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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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While i too yearn for the downfall of capitalism, pre-capitalist societies were still responsible for environmental distruction, slavery and genocide.
As long as individuals or a small elite have enough power to enforce their needs over the needs of everyone else, we'll always have capital-b Badnesses.
We have to usher in the collapse of perminant heirarchies, whatever form they take.
We really need the death of money more than we need the death of capitalism. Because you're right, even before rampant capitalism, we still weren't really great to each other.
What's amazing to me is I'm perfectly content to live and let live. My neighbors, friends, family, all of us....ain't got no beef with anybody. Why does this fail so badly when scaled up?
There's a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.
Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.
Or that's how i see the problem.
Well that makes the problem even more blatantly obvious...the problem is social hierarchy. It's impossible to have equality and hierarchy simultaneously...they are mutually exclusive.
They (the ruling classes) are vastly outnumbered, yet they manage to gain control over the masses below them, such that we must support them or the whole thing crumbles.
They've got the supporting class believing that we need them....but really that couldn't be further from the truth.
The problem is, though, as soon as one ruler is gone, another replaces them, and that one is equally corrupt. And the cycle repeats.
But conversely, I don't see how a non-hierarchal society could function, because that implies there must be some sort of order, mediation, and enforcement, which automatically means that some people will have authority over others, no matter how you slice it.
There are lots of ways to organize people that aren't heirarchical, or that dilute or limit power rather than concentrating it.
Directly voting for laws, appointing officials by sortition - like being picked for jury duty, pushing decisions down to neighbourhood councils, consensus decision making, a culture that always permits insulting the successful and plenty else has been suggested.
It all comes with drawbacks of it's own, of course. And having grown up in a heirarchical society, it can be very hard to imagine anything else, until you read about all the times and places where people have organized themselves differently.
Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.
That's exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don't really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that's just not in our ape nature.
That would be nice, but is it realistic? It's not just that humanity has always had hierarchies. It's that it seems to be a feature of even the animal kingdom. It also seems like when people try to create a system without hierarchies, someone steps into the power vacuum. The end result is that things are even worse for the people at the bottom.
Maybe a better plan is to accept that human animals are going to end up having hierarchies, and instead of trying to completely eliminate them, instead aim to shrink them as much as possible while still maintaining a functional government that at least somewhat answers to the people at the bottom.
I was careful to say perminant heirarchies for that reason. Bao Jingyan said that power originates in the contrast between the weak and the strong, and the cunning and the naive. I'm inclined to agree.
But we can have social institutions that break up and flush out these natural channels of inequality, rather than institutions that metastize them into heirarchies.
Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen. We could tax all inheritance above say 500k at 100%. Eliminate all personal debt every 7 years.
There's a lot we can do to make heirarchies more temporary.
Yeah, but nothing is perminant, (or permanent). All hierarchies are temporary because everything is temporary.
People have come up with ideas since forever. I'm sure the first philosophy on the redistribution of wealth was "Unga bunga, bunga unga bunga!" The problem is putting those ideas into practice. So far, when people try to eliminate hierarchies, the result is that someone comes in and takes advantage of the people who don't think there's a hierarchy.
Humanity itself may be temporary, but it seems like the idea of hierarchies will outlive humanity.