Society
Greed has always been the one true God. This could change in the modern day but why should it? Those with the stuff, those who covet the things have no incentive to give them up. Even when people rise up and kill those on high, it’s not like some asshole isn’t there to step in as a new oppressor.
Often with fatal results. French Revolution anyone?
Society must collectively elect to change what matters to them. Star Trek has a quote that people no longer pursue wealth but rather enlightenment and personal growth. First, I call BS because even in their utopia, they had Harry Mudd...trading women and other illegal goods. Merchants were trying to make a killing on Tribbles.
And that doesn’t even bring into light the Ferengi who built an entire society around capitalism. Regardless of the fact they were clearly a euphemism for how fucked up America has become, the truth of the matter is no matter the society, some people keep score by how much cash they pull in.
But imagine this system.
What if every profession was built on tiers from zero to ten? Pay went out according to the tiers. Everyone received an amount based on the tier of the job they’re working. You can have up to three jobs at a time. Qualifications for the different tiers depend upon the needs of the task. Some require training, some a demonstration of skill.
Let’s look at the artistic field. It gets regularly fucked by money making assholes. In order to maintain your tier rating, you have to produce works of art in your given field and provide them to the world. The prices of them are not up to you. You’re filling a market niche. Sometimes, there may be requests for art and you can fill those as well.
Providing you’re doing your quota, you get paid based on the tier. An amateur book cover designer might be Tier 2 while Steven Tyler from Aerosmith is a Tier 8. You go up in your tier rating through popularity and education. As you get additional pings and notice, you climb the ladder.
There would be multiple measurements to ensure you’re not gaming the system. Quality of work is too subjective so it’s about how well received it is, what you did to achieve it, how well you fulfill commissions, etc. At the end of the month, you receive your earnings and you start a new cycle.
Qualifying for a new tier requires that you apply for it and show why you should advance. As you advance through the tier system, you gain more clout and as a result, you’re required to mentor those in lower tiers to help them achieve as well. Society itself pays for these things merely by paying for the work which goes into the collective pool.
Let’s talk about sports. Professional athletes fall into the same system. Those who are in something like the NFL would start around tier five. The top players would push toward ten. None of them would be making multiple millions of dollars. In fact, while you would be entitled to a comfortable, even affluent life, much of the excess would be used for socialized services.
The breakdown of NFL money is roughly sixty percent of the revenue going to the players. Team ‘stuff’ (coaches, uniforms, whatever else) is five percent. Stadiums have ranges but can take up quite a bit of the percentage. Then there’s stuff like...front office and other admin stuff but that sum is so low it hardly matters.
Taxes eat up roughly five percent. Profits themselves can be difficult to tally because accounting people have been specifically trained to fuck over financials in a way that the layman has no clue what they’re looking at. The ultimate point is that some teams lose money, others turn a profit.
A family of four can expect to spend around four hundred dollars to physically go to a game. A report stated that a partnership between the NFL and DirectTV netted the league four billion. So let’s apply this to the tier system. Pretty sure it wouldn’t be hard to determine a fair amount for tiers five through ten.
Once done, a star player could still live a lavish lifestyle. It just wouldn’t be as wildly huge as it is now. You wouldn’t hear about a jack ass spending fifteen grand on a dinner for his three buddies. But they COULD do that if they wanted to tap hard into their resources. Ultimately, you keep the costs the same to attend the game but less money goes to people.
Drop the salaries from the median of two-hundred twenty million per team to sixty million per team. Make these people highly paid but not ridiculous. That drop goes toward social requirements. One argument for them making so much money is that their career could end in a second. Okay...but under this system, they would be taken care of still.
Much like the Artistic Tiers that are required to mentor people to maintain their standing, hurt players can do the same thing for up and comers. They can get into the admin side, they can work in the field they love. They just won’t be Scrooge McDuck in the basement of their mansion.
The medical field can be the same. The more experience and expertise they possess, the higher they are on the tier scale, the more they make, the higher their social status is. But with all the excess being dumped directly into the social pot, when a person arrives at the hospital for assistance, they can focus SOLELY on their problem. Not going into debt.
And that’s the real trick here. No one goes into debt. Prices are normalized. Salaries are normalized. Ambition comes from wanting to get higher on the tier and to improve their skills. Acquisition of wealth becomes frowned upon. Aspiration is rewarded. That is the concept I present.
Obviously, there are countless bits that would have to be worked out. Who governs the money? Who keeps it safe? How is it distributed? How do people get demoted or promoted? What happens when someone protests? How do you manage the services to ensure manufacturing is maintained?
This is a fundamental change that requires some cultural genocide. The utter and complete destruction of the capitalist mindset. Starting at the youngest age, people need to be educated out of the concept that Greed is God. Because it’s inherent. They see it in every advertisement, every mall, every celebrity excess...
Because those WITH money are spotlighted. The reality TV millionaires are shown to be the people YOU want to be. Their antics are insane but no one cares because they’d rather be doing that than going to work at some shitty corporate job. And social media doesn’t help because the Greed Zealots are always at the ready to defend their masters.
You’ll see comments where you’re told you aren’t as important as someone else. Maybe that’s true on a social scale because you’re not impacting the lives of as many people but the message you receive isn’t so specific. Mostly, when the Greed Zealots say these things, they’re making it clear that YOU are expendable.
