[split] Are Questions About God Important?

[The Grand Nudger]

If we're open to being right or wrong about what things will lead to flourishing (or our own self interest) then we should probably have some example of some thing that we as individuals could more easily get, if there were fewer humans - and so..less competition. It's at least possible that we have more or access to more precisely because there are so many of us.

I've used a mouse and a hand axe to make a distinction to explore self sufficiency and poverty, in principle and in practice, over deep human time. Hand axes are ubiquitous. Everyone everwhere, at some point, knew how to build a hand axe. The humble computer mouse is even moreso. More of them exist right now than the total number of hand axes ever found or likely to have existed. No single person anywhere knows how to make a mouse from scratch.

Now, we can safely presume that, while there were fewer people before and less competition between people for resources...and that those people were far more self sufficient than any one of today - we can also safely conclude that human life has become less, rather than more impoverished as we find ourselves here today. The whole shebang relies on a vast network of specialized labor that wouldn't even occur to us until we had enough people at a minimum to sustain it.

With all of that in mind, is it really true that fewer people or less competition leads to more human flourishing - or would credibly be expected to service some contemporary persons own private and unique desires, disposition, or expectations about material gain or competition? Could it be that naked greed is misinformed, and is..in fact, the very reason that naked greed fails and has so often failed as a means or justification to acquire it's own aims? That self sufficiency is a myth, that the number of people required to sustain any given number of people -at any level- is always a yet larger number?