Originally Posted by
anticausal
Mostly because they are otherwise useless and waste food and resources. Within the debt-fueled neoliberal ponzi-scheme world order, that is fine. But if we are transitioning to something new, it might not be.
I was thinking out loud more than I was hinting at any concrete theory. I'm doing some wild conspiracy speculation here, so take it with a grain of salt. But if the debt-fueled global order is in fact on the verge of collapse, the most compliant are the most useless and will likely starve if a transitional period of self reliance became necessary. If such a collapse were anticipated now, and this process of starvation and economic disruption were anticipated, why wouldn't some of the elite at least consider a quicker transition to productive order and civilization? One way would be to kill the most compliant and least useful as quickly as possible, and leave the psychologically strong to embrace the coming challenge. You would, of course, need a test for compliance and psychological strength to separate the wheat from the chaff. We have that in the pseudo-vaccine. It doesn't even have to kill you outright, since it could just serve as a marker. I use Israel as the example, since they are a sort of ground zero for this experiment. There are admittedly a lot of holes in this theory, but it's interesting to think about.
The other (and right now, seemingly much more likely) option to the debt collapse problem is to just enslave almost everyone and hope that order and engineering progress (started to say "scientific", but I refuse) will continue well enough to feed everyone and satisfy the needs and comforts of the elite in a dystopian society. This seems easier, but I think it's wishful thinking on their part. It would be the blackest of black swans, since it would require a complete global resignation to be undead rather than alive (I liked your take on that). They're gonna need a lot of Soma. No one has a clue what that world would look like. Some of them must realize the risk of this strategy, but I see no strong indication that our elite aren't stupid enough to try it anyway. It's the "You will own nothing and be happy" option, and probably the most likely Plan A.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the former plan isn't evil. It's just might be less stupid. I'm not sure what the non-evil option would be as a response to a complete collapse of the global economic system. There probably isn't one, but if there is it would involve a movement back towards mutually beneficial localization rather than distributed globalization, and it would still be painful.