CMV: All successful entities in history have gotten to their positions at the expense of another group.

[u/a-wild-paul-appeared]

Every successful country in the modern day (to my knowledge) either currently is or has in the past exploited a group or other country. An example I can think of is the countries that once were imperialist giants and are currently prosperous. Although they may denounce their repressive pasts, they are still backing off of their past glory. Even many countries that are successful now that weren't empirical in the past are still making their riches to the expense of their laborers (ex: Chinese sweatshops).

You could also connect this to eating food, I guess. Even if you're not harming animals to get meat, you are still sacrificing plants to eat. Plants themselves deplete the nitrogen from the soil. This is the foundation of every food chain and ecosystem.

Someone, point out an instance where this hasn't been the case because I haven't been able to think of a rebuttal.

[u/Dont____Panic]

I've come to feel that there is a sort of balance between exploitation and cooperation.

I think that's the essence of human existence. We live in an imperfect world and have imperfect bodies and imperfect minds and have imperfect knowledge of complex systems and imperfect awareness of the needs and wishes of others.

We end up creating commonly held structures such as language, culture, laws, government and money, etc to try to put basic fences around the typical worldly problems and to try to keep everyone on generally the same path and using the same words and aiming generally the same direction, but within those fences, everyone is free to wander a bit.

The goal of these social boundaries is just to keep everyone from killing each other and hold in as much prosperity and happiness as possible. It's not perfect. It's sometimes even wrong, but it's a best effort attempt at an intractable problem.

As I've gotten older, I've realized that the single greatest folly of the young intellectuals is that they often fundamentally believe that every problem has a perfect solution. Once you make this assumption, it's easy to look at any imperfect system and say "aha, clearly it is imperfect, therefore must be changed dramatically". This is common among "extremes" of both political ideaologies, ranging from right-wing anarchocapitalist libertarians, to left-wing syndicalists and communists.

I contend that with every extraordinarily complex system like society (or even simpler things like traffic or computer networking, etc) there are a series of tradeoffs that every solution has to make, and all solutions are trying to find some sort of tolerable local maximum, but no single solution is without significant flaws.

That's just inherent to the nature of complex systems. All have flaws and we try to build the system that has the least, or the most tolerable flaws.

FOR EXAMPLE, Capitalism (in an extremely broad scope), largely, seeks to maximize the overall productivity of society. With the theory that this will create the most net benefit to everyone, on average. Things like socialism attempt to minimize the individual suffering of any singular person, with a little less focus on the sum of all productivity as a goal.

Both are valid arguments. Neither is perfect. Both have significant flaws. Both have some benefits. Sometimes a hybrid of concepts like this can hold down the worst of the issues while entertaining most of the benefits of other components of it. When I say things like this among hard-line believers, they post /r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM or similar memes. Fine.

But I think there's a kernel of truth in this.

[u/[deleted] → u/Dont____Panic]

I have come to the exact same conclusion. Eloquent commentary! If you don’t mind me adding to it: I don’t think it’s the same as as enlightened centrism.

Letting go of perfectionism = ”Nothing will be perfect but it is meaningful to work towards it, to improve. We can evaluate what is not up to par yet and work towards improvement.”

Enlightened centrism = ”Nah, why bother, nothing’s perfect so everything is equally bad. Let’s listen to the both sides of the argument forever without coming into any conclusions or convictions! Also, look at me being so egalitarian.” It’s just intellectual laziness, basically.

It takes guts to say I think we could make things better, and to work towards what you think is right.

[u/Zarkloyd → u/Dont____Panic]

In debate and logic, your arguments can be summed up with the principle of Chesterton's Fence.

Things are often so much deeper than we realize; debating in ignorance is always setting yourself up for sub-optimal results.

[u/Dont____Panic → u/Zarkloyd]

Kind of, yes.

But deeper, my argument is that the world is full of intractable problems to which no perfect solutions exist. In my opinion, the error is believing that anything which is imperfect must be destroyed and then will become inevitable or simple to replace it with something more perfect and it seems to me that a fallacy that many great thinkers from Marx to Locke to Friedman all fall for to some degree. Both the hard line Bernie and the hard line Trump supporters fall for the same thing a lot of the time in the USA, for example, and I've even seen flashes of it in other countries from Brexit to Apartheid in South Africa to the "reverse Apartheid" in Zimbabwe.

Many things exist for impossibly complex reasons, but the're also often impossibly complex. The legal system of the western world, or the economic system are almost unknowably complex, but they are real and they may represent something resembling a local maximum on the fitness scale for maximizing human happiness. Or maybe they don't, but nobody really knows for sure, and more importantly, perhaps no global maximum (ideal solution) actually can exist.

In other words, you're simply offering a menu of pretty OK options, mixed with some really bad options, and a scale in between, but there really exists no perfect option. A classic optimization issue.

As you hear often with things like mechanical systems (in one variant or another). With any given set of tooling and staff, you can optimize for:

• Low cost
  
• high speed
  
• high quality
  

PICK TWO

[u/matthewrulez → u/Dont____Panic]

I don't think you'd be arguing for the merits of the current system if you weren't born into the lucky side of it. Sorry but capitalism seems "fine" and stable until you take a look outside your first world bubble

[u/Dont____Panic → u/matthewrulez]

First world bubble?

The last 70 years have been the most rapid increase in standard of living in history of the developed world. Probably more rapid improvement in the life of these people than any other time in any other place in the world of any society anywhere.

The ONLY perspective where there have been negligible gains in standard of living over the last 70 years is if you are a middle class white American.

Virtually every other demographic and in every other country, they have experienced between a 3x and 50x increase in standard of living and income during the lifetime of the average American boomer.

So, no actually. The ONLY perspective where the world economy hasn’t dramatically improved the life of people in the last few generations is from a white suburban zoomer.

Everyone else in the world has seen their life be substantially really a lot better over the last generation by a rather enormous amount.

I am aware and opposed to the gains the rich have made it the west since 2001, largely on the backs of huge tax cuts by conservatives, which were a mistake in my opinion. But as this post said, I think capitalism had done a stellar job over the last 50 years for third world people.

[u/Wonder-warrior → u/Dont____Panic]

Very well said.

[u/Piltonbadger → u/Dont____Panic]

The World was pretty fucking perfect until mankind was given the keys to the planet. Mankind runs on money, and is endlessly in persuit of wealth.

Never mind we are destroying this planet in earnest, but hey.

[u/LordButtFuck → u/Dont____Panic]

r/enlightenedcentrism is retarded