Edit: and you and Pfhorrest have drawn me off topic. — Brett

So, there have been several references to the lists of people who constitute the top of the 1%. However, the entire rich 1% of the population constitutes a far longer list than anyone would want to read. Hundreds of thousands of names are on that list.

Making the list would require a lot of searching in social registries, country club files, housing sales records, corporate records, tax records, property records, and the like -- some of which is, and quite of bit of which is not public.

And what about the ambitious? The rebels, the innovators who want to do things differently? — Brett

It might depend on what one is ambitious to do. Rebels? Innovators? Society needs them. Hopefully, they will make significant contributions to a good and better world.

Sorry, but I was just quoting Jesus. He's an expert in that area.

How would you enforce this, how would you manage human behaviour? — Brett

I'm not going to enforce anything, and neither are you, Ditto for managing human behavior. Human beings are well equipped to construct society, enforce group rules, and manage the behavior of the group. We have been using these capacities since the Stone Age when we struck out as hunter-gatherer bands a 250,000 years ago. And, please note, we still do. Most of the benefits of an orderly society derive from most people's willingness to cooperate. There are not enough law enforcement personnel in the solar system to make everybody behave. Most of the time, most of us behave because we understand following group rules.

Some people misbehave. There are criminals, anti-socials, capitalist pigs, and such that require the tender, loving care of the community. That's why communities hire people to police the town, and bring the drunkards in off the streets to sober up. That's why communities have mental health engineers to deal with anti-socials and capitalist pigs who just don't know how to behave. That's why there are jails, hospitals, and pleasant preserves on isolated Aleutian Islands to which totally uncooperative persons can be sent for rest and recovery.

To achieve that they would need to do what 1% did, which is build a business from scratch and produce the same wealth that so many resent the 1% having. — Brett

The 1% do not have a fated moral flaw. They are not rich because they are evil. the rich are evil because they are rich. Radix malorum est cupiditas." The love of money is the root of all evil.

OK, I'll dismount from this moral high horse.

Many people are stuck trying to imagine a different way of operating a large complex economy. They just can't picture a world without rich people running the show.

The thing is, we don't need the rich or their motivation to accumulate great wealth at everyone else's expense to have a successful, productive economy. The workers have the technical know-how to produce, everything from digging up iron ore to putting the finishing touches on a car. Workers supervise the factories (they are employees, after all) and workers do the accounting, payroll, design, advertising, production planning, etc. The owners of auto companies (Ford, GM, Fiat Chrysler, VW, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Subaru, et al) do not do any of the work producing cars. They are, to a large extent, what @streetlightx called them: parasites.

The work of beginning an enterprise (let's say, making chicken McNuggets from stem cells) can be done by members of the community who want to provide a sustainable supply of meat (such as stem-cell McNuggets) to other workers. The local elementary school teacher, nurse, construction worker, or mechanic need not know how to do this, because there are people who already know how to do this. The community raises the funds, contributes labor, etc., however they want to do it, to plan, build and operate the ersatz bird pieces. They sell the product to other worker organizations that buy and warehouse food, prior to distribution. Yes, cash changes hands but the intent is not to maximize profit (the capitalist model) but rather to earn enough to operate the plant, pay the workers, and set aside something for future expansion, repairs, machinery replacement, etc.

None of this requires a capitalist bent on becoming rich. Indeed, it requires NOT HAVING such a capitalist deadweight.

The biggest obstacle to success is the dead hand of the past in the form of banks, corporations, politicians, and so forth that would hate to see such a development come to pass. So it isn't likely to happen without getting rid of the dead hand of the past.

There is no cosmic rule which requires the world to meet its needs through the capitalist model.

I don’t see how destroying the 1%, branding them as parasites or robbing them of their wealth will change things. — Brett

Well, gee whiz, Brett; I was just following Jesus on this: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God."

Not only that, but Jesus said to the rich young man “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor."

Upon Jesus' pretty plain advice, very few rich folk have ever made themselves poor, and if Jesus couldn't get them to give it up, I seriously doubt that they will give it up on my recommendation.

