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This is one of the things that I find utterly weird about our moment in history. We just have no concept of how much of what we have is a product of simply having abundance. We can afford to put people in jail being completely unproductive for years and even decades and still feed them for all that. We can afford to pay people who cannot (and often will not) do anything productive. We can afford to tolerate a great deal of deviant behavior and ideologies. And I’ve always strongly suspected that most of not all of our “enlightened ways” come down to us being wealthy enough to be enlightened.
And I think when the surplus goes away (either because of space colonization or collapse) we’ll have to go back to the unenlightened ways of our ancestors. When you not doing productive work means a lack of food, or your deviant behavior puts others at risk or consumes too many resources, other people aren’t going to put up with that for long. If your “transition” in whatever form it takes, costs too many medical resources and you live in a place where medical care isn’t easy to come by, that by itself harms people. The blood used for your top surgery means a shortage of blood for people having accidents or something, or maybe a shortage of antibiotics as well, people aren’t going along with that because they understand that it means they might not get medical care.
Indeed. Just to provide one example off the top of my head, pencil lengtheners were routinely used in public education, especially primary schools, pretty much everywhere in the world until, say, the middle of the 20th century. Just think about it. Even though pencils were mass-produced as the cheapest writing instruments in existence, just buying the necessary number of pencils, even the cheapest ones, was considered by the average family an expense large enough that there was widespread demand for a dirt-cheap instrument that had no purpose other than lengthening the service life of a pencil. I's unfathomable when we look back to that.
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