If you think about the brutality of nature, which we are mostly isolated from, then yeah, organisms in general do have to earn their right to life through overcoming and eating other organisms.
Which was the point of civilization. To isolate us from that hell.
I said this on Reddit and they agreed that you don’t deserve to be alive if you’re not working, it’s really a disease of the mind to believe this shit.
There is a difference between believing everyone owes a debt to the society and civilization you participate in to support those who cannot support themselves, and not deserving to live if you didn’t fit into the rigid hierarchy structures we’ve built for work. But often these sentiments get mixed together.
I don’t think they do. In our society we don’t really let people die just because they don’t fit in. When there’s someone who can’t take care of their self, we take care of them.
Where are you talking about and comparing to what? Cause I see a lot of people dying in the streets because of mental illness or drug addiction when I take the subway to work. We don’t throw them away like ancient Sparta but we definitely don’t come close to providing the services they need to the things they need to begin to get off the street. Cause the solution now is put the homeless in prison and that’s going just fine right? …Right?
I’m talking about basically the entire human civilization, as opposed to a civilization in which people are just permitted to die.
But most of my experience is with the united states. We take care of people left and right, and don’t let them die.
Do you know of a place that isn’t like this? If so, where?
Lmao. What fairy tale society do you live in?
As a selfish conservative you should already know that they are the exact ones who want to steal every single security net from every citizen whilst simultaneously enabling corporations to destroy unions and create monopolies.
I mean c’mon, you have to know this. It’s the core tenet of the traitor supporting party. Thieving, stealing, cheating, and lying are all that the magat traitors have to offer.
I live in reality, and I myself have been given free resources when I’ve been unable to work.
In my country, I have never seen a hungry person who could not obtain food due to lack of fitting in or having money or any requirement other than “oh that person has a stomach and needs food, so let’s feed them”.
That is the reality I see all around me. If you want to call that a “fairy tale”, I challenge you to provide evidence of a person being treated in the way you’re describing. Anywhere other than say a concentration camp or japanese pow camp.
What part of our society is letting people die because they don’t fit in? This is a serious question, because everybody seems to believe what I’m saying is a fairy tale, and yet I see it happening all around me.
How, exactly, are you getting the impression out society is one that doesn’t value the life of people who don’t fit in?
Lmao you do realize Republicans are campaigning on ELIMINATING school lunches for underprivileged children?
They are also planning on cutting social security and other safety nets.
They want poor and disabled people to starve. It’s their only plan.
It’s more like you haven’t earned the right for other people to do the work of keeping you alive.
Human life requires work to sustain. Someone has to do that work. The most fair system is one in which that responsibility falls on the person benefitting from it.
ie, to be alive, you must contribute work. Because your life requires work to maintain.
This meme is mainly talking about workers who are worked to death to “earn a living”. Capitalists who leech off of workers do not deserve to be alive.
Of course, that’s not the case for those who are physically unable to work to the same extent as others. Basically, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
We have more than enough resources for everyone, so long as the working class can control the means of production instead of the capitalists who try to hoard all the wealth.
I could see why tho. What happens today is not the same as this ideal probably. You could argue that if your a fit, 20s, healthy, etc. and you just sit home all day, your kinda a waste, but then again siting somewhere else 9-5 is also a waste so.
Eh, I can see why would someone think that. There are things that I disagree with more.
I’m pro unconditional basic income, but I would argue that it’s more about you having to make sure you have everything you need yourself. No one would say to someone who lives completely self-sufficient that he needs “to earn a living”.
Actually, “earning a living” is an example of an idiom, and it is not meant to be interpreted literally. It just means aquiring the income necessary to pay for the basic expenses of modern life. You may also notice that people rarely find themselves inside of pickles or with butterflies in their stomachs, but before you get angry that someone is suggesting you should break your leg, remember that figurative speech is fairly common.
Yeah whatever. You still don’t get to justify sitting on your ass and doing literally nothing unless crippled or ancient.
Yeah! Dumb babies expecting a handout! Fuck em, they need to earn their keep, let’s leave them on a mountain and see if they come back with ore to sell for breast milk.
You need to consume to live. This means you need to manipulate your surroundings in order to survive. So you need to work to have your basic needs meet. You don’t just get to live with zero effort.
This is the natural order, yet paraplegics live, why? Because we live in a society that attempts to circumvent the natural order in many ways, for the good of all.
You should take a broader materialistic look on society, who does the work (the working class), who benefits from the work (the owner class), and instead of focusing on amping up people to devote their lives to serve the interests of capital, instead focus to reframe the goals of society to serve the interests of workers, which includes working less, or even not at all. Work is not labor.
That’s an entirely different argument. I agree with you on that topic. Reframing capitalism to fit human well being is what we should do. But feeding everyone for free with zero work from anyone just isn’t possible. Saying there are starving people because capitalism is just straight up wrong. There have always been starving people and probably will always be. Feeding everyone is logistically crazy difficult. If it ever did happen it would take a ridiculous amount of work and money from a lot of people.
