Most people are not lazy enough. The kind of relentlessly effortful living conservatives love to preach is unnatural except perhaps for hummingbirds. Half of survival of the fittest is the patience to wait for the steals and deals and moments of unreasonable leverage.
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At civilization level, progress is mostly 90% opportunistic steals, 10% disciplined drives. It’s only at the relative individual social mobility level that it looks like 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
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We’re still collectively free-riding on a 150-year old “steal” — burning our very distant ancestors for fun and profit. The hard workers get a bit more of the fossil fuel pie for a lot higher effort.
And we’re always paying off old externality debts and creating new ones.
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We’re paying for ancestral sins like the invention of religion, the food pyramid, etc. We’re bequeathing a high-carbon, destabilized environment for future generations to deal with. We’re a free-ride/pass-the-buck species.
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Nose to the grindstone mentality also helps keep the populace busy while they’re getting robbed/exploited/colonized/replaced (at which point you blame them for letting themselves become replaceable). Lazy people start getting “ideas” ...
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