How does human attitude change from a crave for earning money to serving society?

How does human attitude change from a crave for earning money to serving society?

[ 28/7/20 ]

There are many ways in which the values and actions of an individual can evolve over time.

One that takes a lot of work delving into mathematics, logic, systems and biology is to understand how evolution by natural selection actually works in the systemic sense of allowing new levels of complexity to emerge.

When one looks very closely at that, then it becomes clear that all new levels of complexity are based upon new levels of cooperation.

New levels of complexity, new domains of freedom, can only emerge and stabilise in cooperative contexts. Competition will always tend, over time, to destroy complexity and remove freedom. The mathematics and logic of that are inescapable.

And every new level of complexity and cooperation requires sets of cheat detection and cheat removal strategies to survive, and that is always an evolving ecosystem in itself (at every level).

Being human is in the systemic sense, being a stack of at least 15 levels of such sets of cooperative complex adaptive systems (not 15 systems, 15 levels of systems, each level built upon the base provided by the level below).

Thus if one does put in the time and effort to understand (at least at the broad brush stroke level) how those systems necessarily require boundaries for their existence, then one can see the general form of the necessary sets of boundaries required for any real and survivable expression of freedom.

When one does that, then it becomes clear that the security and freedom of any is optimised by delivering security and freedom to all.

In the presence of fully automated systems, market based economics fails completely and become the single largest source of existential level risk to the cooperative that is humanity.

In what may seem paradoxical to many, the greatest degrees of security and freedom for any are only available when individuals acknowledge their responsibilities for maintaining the boundaries required to ensure cooperation of all. And those boundaries are eternally uncertain and changing, and require ongoing work and judgement by all involved. The systems are of such an order of complexity that any set of rules must necessarily fail in some contexts. There must eternally be an aspect of trial and error, of probing the system and seeing how it responds, of responsibly testing the limits.

When one accepts and practices those responsibilities, then it is clear that the best way to serve one’s self interest in the longest possible term is to work for the interests of all, accepting all the uncertainty that necessarily comes with that.