Supposedly the 90% are starved for wealth because 1% has it.[/quote]

Correct. Here's the principle behind it:
Workers produce goods and services for which they get paid.
The value of what they produce is greater than the wages they are paid.
The owner of the company keeps the difference between wages paid and value of goods produced.

Of course, there are some other pieces -- like plant maintenance, raw materials, heating an cooling, administration, taxes, and so on. What the owner takes away after everything is paid for is called surplus value. Accumulating surplus value (in the form of money) is the goal of the capitalist. He wants to make money for himself (or herself). The more the better.

But let’s assume the 1% didn't gain it, does that mean the 90% would have it instead? Where would it come from? — Brett

Labor ultimately produces all wealth--in any economic system.

IF there were only workers and no owners (no 1%), THEN what there would be some sort of socialist economy operating. Yes, the 90% would have it instead. Workers and their children make up the majority of the population. They would keep the value of what they produced. They would be better off because they would possess the surplus value they produced. (Obviously, they wouldn't all be filthy rich. One gets rich by accumulating surplus value, not by spreading it out evenly.).

Andrew Carnegie and others have found that it is hard work to dispose of billions of dollars through philanthropy in a responsible manner. Most foundations (even ones that are loaded) give money away in dribs and drabs; usually about 5% of their total assets (less than what the foundation is earning on investments, one hopes). Target Foundation gives away 5% of its profits, about $4,000,000 a week.

If Bill Gates gave his money away at Target's rate, it would take him 500 years to get rid of it all. So, Billy dear, send me... oh, 400 million. It will make life easier for both of us.

Many on this OP regard the 1% as a blight on the land, parasites and responsible for the hardships of the poorer members of the community. — Brett

We live in a capitalist country par excellence and accumulating wealth (surplus value) out of the hides of the workers is The Name of the Game. The 1% are either the most successful capitalists, or they are the children of capitalists (or grandchildren...) Capitalism is not based on any sort of equal distribution of wealth. The Uber Capitalist himself, Henry Ford, realized workers had to make enough money in his factories if any of them were to be able to buy his products. He didn't raise their wages to $5 an hour in 1914 out of the kindness of his heart. Kindness had nothing to do with it.

The existence of extremely wealthy people today, by itself, is not the critical problem. The critical problem is that in heavily concentrating wealth among one to ten percent of the population the remaining 90% are starved for wealth. Large numbers of people (I should say, large percentages of people) can not acquire the basic pieces of a comfortable life style that was available 60 years ago. States, counties, and cities have increasing difficulties financing the essential services and amenities that make a big city and a given state a nice place to live. Students have to borrow a lot of money to pay for college (because legislatures have reduced state funding to higher education). And so on and so forth.

Between 1930 and 1980 the distribution of wealth was not egalitarian by any stretch of the imagination, but it was less severely disproportionate. That more egalitarian distribution turbo-charged the post WWII recovery, which started to come to a halt in 1973 with the Arab oil boycott.

So, within a capitalist milieu, it makes no sense to prevent people from accumulating wealth. Either accept some degree of inequality, or opt for abolishing capitalism.

I think Streetlight opts for abandoning capitalism; he's kind of bitter and resentful about it. I'm in favor of getting rid of capitalism too, but despite my handle I have a sunnier disposition. Odd how that works out.

How can anyone make judgements about these people without understanding who they are, specially here on a philosophy forum? Why would anyone do that? Why insist that — Brett

Yes, without understanding who they are, OR without understanding the social/political/economic milieu in which they exist.

As it happens, tax law has quite a bit to do with how well inheritance transfers wealth from one generation to the next. In times and places where inheritance tax law is quite restrictive, it is more difficult to be "born with a golden spoon in one's mouth". Where tax law is lax, it's much easier.

The organization and operation of the economy has quite a bit to do with how easily one can get rich through one's own efforts. Where investment capital is scarce, where investors are very skittish and reluctance to take chances, starting a company is much more difficult -- and the same for expansion.

How personal income and corporate income is taxed is also an important factor in getting rich by one's own efforts.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak DID NOT get Apple Computers going by buying parts from Radio Shack, building 5 computers, selling those, and using the profits to buy parts for 8 more computers; selling those, and so on until they were making first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of computers, finally seeing some real income.

