6 ms·

I don't know why the poor just don't kill the rich, to be honest. I'm not poor, but if my child was suffering because of abject poverty and lack of healthcare w

I don't know why the poor just don't kill the rich, to be honest. I'm not poor, but if my child was suffering because of abject poverty and lack of healthcare while some asshole was buying a $50000 Birkin bag, I'd probably tear up the person with the bag. Why do the poor not just revolt?

reasonishy 11y ago
Isn't that pretty much why we have welfare - to give the poor protection money to stop them attacking? Sure, you could spend more on police, but it's probably more cost effective to just give poor people money to keep them a bit more docile.
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  Bread and circuses. Basic income could work even better, by giving more certainty. There's probably a better version of circuses too - it was TV, now the mainstream internet, but at least there's more opportunity to use the net to move forward.
joshuapants 11y ago
Please seek psychological help.
- RodericDay 11y ago
  It's a perfectly legitimate thing to ponder, even in movies like Denzel Washington's "John Q", and Amazon Billionaire Nick Hanauer's essay "The Pitchforks Are Coming (For Us Plutocrats)" [0]. If you bury your head in the sand and pretend that people will never break the social contract because "inequality doesn't matter" and "macroeconomic indicators look fine", you're going to miss a big part of the picture. [0] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfork...
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    Not advocating the murder of innocents is burying my head in the sand? Fascinating.
    - tomp 11y ago
      He/She posed it as a question worthy of discussion, s/he wasn't actually advocating murder. That's like saying, "How come bank tellers don't just rob the bank a bit every day?", a perfectly legitimate question.
      - joshuapants 11y ago
        > I don't know why the poor just don't kill the rich, to be honest > I'd probably tear up the person with the bag "I would literally murder a random innocent" is a bit different from what you suggest.
        tomp 11y ago
        Well, if I had to choose between having my child die and letting a rich person keep their $5k bag, I might do the same.
        joshuapants 11y ago
        > Well, if I had to choose between having my child die and letting a rich person keep their $5k bag, I might do the same. Where on earth did you pull this dichotomy from?
        zo1 11y ago
        It's a very common theme, actually. I'm not the OP who mentioned it, but I've heard the same basic form rehashed in many different ways. Essentially, morality and right/wrong are seen as "relative". Thus, you get situations where basic, very simple morals are thrown out the window by some sort of superseding narrative. Unfortunately, we're conditioned into it every day. Long story short: "it's okay to do bad things to bad people" is glorified and romanticized. While the opposite, absolute moral of "doing bad things is bad" is ignored. It's hard to not take this sort of discussion into the realm of politics. But, again, long story short: If we were ever to use absolute morals, we'd very quickly run into a slew of problems with most political systems every created or envisioned.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  I was wondering about the amount of hardship it would take for a person to reject the social contract. That is not psychopathy.
jeremyt 11y ago
Because people have an innate sense of right and wrong. The concept that you should not kill someone else in order to take with they have has been shown to be almost universal across time and culture.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- 13of40 11y ago
  I don't think that's the whole story. I read a really eye-opening book a while back that was essentially an insider's guide to surviving in prison, and one of the things that stuck with me was the idea that people behave themselves (for the most part) in that environment because there's always somewhere "further down" in the system they can send you as punishment. It's the same on the outside. In the US, at least, you have to be really, really poor before being in prison for the rest of your life is a better option. Most poor people have lives, friends, family, a daily routine, freedoms, possessions, etc., that they'd be putting at risk if they decided to start murdering random rich people. Especially at scale.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  That is not true. That standard has historically applied only to people who are "in your group". People throughout history have had no problem killing a neighboring tribe and taking over their stuff (including women and children). I doubt any poor person sees a rich person as a part of their extended social group. The psychological barrier does not exist.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  I really want a citation for that.
blfr 11y ago
People who have the capacity to start a revolution have the capacity to start money-making organizations and usually are pretty well off. This is how revolutions do happen: when capable, rising groups are blocked from advancing further.
zo1 11y ago
I'm more curious why the poor, and the rich aren't calling for more consequences for the politicians. The rich, and the poor alike understand that one of the main reasons for a government is to protect those who can't protect themselves (from circumstance, even). The money is there. The food is there. The shelter is there. It's all there, yet you see individuals suffering left, right and center and even dying. Meanwhile, we can't even get the politicians to provide basic housing, food, healthcare and jobs for society's bottom rung. Perhaps, the reason you question the use of violence as a solution to this problem is because you feel that there is no other recourse. We've been doing the "democracy" thing for a while, yet we can't get the basics right. Hell, we can't even up and call for a country-wide referendum on basic hotly-debated topics. It's all a circus, and the poor are barely getting enough bread to get by.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
Who do you think own all the guns.
- zo1 11y ago
  The government.
praptak 11y ago
Probably same reasons that keep them poor like being too busy with the day to day effort to stay afloat.
BerislavLopac 11y ago
