[ExI] nature's indifference to survival

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 24/10/2026 17:33, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 24, 2026 at 11:11 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> 'Mostly trying to survive and improve your own life' and 'mostly trying to tear down other people' are not mutually incompatible
> But they are.


I don't see how. They often happen together. It's the essence of a zero-sum game.

>
>
>> What are the Israelis doing by trying to wipe out the Palestinians?
> Tearing them down.  Building them up - so the Palestinians don't get
> raised on "our primary purpose in life is that Israel must die" -
> would involve education, providing actual security, and other stuff
> that seems harder than simply killing them as justifications arise.


Exactly. The israelis are improving their own lives by tearing down the palestinians. They get more territory and security by destroying palestine.


>
>> What does Putin think he's doing by openly attacking the Ukraine, and covertly attacking several other countries?
> Tearing them down.  Survival, perhaps, by distracting his people - but
> he's sure not primarily focused on building up Russia.  If he was,
> then throwing his people into meat grinders would stop, immediately.


He's an authoritarian dictator that wants the USSR back. The individual people in his regime don't matter, it's the nation of russia (or some fantasy of it) that he's wanting to build up. In order to do that, he's killing people, both russians and ukrainians (among many other destructive things).


>
>> What is Trump doing full stop?
> Tearing people down.  As many, many witnesses have attested, he had
> little to no concept of actually building people up since long before
> his first term as POTUS.  His life would have been better if he did
> not focus on scamming people.
>
> Note that "merely increase the numerical value of your bank accounts"
> is not always the same as "improve your own life".  This is more often
> the case with people who are wealthy enough that mere money by itself
> can no longer meaningfully improve their lives.


He's a massive egotist. Improving his life means making sure people know about him, and preferably worship him.
He's prepared to throw the world (including the USA) into chaos in order to achieve this.


> Consider Elon Musk, for example.  For all the damage he has done and
> still occasionally does, the majority of his efforts do genuinely seem
> to be spent on attempting to improve his life and others' - though he
> has been having some notable failures of late.  Would this continue to
> be the case if his assets were, say, merely $100 million or even $10
> million?  Arguably yes, and there are plenty of people with merely
> that amount of money who likewise spend the majority of their efforts
> on building instead of destruction.


I've stopped trying to make sense of Musk some time ago. I suspect he may be mentally ill.


> We're talking about individual people here; large
> governments are not individual people, even if some are run by
> individual people.
>


Ok, the same principles apply to individuals as to collections of individuals, when we're talking about zero-sum situations.

A true abundance economy would make a massive difference to all kinds of things. It wouldn't stop people who want power over other people, but it would stop most people depriving others from what they want and need, in order to improve their own lives.

Undermining the power of money (by enabling anyone to have any material and informational good they want (within practical limits), at zero cost) would improve the lives of just about everyone on the planet. The exceptions would be those who want power over other people - the dictators, the anti-choice brigade, the psychopathic egotists, religious leaders, etc.
-- 
Ben
"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." - Pablo Casals, via Albert Einstein