Comment by armchairhacker
10 months ago
> Our lived reality today is that we already know the technical solutions to many tough problems (hunger, homelessness, many diseases, overpopulation, climate change, war) but simply refuse to apply them.
Do we? We can do a lot for individuals, but even with cooperation, maybe can’t immediately give food and shelter to everyone, let alone fix climate change (war is fixable with cooperation, but unless I’m mistaken a very small minority of the world’s population is in a hot war). Even if we have enough resources, we also need logistics (hence why people in some areas lack clean water).
Also, Star Trek’s backstory is that humanity only started cooperating like in the show after nuclear wars. Most people would rather mutually benefit than mutually suffer (otherwise we’d have MAD), and the solutions that benefit humanity the most are mutual. Society may have backslided since the 2000s, but it’s far better now than it was before and temporary backslides happened before; humans have evolved to be altruistic because, barring death or extreme circumstances, altruistic groups win in the long term.
We could, though. Absolutely. Literally feeding all the starving people in the world would cost a fraction of the world's surplus wealth, and a briefly disruptive but manageable readjustment of global logistics. The rest of it would be costly, but still totally doable at the cost of some inconvenience for the world's top 10%.
The problem isn't lack of solutions. It's lack of cooperation on every level from individuals to organizations to social groups to nations to transnational organizations.
> We can do a lot for individuals, but even with cooperation, maybe can’t immediately give food and shelter to everyone
It oddly isn't all that desirable. You don't want to depend entirely on the generosity of others. What you want is a fighting chance to take care of yourself. Helping there, even a little bit is both very effective and very easy.
> You don't want to depend entirely on the generosity of others.
Spoken like someone who knows they'll eat today.
End game, yes, everyone needs a degree of autonomy. But there are plenty of families in Palestine and Ukraine and Nigeria that just need food, today.
It's not either/or. We can provide both jobs and a safety net.