• NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Temporarily embarrassed billionaires are a common thread across eras here. Really dumb delusion

  • SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Gosh, that sounds a lot like “If I suck up to The Boss, and work those late nights and weekends, I’ll be a billionaire one day!”

  • YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    But even if that were true, even if you could kill enough people and subjugate others to have a very comfortable existence, should you do it? I understand an appeal to morality in a society of amoral beings is basically yelling to the void, but come on. Some things are wrong, regardless of how easy your life could become if you did them. I don’t think Americans have ever understood that, and whoever did has historically been shunned (John Brown comes to mind), often imprisoned or assassinated.

    • 33550336@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 day ago

      Probably true, but some countries moved to feudalism or even capitalism at this point of history

      • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I think it’s a fair assumption that nearly every country that developed engaged in some form of slavery, but I struggle to think of any country that achieved the status of a world power that didn’t employ it in some form.

        This isn’t to excuse US’ history of slavery, which was barbaric, just that the singling out one country tends to ignore that slavery isn’t an exceptional thing.

      • PugJesus@piefed.social
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        1 day ago

        Probably true, but some countries moved to feudalism or even capitalism at this point of history

        Slavery and feudalism aren’t mutually exclusive - the most fascinating thing that I heard when I studied the US Civil War was the concept of the US South itself as a feudal society. The Southern aristocrats maintained their client networks of subordinate white folk with which they utterly controlled the social, economic, and political life of the South by the economic coercion of ‘owning’ a labor force, rather than extensive legal protections for themselves. By contrast, Northern plutocrats struggled to cultivate long-lasting client networks because, like most plutocrats, their power is based on the fluidity of their capital. You can be getting richer with every dollar, or cultivate loyalty with it - not both.

        (the notion of ‘feudalism’ itself is often disputed amongst medievalists, but we’ll ignore that for now, lmao, as a casual term it works)