Your individual value is no less than anyone else. Your impact can be dramatically less. Sociology suggests that the most introverted person will still influence ten-thousand people in a lifetime. Obviously, a celebrity impacts a thousand times that number. So yeah, they do have greater social value than the guy at home watching TV.
That’s okay though. The tier system won’t make you more popular. What it will do is grant you the things you require to live a prosperous and healthy life. You’ll be able to enjoy what you do, take in entertainment, with two of the biggest stresses lifted from your shoulders. Those are medical problems and financial difficulties.
Imagine a world where retirement is taken care of by society. People can get old without fearing what happens to them. Imagine a world where you don’t have to be terrified that you’ll lose your job if you get sick for a few days. Imagine a world where your company has enough people to meet demand because the finances aren’t going to six greedy board members?
Trickle down economics is a joke. The greed factor is too great. When the virus came and segregated society into their homes, it became obvious how fucked up capitalism truly had become. Those who had been decried and metaphorically spit on found themselves as the essential workers. The backbone of society, ragged and beating, proved their value.
Only in the sense that without them, the rich would’ve died. But that doesn’t matter. At the core of humanity is an inherent need to win over their neighbors. Competition is rampant. That concept thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself is a joke. Few people bother. Because they have to step on that person to get ahead.
That’s social conditioning. That’s the culture that needs to be eliminated. The Greed Zealots take what they want from the bible, corrupting it with their own interpretations. How many times are these men caught doing what they specifically say not to do? Because they’re catering to a mindset that they don’t believe in.
But oddly enough, despite being caught, their collective group is never shunned. Brainwashing is real. And it happens because education is an absolute joke. There’s no value placed there. And before I go on to talk about the real feelings of our rulers, let’s see what might happen if education fell into the tier system.
Valuing school over all else would alter society at the fundamental level. If tier three teachers made enough money to live in a comfortable house, drive a reliable vehicle, and not worry about accruing debt, we could attract additional qualified individuals. Right now, we’re stuck with patient people...not necessarily GOOD teachers.
But imagine if someone could be identified as having a learning disability and immediately assisted so they never became fed up? Imagine if we could change the way people view learning so they never wanted to stop. What happens to the world when society as a whole looks at school as a positive thing they always want to be part of?
We have people who get to a point that they say ‘fuck that, I’m NEVER studying again. I hated it.’ That’s because the value placed on school is so low, it’s a joke. People slip through that can’t fucking read. What’s that mean for society? More crime. More frustration. Less aspiration. Less growth. More apathy.
You do away with Greed Zealots preying on people if they have been educated.
But back to cruelty. Right now, a member of the conservative party would gladly state that a transgender person should be shot in the back of the head. They would happily burn every homosexual, ever minority, every ‘undesirable’ if they could just come out and say it. They’re cowards because their followers would agree with them.
What are they afraid of? Maybe they really are straight evil. Denying health care to women who need reproductive assistance is cruelty. Denying the right to marital union for homosexuals is cruel. Any of the things they do that essentially say ‘you’re done’ is a masked statement of ‘please go die so we don’t have to look at you’.
And speaking on those topics, anyone that is against homosexual marriage is simply put...an asshole. It has absolutely ZERO impact on them. If their traditions are so fragile they can’t handle sharing it with people in love, then they are filth. I can’t quite be as harsh to people against abortion but they by no means get a pass.
So their religion somehow tells them that abortion is wrong. That birth control is wrong. That premarital sex is wrong. Why do they get a say to religious people when their own representatives rape children? Why didn’t the FIRST of those incidents close the doors on their churches and have people walk away?
Because religious society, regardless of their high minded concept of love thy neighbor doesn’t apply. At all. Because it’s a very specific statement from their God that they apply to only those they deem as worthy. Worthiness comes down to conformity and self denial. It comes down to living the way of another person.
And then you get the religious fucks that use their faith in the government circles. We need more God in the government or prey for this policy to pass or whatever other BS they bust out with. The United States was founded on a religious freedom. Many of the founders had varied faiths. Puritanical shit fucked this place up and we allowed it.
Because their voices were loud and the collective group was not as strong as the hate in the so called religions of love. And it all comes down to a simple fact. Without dramatic change, without a cultural genocide for the capitalist hypocrisy we live in, people will never see prosperity. They will continue to live in constant fear that the God Greed will abandon them.
What would it take to overcome this problem? It’ll happen eventually whether we like it or not. Will it be some kind of revolution? Not without the destruction of the internet. If anyone’s hoping for violence in the streets, for CEOs and executives to be executed in some kind of insane mob terror, it won’t happen while distractions are in place.
And the greediest people on the planet feed those things. Because they’d rather keep everyone distracted than use their power to fix problems. Most of them must believe they’ll be long dead before real riots come along and wipe them out. This is why the environment gets no respect from them. They live in a constant state of ‘I got mine, I’ll be dead before it matters’.
Eventually, the world will change. It may be through another French Revolution style massacre or it could be a whimper. A plague, a war, a natural catastrophe...something will destroy the corruption. What rises in its place will hopefully be better but historically speaking, I’m going to be honest with you.
What comes after will likely be far worse before it gets way better. Look at the fall of the Roman Empire. It took a while before we got the Renaissance. And humanity will look quite a bit different when the dust all settles.