So many people I know personally, especially older ones, are very sad about the destruction of the environment, the extinction of animals, and they feel helpless, as if humanity was doomed. How rich do they have to be for this malaise to not count as a serious injury? How poor or starving would someone in... not 1928 because that's more a convenient than interesting year to compare with... maybe 1728, have to be, for them having a world to not count?

By having a world I mean, we used to think of the world as a lasting thing, and human lifes as short. Now it's the oppposite, the world evaporated, and that's not just because we're less ignorant, but also because of the whole ideology of consumption, of instead of wealth being something you possess, it being the speed at which you gain and destroy newer and shinier things, the fatness of the pipe.

This is and other losses simply do not exist for capitalism because they cannot be quantified. It's the wiping out of the "sapiens" part in one fell swoop, on the whole globe, forever, leaving a lot of "bodies" and "eyeballs". As for "unlimited entertainment", that's both a blessing and a curse when it swamps out the precious insights that thinkers previously had, and that were previously cherished.

> Inequality is only a problem in so much that it leads to higher crime rates

When strong countries wage wars of aggression, or a rich person runs someone over while drunk, rapes someone, what have you, and buys as much of the justice system that should apply the same laws to everyone (not make everyone the same, just apply rules equally), brazenly ripping the blindfold of Justititia, that is not a problem, only if it becomes "too apparent"? I doubt you mean that, you probably just didn't think of it that way.

I agree that inequality in itself is not a problem. That is, that someone else is more beautiful or rich than me, or whatever, as long as they play fair in some basic sense, it is not a problem. As long as there is some recognition that everybody "could have been born as" everybody, some default solidarity and good will. You know, the kind we all had as kids, even if some don't have it anymore. Kids are selfish and cruel, but from my memories and experience they also have a great innate sense of justice, that gets subverted with rationalizations and pressure later on. My theory is that people either loose it early in youth or young adulthood, or become good at protecting it.

And that's not only unfair, as I said above when it reaches too absurd proportions it undergoes a phase change and affects the thinking. The things we enjoy aren't just based on private enterprise since year X, but also more generally on the constant curiosity and ingeniuity of people everywhere, at all times, in all sorts of situations. The unchecked regression of thought into rationalizations and doublethink, the normalization of everyone by fitting them to the numbers and metrics and group relations, in one vast giant "social" "space", will pull out the rug under that, human will die before humanity. Just like when the pilot of a plane gets a heart attack, it takes a few seconds, or even minutes, before the plane actually crashes.

Last, but not least: if ever increasing inequality isn't a problem, then by the same token there wouldn't be a problem with less of it, right?