Corporate culture is based on constant growth and ever increasing profit margins. Eventually they’ll amass so much of the wealth that most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food.
No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it.
The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down.
At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.
What’s the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?
What’s the end game for cancer?
There isn’t one, it doesn’t matter that the host dies eventually as long as they get to keep growing for now.
This is the answer. These people have no plan other than “make more money today”.
Live, laugh, love.
Live in the moment.
YOLO!
🤮
The billionaire space race reminds me of Devil facial tumour disease (NSFL).
It’s the only cancer (that I know of), that can reliably spread to a new host.Edit: I did some reading, there are more but that is the one that feels most terrifying. I posted the article on creepy Wikipedia.
Eloquently phrased.
There is no End Game.
They’re insulated from the short term consequences of their actions and believe that infinite growth can exist inside of a finite system. They treat their bank accounts like a high score board instead of resources to use. Their personal actions can be classified as “banality of evil” because it’s so routine and common place in their circles.
People might point to Musk’s old obsession with Mars, but that has been shown to be nothing more then a dopamine feedback loop. He said things that got him praise, so he kept saying them. When people kept asking about missed dates, he got angry and found a different audience for his dopamine feedback loop.
Don’t forget, those of us who “produce” aren’t even a consideration.
The working class will starve. We’re already working on it with inflation, but managing to keep enough calories coming in.
Soon, the billionaires will have no labor to produce food, and no labor to stock food, and no labor to handle their banal shit.
Then, they will hunt us for sport. Or, more likely, a few class traitors will hunt and butcher us while they go hungry and the billionaires eat of our flesh.
So, eat the rich before they eat us. Got it.
I think the ultra wealthy and powerful understand that revolution becomes more likely as the majority’s material conditions declines, so their endgame is to throw just enough crumbs to the majority so that they don’t want to risk losing those crumbs. Many of today’s ultra wealthy and powerful seem exceptionally out of touch with reality and dumb though, so idk. Some are accelerationists (i.e. e/acc), and purposely avoid taking into account possible negative consequences.
with sufficient technology and capital, they should be able to stave off any kind of revolution. and then the question becomes whether or not there is any incentive to keep the plebian class happy or alive.
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It reminds me of the ultimate game of monopoly I played as a kid (on a handheld). I had complete control over the board. I had bankrupted two of the AI’s, but in order to keep line go up, I’d have to keep the last one around. Every time it’d get low on funds I’d offer to significantly overpay for one of its’ few properties, and then sell it back for a dollar.
I got to around 30k before the game either just quit, or the battery died.
What is cancer’s endgame when it spreads to the rest to the rest of the body?
They aren’t planning for the future of humanity, they just want their numbers to go up.
It’s exactly this mentality. They DO NOT CARE what happens at the end, because they are assuming they’ll be either dead or in AI bunkers by then. Everyone else will be left to burn.
It’s just like Big Oil (or insert massive scale business with environmental consequences) - they’re making the world inhabitable. As the consequences don’t “immediately” matter to them , all they care about is the immediate future, not long term. But it still makes no sense to me.
Their actions don’t make rational sense to you because you’re not a sociopathic CEO beholden to the whims of shareholders. Otherwise, you nailed it.
A frozen economy. The families with capital are the ruling class, and for every else there is zero mobility. Since the ruling class is not a state, it isn’t bound by democracy or a constitution, and it doesn’t have to give anyone shit. There may be some incentive to keep the lower class happy and alive, or there may not be.
Back serfdom and nobility.
Slavery 2: It won’t matter if you’re black or white
🥚-xactly.
The endgame is feudalism.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling everything through the scam that is private ownership.
They’ll happily lend you money to keep buying stuff. So you end up in perpetual debt. It loops back to feudalism and serfdom in a deliciously ironic twist.
So what’s the way out, you propose?
I read a short story years ago about just this. Quite an interesting read if anyone is interested.
By the guy who founded How Stuff Works interestingly enough
Today I learnt!
I started reading before I went to bed, mistake.
I remember despite being receptive to the goal, finding that story a bit maddening.
spoiler
So the dystopian half was sadly credible enough, so not much to say there.
I didn’t like the way he tried to pave the way to the “better” approach as a contrast to the dystopia, while somehow being set in the same world.
So how does the socialist utopia come into being? By a nation of people transforming themselves into a better society? No, because of some benevolent rich dude. Well at least he spent his money to make it happen, but wait, first he had to get money from millions of people for no guaranteed results. So shockingly a rich dude with a very scammy seeming premise happens to be truthful, but realistically if other rich dudes saw the gullible people buying tickets to “maybe utopia one day” then there’d be competition and I can’t imagine the sincere rich dude prevaling against the con-men. So the story is firmly rooted in worshipping some abstract concept of a rich guy, strangely Randian in a way… But fine, it happens, not great, but let’s put that aside for now.
Ultimately, the difference between his dystopia and utopia is that “poor people” in the dystopia are confined to soul crushingly terrible dormitories, and in the utopia, they aren’t even allowed into the country at all. Sure no one will become poor in the utopia, but it’s likely that any person on the ‘right’ side in the dystopia also will never become poor. The mechanism to make it seem “better” is a lottery ticket, further waved away by having someone “off screen” buy it on his behalf, to let the protagonist benefit without actually spending money. Ultimately though the mechanism to get into the utopia was effectively buying a lottery ticket from an already rich dude to make him richer, a pretty capitalist mechanism.
