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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

Look around you and see we are not living in mud and huts anymore

Actually I'd rather start from a mud hut and then upgrade it myself than live in the current rental system, but I don't have that option because landlords own most of the land.

It's racism that fuels this comparison with value. I'm living in a yurt and would gladly trade it for a mud hut. Humans are currently threatening most life (including our own species) on the surface with extinction in multiple ways. That's not value and it is an inevitable conclusion to any form of binary thinking at scale. That includes the thinking that says "this way of life has more value than that way of life." We're living in the curse of the Greeks, whereby we've grown away from connection with our environments in the same ways they did by pedestaling their ways, including a form of logic that's too constrained to model reality.

Here's a paper on uncertainty logic to expand from. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03123

Thank you for saying it. The racism is so embedded into western society it’s intractable

And saying so will get you downvoted on here most times. To anyone downvoting, show us the depth of your reasoning for it?

The fact that while racism exists, Western society is certainly not at the forefront of it? If anything the collective "West" is the most sensitive about race and racial issues.

It's performative because resolving it would require the end of the governments within the "West" and replacing with reindigenizing governance. Supremacy is at the foundation of the whole "West" and racism will always exist while that's in play. The racism is systemic and cultural. Sensitivity isn't sufficient; there needs to be actual systemic shifts that help drive cultural shifts and vice-versa. Not simply language changes, either. Rooting out binary thinking is key to it all. Nondual animist views are more aligned with how things work in the cosmos than dualism/nonanimism.

> Supremacy is at the foundation of the whole "West" and racism will always exist while that's in play.

If this is indeed the case, then it is very much not unique to the West, nor is it most tightly ingrained in the West. I'm not sure in how many different countries you'd live, but I can tell you this from lived experience. It could well be that most of the West is above average on a global scale in terms of belief in supremacy. I too have not lived in a 100 countries so I can't place "the West" as a block with accuracy. What I can tell you is that it does not land at #1.

Unless you call any vaguely US-aligned high-HDI country "The West" regardless of ethnicity, but that would be completely opposed to how any reasonable person would interpret your stance given the mentions of racism.

I'd say Greek culture heavily influenced colonization of the world & this has, in large part, led to dualism being implemented systemically , which drives supremacy-based thinking. Not saying ancient Greece invented it, but definitely helped in formalizing the basis for it.

That's a very different claim, and no one reading your first comments would've interpreted "The West" as "The Western style of thinking" (which is hardly tractable) rather than "The bloc that is the West in 2026".

It would be in a sense Eurocentric and patronizing to suggest that supremacy-based thinking all the way from the Middle East to East Asia stems from Greek culture. And if you're trying to say that dualism is universal and arises everywhere, then Greece becomes almost irrelevant and there's no real point to be made that the West has particularly relevant unique or exaggerated characteristics when it comes to the pervasive supremacy-based thinking.

You might be mixing my comments with someone else's. I'm not focusing on the "West", just addressing what someone else brought in. And it's neither all "the West's" responsibility nor is its responsibility irrelevant. The educational indoctrination used by European/American colonization practices has focused around teaching "Greek logic", and this includes how academic science and math has evolved and spread. The comment this one is in response to even presents a binary as a misrepresentation of what I've written before.

Dualism is not universal. And its wide spread in this world was brought about in large part through brutal colonization carried out by Europeans and their descendants with the help of various Christian denominations. They used Christian spirituality and forcing their own languages on people to disconnect them from the land (which includes the people themselves, as we are all land).

Housing prices certainly can get high, but they aren't anywhere close to a billion dollars, which is the actual number under discussion

The thing being discussed is that wealth can be created, not merely stolen.

The existence of housing is an example of something vlauable being created. The price of housing is not relevant to the example.

Always the same straw man argument. Nobody here is arguing that wealth can't be created.

Did you not read the comment chain above? That's precisely the point that was being discussed, then misunderstood.

I read the comment chain above. I just went back and read it again. I question whether you've done the same.

I can't understand the writing for you. But I can present it.

TheTayTay said "wealth can be created". Avicebron asked for an example of wealth creation. cm2012 provided one, housing. saghm misunderstood the intent of the example. I pointed out the error, and then you came in and have apparently repeatedly failed to understand again multiple comments, both the people who literally are saying that some quantity of wealth cannot be created, and myself.

If you didn't get that after a reread, all I can suggest is that you seek out a literacy class at a local community college. It will improve your life, because this certainly won't be the first or only time you misunderstand written words.

I'm sorry to say that you don't seem to have read either the thread or my comment.

What you bring to the discussion is the straw-man argument that "wealth can be created, not only stolen." Nobody was disputing that. Nobody is disputing it now. It's common ground.

Saghm tried to return to the actual topic, but you don't seem to have understood (or you aren't willing to acknowledge) what that topic actually was. People were talking about how to fairly divide wealth, not about whether it can be created or not.

No, I don't believe that you are sorry. And discussions can diverge; making a comment that follows only the original discussion but is a non-sequiter to the comment it actually replies to, makes the comment nonsensical, not "a return to the original discussion".

The thing you say was not claimed, was claimed by multiple commenters.

Considering you are neither truthful nor literate, I won't be replying again. Feel free to get the last word in if you like.

If anyone else is unlucky enough to be reading this, please just scroll up to see what everyone actually said.

The argument that you seem to have had trouble parsing isn't that it's impossible to create wealth, but that the rewards are not distributed according to the role that people played in creating it. If a company sells for a billion dollars, there isn't a single "correct" way to decide how much each person in the company deserves to get. Some people (likely including yourself) believe that the way it's currently done is the best way, but other people (like myself) disagree and think that the current system gives rewards that are not proportionate to the amount of work each member does in reaching that point. There are plenty of coherent counterarguments you could make against my viewpoint, but asserting that it's equivalent to claiming that wealth "can't be created" is not one of them; I'm arguing that how much each person contributed towards that wealth creation is different than you are, not that it's literally not happening.

But it's extractive, i.e. the housing costs what you can pay if you sacrifice. Those who got housing first need to get paid by latecomers. If the cost of building magically went to 0, the soft costs would inflate.

Sure. The extractiveness of housing costs can exist alongside the fact that constructing a building on land creates value.

Also note that we're 8 billion people living on a much higher average material living standard than when we were 2 billion 100 years ago.

No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.

Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.

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