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0 pointseevilspock5y ago0 comments

So imagine we are shipwrecked on an island, and circumstances are such that muscle, hunting skills and fishing/swimming/skin diving ability is more important for survival of the group than the kind of brain that software developers have. So all of a sudden these physical folk have the leverage (aka "merit") to demand a greater share of the resources and power, and pretty soon the software developers are forced to cook, clean and do chores for them.

Thus "merit" is very circumstantial. Why does one group "deserve" to be wealthy in one circumstance, and another in a different circumstance?

Everyone in our deeply capitalist culture uses the words "merit" and "deserve" in a deeply moral sense to describe something that isn't moral at all. As Inigo Montoya once said, "You keep using that word..."

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strikelaserclaw5y ago· 1 in thread

First of all i never mentioned merit or who deserves what. I merely stated my opinion as to the organizing principle that would lead to the happiness quotient over the population to be maximal. Ultimately i believe power should lie with the people and not with the elite. If i could make a recommendation to the people, i would tell them that there will always be an elite and that it's better to have intelligent, hardworking elite (who have a responsibility to the people) rather than an elite based on hereditary or based on power.

eevilspockOP5y ago

I was speaking to everyone, not you specifically. I basically agree with what you wrote, except the part about "top of society".

You have a group of good friends. A group of friends that genuinely cares about each other as individuals as well as the health of the group as a whole. One of you is better at leading, or mediating disputes, is calm under stress, or has a car or a bigger house or more money. The group deciding/allowing this person should generally lead, or is the one that drives everyone around, or pays for more things, doesn't mean they are "at the top of the group". There is simply no need for that. It's simply a group being both loving and smart, one that understands fairness isn't about bean counting, and it was luck in the first place that gave one member those advantages.

A healthy, unselfish, "egalitarian" group or family will naturally, without ever having knowing about “socialism” or “communism”, will end up embodying "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". This ideal does not imply allowing anyone to take advantage of the others.

In fact I'll claim that all healthy families embody this kind of socialistic ideal. Whether and how this can scale to a society is debatable, but we should have that debate honestly, and without being constrained by presupposing the current way of looking at things is somehow an absolute truth. People once thought that the divine right of kings was absolute truth. Or that white people were superior (even Lincoln believed this). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590540

One of my most favorite words is “solidarity”. I don’t think many people in this selfist day and age really knows what that means.

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