Socialism provides an easy answer to this. Democratizing the means of production doesn’t mean that everyone gets shit for free, quite the contrary. Socialism just means that the surplus labor is no longer given for free to (well, more like “stolen by”) a capitalist, but gets somewhat fairly distributed to everyone by being invested in science, industrial development and social programs through the state. All able-bodied citizens must still work in order to get paid.
I think the critical part related to that discussion is that socialist cultures don’t glorify individual wealth (which directly incentivizes greed), instead focusing on the values of honest labor, mutual aid, societal progress, and the common wealth. This may be a path to eventually remove individual self-interest as a motivator completely, and instead switch to social expectations and the feeling of belonging as motivators to perform labor - “from everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs”, a.k.a communism. It wouldn’t be an easy road for sure, especially looking at it from the perspective of modern humans scarred by capitalism, but I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility. After all, humans do selfless acts for the benefit of their social group all the time, we just need to cultivate that part of our psyche instead of the greedy one.
I’m also personally quite attracted to anarchist ideologies, which don’t have as cohesive of an answer for dealing with greed but do promise an even more awesome society, with no central authority to be greedy whatsoever. If we could get something like that to work, that could indeed be the end of history.
Socialism provides an easy answer to this. Democratizing the means of production doesn’t mean that everyone gets shit for free, quite the contrary. Socialism just means that the surplus labor is no longer given for free to (well, more like “stolen by”) a capitalist, but gets somewhat fairly distributed to everyone by being invested in science, industrial development and social programs through the state. All able-bodied citizens must still work in order to get paid.
I think the critical part related to that discussion is that socialist cultures don’t glorify individual wealth (which directly incentivizes greed), instead focusing on the values of honest labor, mutual aid, societal progress, and the common wealth. This may be a path to eventually remove individual self-interest as a motivator completely, and instead switch to social expectations and the feeling of belonging as motivators to perform labor - “from everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs”, a.k.a communism. It wouldn’t be an easy road for sure, especially looking at it from the perspective of modern humans scarred by capitalism, but I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility. After all, humans do selfless acts for the benefit of their social group all the time, we just need to cultivate that part of our psyche instead of the greedy one.
I’m also personally quite attracted to anarchist ideologies, which don’t have as cohesive of an answer for dealing with greed but do promise an even more awesome society, with no central authority to be greedy whatsoever. If we could get something like that to work, that could indeed be the end of history.