In my experience, the most driven, most successful people, at least in western culture, tend to be vacant idiots that never question or consider their impulses or actions. Ready, fire, aim people are rewarded over careful planners.
“Gifted” people tend to be cursed to overconsider their own actions, often to the point of indolence, all the while being expected to respect and appreciate our backwater, superstitious civilization controlled by obvious con-artists manipulating that superstition, altering the language to embed their con into the culture(ex: greedy fuck businessman = “rationally self-interested job creator”), etc, all to aquire more power and wealth, because it’s never enough. Our leaders have no grand intellectual vision or endgame, just “give me more!”
Possessing great intellect in this civilization is more curse than blessing. You know better, but are hopelessly outnumbered by selfish animals far more concerned with getting more than their fellow humans than maximizing happiness for the species and homeostasis for our sole, shared habitat.
Exactly. The rich monkeys are joined in common purpose, but not out of some grand coordinated conspiracy. Their wealth class values and interests simply align.
George Carlin said it best on an episode of politically incorrect once:
"You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they’re on the same boards of directors, they’re in the same country clubs. They have like interests, they don’t need to call a meeting. They know what’s good for them."
The severe, civilization scale consequences of the damage we have done, are presently doing, and will continue to do for private profit to our only habitat we all depemd on for survival from one moment to the next also doesn’t care about statecraft or political science attempts to minimize/ignore/discredit it through self-serving rhetoric of those in political power attempting to maintain that power.
Sorry. No bullshitting our way out of this one like it’s just another human on human genocide we can rebrand and massage the messaging of. The physics are determinate, and no amount our patented human extracted snake oil will change that.
Try to spin the greed vice, failing, and personality deficit as a positive like “rational self-interest” all day. Humanity sanctioning and even encouraging that darkest of impulses did this.
I believe humanity has passed the point where we can. We lack the will. We’re monkeys just barely smart enough with concerted effort to create technologies we lack the impulse control to wield responsibly. We figured out gun powder, and proceeded to use it to commit genocides, for example.
This wasn’t a problem for the planet, only one another, until industrialization. Now we’re addicted to technologies that make wealthy people wealthier while poisoning our only shared habitat. Now we’re monkeys with multiple, competing self-destructive but potentially profitable technologies all vying to blow up in our face in the quest to enrich those that hold their patents, and they answer to no one. World governments instead seem to answer to them.
So yeah, I don’t see a non-violent solution where you put a big red nuclear button in an orangutan sanctuary that looks like their food dispenser button, and taking thr big red nuclear button away from them, even by force, is off the table.
I can only control myself, I can’t force my fellow peasants to stop digging their own graves to further enrich a few thousand sociopath families who’ve convinced them this is the only way. There’s peace in acceptance I suppose.
The workers built the means, they just never owned them.
Let me guess, you think Steve Jobs made the iPhone because he pulled it out of his pocket on a stage and took the credit of engineers standing on the shoulders of publically funded basic research? Steve jobs couldn’t engineer his way out of a wet paper bag, and that is well documented.