> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else"
This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere. The world in this view is a finite pie that can only be sliced up differently. Nothing is ever created. Wealth can only be redistributed.
This ignores the fact that the past 200 years have seen insane wealth creation that has enabled more people than have ever lived to live better than most people have ever lived. Look at how many have risen out of poverty globally in just the last 25 years.
Someone will inevitably bring up climate change, etc., and argue that it’s all bound to come crashing down. Maybe it will, but asserting that it must as some law of nature is a fatalistic ideology.
It’s a fatalistic ideology that some people seem to like and be emotionally attached to for reasons that aren’t clear to me. I tend to think it’s a big cop out. If everything is doomed, doomed, doomed, then there is no point in even trying. Eat, drink, and be merry while the ship sinks.
> This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere
To some degree this is true, in the sense that human flourishing implies some degree of suffering for e.g. the ants we accidentally step on, animals we eat, bacteria in our guts, etc. But Jains do their best not to step on the ants, many people refuse to eat flesh, and so on. Plants and bacteria will have to fend for themselves for now. We can certainly do better with each other.
I am proposing no version of fatalism, besides the fact that, at least in our living substrate, organisms have not all learned to do each other no harm, if this is even possible, and even if it isn't, fatalistic hedonism is not the inevitable response to this fact.
>> The world in this view is a finite pie
But it is. The physical world is finite, with finite resources, human greed not so.
Finite, but sufficiently abundant for any human to be clothed, housed, fed, taught, married, and succeeded by offspring as well-protected as they.
It doesn't matter because the capacity to increase efficiency is virtually endless and we have a free source of power just 9 light-minutes away.