Do you believe that some people have to suffer so that others can gain?

[Anonymous2998691]

Yes, there are people who are born to fail and live miserable lives, due to their genetics and environment. Those people will always exist, there will always be a person in last place unless every is identical. There has to be a bottom 10% or 1% somewhere, if you get rid of all the people at the bottom the next worse off will replace them.

 

[sserafim]

Yes, there are people who are born to fail and live miserable lives, due to their genetics and environment. Those people will always exist, there will always be a person in last place unless every is identical. There has to be a bottom 10% somewhere.

Would it be better if everyone were identical?

 

[Anonymous2998691]

Would it be better if everyone were identical?

Maybe? But it's not realistically going to happen, it's against the laws of the universe. It's also pretty fun to be a winner.

 

[LaVieEnRose]

That's the way animals work. By definition they have to consume other organisms to live.

Even in human society you necessarily make progress to other people's detriment.Bit you get admitted to a school or hired a job that's a lot of people vying for those spots that won't get it.

 

[sserafim]

That's the way animals work. By definition they have to consume other organisms to live.

Even in human society you necessarily make progress to other people's detriment.Bit you get admitted to a school or hired a job that's a lot of people vying for those spots that won't get it.

Why do you think the world is set up like this?

I suppose if life has to have its 'winners' it must also have to have its 'losers' . There's usually an opposite for everything.

Why do there have to be winners and losers? Why can't everyone be equal?

Yes, because of nature, most people have to suffer so that the few people can gain. Such as how the 1% are who won whereas the rest have to suffer for them

This is so unfair lol

This is a question I've been wondering myself for well over a decade now. Especially since the conventional wisdom of learning moral lessons from your pain makes zero sense when applied to non-human animals.

My best guess is that pain and death is just a natural byproduct of being in a universe that is constantly evolving. If destruction didn't exist, everything would be still and unchanging. Certain concepts, like time, would no longer have meaning.

That's arguably a more hellish existence than what we have to deal with now.

Also, without death, there is no birth. Both are necessary for the cycle to be sustainable.

Do you think that there's life on other planets or it's just us out there? I wonder why life arose. There's really no need for it. There's no need for anything

You will also have situations where people choose to sacrifice for gains of others and suffer in the process. Parents seem to suffer some in raising children: missed sleep, stress etc. They could choose not to, but that doesn't stop the suffering from being necessary for the wanted gains of the other.

Why do they do that? They *chose* to have children though. It was their decision, not the child's. The child never asked to be born

 

[jbear824]

It's the way the world is right now because our species hasn't evolved enough to realize it doesn't actually have to be this way. Humans are still very stupid animals.

Side note, capitalism simps are trash.

 

[xinino]

Yes, Klaus Schwab was right when he deemed humanity as enemy. I will "eat ze Bugz." We just need one tyrannical, authoritarian, anti-democratic technocratic regime to lead us to post-humanity.

 

[sserafim]

It's the way the world is right now because our species hasn't evolved enough to realize it doesn't actually have to be this way. Humans are still very stupid animals.

Side note, capitalism simps are trash.

What do you think the world could be like instead? I hate capitalism as well

Yes, Klaus Schwab was right when he deemed humanity as enemy. I will "eat ze Bugz." We just need one tyrannical, authoritarian, anti-democratic technocratic regime to lead us to post-humanity.

What's post-humanity? Extinction?

 

[PathtoDie]

If there was no suffering, how would people know that they're happy and living a decent life?

Neutrality exists, so we don't have to suffer to experience happiness or joy. We could be neutral and get a rush of joy.

 

[xinino]

What do you think the world could be like instead? I hate capitalism as well

What's post-humanity? Extinction?

More, like transcendence to another species, which is inevitable, so you can consider it the extinction of humanity.

Neutrality exists, so we don't have to suffer to experience happiness or joy. We could be neutral and get a rush of joy.

