If it were that simple, we would be in a better place by now. Everything you've said has already been articulated, and societies and movements have tried to live by those principles and failed time and time again to create life affirming communities.

The "collective" can be just as harmful as the individual, and it should not be unconditionally romanticized and glorified. People live emotionally repressed lives in collectivist, moralizing societies. This is part of Nietzsche's (imo, totally valid critique) critique of Christianity and Liberalism.

We need to move beyond objective, moralizing language and embrace vulnerability and subjectivity. I can feel the undertones of resentment in your comment - your righteousness and hatred is obvious.

People need to be able to embrace a bit of selfishness, egoism and expression. Muzzling human nature is a lost cause which leads to dysfunctional dystopias. We have to work with it, not against it. We need to build a culture in which it can find a healthy expression.

Unfortunately capitalism and Liberalism are the closest we have come to this, but they are still moralizing and soul crushing, placing a heavy burden of duty on people. They rely on ruthlessly shaming all burnout and failure and hiding suffering from public view.

But it is not greed which is the problem, it is the complex psychological trap of "duty" and a responsibility to participate in exploitative public life. All of morality is just a bunch of scared angry monkeys desperately trying to hold it all together and maintain their standard of living. That's all it is. But people objectivize it and internalize it, instead of unconditionally loving themselves like an animal should. It's really that simple - we should love ourselves in a totally selfish and uncomplicated way, like a cat would.

We don't need morality and shame - we have empathy. Obviously there are natural psychopaths, but if we really had our shit together they would not be a problem. It's only around 1% of people, they could be checked by a community of healthy people.

Hope you break out of the psychological prison of Christian morality.

In the world where you sell ten $10 books and get paid, $100, does the store not pay the people who clean, stock the shelves, make sure the registers work, etc? Or is it just required to operate at a massive loss? What about other factors of production, like utilities?

You can learn the rules though, the point of this existence is to choose your experience though so it’s not necessary to learn the rules.

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I think causality + the existence of suffering give most animals, like humans, genuine purpose and meaning in life.

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Destroy the ecosystem of the planet.

What you call exploitation others call salvation. There has to be a system free of coercion where two or more people can freely exchange ideas and the fruits of their labour, and this I have always called Capitalism. Anything after that is something else. If you don't wish to call what I just described Capitalism, call it something else then and I shall agree, because it's that system that has brought us out of the dark ages and given us everything.

What im trying to say is, wealth and value are seperate things. Of course wealth can be produced and grown, im not arguing that. But to produce that wealth, first someone needs to agree on the value you placed on something, and they need to actually give you their wealth in order for you to produce it. Can you answer me how can one generate wealth, or money, without someone else giving up their own wealth?

If you're not under 25, please go work at a restaurant for a couple months or something, this is seriously detached-from-reality thinking. I was in the same boat in my teens, so believe me I understand, but this is outright incorrect and not how capitalism actually works. I'm sure this is how it's described in Atlas Shrugged or whatever, but reality has been twisted by the elites and that's the simplest way I can put it without writing an essay in response.

I've described a mechanism that suggests that everything follows a deterministic path, including our choices. This mechanism seems to conform to everything we know about how the world works (let's just assume this is so).

You are making a claim about how the universe works that differs from mine, yet you do not support this in any way. You don't propose a mechanism or principle, or reason for why it works the way you say. The only thing you present is a sort of allegory about how parts of something must not share the same qualities as the whole. But how does this preserve free will, or indeterminacy?

And yet I just had my Intro to Philosophy professor tell me that the very thesis of Determinism is: All events are necessary.

Why is it a sin? By accentuating the concept of sin you are affirming the grand premise of judeo Christianity as a reality

Incorrect. Workers have no attachment to a particular workplace and always have the option of working somewhere else. The success or failure of any particular business is immaterial to the workers.

If I work at a bookstore and sell 10 $10 books, I do not receive $100. That’s what it means for a worker to receive the full value of the work they do. What would the business owner get under this arrangement, don’t know, the value of whatever books they sell also.

Business owners are not entitled to one cent of the value their employees produce. Maybe take 10 percent off for upkeep of the business, other than that, the workers should be getting the same value as they produce.

There’s many other proposed economic systems. Food being produced == food having a cost. You left that part out. X being produced is the part that has to do with the nature of reality. X having a monetary cost is artificial.

To you perhaps, wisdom can be found in all things or forms even from what you might consider un-wise, to philosophize is to embrace or too pursue without capture, don’t be hubris in presumption or you might loose what you otherwise would have gained

>But when you write a song or a movie, its not like it has some inherent value to it.

