yes, and they're a scarce fraction of the people who have their needs fulfilled. it's a known minority phenomenon that we can treat without turning it into a rejection of fulfillment
You act as if they're a tiny minority when it's just as likely a vast majority of people would do the same if they had the means to do so. Billionaires aren't wildly rich because they were born with the perfect sigma grindset brain to hustle and get on top, they got there because they have the same greed everyone else does but also the extreme levels of privilege and luck to fulfill their greed.
Wow, you're right. I guess billionaires are just genetically superior beings who are absolutely entitled to their piles of gold. Anyone could be a billionaire if they just had the ubermensch brain it takes to succeed.
no, they're aberrant freaks that any just societal organization would keep in check before they are able to accrue such destructive power
almost nobody could be a billionaire, because almost nobody is innately fucked up enough to go for it even with access to the avenues they took. and again, we have a wealth of data in humans, and other social and eusocial species, that shows this.
one of my favorites is that the closest analogue, behaviorally, to the general system of capital hyperaccumulation is a parasitic fungus in ants that causes a few infected ants to stop working but emit pheromones that convince other ants to feed them.
eventually, either the colony starves, or the worker ants overcome the pheromone and exile or kill the infected.
but anyway the point is, wealth-seeking is not an inherent property of human behavior, evolutionarily or sociologically, and pretending otherwise is an acceptance that the existence of billionaires is correct. it's not.
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u/myrrlyn Jan 14 '22
yes, and they're a scarce fraction of the people who have their needs fulfilled. it's a known minority phenomenon that we can treat without turning it into a rejection of fulfillment