Oh, it’s not capitalism doing all that. It’s people. Regardless of the type of government, once people get enough power they start fucking things up for everyone else to benefit themselves. People are shit.
That depends on how you want to break things down. Is all of humanity one society? Do we break it down at the country level? Something smaller?
Again, I don’t know what you mean.
Nope, but capitalist societies came from somewhere. All humans have a common ancestor, and started as indigenous people. At some point most of them decided to adopt capitalism.
Indigenous to where? We’re all the indigenous peoples of Earth.
And I never said it’s all people. Not all people have blue eyes, not all people are gay, not all people speak any certain language or live any certain place, not all people obsessively amass personal wealth to the detriment of others and/or their environment.
The problem doesn’t have to be all people for the problem to be people.
They also produce much of the good and raw materials we in the “first world” use, so it’s all for you. All those coal fire plants are for you. And still they have lower per person emissions.
Oh, it’s not capitalism doing all that. It’s people.
It is done by people, living and being shaped by a capitalist system.
Regardless of the type of government, once people get enough power they start fucking things up for everyone else to benefit themselves
Sure, that can happen in any society. The difference with capitalist societies is that this behavior is the socially encouraged one. Capitalism (or, more accurately, liberalism in its classical form) is taking the natural human greed, amplifying it a thousandfold and putting it on a pedestal. It is only natural that people in power in a capitalist system will be much more likely to try this behavior, and much more likely to succeed at it as well.
Honest question: What would you base an alternative system on? I think any economic system needs to appeal to something as basic as self-interest to survive long-term. If a population exists, there’s a sum total amount of labor that needs to be done to sustain them. How do you motivate the labor?
Socialism provides an easy answer to this. Democratizing the means of production doesn’t mean that everyone gets shit for free, quite the contrary. Socialism just means that the surplus labor is no longer given for free to (well, more like “stolen by”) a capitalist, but gets somewhat fairly distributed to everyone by being invested in science, industrial development and social programs through the state. All able-bodied citizens must still work in order to get paid.
I think the critical part related to that discussion is that socialist cultures don’t glorify individual wealth (which directly incentivizes greed), instead focusing on the values of honest labor, mutual aid, societal progress, and the common wealth. This may be a path to eventually remove individual self-interest as a motivator completely, and instead switch to social expectations and the feeling of belonging as motivators to perform labor - “from everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs”, a.k.a communism. It wouldn’t be an easy road for sure, especially looking at it from the perspective of modern humans scarred by capitalism, but I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility. After all, humans do selfless acts for the benefit of their social group all the time, we just need to cultivate that part of our psyche instead of the greedy one.
I’m also personally quite attracted to anarchist ideologies, which don’t have as cohesive of an answer for dealing with greed but do promise an even more awesome society, with no central authority to be greedy whatsoever. If we could get something like that to work, that could indeed be the end of history.
Just to check, are you arguing for pure socialism or a blended system?
gets somewhat fairly distributed to everyone… through the state.
Not that capitalism doesn’t have its share of this problem, but this is a massive centralization of authority and management. How can that be safeguarded against inevitable corruption?
Also, thoughts on how the ideal system would treat non-essential goods and best motivate innovation in “frivolities?” It’s one thing to want people to stop valuing excess wealth, but people are still going to want movies, video games, food ingredients from across the planet, etc.
After all, humans do selfless acts for the benefit of their social group all the time, we just need to cultivate that part of our psyche instead of the greedy one.
A tall order, but I give away a portion of my wealth regularly and like Star Trek, so I get it. Lol.
I’m also personally quite attracted to anarchist ideologies, which don’t have as cohesive of an answer for dealing with greed but do promise an even more awesome society, with no central authority to be greedy whatsoever.
Not just greed, but every negative human trait that can turn someone into a bad actor. Needing a system for dealing with bad actors and outside threats is how we got all these systems to begin with.
Just to check, are you arguing for pure socialism or a blended system?
I’m arguing for literally anything that moves beyond capitalism. Whether it’s a Chinese-style mixed economy where haute capitalists are allowed but regulated, a NEP-style mixed economy where only small businesses are privately owned, a full-blown planned economy where no capitalists are allowed, a federation of co-ops…
Not that capitalism doesn’t have its share of this problem, but this is a massive centralization of authority and management. How can that be safeguarded against inevitable corruption?
