Imagine everyone on a giant perfectly transparent mountain. So transparent it's invisible. It looks like people walking on air.
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To actually believe in this is to not resent people who have money. To have priceless + 10 dollars is the same infinity as priceless + 1 billion dollars.
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This divides people into 2 camps. If you value your people as priceless, you won't care about money. If you don't value your people, then all you *can* care about is money.
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It's perfectly possible to not care about money but also want to be paid more. Most people who say this have valid non-hypocritical feelings. What they're complaining about is not the money, but how their lives have become similar to a form of slavery.
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They never cared about money but the world became one in which they were FORCED to care about money or become homeless or die on the street.
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Their complaints are about a world where if you're not "smart" enough you basically become a slave to the system. That's because the system has grown so fast that they *are* dumb compared to the tops of what the system produces.
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People who could have had fulfilling lives being themselves now have to give handjobs to apis to barely scrape by. A punishment for not being smart enough to provide society with the fuel it needs.
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Since when did caring about money become such an important virtue? It's like making the best plumber a heroic pillar of society. An important role yes, but hardly the divine figure that the wolf of wall street inspires.
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Because we figured out how to use it as a weapon. It started out as life infrastructure but then became a weapon. As a weapon it absorbed a lot of yang energy and imbued it's profession with many heroic virtues. To wield money well was to wield Excalibur.
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The darkness is in how we figured out to use it as a weapon. Money as a weapon only works on stupid people.
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What Money as God does is that it re-orients societies into a value hierarchy based on the manipulation of money. This turns society itself into a "spear".
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A society that is a Money Spear is very powerful. It has a decent degree of correlation with intelligence so the more knowledgeable people are making the more important decisions.
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Though at the top pure knowledge isn't enough. Knowledge isn't the god, Money is. The top consists of people who know how to handle vast swaths of money to make it grow.
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A Money Spear society will have better weapons and also make far better macro-scale decisions.
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It utterly crushes Physical Strength societies (barbarian tribes) and even Whoever Has the Most Guns Societies (which often implode from money mismanagement)
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This society where it is organized in a way so that people who can make "money" "grow" are valued as the most useful is the best society we've had so far. Valuing people based on other stuff just doesn't come close.
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One of the reasons high school is terrible in the U.S. is b/c it's a physical strength society. Kids have huge size differences at that age combined with the social emphasis on football.
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Valuing people based on who their parents were or how pure their bloodline is also doesn't work. Humans just aren't very good parents. (Though good communities in the aggregate *are*, takes a village to raise a child.)
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Besides better macro decisions. (The high school jock or the used car salesman don't end up making National Economic Policy) what really makes Money Spear the most powerful weapon shape for a country is that it's recursive.
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The best money managers are the best because they can manage, identify, and train good money managers. Because money management lends itself to recursion it allows for snowflake-like incredibly robust scaffolding for society. Like carbon nanotubes or something.
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At each level in society, people can roughly point you to "up" or "down" and tell you how to get there. Society becomes a paved road rather than a wild jungle.
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At the top of these pyramids you can have single individuals making massive amounts of money because of how many layers they seeded. Each layer a recursive and thus SIMILAR to every other layer. Each layer looks at the others and think "I could do that." and are RIGHT.
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Countries who worship Money are granted great demon-like powers. But Money as God has some weaknesses:
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Money has gravity and over time it loses it's ability to actually "grow" in a lively sense. It's just like a black hole sucking up everything it touches. Over time it's no longer possible to use "can make money grow" as a useful measure of ability.
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(Reading and writing similarly are no longer valued skills when they would make you valued scribes in ancient times.)
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It's still quite valuable now. Many CEOs are not just trust fund babies having some fun. Many *are* very good people to have in positions of leadership. They understand the fractal scaffolding needed despite the heated societal arguments around the money as infrastructure problem
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It is getting less so though I think. E.g. I've rarely felt that my managers in my career have actually provided me any leadership.
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Still though, a skeleton of money managers is the best society scaffolding we've come up with so far. I'm quite dubious of the "programmers" as best societal scaffolding.
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The theory is that because each programmer can have leverage over thousands/millions of machines the structure is very lightweight and very strong.
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However this feels like a cyborgy sterile kind of world because it doesn't use actual Humans as the brick and mortar of Human Society. It's the Impossible Meat version of human society.
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Yeah it does have some merit, especially is you add in moral arguments, but it's also kinda weird and untested. Yes yes, factory farming and coal are bad but immediately replace ALL school cafe food with Impossible Meat and Soylent starting tomorrow? r u super sure???
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