Communism

Just out of curiosity, what do you propose we do with the middle class and wealthy who are doing all these things but not impoverished? Trump’s obese, Hegseth is drunk, and Elon’s a junkie. Suffering from moral decrepitude but definitely not impoverished. I also question the poverty of the middle class. While many live below the poverty line, many are only impoverished because they live beyond their means for the sake of possessions over their health. They may be impoverished financially but that’s a self-made situation due to poverty of character.

Speed running a rush to abolish poverty now without considering the future cost to the environment is going to be a short term pat on the back and pawns the cost off on people who don’t even exist yet. You burn through your resources like forests, overload the utilities infrastructure, over extend the available water supply, and disrupt the ecosystem because it’s more important to just get it over and done with, and you create Dust Bowls that blow all your topsoil into the Gulf of Mexico, backflow of sewage and run-off into the watershed, dry up the watershed, and build communities nobody wants to live in because as it turns out, most people don’t want to live in concrete jungles that have no natural spaces relatively close by. How about making sure the new communities have public transportation, are designed to discourage single occupancy driving and encourage walking or biking? Do we build up or do we downsize homes, fewer 2000+sqft “starter homes” that take up the entire lot, or more tiny houses with some sort of outdoor plot to encourage gardening or at least being outside.

Not everybody who is impoverished is suffering from escapist addictions, not everyone who’s an escapist addict is suffering from financial poverty. Elevating people out of poverty also won’t get every impoverished person to give up their addictions, many will continue to indulge, they’ll just have better accommodations to indulge in. And the wealthy, as well as the middle class members who think they’re wealthy like the elite but are in fact just living on credit cards, raising the impoverished out of their state and into at least the bottom rung of the middle class is going to nothing to curb their excesses and consumption. If anything, the class system is so designed to punch down there will be resentment that someone was raised to near their same level. Look at the hatred for the minimum social services we already have. We have people who rely on welfare that support candidates that promise to abolish welfare to prevent others from getting it, literally cutting off their own noses to spite their faces.

China should be an example of why massive social change and speed running the creation of a middle class at the expense of the environment should not be replicated by their model. Study it, learn from it, what worked great, what has didn’t work, and what had unforeseen consequences. Otherwise you damage the planet in ways that will never heal in dozens of lifetimes, and you’re passing the next environmental impact on to other countries because you are importing basic resources to sustain your system as well as try and go green to offset the climate change and pollution you already contributed to, which again, requires importing natural resources that are not easy on the environment to extract. We’ve seen the effects of the rise of the middle class in the west and China, and are better poised to do it cleaner than either was when they did theirs. If we chose not to it’s not out of a love for humanity, because we’re clearly not concerned with the wave of humanity that has to inherit the mess.

I’d also point out that as far as we know, we are the only animals that think of suffering in the manner we do, but since we can recognize it we recognize it’s affects on other living things. Causing non-human suffering in the name of alleviating human suffering a moral hardline I cannot get on board with. We cannot eliminate suffering because it has not singular cause and some of it is self-inflicted, people can be given every opportunity to escape or be helped but will not. We at least attempt harm reduction in all our actions.