Daniel Wigton on Nostr: I was not saying that wealth causes poor decisions, I am saying carries a risk of ...

I was not saying that wealth causes poor decisions, I am saying carries a risk of masking mistakes. Plainly some level of wealth is desirable otherwise the consequences of mistakes are fatal. The question is how to maintain learning in the absence of suffering.

The short answer is that you can't, you can only change it's form. Without some form of suffering there is no information about when fundemental limits are bring exceeded. We can handle this in a few ways.

The first method is to transform potential suffering into education. People who have not encountered a painful limitation can be informed of it's existence. But education is itself a form of suffering. We inflict the pain and discipline of education on our children so they can avoid the greater pain of starvation.

The second is to change our understanding of pain. Pain is nothing more or less than information about our body's interaction with the environment and with itself. It is information loaded with negative emotional content to motivate us to move. Tragic suffering is only pain not accepted.

That isn't to say that we should want to be in pain, it indicates a condition at odds with nature that should be corrected, but we should be very grateful for pain and the information it contains.

So yay wealth and yay health, they are goods, but they don't come free.