Goodguy
8hr ago
Well sure, but that's not me and my point. That's those other people. I'm not claiming that taking all of the billionaires' wealth would improve society, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't unless it was done in some completely unrealistic sci-fi fantasy way, I'm just dunking on people who claim to be all about meritocracy while ignoring inheritance.
Goodguy
8hr ago
I do not support pure meritocracy or communism :) I am just pointing out a very common blind spot in many meritocracy supporters' views.
Goodguy
8hr ago
I understand your logic and I think it has a lot of truth to it but that said, I still find it silly when people talk about how we should have more meritocracy but do not want to address the fact that some people are born with 1000 times more resources than others.
An alternative is unlikely unless we solve scarcity emotions using technology and/or massive shock-driven consciousness changes like in Star Trek (hyper-advanced tech and WW3). Basic mammal nature in the presence of scarcity is to priviledge oneself, one's family, and one's friends over others. This usually only fails to hold true in the presence of extremely powerful emotional ideological or political forces like nationalism (where one emotionally feels like the entire nation is one's family) or political authoritarianism (where you are forced to fight for the government because they will hurt you and maybe your loved ones if you don't). And those have their own negative consequences.
Communism could work if we were all near-constantly on an MDMA trip type of immediate feelings of love, but I'm not sure that the average human is even physically capable of being like that without some of the hardware burning out. Some spiritual teachers have claimed that they have gotten there without drugs, but whether or not they are telling the truth, the fact is that clearly even if they did reach it, they have consistently failed to teach that state to anything more than a tiny fraction of the human population. Although I will say that, even by trying, they have probably helped humanity. Modern Western morality is much better than the morality of 2000 years ago, which was basically "tough shit if you're poor or crucified, I guess the gods don't like you lol".
All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance. Even the most wild-eyed free market libertarian who advocates for pure meritocracy typically does not call for all humans to be put on a truly level playing field, which could only be done by forbidding parents to pass on their wealth to their children. And the truth is that, whatever you think about passing on wealth to children, all meritocratic ideologies that accept inheritance are at best just nipping around the edges, and not addressing the biggest un-meritocratic phenomenon in the whole human world.
Well, I would say yes and no. Trump and Trumpism are bad in many ways as far as I am concerned, but what I mean by TDS is the sort of reflexive emotional attitude where a person is willing to believe pretty much any anti-Trump talking point just because they fervently hate Trump/rightism. For example, I am not a right-winger and I dislike a lot of Trump is doing, but I do not have TDS, because I don't automatically believe that Trump's actions are automatically bad/evil all of the time, and I don't believe that he is literally taking orders from Putin, etc.
More options
Context Copy link