First the problem:
Thrasymachus Meets Evolution and Zero-sum Thinking
There is only so much of X (money, food, oil, water, arable land, etc.), so for me to get more of X the rest of you must take less. And through me getting more my genes will be able to evolutionarily dominate yours. I can outcompete you for sexual access, so have more offspring, and can also give my additional offspring competitive advantages – in diet, education, appearance enhancing surgery and so on – that will ensure their ability to dominate your offspring; from which the cycle will then repeat, and so on. This is basic and inescapable reality; ‘the way of the world’ as imposed on us (so, intrinsically, not my fault) by the competitive mechanism of evolution. Resistance to it is therefore self-defeating, in that it can lead only to competitive disadvantage, and thereby ultimately to genetic elimination for the resisters. Its logical corollary is dominance as our only honest directive. If – through my failure to lie, cheat, steal, betray, etc. – I miss some competitive advantage that is not missed by my less scrupulous adversary then, and to my cost, he will gain in dominance; so there is finally nothing but dominance. Reason, fairness, honesty, altruism and empathy are merely naïve comforters for the weak and foolish. There are many more of them than of me, so – as recommended by Machiavelli – I must be able to convincing fake these weaknesses as required to further my dominance agenda. But I’m way too smart and wise to fall for them.
I offer this as a statement of the Trump/Vance/Musk/Putin/Orban/etc. philosophy, in the unlikely event that they were to suddenly become willing to express it with honesty and precision. It is of course a large and stinking pile of garbage; but until and unless our side can sufficiently recover its intellectual mojo for honest articulation of the powerful rational arguments which show it to be such a pile it will continue to trash our world. As per my header image, our ‘plane will continue to spiral down. And as of now, we are running out of safe altitude.
For an ‘out of the box’ mitigation proposal please try thelastbesthope.xyz
