The Craziest Thing In The World Is That We Could End Poverty, But We Don't

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

It’s the craziest thing in the world that we already have the technological ability to provide a decent standard of living for everyone on earth, but it doesn’t happen because it’s not profitable. We attained the greatest scientific achievement of all time and then did nothing with it. Our society is completely uninterested in it because capitalism is completely uninterested in it.

It’s just so insane how this doesn’t sit front and center in our attention all the time. There are people dying of starvation, exposure and preventable illnesses every single day for no good reason. Humanity became more than capable of ensuring that this never happened to anyone ever again, and just rode right past that stunning moment in history without even glancing up from its smartphone.

Can you imagine if we did that with any other major technological development?

“Oh yeah humans can fly now… but let’s not.”

“Hey humans now have the ability to share ideas and information in real time with anyone in the world, but whatever, let’s keep mailing letters instead.”

And I would argue that the ability to eliminate poverty and needless human suffering is a far more significant development than flight or the internet. But because it doesn’t generate value for shareholders, we cruised right past it going “Let’s make a chatbot that can generate an Alvin and the Chipmunks version of any song!”

This happened because caring for everyone was never the goal of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to extract labor from the working class and resources from the global south to sell goods and services at a rate that generates profit for the owners of the means of production. That’s it.

Capitalism has no wisdom. It will start wars to generate profit. It will have impoverished populations toiling in mines and sweatshops for pennies in order to generate profit. It will burn up critical drinking water supplies for AI data centers in order to generate profit. It will cut down the last acre of old-growth rainforest in order to generate profit. It will pollute the air, fill the oceans with plastic and kill all the insects if offloading the cost of industry onto the ecosystem helps generate profit.

The entire world is being consumed by an artificially imposed system which holds as its foundational premise that mass-scale human behavior should be driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake. It’s a mindless, planet-devouring machine of our own making. It is creating unfathomable destruction and suffering for terrestrial organisms of every species.

And it doesn’t have to be this way. There is nothing inscribed upon the fabric of the universe which says that we need to live under a system which causes us to feed our biosphere into the woodchipper so that billionaires can become trillionaires. Nowhere is it written in adamantine that that the many must always toil and suffer for the benefit of the few. Things are the way they are because of systems that were put in place by human beings, and human beings can replace those systems with different ones.

If we are to continue to survive on this planet, we’re going to have to move from systems which drive us to compete against our fellow humans and our fellow terrestrial organisms to systems that are driven by collaboration toward the good of all beings. Such systems would be entirely unprecedented by their nature, because unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. It would be unlike anything that’s ever been done before, but it is now a matter of existential importance that it be done.

We’re going to have to change. We’re going to have to become kinder. Gentler. Emotionally intelligent. Driven by the desire for the greater good instead of by fear and insecurity. We’re going to have to wake up. We’re going to have to become unlike anything we’ve ever been before.

Every species eventually hits an adapt-or-die juncture in its existence. This is ours. We must become a compassionate animal, or we will go the way of the dinosaur.

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