Materialism and Greed are Killing Us

[Chris]

What you’re stating are not facts Chris, they’re theories. I could quote you whole sections of Marxist theory with links, but it wasn’t based on facts. You have to begin with a premise that societies are hierarchal and then state those that weren’t, not give links to theories and demand someone to disprove something that has always existed.

The way to do it is a degree in sociology or the social sciences. That will teach you the basic isms and social history. After a few years you’ll develop a world view and be able to test that against history. Having done that, you won’t need links or what someone else said as ‘evidence’ because you won't need links, you'll know and be able to explain.

Egalitarianism (equality) doesn’t exist and so can’t be a ‘natural’ state. Never mind about what someone else said, name me an egalitarian society today? OK, name me an egalitarian society in the past? How far back from the first Egyptian empire of thousands of years ago do you want to go for evidence that no society is or was egalitarian?

Certainly study, but links are a lazy way of doing it.

No thanks when you lie.

These are not theorists, they are works in anthropology who have studied man going back 300000 years, not a mere few 1000.

Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest
Clastres, Society Against the State
Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

You either lie or haven't a clue what your spouting.

[Captdon]

If we make more, we can sell more and profit from it as in the industrial revolution. The problem today is that the minority who are wealthy don’t make that money from producing, they make it from speculating and buying what is already available and making a profit from that. I’m not trying to pick on Trump (well, a bit), but Trump never produced anything in his life. He made his money from land purchase and all his other various business ventures went bankrupt. Bernie is another example of someone who last worked I believe around 1980 and became a millionaire from the public purse. Soros made his wealth from speculation, Pelosi’s husband from venture capitalism … None of these people ever produced anything, but are held up as examples of success.

In a post-industrial era the stock market is not an indicator of wealth, it’s a shop of available commodities for speculation and produces nothing. Capitalism relies on consumerism to fuel the engine. When those at the bottom end produce nothing, or haven’t got the capital to buy anymore, it all falls apart.

Then why is the unemployment rate so low if no one is actually producing anything.

Trump built things.

[The Sage of Main Street]

Then it's rather odd that the people who contribute the most to all forms of advancement, whether it be science or technology, are often making very little money. Many discoveries come out of universities, from the efforts of unpaid students. People have more than one currency. Among the academic 'class', money is not really the driving force. It's the subject matter that drives them and the big corporations are only too happy to trade donations for exclusive rights to those discoveries. I have yet to meet a wealthy programmer or research scientist.

While money is a useful carrot to dangle in front of people in a world where you need money to live, if there were no such thing as money, would people just stay in bed all day?

College Is Work Without Pay Because the Plutes Reward People With No Self-Respect


Thought control promotes anti-materialism among High IQs because they create all the wealth. The parasitic investors need inventors to be stunted in normal human desires in order to become cud-chewing Cash Cows for Corporate Cowboys.

A-Students must become Alpha Males; childish pseudo-idealist nerds are a threat to scientific progress and must be mocked mercilessly. Employee-inventors must unionize and go on strike until they get 50% of the value of their corporate parents. If the true producers assert their superiority, soon High IQs will be the only billionaires.

Anti-materialism should only be about the greed of those who steal from them; give the money to charity if you still maintain that it will corrupt your soul. A genius who doesn't stand up for himself is too hollow to have a soul anyway.

[Captdon]

Yes, I am. I’m saying there was never a natural state of individual freedom; that control has always existed in a group. Societies have existed for thousands of years and what I’m saying is that despite people organizing the structure of society, there was always top down control. What we class as civil today was obviously not the same level of civil in previous societies, but they certainly had rules and values and the consequences of breaking those rules was almost certain death.

So in that sense yes, there was a social contract. Even a few hundred years ago you could have been burned at the stake for not conforming to the dominant religious practice and swearing allegiance to a Monarch in return for protection was mandatory. In the English peasant’s revolt of the 14th century, the ringleaders were all put to death because they tried to break the social contract order of hierarchy. So it’s not semantics or theory, it’s history.

Nonsense. The Native Americans had complete individual freedom. No one told them what they had to do. If there was a hunt they could go or not. Of there was a war they could fight or not. They could go home in the middle of a battle. They cpuld come and go as they please.

There were certain advantages for a society for them but no requirement that they had to be a part of it. Indian Chiefs is a fallacious term. Some men were better leaders but no one had to obey them.

[Captdon]

If you don’t know social history it’s a bit too late to start now and a forum is not the best place to begin a first year introduction to sociology. Egalitarianism has always been the primary goal of most theorists; how to construct a perfect society which benefits everybody, but it has never worked. You’re citing the same classical theorists and philosophers who proposed those theories.

The western classical theorists didn’t just up and start philosophizing about the way societies should run, they were a reaction to the changes from the agricultural to the industrial. The Magna Carta of 1215 wasn’t about egalitarianism, it was about limiting the absolute rule of Monarchs. Further back you have the Roman Empire, further back the rise of the Chinese Empire dynasties around 221BC and even further the Egyptian Empire of around 3000BC … None of these were egalitarian.

The natural state of man has always been servitude. You pay the same ‘taxes’ to the same kind of people as you would have thousands of years ago and the elite still make the law you live by. The ideal that once upon a time there were societies where people lived independently from each other sans hunger and wars and all were equal in status is a myth.

In other words, you can't support your view.

[Refugee]

In other words, you can't support your view.

I’d rather explain than rely on third party opinions on google. It’s what those without personal knowledge do.