Comment by openrisk

People obviously "care", as in: we are social animals. We survived and thrived through coexistence and caring.

But how do you scale "caring" to huge and complex societies where vast numbers of individuals pursue a vast number of (possibly conflicting) interests?

When it appears that nobody cares its more a manifestation that the amount of systematic care we have invented and organized is not matching the need.

One powerful but ultimately limiting tool we invented is money. You can think of it as tokenizing care. "I have cared for $x worth of cleaning you now you care for $x worth of feeding me in return".

Many of our caring problems link to the primitive and oversimplifying traits of financialization. Which - in addition - over time have become grossly abused by shrewd operators.

Parents don't need to get paid to care for their babies and no amount of money will produce equivalent quality of care.

Elon does not care about others hundreds of billions of times more than a "normal" person does.

But the organizational failure from monetizing everything is only one pathology. There are many others:

As social animals we also care a lot about power structures. Organized violence and destruction shows that caring about others is not universal behavior in time and space.

Above all, intrinsic traits are groomed in childhood in a positive feedback loop. An educational system that reinforces caring behavior does not fall from a coconut tree. It needs to be cared about.