Can I ask that you read a large number of history books across any number of cultures on addictive behaviors throughout history, because you'll find that anytime a society had an excess of time and labor/production that people find addictive behaviors to enjoy. This is not recent. This is not capitalism. This is humanity.
What capitalism has done is given everybody enough free time from starvation to actually follow addictive pursuits.
Yes! Capitalism will solve addiction! Not to sound like a broken record, but in what hell world are we so desperate for profit that we seek something like this?
Caritative actions are part of capitalism. I donate voluntarily to charities, this is part of capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t prevent people from having a soul.
Capitalism is the framework that makes all those people work together: The nun, the family guy, the corporate shark, the idealist who can buy land and create an inefficient community based on non-monetary exchange.
Capitalism also makes us globally quite rich (by virtue of allowing us to simply take the revenue we generate in our startups), which affords us the luxury of giving 63% to the state. Supposedly in exchange for the state taking care of poor people. It’s the capitalism that allows me that money.
So I get it, you pin everything bad on capitalism. It’s just that you allow CEOs to pactise with the state to remove freedoms from you. Meanwhile you forget that this unprecedented lifestyle improvement since the industrial revolution, it’s also due to capitalism.
I think the point is capitalism gives people what they crave. Not necessarily what they need. But any alternative is unimaginable in individualized minds of modern people.
I agree that the average person today lives like a king, but I disagree that capitalism is what brought it about.
IMO, the capitalism = progress relationship is coincidental, not causal. The march of science and technology would have continued, capitalism or no capitalism. Even the Soviets, for all the problems and violence caused by their unfree economic system, managed to make tech and scientific progress work, albeit slower.
And yes, capitalism brought me the smartphone that I'm typing on today: with all the harmful, attention-grabbing and addictive features. That's why I'm trying to quit smartphones altogether.
Human society has been great at and thrived on exploiting people for a very long time now. We'd probably have to go all the way back to hunter and gatherer tribes before we find a point in time where that wasn't a normal fact of life. Capitalism is just the most efficient form of exploitation that we've found. It's not really controversial though.
Capitalism is fueled by consumerism. Even if some choose not to play the game (by consuming and producing only the strictly necessary) it's in their interest that others keep playing it.
And yet there are functional societies out there today, much as there were in the past, that are not capitalistic societies. Treating people like shit and forcing them to do dirty jobs you don't want to do under threat of starvation is not an inherent property of the human condition.
If "Capitalism" involved the conscious coordination of all industry to maximize consumption, perhaps not. But in the terms of, raise money to buy a factory, have factory produce goods, sell goods, there seems to be a huge market for these, quite expensive, goods.
edit: You could even argue, in a conspiratorial mind, that by getting people addicted to sugar ($0.0002 / mg) in order to then get them addicted to a drug that costs ($10/mg) is peak "Capitalism"
There are two kinds of capitalism: value creation capitalism (also known as industrial capitalism) and value extraction capitalism. The latter includes quite a lot of financial capitalism, profit-driven warfare, and casinos and other addiction-driven products.
The former creates value while the latter extracts and concentrates it while overall creating net negative value. Addicting people to Skinner boxes is destroying hours of what otherwise might be productive, rejuvenating, or enriching time. It's macroeconomically indistinguishable from killing people.
One of the central problems of modern Western capitalism is that we fail to distinguish between the two. A businessperson is successful an a genius if they make money; nobody bothers to distinguish between those that make money by creating value and those that make money by merely extracting it and leaving a path of destruction in their wake.
Maybe we can figure out a way to re-channel the impulses of "cancel culture" in this direction, cancelling those that promote addictive net value destroying products and services. Since the algorithmic timeline and other personalized recommendation engines are by far the largest pushers of fascist and neo-racist ideology, the original goals of "cancel culture" might still be indirectly achieved.
Capitalism also re-creates subjects that believe they are isolated from others, deserve what they get, and encourages greed. Human nature is not a one way street.
Personally I have conscious hedonism down for the win, and returning to very little activity eventually having to be structured through overt transactions, but we'll see.
Capitalism benefits a few at the cost of many and it's designed too. Can any supporter articulate a scenario where capitalism enables prosperity for the majority without immediately resorting to bottom barrel comparisons to feudalism? The reality is we need to imagine a more evolved society without pandering to the greed and self interest of a few. This of course appears to be our eternal struggle.
The bigger problem with capitalism is it is designed to perpetuate entrenched interests and status quo. It origins from a time when few had capital or property, only the nobility did, convenient, and was obviously designed to perpetuate feudalism by proxy as they could direct economies and systems with their resources, and continue to.
A few examples of those who sacrifice their entire life to gain more capital offers eternal hope to the masses to hop on to the gravy train some already are on by birth, and those who sacrifice their life to accomplish this are obviously going to be overzealous supporters of 'the system', their entire identity and self worth riding on this achievement.
We need to find a way to detach progress from capitalism. Human progress cannot depend on greed which is basically what capitalism boils down to, rewarding and perpetuating the base traits of humanity and leaving a soulless society unable to rise above basic greed in its wake.
I don't think capitalism itself is the problem. Capitalism is basically just a policy of individual freedom extended to control of production, which honestly is hard to argue with. The main problem in my mind is that as a culture we've bought into the mistaken notion that more goods and services mean more happiness. Of course, this notion is primarily the result of the capitalist propaganda machine we call advertising. If we restricted advertising it would do a lot to tame the beast. Another problem is that we've walled everything off, so if you want to live you need to play the capitalist game. People should be able to opt out if they want.
That being said, while I'm mostly pro-capitalism, I'm also in favor of income redistribution. Happiness from wealth has hardcore diminishing returns, and visible inequality directly creates unhappiness. Based on these facts, significant income redistribution is really a moral imperative.
Yeah, this is the truth right here. Capitalism isn't a system that optimizes human happiness. It optimizes production and profit, which can be correlated to human happiness, but in recent years it has become more and more detached.
Can I ask that you read a large number of history books across any number of cultures on addictive behaviors throughout history, because you'll find that anytime a society had an excess of time and labor/production that people find addictive behaviors to enjoy. This is not recent. This is not capitalism. This is humanity.
What capitalism has done is given everybody enough free time from starvation to actually follow addictive pursuits.
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