True. Many would say it's worth paying off the unemployed (welfare) to keep peace, as the satisfied don't tend to revolt, causing only a small hit to the innovators. Thoughts? Not saying I agree btw.
How To Brainwash A Nation
- Thread starter SeoReborn
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True. Many would say it's worth paying off the unemployed (welfare) to keep peace, as the satisfied don't tend to revolt, causing only a small hit to the innovators. Thoughts? Not saying I agree btw.
I fully agree with BigWill. The problem is all our technological and scientific progress has resulted in a situation where enormous wealth is created with a tiny fraction of the manpower it once took. The result is what you're seeing now - lots of people and fewer and fewer jobs resulting in huge unemployment. The jobs that are around are mostly either 1.) highly skilled (which, let's face it, not everyone is cut out for) or 2.) low-skill service sector jobs (e.g., flipping burgers).
Moreover, the wealth created by all this human-labor saving progress has largely gone to the wealthiest. This is really an untenable situation in the long term. We'll end up with a tiny capitalist class that owns all the production capability and very nearly all the wealth while everyone else fights over the few leftover table scraps.
Social programs and wealth distribution are a way of mitigating the inevitable societal degradation, but they really don't tend to enable people to do anything much more than survive, by themselves. No, what's really needed, IMO, is an entirely new paradigm: the post-scarcity society (of which the Zeitgeist Movement is an example).
Between increased automation and myriad other scientific advances, we have or will soon have the technological capability to provide for all of humanity's basic needs, at marginal cost. In the near future, wide availability of desktop 3D printers and falling costs could do for physical objects what the internet has done for software, music, and movies, dropping the cost of distribution and manufacture to near zero. With all this abundance, the entire idea of money and wealth may become obsolete. And I think humanity would be tremendously better off for it.
Look at how many of society's problems come down to either 1.) not having enough or 2.) wanting more. Need and greed. All the worst shit people do to each other mostly come down to those two things. What if we could live in a world where abundance was the norm rather than the exception? I believe that's within our grasp within our lifetimes. The only question is, can we muster the will to do it? Can we overcome the entrenched interests - those who would desperately cling to the old paradigm, to their wealth and social structures, their control over others? They're not going down without a fight. Look at the RIAA. Faced with the sudden reality of the internet and its enabling of virtually zero-cost near infinite reproduction of its product, what does it do? Kick and scream and sue. They're in their death throes. The writing is on the wall. Meanwhile, artistic expression, what the RIAA et al are ostensibly there to facilitate and promote, is flourishing more than ever.
Is post-scarcity a pipe dream? It's possible to do it. There's nothing from a technical perspective that prevents it, and that will only become more true as time goes on. We just need the will to do it.