What they did was get a loan to buy parts, rent space, hire some people, and then build a bunch of computers, sell them, and then show the bank that their plan was worth another loan. The banks made money, eventually Apple made money, and finally Steve & Steve got rich.

Businesses almost always require borrowing in order to operate -- even very large companies. Bankers can kill or promote a company with the denial or granting of credit. Start-ups especially require credit.

Why do banks lend money to some people and deny it to others? Well, connections matter a great deal. Backers (or guarantors) are another. Collateral helps a great deal. Some sort of track record is important. The fact is that a lot of people couldn't get a loan to get the greatest idea in the world off the ground if banks don't like their looks, background, connections, plans track record, or the astrological sign they were born under.

Of course, banks lend money to make money, and they hate losing it. Consequently, most credit seekers are going to be shown the door pretty quickly.

The OP is actually about who these people are. — Brett

There are a number of studies about who these people are, and how they operate. If you want to know more (much more) about wealth and power, start with G. William Domhoff, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His four books are among the highest rated titles in sociology (OK, not the same as the best selling books on Amazon).

Who Rules America? (1967, #12)
The Higher Circles (1970, #39)
The Powers That Be (1979, #47)
Who Rules America Now? (1983, #43)

Don't be too concerned about the publication dates; the perches where the elite roost do not change very fast. Besides, he's still publishing:

More recently, he is the author of The Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century: How They Won and Why Labor and Liberals Lost (2020); Diversity in the Power Elite (3rd ed., 2018, with Richard L. Zweigenhaft); Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich (7th ed., 2014); The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance From the Great Depression to the Great Recession (2013); The New CEOs (2011, with Richard L. Zweigenhaft); Class and Power in the New Deal (2011, with Michael Webber); and The Leftmost City (2009, with Richard Gendron).

Domhoff has a good website, https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/about.html which has more information,

Wealth and income are closely related, but maybe not inseparable. They are often reported separately, So, if you look at a list of people's earnings, it's often much less impressive than the list of people's accumulated wealth.

Then there is earned income from work, and unearned income from investment. If you are worth $100,000,000 your earned income might be peanuts, while your unearned income could be quite high.

Frugality is an underrated virtue, especially for people who aren't already rich. And for those who are really really rich, there is no amount of wealth that stupidity can't flush down the toilet.

Even someone who worked in below-average-paying non-profit or service job (with or without degrees) can end up a lot wealthier than one might suppose: If they saved money consistently; if they bought a house prudently (smaller, at the bottom of the market); if they paid cash for cars (by saving over the life of the present car); having adequate health insurance; investing conservatively, if they maintained a lower-income life style, and so on. They could end up having 350,000 to 500,000 in wealth when they retired. Were they employed in better paying jobs, or well-paid jobs (but not high-paying) they could, with the steps listed, end up as millionaires.

Having children is expensive, so raising a family might deter one from achieving any accumulation of wealth till later in life.

Frugality doesn't require one to live a pinched pleasure-free lifestyle, but it does foreclose freely spending on vacations, decorating, drinking a lot (alcohol is expensive, especially when regularly consumed at a bar), smoking (especially at the average per pack price of $6.30). Over 10 years a pack a day smoker would spend a minimum of $22,920. That's a significant hunk of cash. A 2-pack a day smoker in a state with higher taxes ($8-$10 a pack) would spend close to $60,000 over a 10 year period. Regularly eating meals in restaurants (even if run of the mill or fast food) can prevent one from saving much. Pack a lunch on your way to becoming a millionaire.

OK, so a millionaire today isn't what it was 20, 30, or 40 years ago -- let alone 100 years ago, but having cash in the bank is imminently better than owning money all over town. Even if one's wealth is minimal, avoiding debt is very desirable.

Of course, holding up a mirror to society might be an extremely political thing.

Full disclosure: I don't much care how you, or someone else, defines "action". However, as a confessed uninterested party, I would make this suggestion: Simplify.

Why?

The longer, more elaborate, and maybe rococo the definition, the more opportunities for misunderstanding, misconstrual, definitions of the words used to define the term under discussion, unproductive quibbling, and so on.

At some point the lengthy definition departed the road and ended up in the weeds.

