Whole societies lived without poverty in the past. Of course, often the sort without leaders…
I know, not believe, that such societies have existed, so I know they can exist.
I don’t have to be a SciFi writer to criticize societies portrayed in SciFi. And in any case, Iain M. Banks already wrote one.
Plenty of humans are not selfish dicks.
Equitably =/= equally.
By mandating that the necessary proportion is reserved for space travel, and distributing the rest in a free market. Which CHOAM is not.
If space travel is a vital resource, it is essentially a common good, and reserving most spice for maintaining it is an equitable arrangement. As long as space travel is open to all, not reserved for rich assholes and their bootlickers, or run at vast profits.
Anyway, the reasons worlds like the ones in Dune still have poverty, conflict and oppression is that otherwise they’d be utopias, and utopias make for crappy literature.
Several Southern African H/G groups, like the !Kung, as well as some Native American groups like the Wendat. We also don’t have any evidence for social stratification in some early cities, like the Harrapan civilization and Çatalhöyük.
Economically- and politically-equitable societies still have personal conflicts, and will have interactions with other societies, and it’s certainly possible to write great literature about that kind of thing - Banks certainly managed.
Indeed. I admire the Duniverse, although I’m constantly shouting at the protagonists to stop behaving like idiots; but I love The Culture, a true post-scarcity utopia. On the other hand the Culture is too peaceful within its own borders to make great stories, so the best stories are when they interact with other, more inequitable societies.
One could argue that these entire societies were equally poor. Was their quality of life any better than that of poor people in stratified contemporary cultures? Did individuals have greater access to material possessions? And if so, are we sure it wasn’t simply a result of lower population density, thus leading to greater access to resources? I mean, if you throw a dozen people on a small desert island, they’ll probably live better than 10,000 people on the same desert island, regardless of their social structure.
I’d just like to add that I do not believe that social stratification is necessary for the existence a complex, technologically advanced and urbanized society; I’m saying that it’s inevitable. I want a society without poor just as much as you do, it’s just that I can’t see it happening.
Something like Hydrogen Sonata is still a good story even when it’s all Involveds interacting.
Poor societies don’t have city-wide sewerage and enormous public baths and bronze sculpture, like the Harappans.
Given they weren’t European peasants being worked to death, say, in the case of the Wendat, I’d say definitely.
Greater than whom?
The Harappan civilization covered several large cities.
I’m saying it isn’t. That it’s not an immutable law of how complex societies are organized. That we can do better. We know because we did, in the past. The Harappan civilization was as technologically advanced as its Egyptian or Mesopotamian contemporaries. Better, in some ways, like sanitation. But no evidence of social stratification.
First of all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Second of all, even if they did do it, we don’t know how they did it, do we? So how do you expect science fiction writers to recreate a culture if historians and archeologists can’t?
Look: 99% of all advanced cultures throughout history have been stratified to one degree or another. I have to assume there’s a reason for this - that something in our nature or environment or some other factor makes stratification all-but-inevitable. To go against these titanic forces, we can’t just say “we have to do better”, because obviously, we can’t. We need an actual new model for society. I haven’t seen a convincing one yet, either in the real world, or in science fiction.
It is when the absence is marked. Palaces and armour and spearpoints and hovels and destruction layers don’t just disappear from the archaeological record.
Doesn’t matter to my argument. And we certainly can speculate.
There’s plenty of speculation on how the Harappans were organized.
Not that I’m asking SciFi writers to recreate that particular culture, anyway. I’m just using its existence to point out that the argument that complex societies must be stratified is bunk.
I’d quibble the figure, but I’ll allow the general point.
“People can be selfish dicks” seems like a good enough reason.
Stratification isn’t inevitable, but the ability of stratified societies to impose their cultures on non-stratified ones has been greater.
And anyway, my original argument wasn’t that society need not be stratified (although it needn’t) , it was that poverty need not exist. Not the same thing.
We obviously can do better, since we have. We actively choose not to anymore. By, for instance, saying “we can’t do better”. Or viewing the forces of oppression as “titanic” in some way.
Or we need the old ones back.
I found the Culture perfectly believable. Not at all a hippy, dippy lovefest.
Right. The problem isn’t that everyone is a selfish dick. The problem is that it’s inevitable that some of us will be selfish dicks. The nature of being a non-selfish dick means that the non-selfish dicks are a lot less likely to stand up to the selfish ones. As evidence just look at the threads here on the SDMB advocating for mild punishments for violent criminals. This means we end up with the selfish dicks in charge a disproportionately large amount of the time.
It happens occasionally. Sometimes we get a Jimmy Carter or Mikhail Gorbachev. But it’s a lot more likely we end up with Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.
Well, at least now I know why I had no chance to buy that book at auction. 2.9 million crypto money, I can’t beat that.
According to the OP’s initial article the bidder who won may not even be an asshole. Still: damn! That was not fair bidding. And I still wonder who the other was, the one who drove the bidding to those heights. Because had the other bidders all been “normal” people with sensible limits he would have bought the book for much less. Almost 3 million $ means there was a contest.
Oh, yes, and this:
I love openculture! They gave me the idea to bid, but not only me, of course.
History is full of people who weren’t selfish dicks. This is just open disingenuousness.