Socialists use work and labor to describe different things. Work is the set of actions a worker is coerced to participate in by capitalists to align with the interests of capital. Labor can be something you engage in as part of work, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes people have jobs that are so inefficient or bullshit that they literally don’t labor at all at work (read Bullshit Jobs).
Labor is necessary (currently), work is not. Aligning with the interests of capital is not synonymous with the interests of humanity (think ad work, literally encouraging greater consumption, especially around harmful products like tobacco/alcohol/sugar. Most western countries now have bans on tobacco advertising, but still let advertising in general flourish).
On the topic of feeding everyone, it would be very logistically difficult in the 1600s no doubt. Now we have a massive international trade system, I can easily get massive amounts of goods shipped from the other side of the world in weeks or maybe months at the worst. We also produce enough food currently to feed 12 billion people, and that’s with our incredibly inefficient system of converting edible plant matter (mostly soy) to animals.
The issue is, under capitalism, poor people don’t deserve to eat. If they lack money, they’re better off dead than alive and consuming resources without paying for them, so that’s what the global international capitalist system does, it moves more than enough food great enough distances to feed everyone as it is. It just moves it to the rich countries where obesity has been a massive issue instead of the global south, because people in rich countries have the money to pay for food, and so they deserve to live (and overeat/waste food) but people born in Africa deserve death.
Capitalists often lose sight of what an economy is for. An economy isn’t something of value in and of itself, it’s about setting up incentives and systems to benefit humanity. Capitalism fails to do this in everyway that is uniquely capitalist. Anything it does right is attributed to the general functioning of markets, which existed before capitalism and can exist after capitalism (market socialism is a real thing). There are problems with markets no doubt, but capitalism really has no redeeming qualities when compared to market socialism. If you compare it to feudalism, it does do better at mobilizing productive forces, of course at the massive detriment to workers.
Thank you brave friend. I came here to say this.
I’m so fatigued by the sentiment behind this meme and so many others.
Ergh… there’s something intruding on my video game playing… what an inconvenience… boo hoo…
You’re infantilising disabled people.
Compassion is a part of human nature.
I think that people who need to be cared for should be cared for.
I think that’s a different issue than the one presented in the meme.
Is there a point of disability at which you no longer believe someone should be cared for? Like, say someone is colourblind and has no other conditions, do you think that person needs to earn their life?
So… let’s keep this in the context of the general population.
There seems to be a subset of perfectly well adjusted able bodied healthy adults that complain about anything that distracts them from video games.
I think that’s a problem.
How about you?
No, those are imaginary people you made up to complain about. And if you act on the existence of those fake people, you’ll harm actual people.
Why am I getting the feeling that the only people you acknowledge as actual are disabled?
You should. We’re not cave people, it’s the 21st century. We can provide for everyone easily.
We can provide shitty cheap unhealthy food to everyone sure. It wouldn’t be easy but yeah we could probably do that. But we absolutely would not be able to give people the kind of food they actually need.
Yes we would. And if we can’t, the cheap food should be free.
It should be sure. But that’s not our reality. Even if you take away monetary value things still hold more practical value. Try collecting and making food for 20 people. Go outside and find all that or grow it or whatever you have to do to get it tell me how long it’s you and how difficult it was to do. Now multiply that effort to 8 billion people.
I will play along with your experiment if you give me control of the government. That seems only fair, since we’re talking about the government providing for everyone.
We could be living in a post-scarcity society, but our capitalist overlords can’t profit from that, so, here we are.
I would love to live in a society where robots over produce everything. Unfortunately that isn’t our reality.
We live in interesting times. Every year it gets more interesting.
You didn’t read the article, did you? We already live in a post scarcity society. All of our scarcity, at least the kinds that are meaningful to the working class, is manufactured. We throw away perfectly good food in the dumpsters behind grocery stores because nobody paid for it, while people on the streets starve. Properties sit empty as an investment for corporations while people die out in the elements.
I really don’t think you understand how many people are in this world. Sure grocery stores donating food instead of throwing it away would help some. But providing good quality food to 8 billion people is not possible. Imo.
In any good society everyone who is able should be expected to contribute something though. Even in the wild you have the right to be alive but you don’t have the right to free food, shelter etc without working for it
Similarly under capitalism you’re not going to be executed for not working but also unless there’s a good reason you can’t contribute nobody’s going to work to feed you for nothing in return
The wild and capitalism both suck. Let’s have communism instead.
Sword Logic
I suppose it was the same back in the ancient times but you had to ask the saber kitty if you were worthy of passing your genes or not. /S
When you become a billionaire you should be forced to earn a living. Prove to the world why we shouldn’t eat you this year
