No, you are not stupid, though not smart either- you are wise. I often look around at society (and much of history) and feel like it is a shitty video game that I do not want to play, but it is stuck in my console so this is what I'm working with lol. The Tragedy of the Commons was a great paper I was shown that did a mathematical break down of selfishness, and the effects of private gain in a shared space. I'm with you, I believe that it is possible to have a much more productive (not to mention enjoyable- the bigger of the two IMO) social organization if we are NOT selfish, and I have to fight the urge to starve to prove it. We need to fix the game, we have been playing this version for a looooong time, and its way past due for an update lol
Thanks, an enjoyable to read reply :)
We do need to fix the game, Steemit was a hope for some - and still is I guess, lets hope we can get an update to this game somehow!
I look at it like this: older civilizations might take 2k years to get to domination then collapse. That's quite a few generations and even though people tried to pass stories down to warn about what happens when such and such a problem occurs, it was tough to get most people to understand it before it was too late. So we repeat mistakes over and over and over. Now the U.S has take just over 200 years (not to collapse but to start to see signs of a collapsing society), still fresher, but hard for most people to witness the full cycle (they can't live through it, but we have more public sharing of information). Now Steemit has taken only about 2 years to go from a fresh society to one that shows signs of the same selfish, economic and law problems that we see in any society. 2 years is short enough that most people are going to watch the cycle and really see it for what it is... this is great! We now might actually have large scale use of people's minds to solve these problems- experiment with 'rules' behaviors and social rewards. We might actually solve this sh*t haha. i am pretty hopeful about this project and the blockchain, micro economic, decentralized stuff in general. i'm still getting very bummed by how people are acting, but i have some hope we may actually figure it out finally :)