The less hard work offers a truly meaningful improvment in one’s conditions - material, existential, hell even spiritual - the more people will opt out.
Rational actors, etc etc etc.
Also, if you - by which I mean the extractive class - make it difficult and humiliating to find work, and difficult and humiliating to retain work, then yes, as above, more rational actors will opt out.
Can you run society for awhile please? You seem to have a basic grasp of priorities
Hmm, I’m a fan of the “every setup no matter how well-intentioned eventually produces a dystopia” genre of storytelling, I wonder what kind of dystopia I would produce 🤔
I’ve been dreaming for years that one of my favorite authors, Peter Watts, will write a novel about the dystopia produced by a concerted global effort to prevent sociopaths and narcissists from positions of power. There’s gotta be some kind of horrible emergent outcome that’s more interesting than a relatively uninspired left-authoritarian totalitarian state. I’m interested in what goes wrong when the effort succeeds.
Ohh now that’s a challenge, totalitarian is usually the go to move.
What’s your favorite Watts novel? I think I’ve only read Blindsight (dark but intriguing).
Blindsight changed my worldview in ways that are near impossible to articulate, and not for lack of trying on my part. At the very least it’s led to years of fascination with fiction which digs into questions about consciousness and being-hood, especially those that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
More recently his Sunflowers series has been interesting. tl;dr, what if instead of writing a story which makes use of ancient stargates as a plot device, we write a story about the crew which built the stargates, traveling around the galaxy at sublight speed on a craft - term used loosely - with built-in anti-mutiny mechanisms?
Also I enjoyed his short story The Things, classic Watts. CW: rape mention.
I’ll check out Sunflowers! I agree Blindsight was really philosophically engaging. I should add it to my re-read pile since I’ve been reading a lot about being lately
Utopian sci-fi: the humans have cracked the problem of society, somehow. Then, external nasties try to ruin it. Drama is created, no totalitarianism required.
Maybe you’ve heard of Alastair Reynolds’ Prefect series, which is set just after a future society has crashed out of just such a golden age due to an alien plague. It goes into detail about how they achieved democratic perfection, and how it all fell apart under (very substantial) external pressure.
Thank you for that recommendation, I hadn’t heard of it!
I mention Watts because he seems to have a disturbing talent at imagining hair-raising fault conditions which are non-obvious at first.
I feel like - and this is a matter of opinion only - a “bog standard” left-authoritarian totalitarian state, and a “oops we eliminated all the General Pattons and now we need some due to facing an existential threat” scenario, are probably the most foreseeable issues with purging narcissists and sociopaths from human command structures. Not that there’s anything wrong with these, and I’m quite sure some extremely compelling fiction can be created about either - I’m just wondering what kind of bone-chilling Wattsian failure mode I haven’t thought of here.
Full context: I have a personal belief that the human species’ lack of systematic development & deployment of technique to control dark-triad personalities in command structures may represent a potential Great Filter, so thinking of the possible drawbacks of doing so is kind of a big deal in light of that.
I’m in absolute alignment about that Great Filter thinking. There may in fact be no way to escape it, why would sociopathic behaviour not be a universal trait in species with language? And then how could that fail to lead to societies similar to what we have now where they do infinitely more harm than good.
I think the failure mode would be totally dependent on the (sadly imaginary) method of control of dark triad behaviours. Let’s say there’s an implant which suppresses human actions based on these traits. Then the interpretation of bad actions or the control of the chip algorithm are big failure modes. Or if, say, we fight a great war in the near future and realise universally that the reason was allowing these personalities to get into power, so we adopt a species-wide Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Art could imitate life then since we’re now seeing Germany potentially voting in Nazis IRL as WWII slips from living memory. I honestly think the question is so ripe with potential I wish I had the time or the experience necessary to write a sci fi novel myself.Additional comment to add: One other line of questioning comes to mind in the “what plot could we imagine where suppressing sociopathic / psychopathic / narcissistic traits in humans to the extent they are kept from amassing power leads to severe problems for society down the line” - what are people with such traits uniquely good at, if anything, which results in a net gain for society?
There’s plenty of pop psychology which points out that people with at least some of these traits tend to be concentrated in roles like leadership (which may not be entirely due to self-selection) and first responders.
