/lit/ - Literature

>>21665767
>The sad truth is that everyone is and always has been powerless to the whims of fate and to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Getting a bit off topic now but I heavily disagree. Of course as a general philosophy this is and always will be true; but if you were a high IQ physically fit male in the Middle Ages for example, or really any time before the Industrial Revolution, like some of us are now, you could rightly expect to become a very important and valued member of your community and receive ample reward based on merit, regardless of class. And I say regardless of class because as a serf sure you couldn't expect to become a king or a baron but you could become a very valued member of your class and that would be a more worthwhile and rewarding endeavour than almost any today. After the Industrial Revolution, technology quickly made the working classes, particularly the males, obsolete, or at any rate made their labour worth far less. What we see now with the information/computer revolution is just that same concept reaching the higher classes, i.e. from those whose primary means of production was their body to those whose was the mind. Also I'm not a Marxist but technology "creating jobs" is almost always code for a shift in self-sufficiency and ownership of the means of production from a lower social class to a higher social class (the owners of the technology). To a transhumanist this is all wonderful news, but to anyone of a saner disposition, well you know what I'm talking about.
I do agree with your general notion that we have power over lives, and I thank you for the encouragement, and maybe I'm just playing devil's advocate, but it seems a little disingenuous to put all the emphasis on the individual.