Wouldn't your definition for "action" be a lot simpler, and say essentially the same thing if it was worded something like this: "anything which results in a change"? — Metaphysician Undercover

I like MU's definition better than yours. His may not be the best definition possible, but with a glance I can entertain his definition and think about it.

Practice prudent parsimony.

Hmmm, never looked it up. Well... never too late.

Yes, people do make money trading insubstantial derivatives. I don't really understand how this works, but a lot of money is involved. All kinds of commodities are covered by futures contracts -- everything from peanuts to platinum. People in this group trade commodity futures, currencies, credit derivatives, credit default swap insurance contracts, financial instruments--insubstantial - but real paper stuff. There is usually something of real substance underneath the speculation.

This is a short list from one small site

Bill Lipschutz - probably a Five Percenter; worth less than a billion. He was bringing in $300,000,000 a year for Salomon Brothers for a while. He was very good for Salomon, at least.

Joseph C. Lewis - worth over $4½ billion

Stanley Druckenmiller - worth over $4.7 to $4.8 billion; worked with Soros

Paul Tudor Jones - worth over $5.3 billion

George Soros - worth about $8.3 billion, but that is after transferring 20 billion dollars to the Open Society Foundation. Soros and Druckenmiller made $1B in their bank breaking bet against the Bank of England.

Bruce Kovner - worth over $5.3 - $5.5 billion

Martin Schwartz - a well known player, but his wealth figure is unknown; he's 75; he spends his time owning and racing champion horses

Andrew Krieger - unknown, but probably in the $100 million range

The last Tzar of Russia, Nicholas II, was worth an estimated $300-400 billion in current money. Well worth the Bolsheviks' time to liquidate his fortune. And it was time. The Romanovs had been running things for several hundred years (think Peter the Great--that's what his friends called him, anyway).

Except for those 1 percenters who make their money by trading in currencies and the like, most of the Uber-rich, super-rich, and merely rich make their money by supplying the world with stuff. Here's a list of the first 50 of the Fortune 500 companies:

Walmart
Amazon
Exxon Mobil
Apple
CVS Health
Berkshire Hathaway
UnitedHealth Group
McKesson
AT&T
AmerisourceBergen
Alphabet
Ford Motor
Cigna
Costco Wholesale
Chevron
Cardinal Health
JPMorgan Chase
General Motors
Walgreens Boots Alliance
Verizon Communications
Microsoft
Marathon Petroleum
Kroger
Fannie Mae
Bank of America
Home Depot
Phillips 66
Comcast
Anthem
Wells Fargo
Citigroup
Valero Energy
General Electric
Dell Technologies
Johnson & Johnson
State Farm Insurance
Target
International Business Machines
Raytheon Technologies
Boeing
Freddie Mac
Centene
UPS
Lowe's
Intel
Facebook
FedEx
MetLife
Walt Disney
Procter & Gamble — Fortune Magazine

Chances are, everyone here has bought something from one of these companies or from the other 450 companies on the fortune list. The major stock owners of these companies are likely to be among the richest 1%, 5%, or 10% (United States). Of course, companies own shares in other companies. 4½% of UPS is owned by Black Rock Fund advisers (31,243,809 shares). In turn, a large hunk of Black Rock is owned by Laurence D. Fink--Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock. He is worth about $1 billion.

Jamie Dimon is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase, the largest of the big four American banks. He owns a small percentage of MorganChase and is worth 1½ billion.

Hey, let's not be sneering at people who are worth only a billion bucks. I would gladly settle for $1B!

Just an aside... Rich, Super Rich, and Uber Rich.

With a fortune of around $400bn, Mansu Musa 1 of Mail, the first king of Timbuktu, may not be a household name, but by most estimates is the richest person who ever lived.

Deriving his wealth from his country’s vast salt and gold deposits, which at one time accounted for half the world’s supply, Musa ruled West Africa’s Malian Empire in the early 14th century, constructing hundreds of mosques across the continent, many of which survive to this day.

With a fortune estimated at between $300 to $400bn in today’s money, Tsar Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (Nicolas II) of Russia was deposed and subsequently executed by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

What you say sounds a lot closer to what people understand as Chomsky's approach.