Just to look at one example, an additional trait (beyond limited prosocial emotions and willingness to violate the rights of others) which may or may not be necessary, and is not sufficient on its own, to constitute psychopathy is relative fearlessness. People with this trait typically aren’t so fearless that they act completely irrationally with regard to self-preservation, but they very measurably experience far fewer of the effects of fear in dangerous situations. You can see how this may be useful among police, firefighters, soldiers, etc. How does this trait relate to the other traits in question? Does suppressing the other traits like limited prosocial emotions also suppress this trait, thereby depriving a society of General Pattons? And so on.
Yeah, if we accept that leaders and heroes are generally afflicted by this, then the suppression itself would cause a lack of those people in society, which could have really interesting effects. Lack of parasocial role models to project on to, as a subtler one than the obvious lack of leaders and front line troops.
As you say, the method of suppression could lead to some interesting emergent properties too. I keep thinking of Soma from Brave New World or Prozium from Equilibrium, or even social suppression like in 1984, and how difficult it is portrayed to be to suppress human nature, and how it seems to bubble up no matter what you do. That’s a pretty nice theme that would surely fit in to any mechanism that would suppress “bad” traits.
Hmm, that question of inevitable filling of the niche in a species with language is a good one, and one I hadn’t thought of.
In part it seems to be downstream of questions about what sociopathy and/or psychopathy actually is, which have been in debate for decades and still very much are. “Limited prosocial emotions” is necessary but not sufficient. Willingness to lie and violate social norms established to preserve the rights of others at a cost to the actor, probably also necessary, I’m not sure (no coffee yet) if sufficient in combination with limited prosocial emotions.
My housemates have 3 cats, one of whom I would describe - as a cat lover who has lived with many cats the majority of my life and has one in my lap right now - as the cat equivalent of a violent psychopath. (I actually like that psycho cat and she likes me as much as she’s capable of liking anything.) Since she’s a cat, she’s not capable of the sociopathic pattern of abusing and/or manipulating social structures at a high level, e.g. by deception, to further her aims.
She is basically limited to violence, either direct (you touch her, and if she’s not in a good mood she shreds your hand) or instrumental as instrumental as an animal without complex planning ability can be (she stalks the cat currently in my lap who she hates, and maintains a more or less continuous campaign of suppressing fire to minimize that cat’s territory in the house; if I leave the house for a few days, she quickly steps it up because I am the human in the best position to intervene in her suppression efforts).
In humans there is likely some distinction between those who are violent psychopaths with little to no manipulative behavior, versus ones with psychopathic traits (limited prosocial emotions, problems recognizing and thinking about certain emotions in others) who are manipulative and may or may not be violent. The question this brings me to is, is language necessary for such socially manipulative traits like the much-ballyhooed “superficial charm,” and others like tendency to deceive, to arise? I’m not sure. And then subsequently, in a language-using species, is deceptiveness based on language and theory of mind - lying - for personal gain such an attractive niche that it must always arise?
I’m sure there’s a lot lacking about my ramble here, it’s early in my day. And I might be off topic. But I’ve been researching these traits as a layperson for decades because my life has been strongly impacted by people with psychopathic and narcissistic traits in several contexts, and thus I’ve developed an interest in understanding how their minds work.
I’ve had similar experiences with psychopathic humans and cats.
I think, broad strokes- humanity is probably very similar to any other social intelligent species with language. Obviously no evidence of this exists, but evidence that we aren’t in a privileged or special position in the universe abounds, so it’s a fair assumption. With that out of the way, the question just becomes, “why is this behaviour such an effective strategy?” And we can kind of see why, these people are often stupendously successful. So, is that because of human societal factors being susceptible to this kind of manipulation? Your cat example is a brilliant illustration of why that’s not the case: because animals do it too.
You’ve made some really interesting points there, I don’t know if you’re in agreement but I tend to think now that, unless dark triad personalities are somehow shown to be a property of mammals by some mechanism, it’s fair to say it’s probably present in extraterrestrials too, and it’s a strong candidate for a great filter, because, hey, look around.
I’m very sure that disqualifies you from running for office. Generally speaking what seems to be sought in a potential leader is complete isolation from the society which they will be leading generally as a result of wealth, privilege and if it all possible lack of brain.
“Even though we allowed HR to replace themselves with AI since they didn’t want to work, and the new AI is filtering out all the qualified people who want to work, I have to ask why nobody wants to work anymore.”
