RideAgainstTheLizard

Very good point!

Thanks for the insight and the video :)

Thank you for sharing!

Thanks for this!

I'm not sure how useful this exercise is, but I like to boil things down to the basic "cavepeople fighting for survival scenario".

In this scenario, art is irrelevant. So are any politicians that don't offer immediate results such as more food or more water.

What matters is survival by means of effectively allocating resources and defending those resources. This is where ambition comes in.

These drives don't go away when survival is no longer at risk. They are inherent to our being because they ensure our survival. Unfortunately, we also love excess.

I fear the current system exists because our nature has resulted in it existing.

I am unfamiliar with the potlatch system, so please forgive me if I am misunderstanding it, but I would guess that the fact it is no longer around and capitalism is proves that it is not a viable long term solution that humans would gravitate towards.

I fear that eventually someone in the system would think "those people who are giving away their stuff are gaining social approval, sure, but at the end of the day I have all of my resources and can use them to accumulate more, and then social approval will be irrelevant because I will own all of the wealth"

Admittedly I need to learn more about degrowth. However, I feel GDP is just a manifestation of multiple cases of personal ambition.

Let's say we all worked to the point that we had equal, abundant luxuries. Surely at this point we are happy and need no more? Unfortunately I think this is not the case. If a person or a group identifies a route to greater success, or dominion over others, it's likely they will take it, just for the sake of being more powerful.

Then apply this not just to the individual, but to the group, and then to the nation.

I've heard of this author, thanks for the recommendation!

Thank you for the recommendation! I will check it out

I agree, our ambition seems useful at first but tends to become a curse once we have what we need. If you take space exploration as an example, I feel that until we go to mars humanity is always going to want to go to mars. And then, we will want to do the next thing. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, assuming we can. If we can, we will.

Unfortunately, a very annoying human happens to be leading this effort at the moment.