Technically we pay for all the shit that makes living on earth less brutal than what the monke has to put up with on a daily basis
Money tends to be less painful than getting mauled by a predator trying to scavenge food
Also we have beer! No seriously archeological evidence suggests beer was the main selling point of settled civilization for a lot of groups, so much so that it was the money until someone in turkey figured out you could use weird metal disks for that instead.
Fr, capitalism sucks absolute ass and there are better systems we can revolve around.
BUT if it's between capitalism and going back to having to forage, scavenge, fight nature itself on a daily basis and all the other crap all other animals have to deal with...mmm yea I'll stick with capitalism lmao
well yeah, capitalism was a step up from feudalism and so on.
Let’s go back to the beer economy, where your money goes bad eventually if you don’t drink it. Elon Musk would have the largest reserve of rotten beer in human history. He deserves it.
As satisfying as that would be parabley speaking, it'd also ruin our ability to organize commerce and infrastructure at a grander scale than a single region that happens to have a good breadbasket to get the beer crop from.
Money tends to be less painful than getting mauled by a predator trying to scavenge food
Easy to say when you're ensconced in the imperial core. But I wouldn't want to be living on the periphery. Humans are far crueler and more destructive than any natural predator.
A jaguar won't double-tap your house with a missile strike, to make sure it kills everyone inside and then any neighbors who rush in to help. An orca won't spend six years running caricatures of you in a tabloid newspaper, in order to build up enough bigotry and fear against your neighborhood that there's no push back when local politicians green light it for "slum clearance". No chimpanzee ever worked at Abu Ghraib or Vladimir Prison.
What humans do for money is far worse than what any predator has ever done for a meal.
That's because they're not capable of doing those things, of the animals you listed, I could absolutely see them doing those things if they had the intelligence and capabilities to do so.
Especially Orcas, what you listed would be an easy day for them, they're a bit of an asshole.
Most animals on this planet will do whatever it takes for their next meal that their capabilities will allow for because that's the only way to survive in the wild.
I could absolutely see them doing those things if they had the intelligence and capabilities
If you reduce other species to aesthetics, sure. Big Orange Man ultimately behaves the same as Smaller Brunette Man. But there are a bunch of sociological elements you're leaving on the table. Different species organize and interact with each other and their peers very differently. The Chimpanzees and Bonobos have night-and-day different social hierarchies and organizing principles, despite only minor variances in genetic traits.
Most animals on this planet will do whatever it takes for their next meal
But then what? We've long since solved the problem of the next meal. You don't need to send a man to the moon looking for the next meal.
If anything, we've seriously lost sight of solving for "the next meal" on a long term scale, as we engage in the kind of industrial activity that degrades and collapses our arable biome.
less brutal for us, more brutal for everyone else
Monkey pays to live. He pays in the form of the daily labor of foraging, avoiding predators and finding shelter. It's just not converted to the generalized form of money and then back to the basic needs of the monkey like we do it.
Labor is the basic unit of wealth. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Even if you somehow had your own sovereign nation with everything needed to self-sustain your whole family, never needing to leave...
You're still paying.
With your time and effort.
Only difference between us here is we pay with paper, they pay with blood
Not even paper anymore, it's almost entirely funny numbers in a computer
Yeah its become so innocuos and default i forgot
You pay with blood every day
But not my blood and that's the real difference
Not me. Just sweat and tears. I leave the bloodwork for those with the stomach
But blood I actually have.
Don't say that too loud
Ey, if I could sell my blood and pay the rent, I would.
You can sell your plasma...
Not where I live. It's illegal to sell human things. Organs, blood, plasma.... If it comes from a human, you basically can't buy or sell it.
Technically you can't here either, they call it a donation, but they pay you... Not sure exactly what the loophole is. I've never done it, but I used to work with a guy that did it as much as they'd let him.
You make a donation, you receive a gratuity/tip.
It's pretty minor as a difference, functionally it's the same as selling it.
