The world is inherently unequal and unfair. We’re all born in different bodies with varying abilities and in different circumstances. The world we’re born into is one with scarce resources that cannot ever match our infinite desires. What this means is that there is no end state to social progress. There will always be inequality in the world. A world without inequality is a utopia, and utopias will never exist because they’re just fantasies.
But perhaps that’s not a bad thing. One of the hallmarks that define civilization is inequality. Inequality creates hierarchies, and hierarchies create order. It is through this order that we have been able to organize and mobilize to build the world we live in today. It is because people aren’t entirely equal that we have different people specializing in different things to give us our complex modern economies.
In a way, inequality could be seen as a law of nature just like death. It will be something that we can never defeat, but it will always be an issue that we try to solve, or at least avoid making worse. Our disdain for inequality could be an evolutionary trait that helps keeps our primate societies healthier and stronger. If this is the case then inequality is a never ending problem, and social progress will never cease to be. Sometime it’ll advance, sometimes it’ll regress, but the issue will never be resolved.
If you were to go a time machine and travel another 1000 years into the future. You won’t be stepping into a utopia, instead, you’ll be stepping into a much more complex and advanced society that will still be facing the same types of challenges we face now. These are also the same challenges that we have faced for thousands of years, throughout all of human history. Perhaps this struggle is just a part of human nature.
If you were to go a time machine and travel another 1000 years into the future. You won’t be stepping into a utopia, instead, you’ll be stepping into a much more complex and advanced society that will still be facing the same types of challenges we face now.
We are on track for +2.7C by the end of the century. I think society 1000 years from now will still be trying to scrape its way back up to Renaissance Europe levels of tech and complexity.
The world is inherently unequal and unfair. We’re all born in different bodies with varying abilities and in different circumstances. The world we’re born into is one with scarce resources that cannot ever match our infinite desires. What this means is that there is no end state to social progress. There will always be inequality in the world. A world without inequality is a utopia, and utopias will never exist because they’re just fantasies.
But perhaps that’s not a bad thing. One of the hallmarks that define civilization is inequality. Inequality creates hierarchies, and hierarchies create order. It is through this order that we have been able to organize and mobilize to build the world we live in today. It is because people aren’t entirely equal that we have different people specializing in different things to give us our complex modern economies.
In a way, inequality could be seen as a law of nature just like death. It will be something that we can never defeat, but it will always be an issue that we try to solve, or at least avoid making worse. Our disdain for inequality could be an evolutionary trait that helps keeps our primate societies healthier and stronger. If this is the case then inequality is a never ending problem, and social progress will never cease to be. Sometime it’ll advance, sometimes it’ll regress, but the issue will never be resolved.
If you were to go a time machine and travel another 1000 years into the future. You won’t be stepping into a utopia, instead, you’ll be stepping into a much more complex and advanced society that will still be facing the same types of challenges we face now. These are also the same challenges that we have faced for thousands of years, throughout all of human history. Perhaps this struggle is just a part of human nature.
We are on track for +2.7C by the end of the century. I think society 1000 years from now will still be trying to scrape its way back up to Renaissance Europe levels of tech and complexity.