This ain’t a shitpost, but it is a realpost
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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Yeah, I was confounded as to what about this was a shitpost.
Is there anyone who genuinely believes that working for basic needs is freedom?
I imagine the people who actually think about how they are working just for basic needs are mostly a different group of people than those yelling about freedom.
I don't know how many conservatives wake up in the morning with the feeling that everything they do is just to make some rich guy richer until they eventually die. Because why would they be a conservative at that point?
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I do wonder what the alternative is... Would that be growing/hunting your own food and making your own clothes and building your own shelter? I don't know about anyone else, but I would not live long in that scenario.
The context is that there is enough wealth in most western countries that not everyone must work to survive. Working should be for having access to more things that just surviving, and not everyone should be required to work all the time just to survive.
Basic needs are basic, like food, shelter, and healthcare. If everyone had access to those basic things they would be free even if they need to work to attain more.
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Surely there isn't an economic system in which people don't work for a top 1%, but for everyone, you could say a communal, or a social, economic system...
I mean, that experiment has been run and it is wildly difficult to manage (humans are quite wily!).
People said the same thing about not having kings
Well, we will need some different, better minds on it to see success. I'd embrace it if I thought someone had any vague idea of how to execute it.
Oh they will execute!
Not the experiment mind you, but the participants
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The alternative is all the wealth and resources hoarded by top 1% are shared among people so that everyone has access to basic stuff like food, shelter and healthcare regardless of whether they're able to work.
Which isn't to say this would be easy to achieve, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
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It's called democratic socialism.
You should tell this to subsistence farmers living in Sub-saharan Africa that farm nearly every calorie they consume. It's a negotiation between them, the earth, and the uncaring sky. Same as its been for millennia. No rich people necessarily involved.
Are they free because no rich people are involved?
Is every person in those communities required to work to eat and have shelter, or does the community take care of those that are unable to contribute labor due to health conditions/old age?
Everyone works, it's just a matter of on what.
In the community where I lived, usually the guys did the farming, which was back-breaking work, leaning over hoeing land manually. Men would also raise livestock, be tailors, teachers, traders, barbers, and a few other jobs. Don't get too wound up over "traders" - a guy would borrow money to walk to a large town and buy things he would sell to neighbors out of his home. He would do this until so many people said they would pay him back for the things from the "store" that he didn't have any money to buy things in town anymore, so the town would be without things like salt or kerosene for lanterns for a couple weeks, and then people would get fed up, and one new guy would start the cycle over again.
Women pounded the millet and sorghum into flour to make food, did gardening, made every meal, raised the kids, pulled water from the well, and some other micro-level cottage industry-ish type things.
But people worked every day. Old people worked every day. Unless you got malaria or had a severe injury, every day was work until you died, and even then you tried to do something because there was always so much work to do.
Some people took care of meals and the household. That isn't the kind of work to live that we are talking about because it isn't directly paid.
Not to mention people with severe injuries or illnesses that can't do hard labor. Someone with crippling arthritis will still be provided for by the community.
The lack of rich people doesn't imply freedom - people who are forced to hunt, gather, fish or farm for subsistence only with no reward beyond that are enslaved to the need to produce food and find shelter, but that differs from a society where there's sufficient food and shelter, it's just hoarded by those who have too much
Additionally the presence of rich people doesn't imply a lack of freedom - you could have a "safety net" system where everyone is guaranteed housing and enough grains and beans/similar to survive, and if they want more they can work for it (some of the taxes from this go towards compensating farmers and builders), giving people the freedom to not have to worry about survival, while also allowing for people to earn lots of money and buy nice things if they want and/or can
I can imagine by some stretch you can still blame the rich, maybe without the rich people they'd have more access to better farmland, cheap water, etc.
If you want to simplify the thought experiment, imagine being the only person in existence. You would still need to struggle just to meet the basic needs of survival, but you would definitely not be oppressed.
Nature is oppressive, so are billionaires. Working together helps overcome that, both when combatting nature and the asset class
I think that those are different meanings of the word "oppressive", which has a moral component when referring to human actions but not when referring to natural phenomena. You can only be wronged by another person, not by nature.
Imagine the following scenarios:
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You're alone on the planet. You struggle to survive.
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Now there's a wealthy person on the other side of the planet, where his lifestyle has no effect on you. He could rescue you but he chooses not to.
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The wealthy person offers to rescue you on the condition that you must work for him. He would get most of the products of your labor but survival would still be easier than it was when you were alone.
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Now you have no choice except to accept the wealthy person's offer. Survival is still easier than it would be if you were alone, but there isn't anywhere left where you could survive alone.
Your life is oppressive in each of these scenarios in the sense that simply surviving is difficult and there's no possibility of improvement. However, there's clearly no moral component to that in (1) because you are alone, and (4) seems like it almost certainly has a moral component. However, in every steps from (1) to (4) you're either better off or not worse off than you were before. Where does the moral component come from?
At step 3. Where the rich person forces conditions onto you and takes most of your production. That is immoral. Especially if he has the resources for both to survive with less effort just by not being selfish
Does it matter what your "default" state is? If you're safe until I threaten to harm you unless you comply with my demands, then I'm obviously oppressing you. If you're in danger until I offer to rescue you only if you comply with my demands, your options are the same (either harm or compliance) but the two situations don't intuitively feel morally equivalent to me.
With that said, humans do innately interpret an offer of rescue contingent on paying a very high price as a form of compulsion. Someone who makes such an offer is going to be viewed much more negatively than someone who simply does not offer to help at all. Maybe it's a way of making credible threats?
A purely logical person cannot negotiate with the rescuer, because the rescuer knows that purely logical people will pay any price. However, a person known to be irrational and willing to die rather than be taken advantage of can negotiate. There's a trade-off between the advantage of negotiating and the very high price of failing to come to an agreement, and I suppose the strength of humans' innate intolerance for unfairness has been tuned by evolution to attain this balance (or perhaps it attained balance in our ancestral environment but no longer does in our civilized state).
If you're in danger until I offer to rescue you only if you comply with my demands, your options are the same (either harm or compliance) but the two situations don't intuitively feel morally equivalent to me.
"Wow, your house is on fire! Shame, that.
...Would you like to be rescued, for only three easy payments of $99.99 USD?"
Also, I originally set the fire in the first place, but you don't know that. Six months after your last payment clears I'm going to do it again and the price will increase.
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Rich people are very likely at fault, too, given that shitty countries are handy for cheap labour and materials, like coltan...
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