3 ms·
Egalitarian? That just means equal protection under the law. I' guessing you mean something akin to everyone ending up with the same size basket of goodies at t
by ci5er 11y ago
Egalitarian? That just means equal protection under the law. I' guessing you mean something akin to everyone ending up with the same size basket of goodies at the end of each round of the game...
Of the societies we humans apparently know how to create... We know how to create societies with equal misery. We have from time-to-time been able to construct unequal societies with growing wealth, where everyone did better than their parents, over time -- and than those in many societies around them and in history.
What we have never been able to construct is a society where everyone is equal and wealthy and getting more-so. This may or may not be possible with human beings. One thing is certain -- we're not bees.
While poverty is a real tragedy and a real grind, a harm to people that should be mitigated, it's not clear that the fact that someone somewhere might be richer than me is any sort of tragedy whatsoever that needs to be addressed.
- wz1000 11y ago> What we have never been able to construct is a society where everyone is equal and wealthy and getting more-so. This may or may not be possible with human beings. One thing is certain -- we're not bees. This is false, or at least unjustified. Sure, an equal society may not grow as fast as an unequal one, and so the latter may take the former out of the competition. But how can you conclude that such a society won't progress in isolation?
- ci5er 11y ago> But how can you conclude that such a society won't progress in isolation? Don't know. We aren't bees or ants - we're tribal hierarchical apes - so we don't have a lot of isolated (or even positive) "everyone is equal here" examples to study. The socio-biologist E.O. Wilson, when asked about such altruistic-sounding theories, responded: "Right theory - wrong species".