Shove it up your ass. People want to work for a living wage, but you are putting up endless barriers to prevent that from happening. You are turning away amazing talent before a human even lays eyes on them.
I have seen this a couple of times. Is there a version with sources. I really would like to confirm this is real before I share this
I know Snopes has some issues, but they seemingly did the legwork already, so:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore/
What issues does snopes have?
Anyone trying to claim to be an adjudicator of truth is going to have some objectivity issues
I’ll be honest, I wrote that in anticipation of someone bringing up old gripes. Snopes generally does good work.
I hadn’t realized just how long it had been, and frankly barely remembered what happened. There have always been accusations of bias or quality issues, but the thing that got people really upset was this:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson
As I recall, they kept the cofounder on as an executive after this, and that did more reputational damage.
When you search “what was life like in 1895?” And the summery is “Life in 1895 was a world of rapid technological transition, stark contrasts between extreme wealth and crushing poverty, and the height of the Gilded Age and Victorian era”
Oof
Dejavu♪
Damn, year 1905 ALMOST had it right when they said “nobody wants to work for wages”. A slight correction to “these wages” and they wouldve been 100 years before their time.
Also, some variation this argument keeps getting re-used again and again since the beginning of time: This new generation is nothing like the old one, they have no respect, are so entitled and don’t want to grow up.
It’s true. That’s why you have to pay people to do it.
Complaining that nobody wants to work in 1940 is wild. There’s this huge military that everybody thinks is going to take over the entire planet and the biggest complaint this guy has as apparently the youth.
Priorities, he no has it
Few phrases actually make me want the speaker to die. This is one of them
I’d love to work
what I don’t love is how for a couple years my job was to just clean up other people’s messes, babysit other departments (including their managers that outranked me!), figure out how to make the abso ok itely terrible systems that management put in place work for us, take the abuse that people directed at me for those terrible systems instead of management despite how I nearly quit my job because nobody was listening when I repeatedly explained very clearly how terrible those systems would be for literally everyone, and was still expected to complete new types of projects (which we were not set up to efficiently work on) faster with fewer resources and shittier planning, while not getting any meaningful raises.
yeah, that sucked. so now I do 40s and don’t worry about the stuff I can’t control. I tried, for years. it didn’t work. any time management wants to fix that work environment, I’d love to get back to doing lots of actual work. but cleaning up somebody else’s shit isn’t work in interested in doing
Is that any surprise? Industries on the downslide will always encounter difficulty staffing as will companies that suffer excess greed.
What happened in 1990 to deserve the 20 year gap in complaints?
Hmm, time to
speculate! hypothesize!First, it could just be a sampling effect. Someone put this together, and they only had so much time. These may simply be the dates they happened to find, with no real relation to how public sentiment changed over time.
But if it really is true that on average, fewer people were lamenting “no one wants to work anymore” from 1981-1999, what could have caused this?
Two ideas:
This era really was the peak of America’s labor participation rate. The Boomers, the largest generation ever relative to total population, were at the peak of their careers. They were raising kids, putting kids through college, living the Boomer lifestyle, and saving for retirement. And they had to work to pay for all of that. This is a likely factor.
I believe this also may have been an era of a high water mark of undocumented workers coming across the border. Mexico was at its peak of labor surplus, and the US hadn’t really started putting up the walls yet, figurative and literal. ICE was founded in 2003.
For a variety of reasons, this really was the high water mark of America’s labor participation rate. Again, this could just be a sampling effect. But if it is real, I can imagine some good reasons for it. And when labor is abundant, it becomes cheap. And when labor is cheap, fewer bosses will be lamenting the lack of workers willing to accept terrible jobs for low pay.
If people wanted to work they wouldn’t have to pay us to.
That’s not true. Most people are willing to work for no pay at all.
People volunteer all the time. People help their family, take care of their kids, plant trees, keep their street clean, help organise events, … When people retire they often go work for a charity, just because work gives their life meaning and helps them socialise with people and feel useful.
Almost everyone wants to feel useful. Work gives life meaning.
The reason they have to pay us, is because only an idiot wants to do meaningless work, for too little pay, just to make someone else rich, especially if the end result is that it makes the world worse for everyone but the same people still running the show.
Unlikely to be your original image but could you give me sources for each article? I’m going to share this as a meme in a group I know one guy will take it too seriously and say it’s fake and ask
