The fairy tale German politicians and the media tell 24/7 of how high energy costs for the industry and much too high wages are the problem. And this is after all about a German CEO calling for lower wages “to safeguard Germany’s prosperity and welfare state”.

When in reality Germany, so the other 99,999999% but him, are struggling because of low wages that in no way represent their economic output, high and rising energy costs –exactly so the industry gets lower costs– and with the pension, social and health system not looking sustainable, but again not because of the delusions this guy and his other rich friends are spreading, but because they are linked to stagnating wages. Suggesting more less and lower pay so his profit margins go up and the country is more fucked is simply insane… or just shameless. Yeah, probably the latter.

Wasn’t meant personally in any way. As I said, it sounds logical without a closer look. So I told how it looks from the inside.

The point that I made completely flew over your head. I didn’t ask you what you thought the appropriate punishment should be, I specifically criticized the notion that you think that the world’s problems can be solved by a quick fix, which in this case is getting rid of the billionaires.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why this shallow line of thought is flawed. It oversimplifies all the world problems to a single source, which is never the case, and it tries to sell a one time silver bullet solution that promises to immediately fix a lot of the world’s problems quickly, which also never happens. For all your talk about Nazis, this mentality is ironically one of the biggest drivers of evil ideologies in history. All the most bloodthirsty dictators have the same idea of “if we just get rid of all the people we don’t like, the world will surely be a better place”. They all think that history will look kindly on them for doing what they’re doing, but that’s never the case.

Take Mao as an example. He did exactly what you want down to the letter, and the result was the worst man made catastrophe in recorded history. He is responsible for the single highest death toll of any state leader ever, and he is globally recognized as a monster. All of that, and his original goal of getting rid of social classes failed. Despite all the killings and deaths, it changed nothing. China has the highest number of billionaires in the world.

Do you know why Mao failed and why your wish here will fail in the same exact way? It’s because it’s not based on grounded reality. Billionaires just represent a tip of an iceberg. They’re just the top of the economic hierarchy. If you kill them all, they will be immediately replaced by the people right under them, and if you kill those, they will be replaced the people under them, and so on and so forth. In a hierarchal system, vacant positions at the top will always be filled by the next in line. So what is your master plan? To keep killing people until there is no one left? What death toll is good enough to satisfy you?

The next thought for people with beliefs like this is they think that if they can’t solve problems by killing people then they’ll just destroy the system that enables the current hierarchies… but that’s also stupid because you’ll just replace them with a different set of hierarchies. Take a look at the Soviet Union. They tried to get rid of the capitalist hierarchies based on economic wealth by having the state seize and redistribute private wealth. While they got rid of their economic classes, they introduced new political classes that took over as the new elite. The power and wealth that was with the tycoons transferred over to government and party elites. It’s the same problem just reskinned, that’s actually why the USSR collapsed.

This is because you can’t actually get rid of hierarchies. Inequality is literally one of the definition hallmarks of civilization. We are social animals, and all social animals are hierarchal. That’s how we organize ourselves and our societies. It’s a part of our DNA, so trying to get rid of it is a battle lost before it started. That’s why any serious ideology needs to factor this in order to be pass the bare minimum of being considered pragmatic.

As it turns out, history has shown how we can fix the issues we’re seeing today. The reason why Germany, Italy, and Japan were able to rebuild and move past their fascist chapters is because they were forced to rebuild their system from the ground up based on liberal values, not by killing all the Nazis… that’s just historical illiteracy. Things like secularism, democracy, freedom of speech, rule of law, equality of opportunity, and most importantly, check and balances is what transformed those societies into the advanced and open nations that they are today.

In America’s case, that’s what’s missing. There is no accountability at any level. The checks and balances that used to be there aren’t being applied anymore. The branches of government aren’t keeping each other in check, the constitution isn’t being respected, the economy isn’t being regulated, the people are largely apathetic to the abuses of power, laws aren’t applied universally, and opportunity is not given equally. The lack of accountability erodes trust in the country and its intuitions, which just fuels more distrust creating a vicious cycle. This isn’t an issue that can be solved overnight by killing people or destroying things. It’s a multifaceted issue that requires education, great coordination efforts, and a politically active public… which unfortunately a lot of people don’t find sexy enough of a problem or solution to do something about it and so we’re stuck with ideas like yours for the time being.

I have no clue what the hell you’re talking about.

And as for the people who say they didn’t read it because it was “too long”, my personal favorite, I can tell them to go fuck themselves. They’re among the most useless and intellectually incurious people in any demographic, and their refusal to engage with something simply because it requires more than a few seconds of their attention makes them eminently dismissible.

You’re an idiot.

First of all, thank you. Your response was well-mannered and thoughtful, which puts it several multitudes above the usual riffraff on this platform who encounter criticism of a belief they hold and immediately start foaming at the mouth.

Let me be perfectly clear about what I am arguing against: the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people.

That is not revolution. That is not justice. That is not liberation. It is simply another form of barbarism, dressed up in whatever ideological language makes the person committing it feel righteous.

Human history is littered with the corpses of people who were convinced that this time the mass killing was justified because their victims were the right people to hate. It has never ended well. One hatred does not magically become virtuous because you attach a political theory to it.

There is already more than enough hatred in this world.

And no, I am not opposed to violence in every conceivable circumstance. There are political leaders in the Middle East and Russia whom I would have very little sympathy for if they were violently removed from power. There are people who commit such extraordinary acts of cruelty that I have no moral objection to the idea that they should face the ultimate consequence.

I can even understand the moral argument behind what Luigi Mangione did, regardless of where someone ultimately draws the legal or ethical line.

But there is an enormous difference between saying some individuals have forfeited their moral claim to our sympathy and saying an entire class of human beings deserves to die.

That distinction matters.

I understand why people are angry. I understand the plight of people being crushed by the economic and political systems we have constructed. I understand the desire to smash a system that appears fundamentally indifferent to the people trapped beneath it.

And I am not even particularly enthusiastic about capitalism. I see its failures. I see its contradictions. I see the suffering it can produce and the ways in which wealth and power concentrate themselves.

But here’s where I draw the fucking line:

“Kill the capitalists.”

No.

Because the moment your solution to oppression becomes finding another category of human beings to exterminate, you haven’t transcended the system you despise. You’ve simply inherited its worst characteristics.

You have become the thing you claim to be fighting.

And that’s the part nobody seems to want to hear.

If your revolution requires you to dehumanize an entire population before you can justify killing them, then congratulations, you haven’t built a better ideology. You’ve just found a new excuse for the oldest human vice imaginable.

We have to be better.

Someone has to be willing to say the quiet part out loud: killing people because they belong to the wrong class does not make us morally superior to the people we condemn for doing the same thing to someone else.

You don’t get moral absolution simply because your victims are different from theirs.

If the only thing separating your politics from the atrocities of the past is that you have chosen a different group of people to hate, then you haven’t learned a damn thing from history.

You’ve just changed the uniforms.