I was thinking about human development and how as we get further into a socialist society we may find it hard to get children to fully grasp what past systems were like.
There are people who theorize we are a simulation and they give various ideas for why this might be. One most of them wouldnt consider as they are libs is we could just be in a full immersion learning environment. Imagine we are all students in some future school who have been sent into a simulated past to live the lives our ancestored lived and see first hand the horrors of capitalism. Start taking notes youre probably gonna have to write a paper on all this shit once you wake up.
I do get why you might see it as torture. I do think though that we should keep in mind with the level of tech required to simulate an entire world the same group could probably easily just scrub through your memories of the time you spent here and get rid of anything too traumatic. Once its over it might feel more like watching a horror movie from the first person. Where you know what went down but it doesn’t effect you the same way it would to actually experience it. With tech like that something like trauma might not even be a consideration. They could probably snap their fingers and fix issues like that.
Obviously if we start to consider this idea too seriously we hit a wall of trying to conjecture how such a hypothetical culture and society external to the stimulation would even work, given the extreme amount of cultural and worldview diversity in our own world.
But in my Earthly perspective of torture, I don’t believe not having lasting effects or trauma would be enough of a disqualifier. My own existence is quite a painful and unpleasant affair, primarily from things outside my control, and I don’t even have it anywhere near as bad as I could have. And I believe that to willingly put somebody in these worldly conditions without informed consent (as our worldly mind would have no worldly knowledge of the simulation) or means of stopping the experiment would count as torture.
I suppose that’s why “what if’s” like this and Last Thursdayism get such aggressive reactions from a lot of people. It’s either seen as invalidating (“what you went through didn’t actually happen”) or attributing a greater cause to suffering.
You might find It’s Hard to be a God or its adaptations interesting. I haven’t gotten around to reading or watching it yet, but it’s about an observer from advanced socialist society on a medieval backwards world.