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Comment by Paul_S | Hacker News Reader

I have watched the whole series and it is an amazing experience to watch someone's whole life. Most people will never see lives of people of different class, here you can see orphans, working class, privileged.

You can see how society works and how rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor. If you're poor and work really, really hard then maybe you'll become middle-class if you're lucky. If you're rich it really doesn't matter what you do, you'll be fine.

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The more interesting discussion would be with what to do about that. So far I haven't seen society was able to solve that (and should it?).

E.g. Communism tried to solve the problem, but failed miserably, not only not resolving the problem, but also became a good excuse for imperialistic land capture.

The closest to the fix came the countries top of the "Social Mobility Index", what we can learn from them?

https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...

If society shouldn't try to make everyone's life better, what's the point of society?

Make most of the people's life better.

Everyone is an impossible target.

Maybe make the life better for more than the alternatives

This seems to cozy up to Utilitarianism, which has it's own problems. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism#Criticisms_and_...

I was trying to reply to the Everyone part in:

If society can't make everyone happy, what's the point.

Right. Depending on the take, your aligns with the utilitarian perspective as well. You don't need to make everyone happy, as long as it leads to the "greatest good" (rule utilitarianism) or the "highest average happiness" (average utilitarianism). My point is that this perspective is not devoid of philosophical problems.

There are many other ideals, it borders philosophy actually.

For example I can think of (obviously exaggerated) example: everyone lives absolutely happy as they are, but climate worsens so much than no one survives. In about 500 million years oceans will boil anyway. But fixing that will require many people to be unhappy.

PS: > what's the point of society?

Survival? Space expansion? Ubermensch / AI? Why, as you say, hedonism is the ultimate goal?

Who said anything about hedonism? How about just making sure everyone has what they need to live comfortably?

I'm probably using exaggerated word again, sorry, not native speaker.

I'm just questioning why "Live comfortably" is an axiom. It's a natural human desire, yes, just as other animals, but I'm not so sure we should maximize that as a society. Many exciting and proud things I did in my life were outside my comfort zone.

E.g. a lot of drug addicts can vouch that their current comfort zone is not what they would want, but there's no one around to force them through tears and sweat to change it. Same thing can be said about sugar or, I dunno, comfortable cars. (I'm exaggerating again :)

I think what you're alluding to is the distinction between eudaimonic and hedonic wellbeing.

"Comfortably" doesn't refer to comfort zones here, but is used in the "without major difficulty" sense (that is, one's needs are met to the point they're not stressed about food/shelter/medical care/etc.)

>You can see how society works and how rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor.

Shh, you'll wake the techno-libertarians.

"Capitalism is God's way of determining who is smart and who is poor."

- Ron Swanson (not sure if his character was a techno-libertarian, but certainly a libertarian)

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