[ap99]

I think it's more trying to say, if an individual cannot support themselves or provide value to others who can support them then those other intangible factors don't matter too much.

In the first world we have a ton of excess value so we can do things like homeless shelters, charity, socialized medicine, etc.

But if we suddenly don't have that excess value to spread around and it becomes either I eat today or you eat today and I'm the one who farmed the wheat and made the bread -- me and my family are going to eat today.

We go back to "fair" very fast.

[tvier]

I think that is a more clear framing of what the OP was saying, and if they had written it that way I probably wouldn't have bothered replying. It just had a very fatalistic tone I didn't agree with.

I still disagree though, the relationship between scarcity and generosity is very complex.

And as an aside, homeless shelters and socialized medicine are cheaper than the alternatives in developed nations, so I would argue those are the sign of good governance rather than excess value. Although that depends on your definition of value...

[_DeadFred_]

If you're focused on farming and I'm focused on taking the product of your labor I win. Your attention/resources are split between producing and defending yourself/survival. Mine is entirely focused on extraction.

Over time the imbalance compounds. I spend all my effort improving the mechanisms of coercion and extraction. You split yours between survival and production. I get better at taking you get just good enough at surviving to keep producing. The system stabilizes around that balance with you allowed enough to survive, but not enough to escape the cycle.

We have had extra excess because for a little while enough of us didn't think in the hundred thousand year old way you wrote. But the 'modern' tech bro world isn't able to get away from the hundred thousand year old thinking. And generations of progress potentially erode because the systems of power guiding them haven’t evolved beyond ancient incentives with all signs now pointing to new locked in systems of control instead of shared prosperity.