[readyman]

Your platitudes do nothing to make up for the fact that wealth inequality is worse than it has ever been many times over. The cruel and unusual experience of such exploitation and social contortions faced by those at the bottom will always undermine your pathetic attempts to legitimate such ignorance.

[Ferret7446]

The quality of life of the poorest members of society is also much higher than it has ever been, indeed, much higher than historical kings and lords.

Unfortunately, people do tend to be happier if they're miserable among other miserable people, than if they were living comfortably among people with cooler things than them.

[readyman]

Your first point conflicts with your second. Maybe work on that.

It is very well understood across all relevant metrics that younger people are less economically secure than their parents. Coupled with extreme and growing wealth inequality, this is bound to be a political problem whether you like it or not. And, these suicide numbers suggest it may be a serious psychological problem as well. Your platitudes don't change that.

[tossandthrow]

can you elaborate? the current wealth inequality seems quite a bit better than a feudal society.

[readyman]

Feudalist societies were not organized by wealth but rather by roles that people were essentially born into. These roles were not achieved but rather understood as basically granted by god. Just as kings had divine rights, people had god-given qualities and understood themselves as having inherent and inherited positions in society, which effectively eliminated all of the social pressure and unusual contortions experienced by subjects under capitalism, even at the level of peasants. So-called fairness as we understand it today was not even a coherent concept at the societal level. Peasants owned nothing but also had far more freedoms and access to resources, which were eventually deemed property as humans entered into capitalism, which forced peasants into capitalist production as workers.

To understand the differences between feudalism and capitalism, you must also understand the conflict between the feudalist aristocracy (god-given) and the capitalist bourgeoise (industrious accumulators of capital). This conict was really the source of the shift to capitalism. The aristocracy could not compete with the capitalists as the capitalists promoted a story of mobility by accumulating capital. Of course, however, only a few can achieve that, and they basically still argue that their abilities are god-given. But the claim about abilities and hard work paying off vs. simple i herited permanent roles results in a much more damaging psychology.