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by benreesman
574 days ago
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I want to answer this point separately. My standard of living ten years ago was so high it was honestly gross, I imagine it was easily in the ballpark of a BlackRock quant. The year I quit was my second highest earning year in which I made an amount that is shameful given that my job was to sell digital fentanyl. I will sacrifice my standard of living up to and including not living because I feel a deep identification with the abstraction I call “my fellow person”. A lot of people will sacrifice their principles to preserve their standard of living. In what is looking to be a rough decade or two those people are a liability to that same abstraction. |
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The line where principles outweigh personal interests (alternatively, where individual interest should be suppressed for the group) vary from person to person, group to group. But they are universally ahead of where those who’d prefer humans weren’t flawed, in their view, imagine them to be. The easy excuse is to conclude everyone is evil. The hard work, that granted few of us are cut out for, is making do with the world we have. (The fun, in exploring the richness these “flaws” produce.)
Note: I’m not asking anyone to settle for a lower moral rung. I’m saying: see the world as it is, not as you judge it to be. Would spacefaring be simpler without gravity? Yes. But the universe’s beauty, ourselves included, could not then exist. Human ambition and aspiration and yes, greed, are not aspects of ourselves I’d ever wish away. Even if it would make some problems easier.