this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
70 points (100.0% liked)
World News
352 readers
482 users here now
Please help and contribute as we vote on rules:
https://quokk.au/post/21590
Other Great Communities:
Rules
Be excellent to each other
founded 9 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Human nature is bursting at the seams, creating mental health epidemics across the world due to our slavish obsession with working ourselves to death over some arbitrary playground rule called "money." I've been thinking a lot about the "Butcher, Baker, Barber" allegory for capitalism, and I still don't understand why the butcher can't just get their haircut, the baker get their meat, and the barber get their bread when they need it. What is the reason for abstracting human interactions into worthless pieces of paper or coin (or digit on a spreadsheet) unless it's for the sake of despiritualizing humanity all together, passing the buck to future generations, and hoarding wealth over others?
Now increase the complexity by a couple of orders of magnitude and see how that works out.
That's what money does, increases the complecity by a couple orders of magnitude, and it's not working out so great. What does that have to do with requiring an abstract counting system to be allowed to eat?
How many suppliers and service providers are involved to get you a frozen pizza in the supermarket? How are you going to barter with all of those?
Why does there have to be a barter? Workers maintain the services and supply so that themselves and others can have frozen pizza in the supermarket, therefore people have access to frozen pizza in the supermarket if they want it.
You obviously have no idea how supply chains work. Just take any fabricated object in your environment and think about it for a while. Where did all the raw materials come from? Where did the machinery to obtain those raw materials come from? What parts does the machinery consist of? Where did that come from? It gets very deep very quickly.
All that stuff comes from the ground, and are dug up by people who need to use them. What's your point? That without money these things wouldn't exist in the ground, or that people don't need to use it?
I totally agree that in a post scarcity society, people should just be able to take what they need, no questions asked.