I don't know that I have that loophole here. If I find out that we do, I'm "selling" all the plasma/blood/whatever the hell I can live without, as frequently as my poor body can take it.
you can work for food or you can work for tokens then exchange tokens for food but to imagine that every other living thing is just having a lovely time vibing and munching on infinite, freely available grindage while humans are the only species that has to do shit that sucks is just ignorant Rousseau noble savage dumbness
I think we tend to greatly underestimate how much the average wild animal's life completely sucks. Predators. Disease. Food shortages. Injuries that never fully heal. Teeth...you know what happens to teeth if you never brush them? A lot of animals are just scraping by. You know how most animals have pretty big litters, and quite often too? Yet their population stays roughly the same? Consider the implications of that fact on the survival rate for an average animal.
Wholeheartedly agree. The only thing I'd add is that I think it's in theoretical discussions that we underestimate how much a wild animal's life sucks shit. In the US at least there's enough forest that if a person wanted to get lost and be totally self-reliant they could take an honest shot at it. I think each of us has had that thought deep down in our secret hearts and, when we do, in that particular moment we make a very frank, honest and accurate estimate about how much fun it would be dying of an infection while lying face down in the cold muck. And this coming from a person who prides himself on being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
The rabbit that my cat brought home today was definitely not vibing
Your cat ought to work a little less.
I know this is a joke, but for real outdoor domesticated cats kill 1.3-4 billion songbirds a year… and most of those cats are being fed by humans.
They really do need to stop working so hard, and humans really need to start thinking about the ethics of letting their cat out to slaughter the wildlife around their home for no reason.
I keep finding dead things in my yard because of this. There are at least 3 "neighborhood cats" that someone lets run wild. They're definitely fed, groomed and collared, they have somewhere to go at night. Do you know of any techniques to reduce the impact short of just letting them come into my house during the day?
Steal the cats. Indoor cats live longer and don't murder birbs.
that would condemn my rats to a lifetime of constant terror
Maybe not. The bars on our cage are too small for cats to actually get at the rats, and they don't try. The rats are unbothered by cats being around. Obviously we close the bedroom off when it's ratty playtime.
If monkeys could exchange goods and services to have shelter, easy food, and entertainment, you bet they would.
They even understand when the boss is fucking with their pay.
Adam Smith was much more critical of capitalism than he is given credit for. For example, Adam Smith was critical of rent seeking and landlords. It would be somewhat accurate to replace Orangutan with Adam Smith in this meme.
Yes Capitalism is supposed to be pro-worker/anti-rich
Hence my comment about people still paying to live before adoption of capitalism
Yes Capitalism is supposed to be pro-worker/anti-rich
Supposed by whom? The rent-seeking behavior that Smith criticized was largely brought about by enclosure; the process of enclosure was foundational to capitalism.
Hence my comment about people still paying to live before adoption of capitalism
This is ahistorical, before enclosure the peasantry had substantial rights to live freely on the common land.
I suppose it does depend on what is meant by ‘pay to live on this earth’. If you just mean that people have to work to take care of themselves then, sure. But that’s not really what this meme is referring to. If it was then the orangutan would be ‘paying to live on this earth’ as well.
Adam Smith is the inventor of capitalism specifically his criticisms that you cite are about the systems we had prior
Are you just wrong for the sake of it?
He wasn’t criticizing a system that was built based on his writings because it hadn’t happened yet
Adam Smith did not ‘invent’ capitalism. No single person can invent an economic system. He made some early observations and normative assertions about a set of economic relations that were forming independent of him.
So the economic system we had prior to capitalism was feudalism. The common lands that I mentioned were apart of the feudal system. The system of landlords and rent-seeking were and are apart of capitalism. You can just look around… we still have these things. You do understand that right? Unless you’re saying our current system isn’t capitalist.
Yes, true capitalism has never been tested
But it doesn’t matter because the lesson to take away is that in any system the people with power will modify it to what we have now
For socialism
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
But it doesn’t matter because the lesson to take away is that in any system the people with power will modify it to what we have now
Was the system that the peasantry lived under in the commons the same as what we have now?
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
But your comment is actually in direct contradiction to Orwell’s actual more nuanced point. His point was not that every system devolves into capitalism… he was himself a socialist who fought along side communists in the Spanish civil war after all. His point is that we need to think critically about the structures we’re creating to ensure they’re serving egalitarian ends. Something I agree with Orwell on.