Through democratic mechanisms, mostly. I won’t claim that democracy worked very well in USSR or China but it sure as hell is/was better for people living there than the capitalist “democracies” of the west.
I won’t claim that democracy worked very well in USSR or China but it sure as hell is/was better for people living there than the capitalist “democracies” of the west.
Are you saying just the application of democracy was/is better or the overall living under those systems?
I think your argument finally convinced me. Before I believed that people are people and will find a way to game any system to build power/wealth. You’re right though. Our current structure rewards greed while it spits on hard work, helping your fellow man, and generally all the good things that make society work.
Tell me why a single person can be valued at a trillion dollars. Did that man really do that much work that progressed society? So much more than mine or my neighbor so that we deserve to barely get by?
Before I believed that people are people and will find a way to game any system to build power/wealth.
I think we as a society need to sort of build “antibodies” against that, and be educated to look closer at how self serving the people looking for power are. And obviously that needs a prevailing ideology that is not glorifying greed.
I think that was sort of the idea with the second amendment in the United States, but things were different in the late 1700s. They didn’t havt roving squads of police, backed by swaths of AI detection cameras, who are willing to bomb and murder citizens to maintain order.
I agree, something else sensible needs to genuinely exist. I would like to think it’d be teaching morals and focusing on virtues again. Like making ethics a course as mandatory as science in schools, but the Milgram Experiment makes me wonder if that would even work.
I think the Milgram experiments show the power of authority to both change moral behavior, for ill but also potentially for good. And of course the participants learned from their experience. I’m sure just knowing and really understanding these experience changes people’s attitude towards authority and creates “antibodies”.
Knowledge is power. Just like we have now run the experiment and seen that capitalism is incredibly dangerous and can capture our whole global civilization and prevent action against an existential threat like climate change. Just education and full understanding how and why this happened would create “antibodies”.
Instead we’ve been taught over and over again how endless greed is good. Of course this is just speculation about how stable or unstable a better society could be against zero sum gaming.
I agree with that. Knowledge is a true good, I believe that. The challenge is currently, from my sample size at least, society is apathetic. The desire to put in the effort to learn and the difficulty to change their lives for the better if it inconveniences even for the short term does not really exist. I mean, people freaked out and bought all the toilet paper that existed basically during covid. That’s not a necessity and yet people hoarded it.
I also want a better, more knowledgeable future, and will do my part with the people around me, but I don’t even know how to begin with making a societal change. I tried to get people off Discord when I recognized I didn’t need them and they would do whatever they needed to breech your privacy, and no one left with me even though I gave plenty of equivalent alternatives.
There is a lack of vision of how it could be better. People are angry but are constantly misdirected and distracted, and no groups seem to exist to come up with a viable alternative. Or they are suppressed or I haven’t looked enough, but that is how it feels. It feels like we’re stuck with the current system. If there was a revolution today, what now? The only thing we hear is democratic socialists suggesting that maybe we could lessen the economic cruelty a little bit.
Even the communists on lemmy are mostly “conservative” communists who seem to be mostly talking about 50+ year old textbooks and want to rehabilitate Stalinism. Technology and science (political, psychological, IT, industrial) moved the fuck on you know.
About the selfishness - it’s now surprise because that is what has been taught. And you need education / accurate news, peace / security and modicum of prosperity. Then people can be expected to act with solidarity. You see the change now in Europe. Prosperity - gone, peace - gone. News? We still have better news media but even public broadcasters are somewhat captured by neoliberals, and social media is global. The memes transmit with lightspeed. The leaders don’t know how to do anything else than escalate neoliberalism.
So I don’t see a sensible way forward either, except a gradual but unstoppable collapse and then rebuilding. But there is always hope, and we need to be clear about the reasons. None of this was inevitable. It’s just that the power inequality is immense now. A group of billionaires are vastly more powerful than millions of people. Just compare how much money either group can spend on propaganda and class warfare.
What we should be focusing on now is a better political and economic ideology for the future. And ideally technology that enables higher “tech level” without requiring a global hyper-complex supply chain and pollution, like genetically engineered plants producing biofuels, plastic precursors or bioplastics, medicines, building / insulation materials. Maybe even biocomputing. Solarpunk but by doing actual research and development and preserving knowledge.
