this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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There is no limit to the amazing shit you can do if you have power and ignore human suffering
While this is true, and there were definitely some people who suffered making the pyramids, many were just the most skilled artisans of their day. Egypt brain-drained the rest of the world for thousands of years by being the best of the best of the best.
It's amazing what you can do when you spend all that time attracting and cultivating that much ingenuity. In the course of human history, it's really only happened a handful of times. I read somewhere once that when you have that many intelligent people in a room you either build the pyramids or go to the Moon.
Yeah that's another way of looking at it. Excessive productivity creates a class that can live in leisure and luxury and experiment with new ideas, and that can lead to useful advances. Just like it's sometimes argued that war leads to technological advances.
And then God came and ruined it all just because of a little slavery!
The pyramids weren't built by slaves.
True, the people that build the pyramids were paid and fed relatively well and probably believed they served their God-emperor. But they also had slavery which helped them create enough wealth to do this. So still the pyramids were only possible because of a lot of human suffering.
Modern globalized society is in the same boat, but yet at the very least it is the least-impoverished empire in human history.
When the gamer you play Call of Duty with could be a kid living in South Africa (and yes, I do mean an average black South African and not the kid of some wealthy expats/diplomats/colonial old money) or Nigeria (ditto) and the world's largest country is a democracy (India, it recently surpassed China's population) yet we're still convinced the future is doomed to be The Hunger Games, I think it's time to admit that the anger of 9/11 and the Great Recession not only led to hate led to suffering, it then led to cynicism, defeatism, nihilism and finally outright anti-humanitaianism.
You want something to be scared of? Even monsters like the Nazis had an ideal, you clearly just want the world to burn because it's easier to sit in a chair reading social media and doing nothing to actually solve the problem until things get bad enough that you have a perfect excuse to go hurt whoever you disagree with. You know who was doing that during and leading up to WWII? The sheeple that let the Nazi party take power. Don't be a fucking tool, especially not a tool of oppression. Careless realism costs souls, regardless of whether a soul is immortal or a scientifically-quantifiable finite mental construct, and even if you honestly came to the conclusion free will is an illusion it would mean our entire moral and legal case against slavery comes into question.
Seriously. Find an ideal, please, especially if its one that keeps you from hurting people instead of blindly hating anything that could be achieved. I don't know you, but I know the internet and I've been seeing this pattern of existential anti-humanitarian (my best attempt at a philosophical label for it) behavior online since 2017 and I do not like what I'm seeing coming. If you don't find something to live/die to protect, then someone seeking a mob to do their dirty work will, and if that happens the "ideal" you will be serving will be a lie and anything but ideal.
Thanks for the interesting comment, I'm not quite sure why you're addressing it to me - I'm the very picture of mental health!
This'd be cool on a tshirt lol
take that quote to Reddit and some bot will make a t-shirt and a mug out of it.
But the products will be a scam and you can't actually buy them.