It's not surprising to me whatsoever that within that same sentence that as you said, "leads to authoritarianism", is a reference to absolute morality and sin.

The scariest part of this line of thinking being so common is that it has happened! We've bench-marked humanity towards productivity before: dosed drinking water with amphetamines instead of fluoride and outlawed art and mandated labor at tank factories. Productivity!

Down that path lies authoritarianism, but more than that: down that path lies mass murder. What could be more productive than removing those who block productivity?

I appreciate your comment but I am always blown away by how kindly people respond to that idea of "unworthy activity", as if its not one of the cruelest ideas a person can possibly have. It's more common here because it's a community of engineers - we work with complex automations all the time - so it's only a natural mistake to see humanity as a complex automation too, and want to engineer it. But I still can't forgive the callousness.

I think you may be confusing economics terms with moral and ethical distinctions. I’ll grant that the idea of productive and unproductive labor is an outdated economic concept.

Regardless, academically defining something as more or less productive than something else is not authoritarian. Nor is deciding personally if something is “good” or “bad”.

Now if someone in government decided to create and pass legislation based on their personal academic or philosophical beliefs, and not based on some factual usefulness of the legislation, than I think that would fall under the definition of authoritarian.

Great point

But this is the nature of a casino. One out of ten people gets a big payout for the same basic actions. If you're among the other nine people like I am, you take it in stride. You don't jump and cannibalize the guy who won. Not least because your self-esteem shouldn't be contingent upon how much money you have compared to someone else. People who win big randomly can't really be proud of what they have. But if you know you earned and deserve what you have, you can have pride. True pride in yourself is more valuable than money. I see this every single day with the ultra-rich I work for. The ones who got it by luck have no self control or pride. They'll soon lose it. I really don't care if they have more goodies than me. But that's because I have pride in myself, and it's ugly and despicable to base your self worth on comparing what you have to other people's material wealth.

In fact, frequently I feel sorry for them because they seem so desperate to be friends with me - because my life experience had been "real" and presented me with real shit they never had to deal with. They lack more for true friends than you or I. And I can't covet what they have when I can see, plainly, that I wouldn't want to trade places with them. And that a lot of times they want to trade places with me.

We all die. Happiness and bliss is just as likely to find you in a park behind a dumpster as in a penthouse. All the rest of the angst about judging who deserves what is just a waste of the time you have on this earth to define yourself independently.

This isn't lucky, but besides that, no, I'm not happy when a very small percentage of our population "gets lucky". We should have 80% of this country be able to afford a home, a vehicle, have affordable healthcare, and a minimum of 4 weeks vacation in the modern 21st century.

Everything else is just a smoke screen to make "your lucky existence" justified compared to the masses who did nothing wrong except be born into this system.