Of course they do. When they do it individually, they quickly get arrested and thrown in jail. When they get organized, you get revolutions, which when successful end up by someone else becoming rich.
evanpw 11y ago
World GDP per capita (PPP) is about $13,000 / person [1]. So if the poor rose up, killed the rich, and distributed everything equally, then, assuming that the rich produce literally nothing and compensation has no effect on work effort, everyone in the world could make slightly less than the US minimum wage. [1] http://www.indexmundi.com/world/gdp_per_capita_(ppp).html http://www.indexmundi.com/world/gdp_per_capita_(ppp).html
informatimago 11y ago
Really this is an important point, expressed in the other answers. There is a game and there are rules of that game, and almost everybody adhere to those rules and play the game, winners or losers. Killing somebody, notably the rich, is a game move, and there are rules about it, like go to jail, don't get the $20,000. The question you're asking is why don't the poor just stop playing the game? Even rich people realize the game is no fun, and the losers of that game have a hard time, and I guess, some of them wouldn't mind stopping the game. The thing is that the game is rigged to ensure that you don't realize it's there, and to ensure that you run and run all the time to catch up, without time to stop and think about the game. Really, the majority in the middle can't take the time to think about it, and they still think they can win! Or if not them, their children. Only a few winners and losers could realize that. The losers, if they realize it, before they die, they can't do anything about it anyways, having to work hard to survive. The winners, they can't du much about it either, even with all their money, because everybody else wants to play the game. You could hope to try to change it thru education, but now it's obvious that education is rigged to maintain people in ignorance and have them keep running for the game. http://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=ur2&qid=1415945808&sr=8-1&tag=revolutcapita-20&linkId=5KXY4TEBP3WULKB5 http://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE/?_encod... You could hope to try to change it thru the political system, but now it's obvious that it is rigged by the winners to maintain a winning game for them. http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/tv_turnout.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/tv_turnout.pdf http://home.bi.no/fag89001/TV.pdf http://home.bi.no/fag89001/TV.pdf As mentionned in another answer, a revolt only lead to the reproduction of the game, with another set of winner (or often just the same), and this arguably comes from the fact that the formal rules are written down by the same set of people designated by the winners, instead of by the people doing the revolt. I'm talking here of the constitutions. So one way would be to educate people to teach them constitution writing so that they could write their own consititution next time they revolt, and not have the same bunch of goonies write it for the ex-winners so they can be the new winners again. But see the problem with education above. On the other hand, here is a little light, with the Internet, people could educate themselves. Learn about true democracy at http://le-message.org/?lang=en http://le-message.org/?lang=en and write constitution articles with your friends! But more than just the consitution and formal rules (laws) aspect to the game, it also exists in an informal way in the mind of people, culturally. The notions that you have to work to survive, the notion of money (and how it has been transformed in the recent centuries by the banksters), have to be changed. It's true that for a long time scarcity made it rather difficult to envision those changes. And the winners know it, since they are even today sending propaganda about a so called "Earth Overshoot Day" and other bullshit like overpopulation and climate "change", http://www.footprintnetwork.org/ http://www.footprintnetwork.org/ to program deeply into your mind the notion of scarcity. http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin/dp/2355120471 http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin... Instead, people we have to free ourselves from this mind set, learn about alternatives, and prepare for a real "revolution", where we will be able finally to get rid of the psychopaths "winners" of games, and of any "game" that pits man against man. https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/ http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ In the meantime, and pushed very hard by robotization and automation of enterprises, the establishment of a universal income, basic revenue, whatever you name it, should ease the transition and perhaps let us avoid a bloody revolt. There's also another dimension to take into account, that the poor are actually not in the same country or even the same continent as the rich. Some of those poor, pushed by war (resulting directly or indirectly from the USA and Europe action!), are migrating "refuge" into our countries; thus they are getting closer to the "rich", but most of the time they just start to run to play the game, happy of being already richer or more alive than their cousins they left home. Fighting fewer wars, killing fewer "dictators", and instead having some kind of international cooperation that would transform those countries into something less than us as we are now or were in the past couple of centuries, but instead more like what we'll be in a few centuries, could greatly help with this. Instead of killing a dictator, installing Internet in his country ought to be much more efficient. Instead of accepting the Internet filters of China, India or UK, promiting a free Internet everywhere could make it easier to resolve poverty everywhere.

reasonishy 11y ago

Isn't that pretty much why we have welfare - to give the poor protection money to stop them attacking? Sure, you could spend more on police, but it's probably more cost effective to just give poor people money to keep them a bit more docile.

hyperpallium 11y ago
Bread and circuses. Basic income could work even better, by giving more certainty. There's probably a better version of circuses too - it was TV, now the mainstream internet, but at least there's more opportunity to use the net to move forward.

joshuapants 11y ago

Please seek psychological help.

