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from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gallondr00nk on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:01AM
The issue isn't him, its the whole rotten infrastructure. Appealing for rationality in a segment of society that willingly and gleefully drove the entire world into the dirt in 2008 (and has been attempting to do so since) isn't going to work.
If there's one thing that you could draw out of the behaviour of capital in the last ten or twenty years, it's that greed is bottomless. To them, there's no line that shouldn't be crossed. Neoliberalism, it seems to me, cares about nothing except money, even when faced with its own eventual destruction.
He's probably right in that the way to avert the disaster is to reduce inequality and bring back the sort of economy that prospered in the immediate post war years. Yet, when the prevailing ideology is concerned entirely with the accumulation of money, there's no room for social security or a minimum wage, even if it was to the eventual benefit of the rich. Indeed, there's no room for any sort of discourse other than how to extract more money from more people.
Our economic system prides itself on being the product of thousands of years of civilisation, of being the one that survived while the alternatives crashed. Yet it seems to me that it isn't an intelligent system, run by intelligent people, capable of understanding subtlety and making adjustments.
It's a stupid, pig headed creed, squawked and parroted by wide eyed zealots. It just happens that these zealots are rich. They own newspapers and lobby governments and hold enormous power. But that barely masks that they're incredibly stupid.
I don't think it'll even need pitchforks to take a system like that down. It'll eventually devour itself.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:37AM
No.
People, all people. Are good.
Even the those who have done the most horrible things, are horrified by their own actions, and want to be good.
What happens is, to cope: They just can't feel at all.
The biggest hearted people become overwhelmed, and then numb. And it is easier, so very much easier, not to feel anything at all.
Even as I type this, my ex-fiancee is outside in an ambulance. She has multiple illnesses but I just can't find it within me to care, to feel for her any more. I would have given her a lift to the hospital, again. But I would have merely dropped her off, not sat with her all night as I had done so many times.
I read books and am brought to tears by the fake emotions within them, but I can't feel anything anymore for her sad situation.
Am I Evil? I don't feel so.
I don't think "Evil" really exists at all. It's nothing more than a childish bogeyman. A convenient lie.
"They" arn't out there.
Pointing at the sad shape of the world and saying it's the fault of the rich does nothing to solve the problem.
The problem is, that people believe that evil people, that a group of evil people, a category of them, exist out there somewhere.
But never ourselves.
So the rich think: "If I don't profit, some other greedy bastard will... It might as well be me, rather than someone worse.
And so we justify taking the easy, seductive route. Justify not looking too closely at the pain we inflict. We put ourselves in a class of "people" who are all we allow ourselves to feel for.
So we can be inhumane to all those not human.
Sharks are gentle creatures. A research vessel found a shark, and tagged it. It swam away in fear, bleeding from a trivial wound.
Its mate did its best to destroy the research vessel, knowing that the trivial wound was a death sentence to its mate.
Sharks stay hungry until they smell blood, you see. They don't want to kill, but they must eat. So if their prey bleeds, they can justify killing it as a mercy. So you don't find many small, wounded sharks. They're food the moment another, bigger, shark smells its blood.
But they're not evil monsters, out to kill anything that crosses their path.
So how about this rich guy? He seems nice.
All thats necessary for the situation to be fixed is for the rich to realise that by accumulating wealth, they have accumulated responsibility to DO something with it.
And not just collect more.
For it isn't money they have "made", it's merely currency they have collected.
The poor criminals who thieve and yet somehow never stay rich for long just made an early optimization, that no money is bad, some is good, and more is best. Childish linear thinking.
But wealth isn't linear. It's sets a threshold. If you Have Not, you Can Not.
Not enough to eat? Then you cannot just keep conforming to society.
Might makes Right? Social darwinism?
Evolution by Natural Selection is merely the default process in the complete absence of any better organization.
All that lives is in the same boat in this universe: A little blue planet.
(Until we find evidence otherwise).
The second law of thermodynamics is trying to kill us: But it sure seems like a malevolent intelligent force, how things go wrong at the worst, how the worst of people seems to have the easiest time.
How problems fester if shoved under the carpet.
How certainty implies belief, not knowledge. How easy it is for those so certain to take drastic action, because they *know* they are doing the right thing. How hard it is for the truly wise to act, appreciating full well how wrong they could be.
In this world, things need maintenance. Else mess increases. Only life cleans up.
Everything else just gets worse.
We already have a common enemy, one eternally sufficient to unite all in cooperation: Death.
But so long as we believe in a "good god" because there clearly seems to exist a bad devil. So long as we believe the lie that people must be fundamentally evil. (that evil can even exist!)
We will continue to treat the masses as if they are evil. And the masses will continue to behave as they are expected to.
The solution is quite simple. It's the old golden rule, plus a small correction.
It's got a name, but I can't remember it.
I'm bad with names.
Goes like this: Be flexible in your acceptance of the behaviour of others, and be mindful of your behaviour, when you're at your worst. Try to make your worst behaviour better than that of others.
This isn't easy. It's hard. But it matters.
You'll just have to do this, and just trust that enough other people will have the wisdom and decency to "get it" and also lift their game.
Along with this, realize that the standard you walk past is the standard you set. Fix any problem you can see, as soon as you can see it. And if you can't, at the very least bitch and moan about it to raise awareness! (preferably online) so others who might be able to fix the problem get a chance to see it!
And also so the problem doesn't become forgotten. It's the least you can do.
Good luck.
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:59PM
You are wrong that evil does not exist. It does. There is evil in this world. Pure naked malice. There is a God, there is a devil, and there are demons. I know because I've met those demons.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:24PM
Sometimes, when you meet demons, they are in a mirror. Just like in that movie Constatine with Keanu in it. Well, not exactly like that. But any non-superstitious Christian theologian knows that evil is only bonum privatum. So there is that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @10:08PM
Before money existed, there was no logic to owning way more stuff than you could use.
...then somebody invented coins and credit and it became a dick measuring contest for guys who are insecure about their manhood, gathering up more wealth than they could spend in multiple lifetimes.
Back in the days before cities, when clusters of humans didn't get larger than about 150 individuals and COMMUNITY was still an actual thing, this kind of behavior would get you banished as an anti-social asshole.
The community spirit was still working great in the Stone Age cultures of the Western Hemisphere [wikipedia.org] when white guys first showed up.
Everywhere that the pestilence of European conquest touched, that served to displace and destroy The Sharing Economy.
-- gewg_