this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Degrowth
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Also what no one ever wants to admit is that this kind of system can only be carried out for so long before it collapses on its own.
If you start filling a million gallon wine glass on top of a bunch of small glasses, eventually you'll just crush and destroy everything at the bottom.
I like to imagine it as constructing a building. We keep building higher and higher, trying our best to place the richest at the very top and ever higher floor. To make it work, we keep taking building material from the foundation to build the penthouse. As the penthouse becomes higher and higher, heavier and more lavish, the foundation becomes thinner, smaller and weaker.
At one point we'll have an absolutely beautiful penthouse for a handful of people, resting on a very thin foundation that will eventually fail, fall and destroy everything and everyone.
That is part of the problem, when it collapses it hurts everybody. At least until something new can be set up. So much better to stop making it worse.
Hurts everyone except for the people at the top. The world is so globalized that they can easily fuck off with their digital money bank and not have to worry about the collapsed house of cards they left.
That's the great equalizer of imaginary money ... it requires a global system to manage it and make it possible and an entire population of people who believe in it and have faith it, much like a religion of sorts .... if the system falters, their money dies with it ... if the people lose faith, their wealth disappears as well.
That and global nuclear war that just sends every digital system no matter how robust back a hundred years and virtually vapourizing a lot of imaginary wealth for a lot of wealthy people.
In my personal opinion, its the only thing that keeps us from destroying ourselves ... they know if they try to take all wealth, theirs will disappear ... they also know that if we lose faith in the system, nothing is worth anything any more ... they also know that if we all gain a bit of wealth, they lose power over us
So leaders and wealthy elites have to walk a fine line between fleecing us on a regular basis and giving us just enough to keep holding faith in the system.
It's funny when you think about it .... imaginary wealth is what caused all these problems .. but its also imaginary wealth that is preventing us from destroying ourselves
It's like what Homer Simpson famously said about alcohol .... "Alcohol the cause of and solution to ... all of life's problems"
That would be the absolute worst case scenario which I don't think would happen. Barring world nuclear holocaust they're pretty immune. Look at the Russian oligarchs, for the most part even with their assets frozen in multiple countries they're still living in opulence as they have money stored in plenty of countries that don't hate them. That's the trick, they're so rich they cna afford to have multi million dollar piggy banks all over the place.