doing it to make money and will rebel if they lose some of the money they make. But then, why doesn't the latter group of intelligent people just stop working if they have enough money? Are they less/more/differently intelligent than the former group? Are we thinking about other, more narrow forms of intelligence when describing either? Also > The most intelligent will prefer a system where their superior intelligence provides them with sufficient resources to choose a high-quality mate. If they see an arrangement where high-quality mates are being obtained by individuals who they deem to be receiving benefits that they cannot defend/protect adequately, such an arrangement will be dismantled. This evolutionary drive is hundreds of millions of years old. I don't want to come off as mocking here - it's hard to take these points seriously. The whole point of civilization is to rise above these behaviours and establish a strong foundation for humanity as a whole. The end goal of social progress and the image of how society should be structured cannot be modeled on systems that existed in the past solely because those failure modes are familiar and we're fine with losing people as long as we know how our systems fail them. That evolutionary drive may be millions of years old, but industrial society has been around for a few centuries, and look at what it's done to the rest of the world. > Primitive animals will take resources from others that they observe to be unable to defend their status. Yeah, I don't know what you're getting at with this metaphor. If you're talking predatory behaviour, we have plenty of that going around as things are right now. You don't think something like UBI will help more people "defend their status"? > it will probably end in economic crisis, revolution, and the resumption of this cycle that has been playing out over and over for centuries I don't think human civilization has ever been close to this massive or complex or dysfunctional in the past, so this sentence seems meaningless, but I'm no historian. |