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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

The alternative of last resort is always violent revolution[1]. Wealth redistribution is the olive branch.

There seems to be an open question among the wealthy and political class of how far inequality can go given the modern police state and effectiveness of technology in accomplishing the goal of maintaining or exacerbating the current political economy.

1. See historical populist grivences against aristocracy that result in social restructuring.

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Overwhelmingly, violent revolution doesn't actually bring about the goals of the revolution. It just installs a new power structure with variations on all the old problems. Sometimes much worse.

So it isn't really a "last resort". It's more of a "well you didn't compromise, so now our choice is to burn the whole system down"

Wholeheartedly agree. For the peasants, revolutionary goals are rarely fulfilled. For the previous elite though, they rarely find continuity of power post revolution.

The sans-culottes didn't quite accomplish their goals(at least immediately), but Louis XVI among other elites didn't survive.

Toussaint Louverture et al didn't accomplish their goals, but the French no longer controlled Haiti.

Even Lenin and Trosky didn't accomplish their goals, but the Romanov didn't leave the Ipatiev House alive.

Like many conflicts, one side doesn't have to win for one to lose.

All true, which brings up the question how much better will the world be with a new elite. Also, maybe today’s generation of revolutionaries will do something different.

> Overwhelmingly, violent revolution doesn't actually bring about the goals of the revolution. It just installs a new power structure with variations on all the old problems. Sometimes much worse.

There are examples either way, and sadly you seem right.

I recently read but now can’t find a discussion around this that argued that extreme times promote extreme individuals. A violent revolution is clearly an extreme time and any leader that emerges is likely to have fought hard for their position.

This feels true to me. So my question is - and I don't know the answer yet, though I continue to seek such - when do we, as a humanity, break this cycle? When, and how, do we override the greed impulse, the impulse for power and control and domination of others? When do we begin to leverage a superior cognitive capacity enough to gain true enlightenment and break free from the bonds of behaviour which, while necessary as we evolved, is no longer required, and replace it with an egalitarian perspective and an accompanying stewardship model of life on earth?

We are pretty much there already. The average person in a developed Western country is pretty much a billionaire when compared to the living conditions of even the wealthiest people in ancient history. It's only the impulse of greed and envy towards others that leads us to believe otherwise.

I'm always reminded of the video where one monkey is rewarded with a cucumber and one with a grape[1]. Certainly getting a cucumber is infinitely better than not having a cucumber, and yet the monkey protests.

Despite having higher cognitive functions, that impulse still exists and can only be suppressed for so long and so far. No one has infinite capacity to maintain what they see as unfairness indefinitely, especially when it seems that humans make their own rules.

1. Capuchin monkey fairness experiment, total duration: 57s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KSryJXDpZo

Not quite. Some things are fundamentally restricted in supply - for example and most pertinently, decent housing where people need to live. It is hard to feel like a billionaire when you have to share cramped living spaces that take most of your income.

Traditional responses see that as either good (which I think is your implication) or terrible, a la "bread and circuses" where people are too complacent to demand any real changes. I would say that the "average person" is a tricky model, here in the US there are people sleeping on the sidewalk, but they have smartphones in their pockets. Are they better off than a Roman emperor? I would say no.

Thanks for pointing this out. It helped me contextualize the argument.

It is a combination of "Other People Have It Worse Than You Do" but uses the past as a point of reference.

We could just as easy compare ourselves to our presumably better off future and say that we have it worse off than them so we deserve to improve things now.

You don't. Biology is a weird and wonderful thing and all these behaviours are ingrained deep. You arent changing anythibg without likely making it way worse through unforeseen outcomes. What we have to do instead is harness these emotions for financially wiping out the weak wealth inheritors mich more effectively so that it is rare to get more than 3 or 4 generations of these people with no skill growing the pot. One generation of imbecile/useless person needs to be likely to wipe out the pot.This would take the form of such things as (but not limited to) drastically limiting the controls one can keep on inheritances through time so more money ends up in inheritors hands with no restrictions sooner, finding a way to make private equity mich riskier/more evemly allocated so that the expected return for rich people is lower (but skilled rich can still earn high returns), more effectibely limiting corporate market power abuse by more effectively breaking up oligopolies (dont have to go back to prerehnquist levels of trust breaking but need to jead back in that direction some), etc.

There is an argument that Karl Marx provided a guide for the aristocracy to work out the point that inequality would provoke a revolution then back off slightly from it.

Like yes, but also no? The aristocracy no easier to organize than the peasantry. They, through individual self-interest, graze on the commons of wealth and power and are subject to its tragedies just the same.

Good luck with that in USA.

I'd rather die some billionaires minimum wage security squad protecting his gold plated yacht than let some violent freeloaders take my shit and install some cuban-tier communist hell-hole where there's no incentive to produce even basic grain stocks.

If you are minimum wage security guard, nobody is taking your shit.

What incentive would this guard have to keep working?

So are you arguing we _should_ make rich people poor so they have motivation to work; that only poor people can be motivated to work?

The solution is simple: Don't be that rich. If you can manage that, then you'll be fine. You're probably not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.

There won't be any incentive to produce even basic grain stocks if the large majority of the population can't afford to eat. See the Great Depression.

Life expectancy rose to a multi decade (all time at that time?) record peak during the great depression in US and starvation was exceedingly rare. Even at one of its worst the outcome was remarkably robust against starvation.

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