What is the difference between humans and apes?In his book A Brief History of Mankind, historian Yuval Harari argues that one of the things that distinguishes humans from other living beings is that we lie collectively. Other apes can't do that.
Human beings weave stories, forge beliefs, and form races, tribes, and religions through their imaginations. The nation is also born in the story. Bringing together a disparate group of individuals, so that collective group cooperation overrides the more powerful individual creatures. From antiquity, tribes were formed, easily defeating individual powerful beasts, and large tribes exterminated small groups.
France created the concept of the nation-state and became the first powerful collective, swept across Europe under the leadership of Napoleon, and almost unified Europa. Through the efforts of philosophers and politicians, in 1870, the German nation was unified with many small states, including the contribution of "Grimm's Fairy Tales".
Once most people embark on the path to self-sufficiency, the first thing they have to think about is to eat together. Nowadays, the hot discussion about the future of artificial intelligence mainly revolves around the question of whether artificial intelligence is coming to grab jobs.
People's sense of existence has a lot to do with how much money they make. As early as 200,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens appeared, people began to exist in relatively small and independent groups. As time passed, the team grew bigger and bigger, and faith brought many ethnic groups together, and finally created a different human society.
In the beginning, people didn't have any mechanical tools at hand, so they had to roar at everything. At that time, the labor, moving bricks, digging pits, and picking fruits, was only a piecemeal work of individuals, and the so-called value was only contained in individuals, and they could not be connected, let alone networked. The macro value of human beings is to create a set of rules and processes, so that the scattered and independent values of working people can be brought together for collaboration, and everyone becomes a machine part in an orderly system.
Relying on this set of large and comprehensive muscle synergy, as well as a belief system with a strong story, human beings built pyramids, temples, and cities, and finally had human civilization and the so-called entire human system. Those grand projects, splendid civilizations, inseparable from inspiring narratives, without the power of narrative, human beings are a plate of scattered sand, at most they are just small tribes living a small life, so far there is a high probability that they are still competing with orangutans and baboons for resources, and it is also a meal for beasts.
In today's capitalist world, nothing has changed about the system. In this system, most people make up the whole process, and everyone in it is just a small cog in it. To put it bluntly, it is this basic labor that makes people feel that they are worthwhile.
The lie of the mainstream values of capitalism, where economic success is the highest goal, and the accumulation of wealth by the individual is considered a symbol of success and happiness, emphasizes that everyone should be held accountable for their own successes and failures. The value lie stimulates dopamine and amygdala, motivates migrant workers to drive a truck on a starry night and go on a long journey, go to the office to drive the computer to brush data to do **, and program for testing at eleven o'clock in the middle of the night, all of which are convinced by this set of lies.
The result, however, is a greater divide between rich and poor in the capitalist world. With the advancement of technology, wealth is increasingly concentrated in the pockets of fewer people. The nature of capital is profit-seeking, science and technology are the dragon-slaying knife of capital's profit-seeking, and the necessity of capitalism is that capital does everything possible to increase productivity and extract wealth. To get a feel for the meaning of the so-called differentiation in recent decades, I took a moment to search and organize the following materials, and use data to gain perceptual cognition.
According to the World Inequality Database (WID), in 1980, the world's richest 10,000 people controlled a 11%。In 1980, it was the richest group of about 1/250,000 of the world's adult population, and together it controlled about 11% of household wealth.
In the same year, the top 1% of the world's richest population controlled 9% of global wealth.
If we compare the following 30 years, in 1980 the wealth of the world's richest people was not very high, and the middle class accounted for a significant proportion of the wealth. This reflected the relatively equal and equitable distribution of wealth across the globe at the time, far from the high inequality it is today.
In 1990, the world's richest 10,000 people accounted for 17%。In other words, in 1990, the number of billionaires, who were only equivalent to one-third of the total adult population in the world, collectively controlled nearly 17% of wealth.
With 1980 this group occupies 1Compared with the 1% share of global wealth in 1990, this proportion has increased markedly, and the inequality in the distribution of global wealth has tended to worsen over the past decade.
However, the distribution in 1990 was relatively even compared to the current level of inequality. As of 2020, the top 10,000 world's richest people may have mastered more than 5% of global wealth.
In 2000, the world's 10,000 richest people held about 3.3 percent of the world's total household wealth6%。In other words, in 2000, the number of the top richest people, equivalent to only one-third of the world's total population, was nearly 36% of the family's wealth. Compared with 10 years ago, the proportion has more than doubled.
In 2010, the world's richest 143%。By 2010, the top billionaires, who numbered only one-fourth of the world's population, had a combined command of 43% of household wealth.
This trend continues, and by 2020, the top 10,000 richest people in the world may have accounted for more than 5% of their wealth, but I don't know the exact number.
I found a report published by Oxfam International Charities in 2017 that the combined net worth of the world's 500 richest billionaires in 2017 was 7$2 trillion. At the same time, the combined net wealth of all adults in the world is about $280 trillion.
The number of the top 500 richest people, who account for only one millionth of the world's adult population, together controls nearly 26% of the family's net worth. The global distribution of wealth is extremely uneven, with a high concentration of wealthy individuals in a very small number.
In 2017, the world's 10,000 richest people roughly controlled 4Around 5%-5% of the total household wealth. Another set of data: according to a 2017 research report by the international charity organization oxfam, in 2017, the combined net worth of the eight richest people in the world was about $422.6 billion. The 8 richest people are: Bill Gates, Amedus, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg.
At the same time, Oxfam estimates that there are about 10700 million people live in "extreme poverty" with an average daily income of less than 1$9. If a conservative estimate of $100 per person living in extreme poverty is used, then this is 10The total assets of the 700 million poor are about $107 billion.
In other words, in 2017, the total wealth of the world's eight richest people was equivalent to 10 percent of the world'sAbout four times the total assets of 700 million people living in extreme poverty. The eight richest people have the entire wealth equivalent of billions of poor people, and the statistics are staggering.
In the past 40-50 years, the world has experienced two industrial revolutions, the information Internet revolution in the 80-90s, the fourth industrial revolution since the 2010s, and is still on the journey, the first half of the fourth industry is the mobile Internet and the Internet of Things, and the evolution of technology has come to the era of semiconductors and artificial intelligence, which is the second half of the fourth industrial revolution, and it is the second half of the unfathomable and unlimited.
Over the past 40-50 years, the concentration of wealth has increased dramatically, coinciding with technological evolution. What does this mean: the nature of capital is profit-seeking, science and technology are the dragon-slaying knife of capital's profit-seeking, and the inevitable process of capitalism is that capital does everything possible to improve productivity, make more money, and concentrate more powerful resources.
The fourth industrial revolution, with artificial intelligence as the c position, the technical force will be jumped, the ability obtained by this jump, the information revolution and the mobile Internet are the little brother, and the dragon slaying technique directed by the essence of capital is about to open the world.
The sky is shattered, the earth is cracked, the stars fall, the flood is poured in, the vast number of people in the capitalist world are rolled up by thousands of waves on the flat ground, dragged into the deep cracks of the earth, polarization to the extreme, can only be the flood rolling, the starlight extinction, the technological leap will definitely bring profound changes to the social system, the phoenix nirvana, the birth of a new world!