The original reason why I commented was because it didn’t seem you were engaging in the same project of critically examining economic structures in the way Orwell was and the way Smith was. Though I would love to be proven wrong.
I think you should think more critically about what people tell you about Adam Smith and George Orwell.
Was the system that the peasantry lived under in the commons the same as what we have now?
Globally…if you are living better than that then you’re in the high earners tier
The quote you just gave is from famous socialist George Orwell from his book Animal Fram. Which is critical of the structures the Soviet Union created.
Yes, glad you can keep up…now try to use a small amount of critical thinking and question why that was?
Did socialism not work because of capitalism? Did capitalism not work because of capitalism? Did feudalism not work because of capitalism? Did mercantilism not work because of capitalism?
Of course not, you would have to be an idiot to argue that…or that Adam Smith argued against capitalism
It’s because of the bourgeoisie class that will always change the system to their benefit. And replacing the people in that class with new ones doesn’t change that
Capitalism is pro-worker.
Capitalism is based on voluntary exchange. It is defined by the so-called “free market”, which is word for “a situation in which nobody cooperates economically without their own consent”.
And that's the problem, because everyone is coerced to do that if they want to survive. And those, who own the means of production, the capital, the companies, are those who have the power to exploit those who don't. And they do.
More like paying to prevent someone from assaulting you and taking all your stuff. Literally all of society is built from this foundation. Monkeys will just fuck each other up.
You literally dont have to pay for that. You can choose to not do that. It would be pretty dumb of you to do that but it's possible.
It's all about resource management and having skills to survive. Both monkeys and us - humans do it.
Our economy is an abstraction of nature. Both require work for survival.
Our economy is an abstraction of nature.
Its several layers deep in abstractions, which leads to some serious contradictions and faulty logic chains. Climate Change is probably the most current and obvious example, but we've got a host of instances in which we misappropriate or squander natural resources in a way an orangutan could not or would not. From the volume of trash production to the concept of financializing capital construction, we generate enormous amounts of excess capacity and waste very rapidly and then simply displace it onto distant habitats in order to keep it out of sight and mind.
When we talk about a distinction between natural and human activities, a lot of what we're describing is the artificially rapid pacing and the subsequent over-consumption of our behaviors. No orangutan could deliberately accrue the kind of ecological debts that a human child incurs without even thinking.
we generate enormous amounts of excess capacity and waste very rapidly and then simply displace it onto distant habitats in order to keep it out of sight and mind.
In fairness, the other apes also tend to walk a little bit away from their nesting sites before they poop. The reason there aren't great big mounds of orangutan poop visible from space is probably more due to the fact that there aren't 8 billion orangutans all pooping at the same time than anything else.
And now I'm picturing 8 billion orangutans all pooping at the same time. Thank you.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine 8 billion orangutans all pooping— at the same time
George Orangutanwell - Nineteen Eighty Fur
The reason there aren’t great big mounds of orangutan poop visible from space is probably more due to the fact that there aren’t 8 billion orangutans all pooping at the same time than anything else.
The vast majority of human waste is generated by a fraction of that 8 billion. The Sentinelese Islands aren't causing climate change.
That's not even to say that primitive man wasn't an ecological force. A great part of the Holocene Extinction came about during the Hunter-Gatherer phase of human existence. But mass migrations and displacements of native species aren't unheard of in prior epochs. The bigger problem came with post-industrial development, wherein our share of "poop" ballooned from 320 pounds of fecal matter to 2000 pounds of excess plastic waste per capita. Its this 7x increase in volume of junk that's causing us problems, not the short term jump in the number of subsistence farmers in central Asia.
The vast majority of human waste is generated by a fraction of that 8 billion
to what end do they generate all of this waste?
National recreational travel and industrial-scale armed conflict.
Go live the... Is that an orangutan? Life and get back to us.
Economists hate him!
A. Who just randomly says orangutans are dumb
B. I don't pay to live on earth
C. Orangutans are awesome
D. I hate capitalism
I've thought about this. Have the "Agriculture was a trap!" people ever designed like a hunter gatherer Eden? Like not historical reenactment. We have tech be a human and use it. But like buy a few hundred acres and plant a shitload of fruit trees with modern fertilizer, use GPS to navigate it, live in a badass modern tent...
