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>Of course the slave owners don't want the slaves to stop serving them. Even if they did, we'd all starve if it happened in an unorganised way. I'm toying with
by SuoDuanDao 5y ago
>Of course the slave owners don't want the slaves to stop serving them.
Even if they did, we'd all starve if it happened in an unorganised way. I'm toying with a postindustrial fiction setting where one of the libertarian-inspired factions is explicit about this - capitalists whose highest value is freedom, where anyone can mint as much currency as they like, but it's backed by hours working as a slave. The eventual goal of the society is to have nobody redeem slave-tokens any more, but of course a lot of people's individual goals are more about accumulating as many slave-tokens as possible. I think it would take that kind of massive collective intelligence to really solve such a fundamental contradiction like our love for freedom and our love of telling other people what to do.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoIt's impossible to resolve this contradiction when an economy exists. The ambition to accumulate wealth and secure independence immediately manifests itself. The solution is to automate everything and free humanity from want permanently. When everything is abundant, there is no need to economize: post scarcity.
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoPost-scarcity is a noble goal! But a lot of people seem to put the cart before the horse and imagine eliminating the economy would cause post-scarcity to show up. To my mind the economy is a jagged, violent tool that aligns everyone's petty, selfish interests roughly with everyone else's. As the 'everyone's a central bank minting slavery-backed currency' thought experiment highlights, it's self-contradictory in some important ways. I still think it's the best tool available for the kind of changes that might lead to post-scarcity if we're lucky.