There’s this part in the dystopian side where they reflected upon how when the plight of people in foreign lands were bad, they ignored it because it wasn’t their problem. Now they feel all too keenly being on the ‘outside’ while the rich enjoy their presumed paradise while the poor are trapped in their dorms. That now that they are afflicted, only now do they care. Ok, fine point. So the nature of the “socialist” paradise in this work is that you or someone you know paid for admittance, and so the protagonist leaves behind just a ton of anonymous folks to once again be part of the ‘in’ crowd. I made the connection that the guy basically had a lottery ticket purchased on his behalf that let him participate in what was likely just like the “rich” crowd. So I thought that the author would circle back to how quickly the protagonist got comfortable with ignoring those on the ‘outside’ again. Nope, now it was just just cool to live it up while the poor saps who did not buy the scam-like tickets are stuck on the outside still forgotten by the protagonist and the narrative, as their existence is now inconvenient to the message.
Then there was the solution to crime, which I thought would touch on a dystopian facet. That there’s a mandatory centrally controlled brain implant that, when “bad” behavior was detected, it would disconnect the brain from the body to prevent incorrect behavior. A world with constant thought monitoring and removal of bodily autonomy at the discretion of a central authority? That sounds like something that will be highlighted as some nightmarish bullshit… Nope, the author seemed to sincerely love the concept as a perfectly valid way of controlling the population, and all the characters loved it to.
It’s even better than that, because the massive inequality created by Capitalism has already got us to a state where the human population is going to collapse within the next few decades, even if climate change doesn’t do it first. Simply, most people never feel like they can afford to start a family during the years when they would have started one before. The oligarchs know this and are freaking out about birth rates now, but it’s already too late - can’t be King of the mountain if the mountain is only a hill.
There’s a solution for reducing population while increasing birthrates: war, pandemias and forced
inoculationsinseminations (physically or by peer pressure).Edit: I’m not an antivaxxer, that’s just idiotic. I’m talking antiabortion and religion.
Why would they do any of that when they could simply use HAARP to trigger a Mandela Effect and change reality though? Seems like hard work.
/s, right?
Right?
And I’m downvoted versus an actual anti-vaxxer? What a world.
Don’t forget banning abortion and birth control through moral and legal processes. Time to give birth to the next generation of disposable exploitation.
Feudalism
They’ll just keep screwing each other over until either one person owns everything, or we’re smushed into the mud of conflict.
that one person becomes what is effectively a monarch
There is no end game. They’re hungry ghosts.
They just want an ever increasing “more”
THIS. I believe even if they think the climate is changing and will kill everyone, they will somehow be immune.
The rich would celebrate while we drown
This isn’t unique to the “hungry ghosts”.
Our behaviors are really quite simple. It has been shown a few times that our logical explanations for how we decide on our behavior are mostly rationalizations after the decision has been made, not actual reasons. I.e. like you say, we want more, then we find an explanation why we would want more.
For example, someone likes a new phone because it’s shiny and new, and says “why wouldn’t I treat myself once in a while”, “it’s faster which makes me more productive”, “it has X and Y new features which are useful in A and B situations”(which they’ll never encounter), and so on
No, actually, normal people can settle. That doesn’t mean they don’t treat themselves “once in a while” or sometimes crave something special or set new goals when they complete one, but they don’t need more more more all the time. They can have periods of contentment. I know I do.
But there are some people who always want more. They never are satisfied, not even for a second. As soon as they get something they want they’re already bored with it and want the next best thing. It’s a hedonic treadmill that gets faster and faster, they’re never happy.
Yeah of course we can override our desires, I never said anything to the contrary. The difference though is not the existence of the desire, but the lack of overriding it.
Normal people don’t desire more at all times. They’ll be happy for a while before setting their eyes on the next goal.
These hungry ghosts, though, never experience that period of contentment. That moment of happiness where they achieve what they want and can rest never comes, not even for a second. As soon as they get what they want they already want more. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say they don’t even have goals. They only want more.
We would disagree there then. In my opinion the only difference is the situation people are in not allowing them to get more. If you need to work 2 months to get a new phone, gotta be “happy” with it for at least 2 months, and also can’t buy something else new.
If you look at lottery winners, most of them manage to lose all the money relatively quickly.
Most “non-rich” people spend their money they get from working quickly/instantly.
Oh I’m not saying they’re like, a different species of human or anything. This is just what being rich does to people.
They never experience that period where they have to settle for less. They always get more, and so they always want more. It’s the way their brains have been trained to expect rewards. Someone like me, who is happy using older stuff and waiting for the prices to come down, has been trained to live this way. Someone like them, who always wants the best and most expensive, was also trained to live that way. They become hungry ghosts because of their lifestyles.
Then we agree. It just sounded like you somehow attributed more inherent evilness to them than everyone else. I of course agree that the resulting behavior is worse, but mostly by accident through the situations they’ve been in.
actually, i think you’re wrong about the ultra-rich being “essentially normal people”.
by all evidence they seem to have developed a serious mental disorder, a kind of trained sociopathy.
I’ve never seen it put in such clear nonchalant terms as in this interview .
give it a watch, it’s extremely interesting and really puts into perspective how…just utterly inhuman the minds of the ultra-rich really are…
But yeah that’s the thing, even you call it “trained” sociopathy. I.e. everyone else could be trained into it as well. Of course that wouldn’t happen because people are different, we can’t predict everything yada yada. If you grow up with awareness about richness and the good of socialism, communism and so on it’s more unlikely you make the same mistakes and so on.
But if you’re extremely poor and have a mindset of “oh I just have to work hard and then be rich eventually” and actually aspire to be rich, which a lot a lot of people do, then I think those will quickly become exactly the same as current rich people. The reason the system still works is because there are still a majority of people believing in it and supporting it. Those poorer people would, if they became rich, be essentially the same kind of rich person as current rich people.
the first corporate war probably
An economy where we all sit in a hoemless shelther watching the five rich guys sell the same five products to each other again and again
