It's so funny i feel like I'm arguing with myself from 5 years ago because you're saying all the things I would have said.
In 1984 Geroge Orwell used Winstons fundamental betrayal of Julia as proof that love didn't exist and that self preservation was the primary concern of all humans.
For a good while I believed this bulshit, I don't have any room 101 fear and the only thing that would freak me out about rats eating my face would be the pain. So i figured pain was my Room 101 thing that would make me betray any person I loved.
But then my appendix burst and got infected and got an abscess because i kept ignoring it and I eventually reached what i would now call maybe a level 10 pain, but it came in waves and i'm naturally optimistic so i didn't feel the need to ring an ambulance, just wait for the next wave of non-pain.
ANYWAY while in this pain i delighted in finally being able to test the theory, and i found that not only did I not wish the pain on my mother or father, i could not wish it on my worst enemy, people who went out of their way to make my life hell. I just wanted the pain to be gone, and even if I had known i could have given the pain to those enemies i couldn't have done it because when you're in pain your personality doesn't even come into it and it felt that this pain was just a bad thing in the world which needed to be expelled and which no one deserved (except maybe me for not going to the doctor on the first day) .
I know that not everyone would feel this way, but i think that it is a more natural and default state than wanting to cause harm to another.
If my mother was in pain I and i could take that pain and give it to someone I hated I would do it in a second, I might even consider doing it to a random stranger. However I spoke to my mom about this and she agreed that when she couldn't walk for a year and was in great pain that she wouldn't have wished it on her worst enemy.
All I'm doing here is reinforcing the point that peoples primary concern are the people they know and love.
You seem to think this is a bad thing.
If I loved every stranger as much as my mother I would go crazy, I would need to spend time with them but have no way of dividing up my time, I would feel sad if i went a month without seeing and speaking to every single person on the face of the earth separately. If one person on earth had cancer I wouldn't be able to function i would feel so sad. It's just an insane idea. It's not natural and it's disgusting. We're supposed to love our families and / or our close friends. This is the way of it and it's a good thing.
( just used my mom as an example, of course i love my dad too )
I thought it was a stereotype and propaganda that communists were anti-family.
Of course we are all concerned for all the other people on the planet, every now and then it hits me like a ton of bricks the amount of suffering their is and the value of each one of those people and the thought is so sad i can't move until I can distract myself with some other thought.
Human beings are naturally altruistic. We want to help everyone and we want everyone to be happy. But. If we loved everyone like our parents the nature of mother nature (who is cruel- there will always be premature death, and even if we cured every disease on the planet there would always be mature death) is that we would be unspeakably sad all the time. Everyone on earth would partake of a suicide pact and we'd be gone in a couple of hours.
I said that ages ago, I said that (not in those words) in my first post, of course in this simplification of it you have to take family as an extension of self when pessimistic and held above the self when optimistic.
I don't know why you're mentioning this as I already told you all about them myself, you just wanted to give the statistics?
They have homes, they have food, they have free health care and access to free education. There are charities willing to help tem with things like counseling etc. Everything else is on them.
What else could possibly be done for them in any world or any society? Would you like us to kill them?
In your opinion, in my opinion its exactly what it means.
So you think that asking people to learn from their mistakes is the same as asking them to be perfect? You must have very low expectations of yourself.
when i answered that question you ridiculed me and said something along the lines of my optimism making you sick.
Fine, I should have said: to all intents and purposes as-good-as free, are you happy now?
I only buy second hand clothes, I was using that as a metaphor.
And that is complete nonsense again by the way, you know full well there are loads of jobs that can never be outsourced, all services,all tourism, all primary industries, most secondary industry (but not all). You're just being negative for the sake of being negative.
You want to believe the world is crap and always will be and you ignore proof and facts and information.
I'll let you in on a secret. Every generation tells themselves that. And long after you and I are dead and forgotten, people will still be telling themselves that their lifetime is the best time to be alive. It's an incredibly short-sighted viewpoint to have.
My optimism is based on facts. Your pessimism is based on nothing but misery and lack of faith in human nature.
You want them to match your view of the perfect human which is necessary for your view of the perfect world, you ignore the fact that they're already awesome and capable of creating a pretty fricking awesome world.
Fact: First world countries are as we speak getting medicine and aid and phones out to poorer countries and helping them build infrastructure, the things I am talking about are not "future capitalism" they have already been set in motion and they are already happening. We're in a transitional phase, but if things keep going as they're going you wil see what I'm talking about come about..
Fact: We are living in the least violent time in the history of the earth.
Human beings are evolving, we're getting less violent, more empathic, more altruistic, more intelligent, more educated, more understanding.
Unless something happens to interrupt this process (2012, alien invasion, communists or libertarians or some other crazies win election, animals take back the planet, trees overthrow the government) , everything is going to be fine