So? Nothing has inherent value to it. That doesn't mean you can't creste things people will find valuable.

>You assign some value to it and if enough people agree on the value you placed, you can sell that thing to generate wealth.

Yes, right.

>Just because we assigned some abstract value to these things, does not mean it creates wealth out of nowhere.

Of course it does. That is what all wealth is - stuff that people assigned an abstract value to. To create wealth you labor to create something or to do something that either a) at least a few people will put a high value on or b) that a lot of people will put a low value on.

>If people dont agree on the value you placed, they will not give you their wealth and you will not be producing wealth.

Sure, yes, of course. You might try to write a good book and produce crap. You might try to grow a crop of potatoes and overwater them so they all die. You might dig up a bunch of shiny rocks and discover no one wants them. You might compose a song and find no one wants to listen to it.

I said wealth can be produced and grown. I never said you personally had the skill and talent necessary to produce it, or that every effort to do so would succeed. Creating wealth is difficult. It has to be, because economic value is largely a function of scarcity.

Pull what of?

Is there much of a difference between Camus' absurdism and Nietzsche's nihilism, or even Kierkegaard's existentialism? I know that they're basically all children of the same family with minor twists here and there, I just find it fascinating how they're all basically colloquial theories discussing and confronting the same problem/idea.

But when you write a song or a movie, its not like it has some inherent value to it. You assign some value to it and if enough people agree on the value you placed, you can sell that thing to generate wealth. Just because we assigned some abstract value to these things, does not mean it creates wealth out of nowhere. If people dont agree on the value you placed, they will not give you their wealth and you will not be producing wealth.

I don't see the usefulness in discussing a theory based on a being that can't be proven to exist.

A perspective only someone who thinks life is sitting in a chair looking at screens would have; out there, in the reals, it's not a game.

>It happens every single day. It’s called work. What benefit do I get if a store or a business succeeds?

You continue to have an organization you can sell your labor to. If it fails, you won't, and then you starve.

> It’s the submission of one’s own goals before that of another. It’s exploitative because the employee receives less value than is produced by their labor.

No, they recieve exactly the value of their labor. If you were receiving less than the value of your labor, you would sell it to someone else, instead.

>People work because they have to, it’s a captive audience and there is nothing fair about these arrangements.

Yes, right, you have to work to eat, because food needs to be produced before it can be consumed, and you have to work to get shelter, because houses have to be built before they can be lived in, and you have to work to clothe yourself, because clothes have to be manufactured before they can be worn. But this isn't some terrible unfairness that only occurs under capitalism. That is the nature of reality itself, and would remain true under any economic system.

Imho, this is all an exercise in a privileged ego-driven community - or the ravings of misfits.

When I was about 12 years old I had my own existential crisis, over the concept of reality. As I mentally explored the possibility that the world was just a figment of my own imagination I got rather confused about what was really real. And after floundering a bit I had a bit of an epiphany, when I realized that embracing a lack of reality would totally mess up my life.

Our current understanding of the way we physically see the world by constructing a model of reality in one's brain (which is constantly updated by new visual data) may have been relevant. But it doesn't change our need to accept the assumption that there's a "real" reality as we go about our daily lives.

In a similar way, we have evolved believing in free will, where we are driven to accumulate resources in order to survive. And while I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the old matrix with 4 options, where,

1. Believe in free-will - and you're right - then it's a win!
2. Believe in free-will - and you're wrong - then it doesn't matter.
3. Believe free-will is false - and you're right - then it doesn't matter.
4. Believe free-will is false - and you're wrong - then it's a big loss.

Of course it's more nuanced than this as there's also the duality option, where we can believe in two seemingly contradictory things at the same time. In this case understanding that there are some things we can't control, allows us to both work hard to meet our goals, AND to accept the fact that we're still okay, and we can still move on and recover when the shit hits the fan.

So, if you're fortunate enough to have the time and bandwidth - and the ability to treat all this as an intellectual exercise, then that's perfectly fine. But taking the results too far, and trying to apply them to one's daily life can end up being disastrous.

>What i dont understand is, in order for you to produce wealth, someone else needs to lose that same amount of wealth.

But that isn't true. If you sit down and write a good book, you have created something valuable that didn't exist before. The same is true if you program a videogame. Or write a hit song. And so on. There are plenty of ways to make society (and yourself) richer without someone else losing wealth. Likewise, the value of your phone lies less in the material resources that make it up and the labor put into to arranging those resources and more in the ingenuity of the idea behind how to arrange those resources. The same is true of most of the material goods we collectively would call "wealth".

People tend to disapprove of their own exploitation and they ought to.