I don’t want to take any credit for the argument, I’m mostly paraphrasing Marx. I personally love this rendition of it by Andrew Collier:
To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough
It is done by people, living and being shaped by a capitalist system.
Unchecked greed is not capitalist tho it isn’t exclusive to any system this argument is just lazy. “this behaviour” is “more likely under capitalism” what behaviour?
What is exclusive to capitalism that is causing this can you articulate it?
One can argue that capitalism is not a zero-sum game because prioritization and valuation of resources is not the same for every individual.
However, from the point of view of financial gain, it is a zero-sum game. In a transaction, only one party gains money (generally). In a zero-sum game where you have the options of share, steal, and give, the optimal strategy is to steal as dictated by game theory. Therefore, capitalism encourages greed.
In contrast, under an economic model such as socialism or communism, financial gain is measured across the entire system rather than any individual. In this scenario, transactions may be a nonzero-sum game because multiple parties can benefit more from working together than competing. Therefore, non-capitalist economies encourage less greed than capitalist ones.
If you’d like any sources about the game theory, let me know.
Cheating to gain an advantage is not exclusive to capitalism :/
Yet another day where no one can articulate what is actually wrong with competing_political_propaganda because it was never the problem it is the distraction.
Cheating to gain an advantage is not exclusive to capitalism
You are correct. Cheating to gain an advantage is exclusive to zero sum games, not capitalism. Capitalism just happens to be a zero sum game, while other economic models happen to not be zero sum games. In which, cheating to gain an advantage is not a winning strategy. The optimal strategy in those cases is to cooperate
Edit: To phrase this differently: under an economic system where sharing is more beneficial than cheating, having more than your fair share becomes a losing condition instead of a winning condition because it decreases the value of future trades and harms the collective valuation of resources. Under capitalism, cheating is encouraged because having more than your share is a win condition.
To be clear, “cheat” or more commonly “take” doesn’t necessarily refer to actually cheating the system, it refers to reducing the amount of resources the other player has.
Let’s imagine that in each transaction you gain ‘points’ depending on how the transaction went.
If 1 player cheats and the other shares, the cheating player receives 1 point (this is your standard transaction of giving money for goods or services or working for money). If both players share, they both receive 0.5 points (this is a transaction where both parties gain money, like a brokerage account). If both players cheat, both players get 0 points (this is when you say “fuck it I don’t want it it’s too expensive” or they say “sorry you can’t afford that”). This is the standard point assignment for a capitalist system or a zero sum game. (Assuming the paying party pays an equivalent sum to that gained by the receiving parties. Failing to do so is usually called Fraud lol)
In this scenario, the optimal solution is to always cheat because it offers the highest average point return. Assuming the other player plays randomly (ie, you are a company selling your stocks to an irrational population like in reality), the average is (1+0)/2 or 0.5. Someone who is kind and always shares has an average point return of (0+0.5)/2 or 0.25. Thus cheating is encouraged.
Contrast this with an economic system that is not a zero sum game - one where creating value for other players also increases your value. The exact mechanism of rewarding “share” over “take” is specific to the economic model in question. As an example, let’s pretend you get an extra 0.6 points from Big Brother when you pick the share option. Now, your average point return is (0+1.1)/2 In this scenario, cheating is discouraged because the total points created on average are lower than sharing and in the case of repeated interactions, cheating reduces the likelihood that the other player will choose share in the future.
The broad concepts with little substance are not convincing me. I understand the nature of capitalism I just don’t understand how it is exclusively responsible for all bad things in the world today. I’m being a little facetious but come on I have directly asked you to tell me how capitalism is exclusively responsible for climate change and you hit me with what I have to assume is someone else’s words that aren’t actually answering the question. How would any other system stop oil?
Ideology (or religion) has a strong influence. How many people around you or in power believe in solidarity? Empathy? How many in “greed is good” or that it’s perfectly natural to be self serving? What we’re seeing now is not “natural”.
Oh? What is the “unnatural” force exerting influence over human behavior and belief? You can’t try to argue that human thought, human ideology, and human beliefs aren’t natural to humanity.
What we’re seeing is entirely natural human behavior.
It’s ideology, or religion. Or “culture”. You could say that a large percentage of the population mostly thinks, says and does what it’s told to think, say and do.
Just because we haven’t successfully created a system that does not trend towards zero sum optimization of greed, there are examples of certain things working much better than others, and being more stable than others. It’s not just people.
