Political compass for the21st century

[pbrower2a]

(02-11-2019, 04:40 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: As for Maslow's silly old pyramid: there were many people willing to sacrifice physical survival for idealistic values. I think it's enough to debunk this geekery.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs encompasses much of human experience. Imagine yourself as a diver, and shipwreck treasure of great value is within an easy dive. If you recover it you solve all the economic problems that you can ever have. The problem is that between your boat and the treasure is...





some of the deadliest stingers (box jellies) in the sea. If you find the shipwreck treasure and encounter these you might not survive to enjoy the proceeds of the treasure that you find, and the pain will resemble being burned alive from inside. You might better return some other time, as in a season in which the stingers have moved on.

It is possible to cheat, but it is rarely successful. A gangster may live far better, at least materially, than an honest laborer, but the honest laborer has at the least no need to concern himself with law enforcement that wishes to put an end to a criminal enterprise such as dealing drugs or labor racketeering -- or with the desire of a rival thug eliminating one so that the rival can enhance his 'market share'.

The worst people of all time have exploited, abused, and humiliated others by keeping people at the lowest levels -- in fear of death or excruciating pain, perhaps working them to exhaustion on starvation rations. It is possible to get the highest level of profit share out of an economy if one reduces people to zeks or slaves. it is also unspeakable.

The only successful cheat that I can imagine is religious ecstasy, as illustrated with those doomed Christians awaiting the lions in Quo Vadis?
In view of what those early Christians believed, that they would go directly to Heaven soon after the lions severed their spinal cords with those horrific fangs, it is easy to see how no other misery in This World could matter -- as it would all come to an end. In some cultures, reciting either the shahada or the Shema Yisrael  might be what one expects.

Still, poverty, loneliness, subjection, and addiction are miserable. Whitney Houston may have been the most successful female singer in her time, but with her cocaine habit she could certainly not self-actualize. Someone like John Gotti could spend enviably by the standards of the honest laborers in his world... but in the end, the Feds got him and put an end to his compromise between ethical vileness and a hollow material success.

So what can I say of someone who says "I can make more money dealing drugs" as an alternative to spending a few years working for a near-minimum wage in a fast-food place? Sure, there is more money, and it will all be cash. As such you will be able to spend it recklessly as someone working in a fast-food place can't. Sure, American poverty is unforgiving in recent years -- but at least in a fast-food place one will get to determine what one does best and not so well and find out how to apply oneself elsewhere in which one can specialize in what one does best. The habit of kissing up to anything with two legs is good for getting along in a grossly-inequitable society... and one might makes some friends there. One does not make genuine friends while dealing drugs. If something goes wrong while you deal drugs -- becoming an addict or being killed by a fellow drug-dealer in a turf war, or getting caught by law enforcement and having to start over in an environment that offers less opportunity than a fast-food place for developing individual talent -- the money that one made dealing drugs will not be waiting for you in some trust fund to ease the transition to the world of honest toil for meager income.

I don't want to go into any details, but I am now just on the margin between the level of safety needs and the 'belonging' needs. Having been at a 'higher' level at times, and with no certainty of getting back there (for one thing I am in what I consider a community in which most people think like peasants, to which I can't relate readily -- and I am on the autistic spectrum which makes developing any intimacy difficult for me as doing integral calculus is difficult for most people. I'd rather have the knack for making friends than knowing integral calculus).

I despise a community that has little to offer me but a stereotypical and hypocritical existence while damning me to both a poverty of material life and experience. I hate an economic order whose elites tell the rest of Humanity to suffer so that those elites can indulge themselves lavishly but offer as a shadow of happiness the dubious delight of taking vicarious enjoyment in their ostentatious display. No philosophical or intellectual trick can redeem life in such a situation. Religious ecstasy? I am tempted to recognize God as a sadist, the operator of a world little better than a plantation -- and we are expected to praise Him for that?