Not for me, but those people seriously seem to have the option right there
Living is free, enjoying the benefits of modern civilization is not. Don't confuse the two.
Technically we pay for all the shit that makes living on earth less brutal than what the monke has to put up with on a daily basis
Money tends to be less painful than getting mauled by a predator trying to scavenge food
Also we have beer! No seriously archeological evidence suggests beer was the main selling point of settled civilization for a lot of groups, so much so that it was the money until someone in turkey figured out you could use weird metal disks for that instead.
Fr, capitalism sucks absolute ass and there are better systems we can revolve around.
BUT if it's between capitalism and going back to having to forage, scavenge, fight nature itself on a daily basis and all the other crap all other animals have to deal with...mmm yea I'll stick with capitalism lmao
well yeah, capitalism was a step up from feudalism and so on.
Let’s go back to the beer economy, where your money goes bad eventually if you don’t drink it. Elon Musk would have the largest reserve of rotten beer in human history. He deserves it.
As satisfying as that would be parabley speaking, it'd also ruin our ability to organize commerce and infrastructure at a grander scale than a single region that happens to have a good breadbasket to get the beer crop from.
Easy to say when you're ensconced in the imperial core. But I wouldn't want to be living on the periphery. Humans are far crueler and more destructive than any natural predator.
A jaguar won't double-tap your house with a missile strike, to make sure it kills everyone inside and then any neighbors who rush in to help. An orca won't spend six years running caricatures of you in a tabloid newspaper, in order to build up enough bigotry and fear against your neighborhood that there's no push back when local politicians green light it for "slum clearance". No chimpanzee ever worked at Abu Ghraib or Vladimir Prison.
What humans do for money is far worse than what any predator has ever done for a meal.
That's because they're not capable of doing those things, of the animals you listed, I could absolutely see them doing those things if they had the intelligence and capabilities to do so.
Especially Orcas, what you listed would be an easy day for them, they're a bit of an asshole.
Most animals on this planet will do whatever it takes for their next meal that their capabilities will allow for because that's the only way to survive in the wild.
If you reduce other species to aesthetics, sure. Big Orange Man ultimately behaves the same as Smaller Brunette Man. But there are a bunch of sociological elements you're leaving on the table. Different species organize and interact with each other and their peers very differently. The Chimpanzees and Bonobos have night-and-day different social hierarchies and organizing principles, despite only minor variances in genetic traits.
But then what? We've long since solved the problem of the next meal. You don't need to send a man to the moon looking for the next meal.
If anything, we've seriously lost sight of solving for "the next meal" on a long term scale, as we engage in the kind of industrial activity that degrades and collapses our arable biome.
less brutal for us, more brutal for everyone else
Monkey pays to live. He pays in the form of the daily labor of foraging, avoiding predators and finding shelter. It's just not converted to the generalized form of money and then back to the basic needs of the monkey like we do it.
Labor is the basic unit of wealth. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Even if you somehow had your own sovereign nation with everything needed to self-sustain your whole family, never needing to leave...
You're still paying.
With your time and effort.
Only difference between us here is we pay with paper, they pay with blood
Not even paper anymore, it's almost entirely funny numbers in a computer
Yeah its become so innocuos and default i forgot
You pay with blood every day
But not my blood and that's the real difference
Not me. Just sweat and tears. I leave the bloodwork for those with the stomach
But blood I actually have.
Don't say that too loud
Ey, if I could sell my blood and pay the rent, I would.
You can sell your plasma...
Not where I live. It's illegal to sell human things. Organs, blood, plasma.... If it comes from a human, you basically can't buy or sell it.
Technically you can't here either, they call it a donation, but they pay you... Not sure exactly what the loophole is. I've never done it, but I used to work with a guy that did it as much as they'd let him.
You make a donation, you receive a gratuity/tip.
It's pretty minor as a difference, functionally it's the same as selling it.
