And a glorious world it is. We had to go through millenia of chaos and violence before we found a system which can channel greed and status and power seeking into something mostly productive.
> No societal consensus believes itself to be cruel and violent and chaotic
Plenty of ancient civilisations celebrated their cruelty and capacity to deal violence as a competitive advantage (e.g. the Spartans, Vikings, Nazis, Mongols and Aztecs, et cetera). Even contemporary American society celebrates its military power. (No civilization celebrates its chaos, almost by definition, as that’s the antithesis of statehood.)
You're describing events against which there has been massive, in some cases politically upheaving, backlash. That's not the same as a core cultural tenet.
Yep that's sort of what I mean. Cruelty is something inflicted on the enemy and the other. Cruelty inflicted on the citizen is systematized or justified, and does not read as cruelty in the "view from within". And especially in the "view from the top".
But most of them are very cruel, within and without.
> Cruelty inflicted on the citizen is systematized or justified, and does not read as cruelty in the "view from within"
Spartans, Nazis and Aztecs were proudly cruel to their own. Hyper-masculine societies have historically celebrated this as a way of culling the weak from their ranks, a necessary evil. If anything, not being an honour-bound and sacrificial culture is something of a modern phenomenon.
I am comparing child sacrifice to the externalities of a dividends-driven system. We may not kill our children with knives, but we certainly let them starve.
> We may not kill our children with knives, but we certainly let them starve
This is hyperbole. We have hungry kids in America, and that's a tragedy. But they're not dying en masse, and we're certainly not celebrating that as a necessary sacrifice.
Neither were the purported child sacrifices dying en masse in Aztec civilization.
We absolutely celebrate the slow death of the poor as a necessary sacrifice in the face of economic growth and dividends. Just not always in the same breath. The fittest grow and the weakest adapt, or don't. Believing that when they don't is a tragedy, is not an effective way of mitigating tragedy, and indeed can serve as an affirming and normalizing act in and of itself.
This is a single metric. Number goes up. What other numbers went up? What numbers went down? What do these directions mean?
It does seem like fewer child deaths is a good thing. It does seem like modern medicine in general is probably a really good thing. There are a lot of other things in this world that are good things.
I'm not trying to deny goodness here. Just asking for more perspective, to better mitigate hubris.
I would guess that maybe less than a third of the total workforce is doing things we actually want and need as a society, and 90% of that third are jobs that are close to being automated.
As one example, the US alone has nearly $300 billion a year in revenue for the advertising industry and employees a quarter million people. When looking at the list of things humanity needs, ads aren't very high. There is a lot that exists to facilitate the other shit that doesn't need to exist.
point of clarification: people have value regardless of their profession and regardless of whether it becomes automated
I think the earlier post is considering capitalism as "more productive" than acquiring riches and resources the old fashioned way: killing your neighbors or cousins and taking their stuff.
The world bank! That classic charitable organization that definitely does not make predatory loans to poor countries and force them to privatize their industries
internally, the united states is very chaotic and violent.
and the united states has caused a ton of chaos and violence throughout the world. arguably they're one of the main causes of instability in a lot of countries.
The US has made some questionable choices, but here I'm talking about not only the US, but Europe, Oceania, Japan, South Korea etc. As a European though I'm eternally grateful that the one country to become the global hegemon was the US. I don't think the world realizes how lucky it is. Might sound like a fanboy but there's plenty about the US I don't like, moved back home because of those things even, but you have to look at the bigger picture here.
