To philosophize a bit, let’s conceptualize 3 phases of human history.
Phase 1. People lived in tribes. There was no money. Work just meant doing whatever was needed to be done so the tribe could survive and thrive. Work wasn’t good or bad, it was just necessary. While there was no strict accounting of individual contributions, the stronger contributors did gain stature and reputation within the tribe.
Phase 2. Money is created as an artificial tool to account for the contributions of individuals. Many of the assumptions from Phase 1 were carried over, including that the work to be done should be that which is beneficial to society. Hence, work is considered virtuous.
Phase 3. Smart and powerful people figure out how to game the system in such a way that they can make a lot of money doing things that have a net negative effect on society. Because these games had not been fully exploited in prior phases, the profits of full exploitation of this new approach are enormous. And the masses go along with it because they get paid more when they take jobs that support these schemes.
The suggestion here is that these 3 phases incorporate different kinds of logic. What makes sense in one phase might not make sense in another. So the assertions one makes about how things work and why, and the nature of people, might work within the context of one phase while not being applicable across phases.
I think what’s bugging people is that the logic of Phase 3 doesn’t include the requirement that people care about people. Phase 3 is an experiment in seeing what’s possible when we relax that requirement. The 21st century is where this has become the dominant paradigm (even though the same experiment was being carried out on a smaller scale for centuries).
This isn’t to say that Phase 1 and 2 were a bed of roses. In Phase 1, if your tribe didn’t have a competent medicine man and you got a severe illness, you were basically out of luck. No health care for you. In Phase 2, we had some happy accidents, like Henry Ford deciding to pay his workers a decent wage (so they could afford to buy cars), and America emerging from WW2 relatively unscathed, unleashing a productivity boom in which middle-class workers were treated better than in earlier (think “Dickensian”) periods of this phase.
I will continue at the “defining Humane” thread.