I don't know that I have that loophole here. If I find out that we do, I'm "selling" all the plasma/blood/whatever the hell I can live without, as frequently as my poor body can take it.
you can work for food or you can work for tokens then exchange tokens for food but to imagine that every other living thing is just having a lovely time vibing and munching on infinite, freely available grindage while humans are the only species that has to do shit that sucks is just ignorant Rousseau noble savage dumbness
I think we tend to greatly underestimate how much the average wild animal's life completely sucks. Predators. Disease. Food shortages. Injuries that never fully heal. Teeth...you know what happens to teeth if you never brush them? A lot of animals are just scraping by. You know how most animals have pretty big litters, and quite often too? Yet their population stays roughly the same? Consider the implications of that fact on the survival rate for an average animal.
Wholeheartedly agree. The only thing I'd add is that I think it's in theoretical discussions that we underestimate how much a wild animal's life sucks shit. In the US at least there's enough forest that if a person wanted to get lost and be totally self-reliant they could take an honest shot at it. I think each of us has had that thought deep down in our secret hearts and, when we do, in that particular moment we make a very frank, honest and accurate estimate about how much fun it would be dying of an infection while lying face down in the cold muck. And this coming from a person who prides himself on being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
The rabbit that my cat brought home today was definitely not vibing
Your cat ought to work a little less.
I know this is a joke, but for real outdoor domesticated cats kill 1.3-4 billion songbirds a year… and most of those cats are being fed by humans.
They really do need to stop working so hard, and humans really need to start thinking about the ethics of letting their cat out to slaughter the wildlife around their home for no reason.
I keep finding dead things in my yard because of this. There are at least 3 "neighborhood cats" that someone lets run wild. They're definitely fed, groomed and collared, they have somewhere to go at night. Do you know of any techniques to reduce the impact short of just letting them come into my house during the day?
Steal the cats. Indoor cats live longer and don't murder birbs.
that would condemn my rats to a lifetime of constant terror
Maybe not. The bars on our cage are too small for cats to actually get at the rats, and they don't try. The rats are unbothered by cats being around. Obviously we close the bedroom off when it's ratty playtime.
If monkeys could exchange goods and services to have shelter, easy food, and entertainment, you bet they would.
They even understand when the boss is fucking with their pay.
https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg?feature=shared
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TBH if Orangutans knew they could pay to conserve their own habitat and buy more food then they'd probably be working jobs, too.
Right up until they tried to unionize, at which point they'd be exterminated to the last orange hair.
Itt: America = The world
AFAIK there aren't any Orangutans in America, they're mostly between Indonesia and Malaysia.
Was this made by a 12yo?
Everything pays, just not with money.
Don't make it about our species. It's capitalism
Existed before Adam Smith
Adam Smith was much more critical of capitalism than he is given credit for. For example, Adam Smith was critical of rent seeking and landlords. It would be somewhat accurate to replace Orangutan with Adam Smith in this meme.
Yes Capitalism is supposed to be pro-worker/anti-rich
Hence my comment about people still paying to live before adoption of capitalism
Supposed by whom? The rent-seeking behavior that Smith criticized was largely brought about by enclosure; the process of enclosure was foundational to capitalism.
This is ahistorical, before enclosure the peasantry had substantial rights to live freely on the common land.
I suppose it does depend on what is meant by ‘pay to live on this earth’. If you just mean that people have to work to take care of themselves then, sure. But that’s not really what this meme is referring to. If it was then the orangutan would be ‘paying to live on this earth’ as well.
Adam Smith is the inventor of capitalism specifically his criticisms that you cite are about the systems we had prior
Are you just wrong for the sake of it?
He wasn’t criticizing a system that was built based on his writings because it hadn’t happened yet
Adam Smith did not ‘invent’ capitalism. No single person can invent an economic system. He made some early observations and normative assertions about a set of economic relations that were forming independent of him.
So the economic system we had prior to capitalism was feudalism. The common lands that I mentioned were apart of the feudal system. The system of landlords and rent-seeking were and are apart of capitalism. You can just look around… we still have these things. You do understand that right? Unless you’re saying our current system isn’t capitalist.
Yes, true capitalism has never been tested
But it doesn’t matter because the lesson to take away is that in any system the people with power will modify it to what we have now
For socialism
Was the system that the peasantry lived under in the commons the same as what we have now?
Ok?