It makes sense to me that the capacity and operation of language would reside in the brain as directed by our species' genetics. Our very complex brains were not built 'de novo'. The need for, and means to communication existed in our predecessor species. We are not born with a ROM-stored language (Chinese, Urdu, Swahili, Norwegian...) but we are born with instructions to acquire the available languages which present themselves to us. We don't have to be taught' it's more like "language falls into place in our brains".

an English text avoiding entirely words of French origin would be just as artificial — Olivier5

It would be artificial and it would be inordinately inelegant. However complete the Old English corpus of words might have been in 800 a.d., it has been irretrievably obsolete for a long time. I do not speak French (hélas; jugez-moi à la légère) but my guess is that Old French had a much larger, more sophisticated corpus than Old English did. Middle English had a much larger corpus, and then became Modern English in the 16th and 17th century as writers reached back into Latin and Greek for word-building materials. [One of the courses for training medical transcriptionists is a study of relevant Greek and Latin vocabulary.]

I like looking up those inordinately obscure words, and I keep a list of them--pearls snatched from the jaws of swine.

I have a (now retired) interest in common short words. When I was working in AIDS prevention back in the mid 1980s, I found it frustrating and annoying that public health pros found it difficult to simplify information for readers or audiences who sometimes were marginally literate. So I started investigating readability, word frequency, "Basic English", and the Anglo-Saxon words that make up the core of English, along with common words acquired from French, making Middle English into a richer language (thanks, of course, to William the Bastard).

One can write pretty good, best-selling texts in predominantly Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English; Tolkien wrote several volumes of it. Granted, Tolkien didn't have the problem of explaining viruses, the risks of anal sex (which is probably what the orcs preferred) or proper condom use.

My plan was to write a manual on how to discuss publicly important matters in widely readable text. I didn't finish that project, though I did write a computer program to evaluate readability and to sort the words in texts into several buckets, which involved making a lot of lists. This was pre-WWW. One can now find tools on line to do much of what I intended.

Unfortunately, the book on how to put the hay down where the goats can get at it, never got written.

What nonsense. Chomsky's approach isn't anything like this whatsoever. — Xtrix

The mods will punish Oliver5 for writing reckless declarative sentences. Or Xtrix, once the most faulty declarative statement has been determined. I'm an agnostic on the matter of Chomsky's linguistic theories.

I have not found linguistics of much interest, but thanks for the historical piece.

Google Translate is useful --no doubt about that. Google Translate was introduced around 2006. I don't remember when I first used it, but it has gotten a lot better since. It still has significant limitations, depending. Sometimes it can't render a term at all, or renders it in an exceeding clumsy way. Specialized terms present more problems than everyday text.

Applications which turn voice into text are quite impressive too, as are apps which can interpret handwriting. I tried it on a handheld device back in the 1990s, and was impressed that it could do a pretty good job interpreting cursive writing that was not-too-carefully performed. .

Google Ngram is one of my favorite tools. It uses the vast text scanning project that has been going on for at least 15 years. 30,000,000 books have been hoovered into its servers. From the billions of words used, Ngram charts the use-frequency of words and short phrases since 1800. Knowing word frequency is useful for, among other things, studying readability. And it's just plain interesting. The term "readability" was scarcely used before 1900, but there were peaks in its use in the 1960s and 1980s.

One of my pet peeves is writers using inordinately obscure words. "canaille" for instance. It's a derogatory word meaning 'the common people'. The English got it from the French who got it from the Italians; it means 'pack of dogs'. It was most popular around 1820, so when a contemporary author uses it, you know the writer is 'putting on the literary Ritz' -- the hotel, not the cracker.

I have pleonastic tendencies. Peak pleonasm was probably before 1800. It's been receding in popularity ever since.

Sure, but what I’m getting at is that it’s someone’s fault that we have so many guns too. I just get the idea that some people treat society as if it was a separate entity capable of making decisions. It’s not. — Pinprick

I totally agree.

We could make a list of individuals who are responsible for the number of guns that exist. First, there is the list of individuals who own gun and ammunition factories. Then there is the list of people who own wholesale and retail companies. There is the list of gun buyers and gun users. We can make up a list of people who are Second Amendment fanatics.

