Submitted 6 months ago by Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dc54a36e-5fa9-448d-80cf-8ab1ab9265d6.jpeg
Monkey pays to live. He pays in the form of the daily labor of foraging, avoiding predators and finding shelter. It’s just not converted to the generalized form of money and then back to the basic needs of the monkey like we do it.
Labor is the basic unit of wealth. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Even if you somehow had your own sovereign nation with everything needed to self-sustain your whole family, never needing to leave…
You’re still paying.
With your time and effort.
Only difference between us here is we pay with paper, they pay with blood
Not even paper anymore, it’s almost entirely funny numbers in a computer
Yeah its become so innocuos and default i forgot
You pay with blood every day
But not my blood and that’s the real difference
Not me. Just sweat and tears. I leave the bloodwork for those with the stomach
you can work for food or you can work for tokens then exchange tokens for food but to imagine that every other living thing is just having a lovely time vibing and munching on infinite, freely available grindage while humans are the only species that has to do shit that sucks is just ignorant Rousseau noble savage dumbness
I think we tend to greatly underestimate how much the average wild animal’s life completely sucks. Predators. Disease. Food shortages. Injuries that never fully heal. Teeth…you know what happens to teeth if you never brush them? A lot of animals are just scraping by. You know how most animals have pretty big litters, and quite often too? Yet their population stays roughly the same? Consider the implications of that fact on the survival rate for an average animal.
Wholeheartedly agree. The only thing I’d add is that I think it’s in theoretical discussions that we underestimate how much a wild animal’s life sucks shit. In the US at least there’s enough forest that if a person wanted to get lost and be totally self-reliant they could take an honest shot at it. I think each of us has had that thought deep down in our secret hearts and, when we do, in that particular moment we make a very frank, honest and accurate estimate about how much fun it would be dying of an infection while lying face down in the cold muck. And this coming from a person who prides himself on being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The rabbit that my cat brought home today was definitely not vibing
Your cat ought to work a little less.
If monkeys could exchange goods and services to have shelter, easy food, and entertainment, you bet they would.
They even understand when the boss is fucking with their pay.
Was this made by a 12yo?
At least they know what Joe Rogan looks like.
Please, enlight me more with your celebrity trivia.
TBH if Orangutans knew they could pay to conserve their own habitat and buy more food then they’d probably be working jobs, too.
Right up until they tried to unionize, at which point they’d be exterminated to the last orange hair.
Everything pays, just not with money.
Don’t make it about our species. It’s capitalism
Existed before Adam Smith
Adam Smith was much more critical of capitalism than he is given credit for. For example, Adam Smith was critical of rent seeking and landlords. It would be somewhat accurate to replace Orangutan with Adam Smith in this meme.
That feels like the wrong meme face for the human
More like paying to prevent someone from assaulting you and taking all your stuff. Literally all of society is built from this foundation.
I’m 14 and this is deep bro
You literally dont have to pay for that. You can choose to not do that. It would be pretty dumb of you to do that but it’s possible.
It’s all about resource management and having skills to survive. Both monkeys and us - humans do it.
Our economy is an abstraction of nature. Both require work for survival.
Our economy is an abstraction of nature.
Its several layers deep in abstractions, which leads to some serious contradictions and faulty logic chains. Climate Change is probably the most current and obvious example, but we’ve got a host of instances in which we misappropriate or squander natural resources in a way an orangutan could not or would not. From the volume of trash production to the concept of financializing capital construction, we generate enormous amounts of excess capacity and waste very rapidly and then simply displace it onto distant habitats in order to keep it out of sight and mind.
When we talk about a distinction between natural and human activities, a lot of what we’re describing is the artificially rapid pacing and the subsequent over-consumption of our behaviors. No orangutan could deliberately accrue the kind of ecological debts that a human child incurs without even thinking.
A. Who just randomly says orangutans are dumb B. I don’t pay to live on earth C. Orangutans are awesome D. I hate capitalism
Go live the… Is that an orangutan? Life and get back to us.
Living is free, enjoying the benefits of modern civilization is not. Don’t confuse the two.
Economists hate him!
I’ve thought about this. Have the “Agriculture was a trap!” people ever designed like a hunter gatherer Eden? Like not historical reenactment. We have tech be a human and use it. But like buy a few hundred acres and plant a shitload of fruit trees with modern fertilizer, use GPS to navigate it, live in a badass modern tent…
Not for me, but those people seriously seem to have the option right there
Returner to monkey: sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Technically we pay for all the shit that makes living on earth less brutal than what the monke has to put up with on a daily basis
Money tends to be less painful than getting mauled by a predator trying to scavenge food
Also we have beer! No seriously archeological evidence suggests beer was the main selling point of settled civilization for a lot of groups, so much so that it was the money until someone in turkey figured out you could use weird metal disks for that instead.
cm0002@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Fr, capitalism sucks absolute ass and there are better systems we can revolve around.
BUT if it’s between capitalism and going back to having to forage, scavenge, fight nature itself on a daily basis and all the other crap all other animals have to deal with…mmm yea I’ll stick with capitalism lmao
umbrella@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
well yeah, capitalism was a step up from feudalism and so on.
hperrin@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Let’s go back to the beer economy, where your money goes bad eventually if you don’t drink it. Elon Musk would have the largest reserve of rotten beer in human history. He deserves it.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 6 months ago
As satisfying as that would be parabley speaking, it’d also ruin our ability to organize commerce and infrastructure at a grander scale than a single region that happens to have a good breadbasket to get the beer crop from.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Easy to say when you’re ensconced in the imperial core. But I wouldn’t want to be living on the periphery. Humans are far crueler and more destructive than any natural predator. A jaguar won’t double-tap your house with a missile strike, to make sure it kills everyone inside and then any neighbors who rush in to help. An orca won’t spend six years running caricatures of you in a tabloid newspaper, in order to build up enough bigotry and fear against your neighborhood that there’s no push back when local politicians green light it for “slum clearance”. No chimpanzee ever worked at Abu Ghraib or Vladimir Prison.
What humans do for money is far worse than what any predator has ever done for a meal.
cm0002@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s because they’re not capable of doing those things, of the animals you listed, I could absolutely see them doing those things if they had the intelligence and capabilities to do so.
Especially Orcas, what you listed would be an easy day for them, they’re a bit of an asshole.
Most animals on this planet will do whatever it takes for their next meal that their capabilities will allow for because that’s the only way to survive in the wild.
anarkatten@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
less brutal for us, more brutal for everyone else