The problem here is that suffering, aka pain, whether it is physical or mental, is a defense mechanism related to the nervous system. I couldn't find any animal that couldn't experience pain, but I can imagine a point in the future where our nervous system will be so primitive that we need to modify it. We have already started to create medicines to endure the pain.

 

[LOVELYDARKDEEP]

Not under the principles of equal exchange. But I think things get progressively more imbalanced as time goes on. But imbalance is also a matter of perspective. The universe is very old and it will persist for millennia yet, in one form or another. The entirety of human existence is only a flicker against that span. Great imbalances can't support themselves for long before natural order imposes to remake everything anew.

 

[Izolita]

No. Their behavior is unacceptable and we can infact live together in peace. Read into communism.

But rn its their world and I just live in it sadly.

 

[melancholymallory03]

Not necessarily. I think some people are born to suffer though. All we can do is be aware of the commonality of suffering , and how we all suffer to some degree. It would be an oxymoron for anyone to assume anybody's not suffering. And ignorant to not acknowledge some people are born suffering more.
The movie skins where they have deformities kind of dives into this and the colour scheme is also very beautiful so an aesthetically pleasing movie in general , but I think it's in Spanish.

 

[cosmic-freedom]

With every stomach that goes hungry in some part of the world, someone else dines like royalty. With every freedom and intellect being stomped out, someone born into a better part of the world has more free will and the freedom of choice.

 

[Guy Smiley]

This is true for a given day . But if you take a 1+ year time frame this is not true . You can always scale up and scale down resources . It's not a zero sum game .

It's possible to scale up resources to some degree, but greed just snaps up the majority of those added resources. There's simply no way in which a portion of the population can have massively disproportionate amounts of wealth and resources without another portion of the population lacking. Never in human history has the entire population had their basic needs met. Poverty has always existed.

 

[11April]

Yes, I believe that this is how the world works.

The grief of some brings happiness to others.
The tears of some bring joy to others.

 

[Forever Sleep]

I guess there are more symbiotic relationships in nature where one species helps another out for mutual gain. The world in general isn't really set up to be fair though. There is a limit to resources- which encourages competition. Plenty of animals predate other animals in order to survive. In general- it's a survival of the fittest game.

Humans are in fact more unique in that sense. In the sense- it's seen as cruel to abandon the sick and weak to die. We actually try to keep them alive. The ironic thing being we could actually be perpetuating suffering in doing that.

I think really though, we just try to gloss over what's going on a lot of the time. When we eat animals or wear their flesh or when we wear clothes or buy goods that are made by children under forced labour, we just try not to think about it.

But no- I don't think it is all that realistic to live in a fair world where no one suffers. We have needs- we need food, water, shelter, hygiene, medicine. Whatever else. There's the obvious problem of greed and exploitation in our species.

There's also a discrepancy if people don't put in the same amount of labour. I'm going to be cruel here and pick on you. What if no one wanted to work. No one grows food, builds houses, creates sanitation systems, provides a clean water supply. Because- people suffer doing those jobs. Most of them involve hard physical labour and- we've all agreed to no suffering now. Would that make things better? If we had nowhere to live, nothing to eat, no clean water to drink?

How is it fair if some people work and, some don't? So- it's agreed that some will have to work. They should be rewarded though- right? Should someone who is planting cucumbers be paid the same as someone risking their safety building a bridge? If so- why would the person risk their safety building that bridge? But- the discrepancy in pay will cause suffering.

Of course, we're supposed to have legislation like national minimum wage and rules like that to try to make sure people can survive. Let's say a company is really generous though and it pays its employees double what other companies pay. What if it can't sustain that though? What if it sells products or provides a service that similar companies provide? Are consumers going to pay shit loads more because they know how well they treat their employees? Unlikely isn't it? Who doesn't like a bargain? Do we think about what a bargain really means though? It's shafting soneone else somewhere along the chain.