RodericDay 11y ago
It's a perfectly legitimate thing to ponder, even in movies like Denzel Washington's "John Q", and Amazon Billionaire Nick Hanauer's essay "The Pitchforks Are Coming (For Us Plutocrats)" [0]. If you bury your head in the sand and pretend that people will never break the social contract because "inequality doesn't matter" and "macroeconomic indicators look fine", you're going to miss a big part of the picture. [0] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfork...
- joshuapants 11y ago
  Not advocating the murder of innocents is burying my head in the sand? Fascinating.
  - tomp 11y ago
    He/She posed it as a question worthy of discussion, s/he wasn't actually advocating murder. That's like saying, "How come bank tellers don't just rob the bank a bit every day?", a perfectly legitimate question.
    - joshuapants 11y ago
      > I don't know why the poor just don't kill the rich, to be honest > I'd probably tear up the person with the bag "I would literally murder a random innocent" is a bit different from what you suggest.
      - tomp 11y ago
        Well, if I had to choose between having my child die and letting a rich person keep their $5k bag, I might do the same.
        joshuapants 11y ago
        > Well, if I had to choose between having my child die and letting a rich person keep their $5k bag, I might do the same. Where on earth did you pull this dichotomy from?
        zo1 11y ago
        It's a very common theme, actually. I'm not the OP who mentioned it, but I've heard the same basic form rehashed in many different ways. Essentially, morality and right/wrong are seen as "relative". Thus, you get situations where basic, very simple morals are thrown out the window by some sort of superseding narrative. Unfortunately, we're conditioned into it every day. Long story short: "it's okay to do bad things to bad people" is glorified and romanticized. While the opposite, absolute moral of "doing bad things is bad" is ignored. It's hard to not take this sort of discussion into the realm of politics. But, again, long story short: If we were ever to use absolute morals, we'd very quickly run into a slew of problems with most political systems every created or envisioned.
littletimmy 11y ago
I was wondering about the amount of hardship it would take for a person to reject the social contract. That is not psychopathy.

jeremyt 11y ago

Because people have an innate sense of right and wrong. The concept that you should not kill someone else in order to take with they have has been shown to be almost universal across time and culture.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
13of40 11y ago
I don't think that's the whole story. I read a really eye-opening book a while back that was essentially an insider's guide to surviving in prison, and one of the things that stuck with me was the idea that people behave themselves (for the most part) in that environment because there's always somewhere "further down" in the system they can send you as punishment. It's the same on the outside. In the US, at least, you have to be really, really poor before being in prison for the rest of your life is a better option. Most poor people have lives, friends, family, a daily routine, freedoms, possessions, etc., that they'd be putting at risk if they decided to start murdering random rich people. Especially at scale.
littletimmy 11y ago
That is not true. That standard has historically applied only to people who are "in your group". People throughout history have had no problem killing a neighboring tribe and taking over their stuff (including women and children). I doubt any poor person sees a rich person as a part of their extended social group. The psychological barrier does not exist.
johnchristopher 11y ago
I really want a citation for that.

blfr 11y ago

People who have the capacity to start a revolution have the capacity to start money-making organizations and usually are pretty well off. This is how revolutions do happen: when capable, rising groups are blocked from advancing further.

zo1 11y ago

I'm more curious why the poor, and the rich aren't calling for more consequences for the politicians. The rich, and the poor alike understand that one of the main reasons for a government is to protect those who can't protect themselves (from circumstance, even). The money is there. The food is there. The shelter is there. It's all there, yet you see individuals suffering left, right and center and even dying. Meanwhile, we can't even get the politicians to provide basic housing, food, healthcare and jobs for society's bottom rung. Perhaps, the reason you question the use of violence as a solution to this problem is because you feel that there is no other recourse. We've been doing the "democracy" thing for a while, yet we can't get the basics right. Hell, we can't even up and call for a country-wide referendum on basic hotly-debated topics. It's all a circus, and the poor are barely getting enough bread to get by.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

Who do you think own all the guns.

zo1 11y ago
The government.

praptak 11y ago

Probably same reasons that keep them poor like being too busy with the day to day effort to stay afloat.

