Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought | A 1C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world gross domestic product, researchers have found
Most people will stop doing something if you show them how it hurts others. Not so the wealthy and powerful.
Being rich actually causes neurological changes, reducing your capacity for empathy and making your brain look more like someone born with psychopathy. 'Power Corrupts' is a biological fact. To be powerful is to be more capable of evil.
I don't get much into doctrinal differences, but I feel like this is pretty core to a lot of anarchist thought. I vaguely recall a quote from engels, something about anarchists believing you need to abolish heirarchy in order to abolish injustice, vs socialists believing vice versa. I think neuroscience shows that power differentials will always create human misery.
I've though about this a lot.
I suspect evolution tilts a little towards psycopathy when wealthy.
Hard to say if theres a mechanism for that encoded in DNA, but if there is, Im betting it would get naturally selected for.
If an individual is in a position of power, then being a self-entitled asshole rapist will reduce competition and increase the spread of genes... Especially if the individual is a male
Assuming this has a negative effect of society, cultural evolution would hopefully respond with counters to this...
Which I think is what we see time and again all over the world.
Society gets living situations relatively reliable. Assholes rise making things worse, society either crumbles into weakness or rejects new situation and removes assholes, encodes new ethics into societal norms and works towards gettingliiving situations reliable, repeat.
When more people are fed abd housed, theres more resources to devote towards economic and war engines, so I think this makes asshole removal naturally selected for on a cultural level.
This loop seems to be getting more frequent and I'd love if we could skip the parts where folks are miserable and dying.
I think it's the whole capitalist system that enables and rewards people with sociopathic traits. Which is why they are more successful in this system.
NIMQE - Not in my quarterly earnings!
Pronounced Nimquee
Example usage:
The CEO, upon receiving word of a new bill that would drastically help reduce carbon emissions but also create a temporary negative pressure on their multinational's earnings per share, pulled a suitcase full of cash from their file cabinet and walked out the door, calling up the governor to arrage a round of golf where they would declare NIMQE.
It might cost more overall but it will be different people paying that cost (taxpayers and poor, mostly) whereas if we took action now it would be the capitalists paying for it.