feelings.
Still, I can see how it’s cons idered unfair for some Americans to have hugely more “future energy control” (money) than others. I get it. It feels – to the caveman brains you still sport - like it should all be split evenly, right? But “split evenly” with whom? Your tribe? Your state? Your nation? Your continent? People already born? Just your species? (Check the next section to follow-up on that idea). In nature, unequal “wealth” serves an ecological purpose – the “poor” die off in tough times while the “rich” survive, rather than an entire species going extinct in a bad year. That’s why your pre - programmed “gene agenda” will always try to convince you to exist as 20 billion starving humans with a large range of wealth rather than two billion happy ones existing in equality. That is, while you insist on equality (or actually, you protest perceived in equality), you also are programmed to insist on doing a large number of things, leading some to excel according to their innate talents, but which makes true equitable distribution nearly impossible. As an alien counterpoint, I’ll note, money held by the ultra -rich humans seems to be generally hoarded (hence the term “billionaire”), while money given to the less- rich is immediately spent (hence the term “payday shopping spree”). One is (mostly) an abstract future claim on energy and resources, which may or may not ever be called in, while the other actually draws down finite energy and resources immediately. Ergo, digital wealth
(that is, much of the wealth of the wealthy) doesn’t turn into neurotransmi tters plus materials plus pollution….until it does.
Ah, but what about the rich who DO spend their money... which is to say, most Americans? Relative to those in other nations, you waste huge amounts of money/energy. Yet ironically, such conspicuous waste may ultimately prove more humane than an egalitarian split among all extant humans, by constituting a nonlethal “buffer” against the inevitable energy decline later this century. This admittedly alien observation derives from the fact that you currently have no mechanism to NOT dig up and destroy all your resources, as the current human economic system requires doing so for “growth”! So IF that insane euphemism is to continue to be your guiding light, then “waste” could be a more humane alternative to Malthusian overshoot. That is, the top tier losing some toys and luxuries might be better than the planet going from 20 billion to 5 billion lives via starvation (though clearly it would be FAR better to adopt a system which enabled you not to waste it at all, and to be at least a LITTLE fair to those who come after you.)
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