The quote you just gave is from famous socialist George Orwell from his book Animal Fram. Which is critical of the structures the Soviet Union created.
But your comment is actually in direct contradiction to Orwell’s actual more nuanced point. His point was not that every system devolves into capitalism… he was himself a socialist who fought along side communists in the Spanish civil war after all. His point is that we need to think critically about the structures we’re creating to ensure they’re serving egalitarian ends. Something I agree with Orwell on.
The original reason why I commented was because it didn’t seem you were engaging in the same project of critically examining economic structures in the way Orwell was and the way Smith was. Though I would love to be proven wrong.
I think you should think more critically about what people tell you about Adam Smith and George Orwell.
Globally…if you are living better than that then you’re in the high earners tier
Yes, glad you can keep up…now try to use a small amount of critical thinking and question why that was?
Did socialism not work because of capitalism? Did capitalism not work because of capitalism? Did feudalism not work because of capitalism? Did mercantilism not work because of capitalism?
Of course not, you would have to be an idiot to argue that…or that Adam Smith argued against capitalism
It’s because of the bourgeoisie class that will always change the system to their benefit. And replacing the people in that class with new ones doesn’t change that
Capitalism is pro-worker.
Capitalism is based on voluntary exchange. It is defined by the so-called “free market”, which is word for “a situation in which nobody cooperates economically without their own consent”.
And that's the problem, because everyone is coerced to do that if they want to survive. And those, who own the means of production, the capital, the companies, are those who have the power to exploit those who don't. And they do.
More like paying to prevent someone from assaulting you and taking all your stuff. Literally all of society is built from this foundation. Monkeys will just fuck each other up.
You literally dont have to pay for that. You can choose to not do that. It would be pretty dumb of you to do that but it's possible.
It's all about resource management and having skills to survive. Both monkeys and us - humans do it.
Our economy is an abstraction of nature. Both require work for survival.
Its several layers deep in abstractions, which leads to some serious contradictions and faulty logic chains. Climate Change is probably the most current and obvious example, but we've got a host of instances in which we misappropriate or squander natural resources in a way an orangutan could not or would not. From the volume of trash production to the concept of financializing capital construction, we generate enormous amounts of excess capacity and waste very rapidly and then simply displace it onto distant habitats in order to keep it out of sight and mind.
When we talk about a distinction between natural and human activities, a lot of what we're describing is the artificially rapid pacing and the subsequent over-consumption of our behaviors. No orangutan could deliberately accrue the kind of ecological debts that a human child incurs without even thinking.
In fairness, the other apes also tend to walk a little bit away from their nesting sites before they poop. The reason there aren't great big mounds of orangutan poop visible from space is probably more due to the fact that there aren't 8 billion orangutans all pooping at the same time than anything else.
And now I'm picturing 8 billion orangutans all pooping at the same time. Thank you.
George Orangutanwell - Nineteen Eighty Fur
The vast majority of human waste is generated by a fraction of that 8 billion. The Sentinelese Islands aren't causing climate change.
That's not even to say that primitive man wasn't an ecological force. A great part of the Holocene Extinction came about during the Hunter-Gatherer phase of human existence. But mass migrations and displacements of native species aren't unheard of in prior epochs. The bigger problem came with post-industrial development, wherein our share of "poop" ballooned from 320 pounds of fecal matter to 2000 pounds of excess plastic waste per capita. Its this 7x increase in volume of junk that's causing us problems, not the short term jump in the number of subsistence farmers in central Asia.
to what end do they generate all of this waste?
National recreational travel and industrial-scale armed conflict.
Go live the... Is that an orangutan? Life and get back to us.
Economists hate him!
A. Who just randomly says orangutans are dumb B. I don't pay to live on earth C. Orangutans are awesome D. I hate capitalism
Returner to monkey: https://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/
I've thought about this. Have the "Agriculture was a trap!" people ever designed like a hunter gatherer Eden? Like not historical reenactment. We have tech be a human and use it. But like buy a few hundred acres and plant a shitload of fruit trees with modern fertilizer, use GPS to navigate it, live in a badass modern tent...
Not for me, but those people seriously seem to have the option right there
Living is free, enjoying the benefits of modern civilization is not. Don't confuse the two.