u/Punished-Maruki

Being rich can effectively be boiled down to having a lot of influence or power. Of course, there are people who have a lot of power but are not very rich, but those people are either few and far between or at the immediate beck and call of the rich. Though there have been times where the rich have held more power and less power, it seems that we are now trending towards the rich having extremely consolidated power over workers because of the coming automation wave.

When the automation wave arrives, many businesses will often no longer have to interact at all with everyday people because jobs will become scarce, and even if people receive UBI, the increased efficiency of automation will make their buying power significantly more limited when compared to other companies. Instead, most of these transactions will simply be between businesses, decoupling the profit motive from its original aim of producing the best product for the consumer.

This problem will only continue to worsen until either the profit motive is done away with, or the average person becomes so powerless that they are deemed useless eaters and discarded.

However, I do not think that AI and automation are in any way bad things. In fact, I want these two technologies to be accelerated. However, if they are to be accelerated, then our end goal must be FDVR. FDVR is the ultimate logical terminus of the profit motive. Within FDVR, you are able to do whatever you want and infinitely maximize your level of influence and power, going beyond any level of influence that you would be able to have in the real world. With the implementation of the decoupling of money from what has hitherto been seen as its tautology, power, we are able to move society away from this dystopian end and towards one where FDVR might be universalized, allowing everyone to live their optimum life.

If you have spent any time doing any introspective work, you would have realised the unfortunate reality that having a sense of self is not a given. Though you may exist, make decisions, and manifest yourself in all the ways that constitute a "self," it is still possible for you to completely lack a sense of self, for you have frighteningly little knowledge of who, as a person, you actually are.

However, if we take that as a given, that having a sense of self is not a prerequisite for human existence, that leaves us in an interesting situation in relation to attempts towards contentment.

Let’s say we have someone with a fairly weak sense of self that lets the opinions of society and others dictate to them who they are and what they are. If this person were to ever reach a point of contentment, a point where they feel truly satisfied with their lives, how would they ever be able to know such contentment is authentic? If they have, in all effect, externalised their sense of self to others, then will that same feeling of contentment not also be an internalisation of their feelings and opinions towards him?

In such an example, you have someone that thinks they have reached the pinnacle, that they have made it, but in reality, due to them having a weak sense of self, they are still far from their apotheosis. It is my opinion, however, that this is the highest point we can ever get to. No matter who we are or where we come from, we are always going to, at least in part, offload our sense of self onto others, precluding us from ever reaching our highest state.

However, with FDVR this is not the case. With FDVR, there is no longer any need for us to externalise our sense of self onto others, because the others within said simulation can align with our own true selves (or sense of self). In such an example, the malforming force of externalisation becomes an impossibility, and the contentment that we feel will be the true highest form of existence.