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an0malous 4 hours ago

He’s right in that business success is largely correlated with sociopathy, it helps you focus on the goal of maximizing your own wealth without worrying about the messy details of how other human beings are affected.

Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.

ceejayoz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves…

Philosophers considered that even before Christ.

https://www.cnbc.com/2011/06/03/the-ancient-and-noble-greek-...

"A fragment of Solon’s poetry describes a situation in which many of the poor “have arrived in foreign lands/sold into slavery, bound in shameful fetters.”"

"In 594 BC, Solon was appointed archon of Athens. His solution to his city’s strife was to cancel both public and private debts and end debt slavery."

> or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs

https://theconversation.com/the-waters-become-corrupt-the-ai...

Pliny the Elder: "We taint the rivers and the elements of nature, and the air itself, which is the main support of life, we turn into a medium for the destruction of life."

(The same is true for introspection. It's certainly not a modern invention. Andreessen asserts it's an 1800s/1900s invention, but Shakespeare's fucking famous for "to be or not to be, that is the question"!)

an0malous 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Andreesen and I are both talking about trends, not that literally no one thought of introspection or the immorality of slavery four hundred years ago

ceejayoz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Andreesen: “If you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective."

You: "it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves"

Come on. Words have meaning.

an0malous 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I was echoing Andreesen's phrasing to make it more clear what I'm responding to, but whatever, enjoy your pedantic dunk.

KaiserPro 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Going back four hundred years, it would have never occurred to anyone that humans shouldn’t be slaves or that the environment will be irrecoverably destroyed if everyone pillages it for their own business needs.

Thats catagorically wrong on both levels.

Common land was regulated and had a ton of bylaws to make sure that people didn't take the piss. There was lots of work done to improve the soil, (leaving fallow, crop rotation, fertilising, etc etc)

As for anti-slavery, there was a whole multi century effort to fight against surfdom.

The Quakers and other more radical religious types condemned it as unchristian,

The secular types also raged against it, thomas paine is most well known now, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Spence was also a key proponent.

newyankee 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well a lot of Eastern religions do talk about sustainability 1000s of years back. Just because it was never part of Abrahamic faiths and their offshoot cultures which took over the world, does not mean that humans did not think this way

RandomLensman 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that is too little credit to previous humans: people objecting to slavery were around four hundred and more years ago. Similarly, concerns about environmental destruction are also old.