Sometimes, I just used to wonder why they couldn't just print loads of money and give it to people. They wouldn't even need to do that I suspect... Like- isn't it figures in a computer for some part? Is all the money in the world actually represented in the form of notes, coins, gold or whatever? But, I suspect that does something weird to the economy...

 

[latte art]

That's the way animals work. By definition they have to consume other organisms to live.

Even in human society you necessarily make progress to other people's detriment.Bit you get admitted to a school or hired a job that's a lot of people vying for those spots that won't get it.

Yeah, this is exactly how I think about it. It's just the nature of the "struggle for existence". It's an inherent fact of evolution that organisms (or traits) that exist better are selected for, and they need energy from somewhere. All energy consumed by an organism is to the energy source's detriment and is not available for other organisms, resulting in one's gain and another's loss.

Looking at it objectively, you might see it as a collaboration of nature to produce the biggest bubbles in the bathtub, so to speak, which is cute, but in the midst of the bubbling there is unquestionable loss and gain, pain and pleasure, due to traits that priorise existence prioritising existence and failing or succeeding to do so.

 

[MeltingBrain]

If it is a zero sum game today and it is a zero sum game on a single day 1 year in the future is it not then a zero sum game overall? If everyday of my life (or anyone's) is spent controlling a certain amount of resources it seems like a constant zero sum game to me at least..

I have the potential to increase my share of the resource pie, which itself might also increase or decrease in size... but isn't that still a zero sum game?

I meant It's ALMOST a zero sum game for a given day . There are small increments in production capacity as we move through time , adding up to big leaps in the long run

Cars manufactured per year, by country

 

[tsumihoroboshi]

only in my personal field of view, people feed off my misery and it makes them happy. in that specific instance, then yes.

i may be too stupid for this question though.

 

[1MiserableGuy]

It's not that they have to suffer for other people's gain, just that they do. People like Marquis de Sade, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and other completely hypocritical narcissists get pleasure from having rules apply to other people that don't apply to themselves. We could hold them accountable, we just don't.

 

[sserafim]

More, like transcendence to another species, which is inevitable, so you can consider it the extinction of humanity.

What do you mean by transcendence to another species? Like transhumanism?

 

[xinino]

What do you mean by transcendence to another species? Like transhumanism?

Yes, specifically transhumanism under the framework of anthropocentrism elitism and hyperrascism, but unfortunately, the world is moving away from anthropocentrism which only lingers suffering.

 

[actualfemcel]

That is how the world works, yes.

 

[sserafim]

That is how the world works, yes.

Why do you think it's like this?

It's not that they have to suffer for other people's gain, just that they do. People like Marquis de Sade, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and other completely hypocritical narcissists get pleasure from having rules apply to other people that don't apply to themselves. We could hold them accountable, we just don't.

Why?

 

[actualfemcel]

Why do you think it's like this?

It's not because I think it's like this. It's because of what I observe, what I experience, and how others experience life. I had "friends" who pretended to be nice to me then said it was a luxury that I be treated with basic human niceness, who plagiarized my work and profited off of it, threw me under the bus because it made them more popular to do so than to keep me around.

 

[Anonymous2998691]

It's the way the world is right now because our species hasn't evolved enough to realize it doesn't actually have to be this way. Humans are still very stupid animals.

Side note, capitalism simps are trash.

It's the way it will always be, 90% of the differences between people are genetic, and they are the root of all inequality. It's literally evolution, but instead of death being the "punishment" for being shit genetics and environment it's misery and celibacy.

