>In the long run, if you strike out at others without cause, it will likely happen to you.

George Bush seems to be living a very nice and comfortable life. Kim Jong * have all lead comfortable lives of great power, with the older two dying of old age.

>Causing pain to others is bad because the response I get is likely to cause me discomfort.

Politicians and CEOs and lawyers and cops do it all the time and it seems to work out quite well for them.

>Money requires relationships.

No, it just requires a job. It's not that hard to get a crappy-to-mediocre-paying job without any personal relationships. Or, you can be like corporate executives or lawyers and just be really good at lying to people, so you have relationships but they're not actually genuine.

>So you can name dozens of people who don't live by caring about others. There are what? almost 8 billion people on the planet?

The dozens of people I can name are actually running the planet. It doesn't look like this system of yours is working all that well.

You forgot young earth creationists, probably the most popular conspiracy theory around. Evolution, geology, paleoclimatology, dendrochronology, astronomy, radiocarbon dating, fossil record and probably a dozen other sciences I forget all a hoax. A false flag operation by either god himself as a test of faith or the devil playing tricks, you don't have to go to the 1% nutters - who mostly lack sanity - to find total rejection of evidence, science and logic.

You're not going to be around that long for the long-term good of society to matter much to you.

>1) If I cause pain to others, or believe that this is justifiable, then others quite likely will treat me the same

Politicians and CEOs seem to get along just fine causing pain to others without suffering any negative repercussions. They just make sure to have some select cronies who assist them in fucking over everyone else.

>2) If everyone lived according to the ideals of "care about is your own personal survival and comfort, and nothing else.", society would collapse.

Yet we happily put people just like that into the highest positions of power over us.

>If everyone took that as an example and behaved that way, the whole mess would collapse. It's like the random jerks who use the HOV lane when driving alone...

The problem with this analogy is that the random jerks who use the HOV lanes alone aren't the ones in charge of running and policing the highways. What's more, the policitians are the ones preaching to us about how to live, when they themselves don't live by these words.

Maybe it'd be better if the whole mess did collapse. If we're so stupid we put people in charge who are like this, then why do we deserve a functioning society rather than starvation and anarchy?

>I do not grow my own vegetables, butcher my own meat, make my own circuit boards, generate my own electricity.

You don't need personal relationships for any of that, you only need money. You can get money from being employed, among other means.

>I require relationships with other people in my household, neighborhood and world to stay alive and thrive.

I can name dozens of politicians and CEOs who happily survive and thrive while not giving two shits about anyone else on the planet.

>We evolved in communities and had to be able to work together to thrive. It is "bad" for me to harm others because it upsets relationships necessary for my survival.

Somehow, this evolution totally failed since our entire society is run by people who have zero empathy for others.

This is a good point. The Koran also instructs people to murder each other many times, and these verses are the very basis of the Islamic religion.

Wouldn't an indoctrination by society of an expectation for others to follow the rules be a suitable enough reason for one to follow that same rule?

No, because what's good for society isn't necessarily good for you, the individual. Just look at all our politicians and business leaders; they don't work for the good of society at all, they work purely for their own personal gain. So why should the rest of us work for the good of society?

Other unrelated people are not your young, they could actually be competitors. There's a reason we humans are so warlike.

Approach #1 obviously makes a lot of sense in small, tribal societies. If you don't work for the good of the group, they'll kick you out and survival on your own in pre-civilization days is very difficult if not impossible. However, #2 is quite doable these days. All you have to do is work a job for money, and use that money to pay for your living expenses. Then, for personal relationships, you can treat people poorly and take advantage of them for your own personal gain. There's countless sociopaths who do just that every day, and it seems to work well for them. They're even running all our large companies and our government.

I have a sense of rightness that derives from empathy. It doesn't take any notion of the supernatural or any deity to understand that if I can feel pain, then I can expect that my fellow humans can as well. If I feel that someone causing me pain is "bad" then it follows that causing others' pain is bad.

Why is causing pain to others bad? Why do you care about what other people feel? Yes, most of us agree that it's wrong to willfully hurt others, but why? If you think that we're just collections of cells, then the only thing you should care about is your own personal survival and comfort, and nothing else.

Surely you've heard of the Golden Rule? This requires zero belief in the supernatural or any sort of sacredness.

Except that it doesn't explain why you should follow it. Most people seem to use "karma" (or "what comes around goes around") as a not-quite-as-supernatural-as-an-omnipotent-God reason for following the Golden Rule.

With TPB mainly running on magnet links, it's not even that it's a hash of pointers to content these days. Even the actual pointers have gone off-site, which reduces the bandwidth by 99%. My guess is TPB actually serves up more ads than content, if you count bytes.