We can divide this list up in several ways. The manufacturing-wholesale-retail owner group amounts to many thousands. Gun owners are roughly a third of the American population -- 100,000,000. The list of people who own a gun (like a hunting rifle) and regularly use it for hunting is much smaller than 100 million. The list of people who own hand guns and regularly use them for protection is smaller than the list of hunters. The list of people who have a hand gun and use it for nefarious purposes is smaller still.

So, 100,000,000 people is too large a number to not count as "society". Society is made up of individuals and individuals are formed by society. It's a circular relationship, but "society" doesn't trump individual decision making. It isn't society that makes someone put a cheap gun in their pocket and go to a convenient store and kill the clerk and empty the register. Or shoot somebody because they were disrespected.

"Society" can't make a decision, but it can and does constitute the cultural environments in which individuals do make decisions. Sometimes a small number of individuals, or even one individual, "shape" society. A president, a dictator, a pope, a charismatic leader, a madman... can constructively or destructively shape society. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were not a large number of people. Only 19 al-Qaeda men carried out the 9/11 terrorist attack that restructured some aspects of American culture and society. So have individual assassins who have killed charismatic leaders.

Sorting out how society and culture is changed is a difficult dicey game--so many variables.

I am reading Sophie's World and in that book they say that practically only philosophers and children have the similar sense of wonder in the world, — Thinking

One of the things that adults and philosophers tell us is that "We should not believe everything we read."

Childhood is overrated by adults. Do children think about how innocent and pure they are? No. Once we are past the irresistibly cute stages of infancy (similar to puppies) life gets more complicated by the minute. As puppyhood passes, we have to start dealing with reality which, face it, isn't organized for our personal convenience or happiness.

Pairing "a sense of wonder in the world" and "philosophers" is not even wrong. Where in hell did they get evidence for that?

The world has wonders and from time to time we ordinary mortals might apprehend some of them--but not because we are children or philosophers.

You must've met neoteny at some point in your life. — TheMadFool

Actually I just met her the other day. We didn't get along; probably won't repeat it. Too larval.

Who could imagine what could possibly go wrong with our attempt to "liberate Thailand" or Hong Kong? Or Cuba--or Monaco--for that matter. If and when there are enough liberation-motivated Thais they will liberate themselves.

The Book of Enoch is interesting because it speaks of angels coming from heaven and having sex with human women — Hanover

Was there a Yelp review of the experience? Did the women like it? Did human women merit the angelic effort? How did human women give birth to the giants--narrow birth canal and all that? Maybe the tale originated in barely remembered ancient matings of Neaderthals and Homo sapiens?

I propose that books of the Old Testament were granted canonical status by Jewish communities on the basis of then-current use and and usefulness. Different communities had varied preferences which resulted in some texts being present and others not.

A critical difference between the Jewish process of compilation and the Christian one is that Jews were a going concern and accumulated their sacred texts and traditions over a much longer period of time than Christians. The very early 'church' had the urgent task of establishing its own foundational documents because its short period of emergence occurred before there was a religious organization to manage it.

By the time the church fathers met to consider which foundational documents to keep and which to exclude (e. g., gnostic texts were ruled inadmissible) the church was already expanding and establishing traditional practices. Consequently, some passages derived from practice after Jesus' death.) For instance, the words of institution in the eucharistic ritual probably were developed as a commemoration of Jesus, rather than something that Jesus said at a Seder the night before he was crucified.

Just guessing of course; my time machine is in the shop just right now, or I would take a camera and come back with a record of what actually happened.

The critical ingredient missing from utopian schemes is a population of utopians. Lacking an appropriate population, utopias remain unoccupied.

That said, our longest surviving social arrangement (maybe 200,000 years, give or take a dozen, was that of the sparsely populated hunter-gatherers. Not very many people spread out on a large planet, and having limited technology is probably the most enduring scheme we are going to get. Of course, we don't know what that was like. It might not have seemed utopian to the wanderers.

Is this a useful means of encountering the world, as we know it? — Jack Cummins

It's what you got, so you'll just have to make do with it.

"Life" built up these senses (and the additional ones that @Banno listed) over the preceding many, many millions of years. Sensory apparatus and neural processing had to be sufficient to allow animals to cope with and survive a complicated environment. We share these senses with lots of other successful animals.