1. Your looks define perception of your personality in online dating. [ https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/weexperimentonhumanbeings.html ]
2. Parents treat attractive children better. [ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/04/050412213412.htm ]
3. Physical attractiveness in adolescence predicts better socioeconomic status in adulthood. [ https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0063975 ]
4. Attractive people are perceived much more positively than they really are. [ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4757567/, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/ ]
5. The taller presidential canadite wins the majority of the time. [ https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Heig...tes#Electoral_success_as_a_function_of_height ]
6. Realtionships signifigantly predict happiness. [ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886918305348?via=ihub, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-019-00074-1 ]
7. Height determines your dating pool. [ https://www.gertstulp.com/pdf/Stulp et al 2013_Anim Behav_The height of choosiness.pdf, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/ ]
8. Short men have 2x the suicide rate of tall men. [ https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.162.7.1373 ]
9. Tall men have more kids and partners. [ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s002650100370 ]
10. SAT scores correlate with IQ [ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/ ]

You don't have control over IQ, height, looks, muscle mass, ability, resistance to diseases, basically 90% of "you" as a person, that's genetic. Then remember you have no control over you environment, wether you are born in 1500 CE or 8000 BC.

Do you really think every professional athlete, CEO, president or rich person is only there because of some "evil" capitalist system? No, they are there because of there great genetic, environment, and natural ability to out-compete others. Everyone learned this in high school but for some reason they pretend it doesn't apply to humans. At least capitalism allows genetic dead ends to cope with reality by having money and buying what they want.

It's the sad truth, the depressing conclusion to the TV show that is life.

 

[sadman710]

You look at life in the jungle, and it's full of traps. I feel like this world just designed more of them in an unnatural way with a plastic image of a safety net that it's not as bad as that. Which leads me to wonder why we made these comforts and toys just to make the masses overall more miserable.

 

[vitbar]

Why do they do that? They *chose* to have children though. It was their decision, not the child's. The child never asked to be born

Different people will have different reasons. Nobody asked to be born and presumably the parents are okay with being on the receiving and giving end of that. It's a matter of asking for forgiveness rather than permission.

One unifying reason is survival instinct of a kind. I think this goes deeper than, and guides, our thoughts and justifications around procreation.

It's not the only kind of suffering people choose to endure for the well-being of others either. Again it's a choice, but still a choice that is necessary for the desired outcome.

 

[Argo]

In principle, no, they don't have to suffer. In practice, probably. And the reason for that second one is... well basically it goes down to the deepest fundamentals of things. What... is this place? We don't know a lot, so we can put aside speculations, but what we do have a pretty good idea of is this place is one where things function a certain way. We can call that "physics" (the rules of the functioning of this place). And what that suggests is that stuff(small various particles that make up bigger stuff) moves around in a certain way, relating to energy, matter, forces like gravity(big stuff impinges its power forcefully on small stuff), entropy(stuff breaks down over time, order breaks down into disorder), right? Really really big place, lots of particles following rules.

What the hell does that have anything to do with the question?

Okay so... within that space... special kinds of particles make up stuff that organizes itself and then replicates itself. We can call that special stuff biology, and it does this by using fuel. Sometimes it survives, sometimes it dies. That's one problem, since there's no infinite source of fuel. So it's scarce to a degree. Another problem is that now you have these things that are competing. Some special stuff even eats the other special stuff to make it die, and uses it as fuel. As this whole project gets more and more advanced over hundreds of millions of years, what decides which of these things actually win the competition? Well... how good they are at accessing the fuel, and how good they are at surviving the game called "acquire the fuel, make more copies of yourself".

What that opens up is, the field of strategy. Which strategies are best for winning? They can't just all be good right? There's a fact of the matter. Once you're there, we can go on forever about small details, but the only important big picture fact is this:

It's all just about power.

Not everything can be equally powerful. That would make the idea have no meaning. Because the competing things have these scripts called genes, they become expressions of strategy. So it's like a video game where you have a bunch of little monsters that fight to the death with different abilities, and you can see at the end of the bloodbath, which ones "win". Then you just repeat it over, and over. Except unlike a game, these are conscious things that can suffer.

Once you get to the question of power, there's an interesting fact about it in that it tends to be a feedback loop. The more you have, the more you express it. The more you express it, they more you have. And so on, and so on.

