This sounds vaguely profound, until you realize that other species are also predated on, starve to death, and die from trivially preventable issues.
This statement is just as "profound" as saying "Did you ever consider that bee's are the only animal that has to make honey just to live on the planet?" Mind blowing!
Although I would argue hunting and foraging is work, so most animals don't get out of it either.
The only problem I have this statement is if you do not believe in the notion of freewill, then yes this is accurate.
If you believe in the notion of freewill, then you would think instead of seeing what's happening and think that all the wealth is being concentrated into the top 1% of society unfairly, what's to stop you from being in that 1%?
Nearly every obstacle you will list, I can name several people who have overcome those impediments to be successful. When you stop thinking the deck is stacked against you, it frees your mind to think of what your capable of, not of the greater odds that stacked against that will prevent you from achieving what you want to.
The free will of the top 1% that don't want to have their wealth diminished by sharing it with others.
The practical impacts of poor education and healthcare leading to delayed educational and/or career opportunities.
Businesses buying politicians to diminish individual access to education, healthcare, and other opportunities.
Politicians and businesspeople working to reduce worker rights to fair wages and safe working conditions.
Politicians working to disenfranchise voters, which in turns leads to their lack of representation and further diminishing their status and reducing their chances of success in life.
> Nearly every obstacle you will list, I can name several people who have overcome those impediments to be successful.
Anecdotes, almost as useful as real data.
> When you stop thinking the deck is stacked against you, it frees your mind to think of what your capable of, not of the greater odds that stacked against that will prevent you from achieving what you want to.
This is true, and it is mentally and emotionally freeing once you're out of the mindset. It doesn't negate the fact that, for many people, the odds are still, in fact, stacked against them.
There are of course exceptions, but you are much more likely to end up in the 1% if your parents are also in that segment.
In the US I have the feeling that a lot of people support its social structure because they believe themselves to be future [mb]illionaires, aka the American dream.
In Europe where most realize that they will never end up in that spot, even with hard work, there is a much more egalitarian structure to society.
I'm not saying any of them are bad, but the notion that everyone can reach the 1% is by definition false. Only 1% of the population can be in that spot.
You can via social structures even it out though so more people can share in the generated wealth. And I think that is actually free will since the social structure is chosen unless one lives under a dictatorship or such.
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21715735-new-dat...
You wrote this like it were a rhetorical question, but let's talk about social mobility. Wikipedia[1] will tell you that it's "movement of individuals... between social strata." Surely you'll agree that "the 1%" is a prime example of a social stratum, and that becoming a member of that stratum is a clear movement.
Obstacles lie between them.
To overcome these obstacles one requires capital: economic, social and cultural.
If you start without them, you'll not go far. Physics are relentless. It may be impossible — within one lifetime — to navigate the socially constructed maze from third-generation-diabetic-of-color to business services firm partner, despite the two persons being physically proximal!
Yes, one can and must make decisions in this life, and if one has free will then by all means, enjoy the faculty, but one is not free to purchase items that aren't in store. One is not free to pull levers that aren't available.
You might ask "why do poor folk fall prey to predatory lenders? Why not invest that windfall in a CD, or a more appropriate financial vehicle?" But that question only exposes your naïveté: some folk have simply never heard of the phrase "financial vehicle". They lack the cultural capital to even see the social constructs allegedly available to them. They are literally blind to them.
Free will does not enable one to open invisible doors.
Apologies for this long-winded tirade: your rhetorical question struck me as absurdly naive. You claim you "can name several people who have overcome those impediments," but "several" is not a statistically significant number, and will not convince a rational person that the United States has high social mobility.
What's to stop one from being in that 1%? Massive, invisible, entrenched social constructs requiring immense luck or capital to navigate. And then your "free" will — certainly not free of biases, neuroses or addictions — can still fuck it up.
https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-gospel-of-consumption/
Take out wildly overpriced education, healthcare, and housing, and you can get by with barely working. 40% of Americans over 16 don't work at all, granted they may rely on government transfer payments and other services. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000
We are an industrialized, domesticated species, whether we like it or not.
1) Dad's side, farming I guess for Mom's side
Jokes aside, but I think this idea applied like many centuries ago. I think I might read it in some philosophical text. So today you would not be able to do that obviously, since you need to purchase land etc. and the whole society is based on purchasing to satisfy your needs.
Sounds profound until you realize we are too.
And while there are more people that starve to death that should, and more people who cannot get affordable health care, I would still much rather live in the modern world than head out into the forest and try to survive by myself, or as a subsistence farmer on a manor lord's land.
What animal would you trade places with? For that matter, would you be willing to roll the dice and change places with a random "free" human being living 5,000 years ago?
I don't disagree that this is probably the best time to be alive on average, but the standard deviation is pretty enormous, and I would argue that it might not be the best time to be alive in all places.
Still statistically better than a random human being in 3,000 BC.
And of course, we don't live in the best possible universe; but on average, a random human's odds of being eaten by a figurative grue monotonically increase as you go backwards in time.
Humans don't live alone in the woods--not now, not 5,000 years ago (nor 45,000 years before that). They band together to modify, control, and tame their environment.
Now, you might miss your devices, pastimes, and widespread sanitation...however, from my understanding, humans don't typically worry about malevolent grues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_human#Mode...
We're all priviledged for being literate and having access to the internet.
A more representative what-if would be to choose between trading places with a random person 5000 years ago, or with a random modern person anywhere in the world.
I would rather trade within the modern world, but it's nowhere nearly as sure a thing.