Does it reach the limits of experience for the baseline, as the starting point of our philosophy adventures? — Jack Cummins

Well... in order to have an experience, you have to have both sensory apparatus and adequate neural processing. Our vaunted neural processing allows us to get out ahead of ourselves enough to have all sorts of adventures, philosophical and otherwise.

Individuals and society interpenetrate  There is no individual outside of society, and no society without individuals. Our complex culture is transmitted through society and the individual bears the benefit and costs of the culture. Sometimes the culture a society hands down is to blame, but only individuals can act. So, in American culture of 2020, there are many guns available for individuals to use. Criticize the society for the number of guns. However, only an individual can pick up a gun, point it at you, and pull the trigger. That's the fault of the individual. But if there were not as many guns as individuals in the United States, it is probably that fewer people would be shot.

Black individuals are killed by other blacks at a higher rate than blacks are killed by whites. Why do black individuals pick up guns and kill each other more often than other groups? Because they have been subjected to harsh social conditions, and because there are guns readily available, and because society does not prioritize apprehending the shooters/killers in the black community.

White uneducated middle aged male individuals kill themselves at a higher rate than individuals in other groups. They also use more opiates than some other groups. Why? Because these individuals have been subjected by society to withdrawal of the means by which they formerly maintained their status and meaning as individuals (= deaths of despair).

Only individuals can act, but to ignore the social milieu in which individuals exist is an act of ideology.

I remember reading a study done that concluded that imperialism was extremely expensive from the host country's point of view and the policy of imperialism didn't really make sense economically. — BitconnectCarlos

I doubt if imperialism (meaning, colonies under the control of the 'mother country') didn't make sense economically. On the one hand, the colonies serve as suppliers of raw material (fiber, ore, wood, foodstuffs, etc.) and on the other hand as a market for finished goods.

Smart imperialists use local forces to control the colony -- like the British did in India. Colonialism is extractive--pulling out wealth from the land and the people. Nice colonialists (I suppose the British qualify) didn't too-crudely shake down their colonies the way bad colonialists did (Belgium would qualify). Sure, there was prestige in having colonies. King Leopold II in Belgium had colony-envy, and felt much improved after he had the Congo colony to screw over. But wealth is the point, not prestige.

I would guess that the initial stage of establishing a colony might not pay off; that seems like a normal investment situation. But in the American colonies, the colonists were expected to begin producing ASAP. And they did. Lumber and tobacco, for instance. England didn't need tobacco but they liked it (as billions have), but they needed a new supply of high quality lumber for ship building and construction. The American colonies didn't make a lot on their own, so they bought a lot of stuff from England.

The majority of Americans have not seen massive improvements in their standard of living during the last 40 years. Inflation and wage stagnation--two very important economic processes--have lowered the standard of living, significantly.

40 years ago personal computers were not a significant factor in most people's lives. Granted, the 1970s had seen significant progress in portable calculators. In 1971, our college library had a very impressive adding machine that used an electronic visual display. We kept it in a locked room. By 1976 we had card-reading calculators that were pocket sized, and they sat on a table in the library. We had access to a shared off-site mainframe computer (using a phone modem). Faster internet speeds were a bigger benefit than more RAM and faster CPUs. Of course, having all three is nicer than watching a B&W TV with an antenna. But in its day, remember, the B&W TV was a pretty big deal.

I happen to like technology, but tech stuff isn't what gave me a sense of quality-of-life. What did that was having enough money to exploit the opportunities of living in a big city (after growing up in Podunk). During the next 40 years I had the opportunity to watch as more and more people were finding it just a little harder every year to make ends meet, and maintain what they considered a nice lifestyle. After 40 years, the decline is significant.

No, it isn't that most people are starving or wearing ragged clothes. What you see are more people in a household working to maintain 'x' level'; you see more household debt; you see more rising balances on credit cards; you see rents rising beyond what a single occupant can afford (hence more adult roommates); you see large portions of the population unable to save for retirement. You see more deficits all over the place.