BerislavLopac 11y ago

Of course they do. When they do it individually, they quickly get arrested and thrown in jail. When they get organized, you get revolutions, which when successful end up by someone else becoming rich.

evanpw 11y ago

World GDP per capita (PPP) is about $13,000 / person [1]. So if the poor rose up, killed the rich, and distributed everything equally, then, assuming that the rich produce literally nothing and compensation has no effect on work effort, everyone in the world could make slightly less than the US minimum wage. [1] http://www.indexmundi.com/world/gdp_per_capita_(ppp).html http://www.indexmundi.com/world/gdp_per_capita_(ppp).html

informatimago 11y ago

Really this is an important point, expressed in the other answers. There is a game and there are rules of that game, and almost everybody adhere to those rules and play the game, winners or losers. Killing somebody, notably the rich, is a game move, and there are rules about it, like go to jail, don't get the $20,000. The question you're asking is why don't the poor just stop playing the game? Even rich people realize the game is no fun, and the losers of that game have a hard time, and I guess, some of them wouldn't mind stopping the game. The thing is that the game is rigged to ensure that you don't realize it's there, and to ensure that you run and run all the time to catch up, without time to stop and think about the game. Really, the majority in the middle can't take the time to think about it, and they still think they can win! Or if not them, their children. Only a few winners and losers could realize that. The losers, if they realize it, before they die, they can't do anything about it anyways, having to work hard to survive. The winners, they can't du much about it either, even with all their money, because everybody else wants to play the game. You could hope to try to change it thru education, but now it's obvious that education is rigged to maintain people in ignorance and have them keep running for the game. http://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=ur2&qid=1415945808&sr=8-1&tag=revolutcapita-20&linkId=5KXY4TEBP3WULKB5 http://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE/?_encod... You could hope to try to change it thru the political system, but now it's obvious that it is rigged by the winners to maintain a winning game for them. http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/tv_turnout.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/tv_turnout.pdf http://home.bi.no/fag89001/TV.pdf http://home.bi.no/fag89001/TV.pdf As mentionned in another answer, a revolt only lead to the reproduction of the game, with another set of winner (or often just the same), and this arguably comes from the fact that the formal rules are written down by the same set of people designated by the winners, instead of by the people doing the revolt. I'm talking here of the constitutions. So one way would be to educate people to teach them constitution writing so that they could write their own consititution next time they revolt, and not have the same bunch of goonies write it for the ex-winners so they can be the new winners again. But see the problem with education above. On the other hand, here is a little light, with the Internet, people could educate themselves. Learn about true democracy at http://le-message.org/?lang=en http://le-message.org/?lang=en and write constitution articles with your friends! But more than just the consitution and formal rules (laws) aspect to the game, it also exists in an informal way in the mind of people, culturally. The notions that you have to work to survive, the notion of money (and how it has been transformed in the recent centuries by the banksters), have to be changed. It's true that for a long time scarcity made it rather difficult to envision those changes. And the winners know it, since they are even today sending propaganda about a so called "Earth Overshoot Day" and other bullshit like overpopulation and climate "change", http://www.footprintnetwork.org/ http://www.footprintnetwork.org/ to program deeply into your mind the notion of scarcity. http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin/dp/2355120471 http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin... Instead, people we have to free ourselves from this mind set, learn about alternatives, and prepare for a real "revolution", where we will be able finally to get rid of the psychopaths "winners" of games, and of any "game" that pits man against man. https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/ http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/ In the meantime, and pushed very hard by robotization and automation of enterprises, the establishment of a universal income, basic revenue, whatever you name it, should ease the transition and perhaps let us avoid a bloody revolt. There's also another dimension to take into account, that the poor are actually not in the same country or even the same continent as the rich. Some of those poor, pushed by war (resulting directly or indirectly from the USA and Europe action!), are migrating "refuge" into our countries; thus they are getting closer to the "rich", but most of the time they just start to run to play the game, happy of being already richer or more alive than their cousins they left home. Fighting fewer wars, killing fewer "dictators", and instead having some kind of international cooperation that would transform those countries into something less than us as we are now or were in the past couple of centuries, but instead more like what we'll be in a few centuries, could greatly help with this. Instead of killing a dictator, installing Internet in his country ought to be much more efficient. Instead of accepting the Internet filters of China, India or UK, promiting a free Internet everywhere could make it easier to resolve poverty everywhere.