Massimo2002
Active Member
And no one was poor and unknown again.
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What would happen if everyone was rich and popular ?
- Thread starter Massimo2002
- Start date
It would level the field so being rich and popular weren't special anymore.
I wonder what new guideline people would use to figure out who the 'ins' and 'outs' are. I'm sure humanity would find a way.
I wonder what new guideline people would use to figure out who the 'ins' and 'outs' are. I'm sure humanity would find a way.
"Riches" are relative. The OP describes the human condition before specialization and status hierarchies, ie: through 90% of our social history.
Audie
Veteran Member
We Never Know
No Slack
If everyone were rich and popular, rich and popular wouldn't have any meaning.
Rich has meaning because of the poor.
Popular has meaning because of the unpopular.
Wealth is somewhat relative and shaped by expectations and circunstances, while popularity is entirely so.
Popularity first.
I have lived through the years when receiving a phone call from another city was a somewhat momentous event. Now people can be famous without necessarily even having a halfway decend awareness of their own fans. We can follow literally dozens of celebrities every day and feel that we know what has been happening to them - and perhaps forget it all for the rest of the day just fifteen minutes later.
Internet and other far reaching media have made contact far easier, but one of the consequences is that there is now a very widespread yet cheap form of popularity, which is easily achieved, easily forgotten, easily lost and sometimes just as easily rebuilt. More significantly, it does not usually involve much of a bilateral bond; it is just largely unilateral awareness tied to some measure of passion. That is not a very recent thing, but it has become far more prevalent in recent decades.
The more valuable forms of popularity have not been lost, however. They have instead IMO just become both more worthwhile and somewhat harder to achieve, if only because we now tend to spend so much of our time distracted by lesser and less reciprocal bonds.
Ultimately, true significant bonds require effort, dedication, and even time itself. There are ways to do without, but those shortcuts affect the results, sometimes drammatically. We can choose to make do with only very disperse and ephemeral bonds, but that is probably not to our benefit. The best approach would seem to be to have a balance of social bonds of various levels of significance, from the very superficial and far-reaching to the very intimate and personal.
By this perspective, popularity is more of a tool or an ephemeral, momentary and somewhat illusory perception and not worth worrying about much. We can and arguably should play with our own popularity according to short term convenience in order to achieve the best, most rewarding possible balance of various forms of social bonds.
As for wealth, it has a component of self-preservation and another of social pressure and reputation. Wealth is ultimately a measure of our ability to achieve comfort and privilege in ways that are accepted as legitimate by our communities. It is of lesser significance to those that are truly self-reliant, and enormously important to those who are not satisfied by the reach or stability of their life spaces.
Achieving a society where "everyone is rich" by those parameters is difficult, but also possible and highly advisable. The main obstacle is a lack of communitary and social wisdom.
Look at the big picture, not just our current situation.
Through most of our history we lived in small, hunter-gatherer bands. Hunter-gatherers are extremely égalitarian. This is our natural state. Before specialization and status hierarchy, wealth was equally distributed, and there was only one lifestyle. In bands of only ten or twenty individuals everyone knew everyone else -- like a family.
Wealth and 'popularity' hierarchies are new things.
Just a thought...
Massimo2002
Active Member
Indeed there are a lot of popular people but there are way more unpopular unknown average everyday people.
There's a lot of unknown not average people, too.
Arnaud1221
Red-hood
We need worker so our society work well. So it's impossible.
rocala
Well-Known Member
Welcome to the class system. Its considered by many to exist solely as a basis of exploitation.
