Their lives can't be meaningless, because the meaning of the system is to allow the elite to live above it, aka they're the meaning itself. Their lives also can't all be thoughtless, because they are the only ones who have the idle time for extensive thought, and there are plenty of thoughtful individuals out there.
Very repellent is a society in which a person can satisfy his need for power only by pushing large numbers of other...
Connor Cox
Kevin Gray
Childhood is idolizing the Unabomber. Adulthood is idolizing /Pol/ Pot. What the Unabomber did was send out a few bombs. He was a gnat trying to kill an elephant. What /Pol/ Pot did was empty out the (((cities))), force a return to a pre-industrial agrarian society and kill off the oversocialized intellectuals. He did everything the Unabomber wanted to do in an entire country.
Oliver Ortiz
>The meaning of the system is to allow the elite to live above it...
Can you show this to me via someone's writing? I haven't seen that in Ted and obviously, don't believe it myself. All I mean to say is that these people must either be completely ignorant and therefore not living full lives, or they are aware of what it takes to sustain their existence. In the latter case, they know somewhere in their hearts that their existence is sustained by suffering. Therefore these people truly are not so rich where it matters most.
Ian Johnson
>Can you show this to me via someone's writing?
Do you mean you want it further explained, or you want it demonstrated in the writing itself? For the former, I'm not sure who to refer to you on this. For the latter, there are many critics and columnists you can seek out if you look hard enough who will demonstrate that there are people living off the fat, for just one example. And not everyone living off the fat is necessarily going to be a writer. This category includes anyone who inherited their wealth, stole it, or earned enough to do as they please. You think no one has an abundance of wealth and little responsibility? You've never met a kid with rich parents then, or a criminal who got away with it, or an entrepreneurial genius who figured out how to have their cake and eat it too.
>All I mean to say is that these people must either be completely ignorant and therefore not living full lives, or they are aware of what it takes to sustain their existence. In the latter case, they know somewhere in their hearts that their existence is sustained by suffering. Therefore these people truly are not so rich where it matters most.
Where's "where it matters most" and why does it matter most? By the way, there's no existence that doesn't require suffering to sustain it, unless you strictly mean human suffering. You eat and breathe, don't you? That means you live off the energy of something else and cause its annihilation. But even deeper than that, we all live today, on this earth, in this galaxy, at the expense of so many past deaths, so many now-extinct species, so many could-have-been existences... Anaximander thought that life itself was a type of repentance. I disagree, but I can understand where that outlook might stem from.
But to get back to the topic, there is really nothing about the current system that prevents such elite members from existing, is there? Can you point to the mechanisms that prevent it? If someone happens to amass wealth in some way, could they not live above the system then? What about someone like Markus Persson? Yes, he may be depressed, but that doesn't mean everyone who achieves wealth is depressed. He was depressed BEFORE he was wealthy. But he has so much wealth now that he can live completely above the system, and so could his kids even, and their kids, if they weren't stupid in how they handled the money. There are many people with enough money to live without the system's fingers up their ass, is what I'm saying.
Jeremiah Jenkins