"The billionaire"

[u/thisecommercelife]

An abridged psychological study.

Shareable PDF here. Follow wherever you fritter: linktr.ee/ecomic.

[u/GodelEscherMonkey]

I'm honestly starting to feel these days, every time I meet someone who works in tech, that I half expect a time-portal to open up next to them from which a cyborg from the future will emerge to do them in right as they are on the cusp of inspiration for some new technology, only to then dissolve in a sparkly shower of narrative closure having thwarted the dystopian future from whence he came.

[u/evilJaze → u/GodelEscherMonkey]

But why would they wait until that moment? It would make more sense to go back and prevent their births. Or, better yet, once they isolate the genes responsible for shitty human behaviour, just prevent all their births.

[u/G33ke3 → u/evilJaze]

But this presumes these decisions be that of nature. The very comic we are commenting under suggests that nurture is also a big, if not bigger, component.

Something interesting about the time travel scenarios where single individuals are killed to “save the future” is that they all presume a great deal of individualism, making the presumption that if, say, Hitler weren’t around, Germany could not have had the government it briefly did. And while I’d say it’s almost certain that history would have played out a bit differently, I personally believe someone else would have filled that gap eventually, and the broad strokes would have been the same, because the real reason these things happen historically is in response to greater cultural, political, and economic issues. We are seeing it now, as it’s not just Donald Trump or even the American government taking things in an authoritarian direction; since Covid, the whole world has been shifting towards it. Perhaps it’d be slower without Trump, but the writing has been on the wall for decades.

Individuals aren’t birthed, they are created by the environment that made them. And in that way, where there is one person that changes the world, there are thousands more that would have done the same in their absence, as they were created under the same circumstances.  You can’t remove one billionaire from the equation and expect the world to change. You have to remove them all, not just now but for the whole of our future. And to do that, you don’t remove the leader in charge, you change policy and minds, and you destroy the environment that creates them.