This is what happens when you let an arbitrary system of resource management based on strife and competition govern your society top-down.
Making everyone compete for resources against one another in an abstract version of Hunger Games is not going to lead to good results.
If you decree a global law that says that everyone is to compete against one another in a zero sum game for resources, in perpetuity, and that law remains in full effect for generations upon generations, people will go insane. The algorithm programs us as well as we program it- “amass, forever” is not a great command to issue just in general with no other conditions or parameters, especially without a goal state. You don’t just “program”, you create a program that is to achieve some result.
If the only game in the world was soccer, and everyone in the world had to play, at all times, at the risk of dying if they don’t, they will start conceptualizing their whole reality around soccer, and soccer will at some point supersede reality- it will become reality.
I like to ask people- “in a thousand years, if humanity is still around, do you think we will still be living under a capitalist system?”. By far the most common response is more or less yes, and furrowed eyebrows. I find that most people are incapable of entertaining even the thought of an alternative. Not because they’re stupid or ignorant, but because the thought would never occur to them, like if one were asking a fish to imagine a replacement for water, it’s just beyond the scope of imagination bordering on the purely metaphysical.
This is what happens when you let an arbitrary system of resource management based on strife and competition govern your society top-down.
Making everyone compete for resources against one another in an abstract version of Hunger Games is not going to lead to good results.
If you decree a global law that says that everyone is to compete against one another in a zero sum game for resources, in perpetuity, and that law remains in full effect for generations upon generations, people will go insane. The algorithm programs us as well as we program it- “amass, forever” is not a great command to issue just in general with no other conditions or parameters, especially without a goal state. You don’t just “program”, you create a program that is to achieve some result.
If the only game in the world was soccer, and everyone in the world had to play, at all times, at the risk of dying if they don’t, they will start conceptualizing their whole reality around soccer, and soccer will at some point supersede reality- it will become reality.
I like to ask people- “in a thousand years, if humanity is still around, do you think we will still be living under a capitalist system?”. By far the most common response is more or less yes, and furrowed eyebrows. I find that most people are incapable of entertaining even the thought of an alternative. Not because they’re stupid or ignorant, but because the thought would never occur to them, like if one were asking a fish to imagine a replacement for water, it’s just beyond the scope of imagination bordering on the purely metaphysical.