This lamentable state of affairs isn't due solely to capitalism. After all, people were doing much better during the post-WWII capitalist economic boom, which came to an end in the 1970s (triggered by OPEC's oil games). Lots of factors came into play, but one of them was neoliberalism and greed on the part of the ruling class, which decided that they needed more gold -- much more.

It fell to Truman ("The buck stops here") to give final approval, but Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and another city had been left unbombed by design to provide a "pristine target". All the important decisions about the nuclear program had been made under Roosevelt. Truman was not part of the decision making loop.

As for the Dresden (or Hamburg, Tokyo...) fire bombing, the 'total war' approach to civilians was tried out in WWI. The level of mechanization and air power in in the 1914-18 conflict didn't allow for the kind of devastating attack that was possible 20 some years later.

And yes, [***EDIT***] Roosevelt and Churchill should be thrown in exactly the same pile as Hitler and Stalin - the pile of war criminals. That Hitler and Stalin were worse is no defense of Churchill's action. — Benkei

In a response I was writing in another thread I was going to compare Stalin, Churchill, Hitler, and Roosevelt, drawing the conclusion that Hitler was categorically worse than Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. I changed my mind because I figured that someone like you would say they were all guilty. Which, of course, they were -- just not of the same crimes and not under the same circumstances. I've read about Stalin's various crimes, and can think of several things for which FDR could be found guilty. But Churchill? I'd appreciate your pointing out his crimes. The books I've read and the films I've seen about Churchill were all pretty positive. I admit a bias from insufficient study.

While granting the Big Four were all guilty, I'm not willing to concede that their crimes were all equal. Stalin has crimes to his credit that happened before Operation Barbarossa, and continued after WWII came to an end. What are the major counts against Roosevelt? The Manhattan Project (atomic bomb)? Japanese Internment? What? Churchill?

As for "Joe Biden: Accelerated Liberal Imperialism" hasn't imperialism, liberal or otherwise, been US policy, more or less, since the get go? (Earlier eras of imperialism maybe shouldn't be described as "liberal".)

Imperialism tends to be such a good thing for the imperialists, be they Belgian, Dutch, German, Russian, English, French, Italian, American, Spanish, Japanese or Chinese--whosever--it's hard to imagine potential imperialists foregoing the opportunities. If they could be imperialists, why wouldn't they?

Since the beginning, has any country's leadership ever said: "We could become fabulously rich by taking over and exploiting those shit hole territories over there; but, you know, imperialism is just wrong, and we wouldn't want to become wealthy by doing something that moralists would consider distasteful." ????

I don't think so. (We can exclude countries from consideration that lack/ed the wherewithal to conquer Monaco, let alone seize a large slice of a continent.)

The human species began as neither good nor evil. Good and evil were nothing until we thought of them. Because we have set out "good" and "evil" as terms that can apply to us, the terms do apply, and we are sorted good or evil, depending on who is speaking.

We are what we are: a primate species endowed with intelligence (but not too much), driven by a strong will (as often heedless as not) and possessed of wisdom (but a day late and a dollar short).

Ants are also world conquering. — JackBRotten

Great read: "Leiningen Versus the Ants" by Carl Stephenson -- a classic short story published in the December 1938 Esquire.

Here's a reading of it on YouTube.

I think there is such a thing as "human nature" but it isn't rigidly consistent from person to person, situation to situation. There is a fair amount of variation from person to person as to which features, traits, drives, and innate responses, and so forth come into play at any given moment. But still, all humans have the same traits, drives, innate responses, emotions, brain structure, sensorium, and so on. You may have a learned fear of the spiders and I may have a learned fear of murder hornets, but learning fears is a common trait.

Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt all exhibited similar human behaviors throughout their lives, even if the consequences of their lives differed enormously. "Human nature" is synonymous with neither goodness nor badness. Adolph, Winston, Joseph, and Franklin were all capable of feeling very similarly emotions, all driven by aspirations (e.g., for power), all having the same sensorium, all having similar learning / memory / comprehension / association / etc. capabilities.

We are all much more alike than we are different BECAUSE we share in a set of features common to our species. We may not like every person we meet -- indeed, we may heartily loathe, despise, and abhor some of them, and the feeling may be mutual. But there is never any doubt that other people, even disgusting ones, belong to the same species as ourselves, as embarrassing or annoying as that might be.