(sometimes expressing power isn't intuitive-- part of power can mean being invisible, because if you're invisible, no one can destroy what they can't see-- that is power)

It's a lot like gravity if you think about it. The more gravity a black hole has, the more smaller stuff it suck in from a greater range, which increases its mass, which... increases its gravitation pull, and so on, and so on, until it devours the entire universe.

And that is basically why suffering exists, because the meaningful part of the universe(not like... the rocks and dust in space, but like the actual beings and creatures that can get tortured-- that's the part that matters) is composed of lots of beings that all just want to not suffer, but they're all in this mentally ill game of being wired to seek power, and avoid falling victim to the power of others, in a way that is not a mutual or social game at its root even if there are some appearances that can seem win-win or pro-social.

But remember the entropy thing? That seems so disconnected from this human level we're now talking about. But here it is at the human level.

(Tangent first: Evil is basically just a strategy to express power, because it fucks up peoples lives and then says, "Your move". It's inherently a power move unless it's punished somehow and often times the punishment doesn't even fix anything. Who cares if the person who killed the only person you love is now in prison? The worse scenario is, it can't truly be punished because power eventually has a ceiling where there is nothing *more* powerful at the level above-- there's a top level of the heirarchy and that is also where the seat of evil sits. Because it cannot be punished, it can do whatever it wants or it can justify. It's not that humans long ago were stupid, they understood this, and historically have masked this problem by inventing the idea of a God who is perfectly powerful but also perfectly fair and loving).

Okay... entropy. Stuff breaks down from order into disorder if we look at some boring atomic stuff, what does this have to do with evil or power or why we have to suffer?

So imagine you're in a village with a next door neighbor and you both have these nice little cottages you built. Your neighbor doesn't like you because they just lack any kind of good intention and they're completely selfish and envious and resentful and so they've justified that you deserve to be harmed. This neighbor needs almost no effort to wait for you to be gone, light a match, throw it onto your nice little cottage and have it burnt to ashes when you return. That is because the "wind" of entropy, is pushing at the back of evil(aka power). It naturally uplifts the behavior. You can imagine it like competing on a race track but a special wind is pushing your opponent forwards but not you.


The same way, you are now screwed. You have to work downwind from entropy, you have the very difficult task of rebuilding your cottage. Compare how much effort it is to fix this situation(create order) to the effort your evil neighbor used to destroy this situation(disorder). While you're busy, your neighbor can run for mayor of the village to continue whatever megalomaniacal bullshit they are interested in since they are wired to seek power(this is a function of their genetics, which are just a special arrangement of the small particles we talked about in the beginning). You're not the one plotting and scheming to rule the village, you just wanted to enjoy your life in your cottage. But now you can't-- you're going to suffer the consequences of the physics, the DNA based evolution, and the game theory of the universe.

This turned out to be a long post but there's one more very important detail to this story. Someone may think, "Okay but... surely now things are better. We've made progress. Now it's not cottages, but we can have things like security cameras, so when the evil neighbor tries to burn our house down, we go to the police with the footage, and they get punished, and slowly but surely things will keep getting better." That... is ... unfortunately, I deeply regret to say, the opposite of what happens. What actually happens is, the same way that the organisms who couldn't survive the "win the fuel and reproduce" game died off, the organisms who couldn't survive the "be evil pieces of shit and get away with it" die off. That does not mean evil dies off with time, that just means evil only gets stronger and stronger and more and more masked and camouflaged with time.

That's why people suffer at the expense of others. If this problem was completely solved, it would just be an upwards motion into a better and better world because humans are more than intelligent enough to create genuine improvements. But since this problem cannot be solved (or at least it hasn't even been identified by anyone in any clear way to be solved), the only progress you will see on Earth is a kind of superficial illusion that acts as a mask for malevolent and power obsessed beings to function undetected. The real sinister truth is that the "problem" you're seeing and would hope to solve, is actually not a bug to those who rule reality, it is a feature that they feel is "the way forward" towards greater and greater power.