I do believe we need to develop more tools, both social tools but maybe also technological tools to help us prevent purely self serving people from rising to power. Not just in politics but economics too.
Because that is where I agree with you, hierarchical systems to filter for those who are most focused on advancement and nothing else. This selects for sociopathic traits and single minded focus (=uneducated in anything but gaining power/wealth). What we glorify as competition is a selector for the worst of the worst. And the larger the hierarchy, the worse the results. But knowing this, we could design tools and systems to combat it.
Most people, if given good education (e.g. taught about solidarity and empathy not just greed), who live in peace (not terrorized by “War on X” or emotional abuse hurled at them) and who have enough prosperity to raise their family without financial stress will be perfectly content and agreeable people. They are not like the predators that rule us, the ones we selected to be the worst of the worst.
PS: I previously edited my message but you replied to fast and I reverted it now.
Until there are plenty of wonderful examples of that working out well, long term, in large nations with large economies then it’s as relevant as the Spiderverse.
I saw a documentary once and the supreme leader was chosen by a woman in a lake throwing swords at you. Times were better then. No one had to get on the dead carts until they were ready.
Societies went splendidly and were all utopian paradises before Capitalism was invented, that’s why Ghengis Khan and the bulk of old timey figures we know the names of were all renown for their diplomacy and love and those floral crowns they passed out.
You can make strong arguments that our Soma is just the pervasive bullshit that is hoisted on us in a constant torrent. Everything at our fingertips even when a shitheel like Trump is in power.
Oh, it’s not capitalism doing all that. It’s people. Regardless of the type of government, once people get enough power they start fucking things up for everyone else to benefit themselves. People are shit.
“The problem is people” is eco-fascist rhetoric. It’s not indigenous people’s fault that it’s 100 degrees in the arctic.
Every capitalist society on Earth once started as “Indigenous people” that grew and evolved in to what we have today.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at.
Indigenous to where? We’re all the indigenous peoples of Earth.
And I never said it’s all people. Not all people have blue eyes, not all people are gay, not all people speak any certain language or live any certain place, not all people obsessively amass personal wealth to the detriment of others and/or their environment.
The problem doesn’t have to be all people for the problem to be people.
No it’s the Chinese communist party building and opening a new coal power plant every week, year after year.
They also produce much of the good and raw materials we in the “first world” use, so it’s all for you. All those coal fire plants are for you. And still they have lower per person emissions.
“look what you made me do”
“He who smelt it dealt it”
So, China?
It is done by people, living and being shaped by a capitalist system.
Sure, that can happen in any society. The difference with capitalist societies is that this behavior is the socially encouraged one. Capitalism (or, more accurately, liberalism in its classical form) is taking the natural human greed, amplifying it a thousandfold and putting it on a pedestal. It is only natural that people in power in a capitalist system will be much more likely to try this behavior, and much more likely to succeed at it as well.
Honest question: What would you base an alternative system on? I think any economic system needs to appeal to something as basic as self-interest to survive long-term. If a population exists, there’s a sum total amount of labor that needs to be done to sustain them. How do you motivate the labor?
Socialism provides an easy answer to this. Democratizing the means of production doesn’t mean that everyone gets shit for free, quite the contrary. Socialism just means that the surplus labor is no longer given for free to (well, more like “stolen by”) a capitalist, but gets somewhat fairly distributed to everyone by being invested in science, industrial development and social programs through the state. All able-bodied citizens must still work in order to get paid.
I think the critical part related to that discussion is that socialist cultures don’t glorify individual wealth (which directly incentivizes greed), instead focusing on the values of honest labor, mutual aid, societal progress, and the common wealth. This may be a path to eventually remove individual self-interest as a motivator completely, and instead switch to social expectations and the feeling of belonging as motivators to perform labor - “from everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs”, a.k.a communism. It wouldn’t be an easy road for sure, especially looking at it from the perspective of modern humans scarred by capitalism, but I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility. After all, humans do selfless acts for the benefit of their social group all the time, we just need to cultivate that part of our psyche instead of the greedy one.
I’m also personally quite attracted to anarchist ideologies, which don’t have as cohesive of an answer for dealing with greed but do promise an even more awesome society, with no central authority to be greedy whatsoever. If we could get something like that to work, that could indeed be the end of history.
Just to check, are you arguing for pure socialism or a blended system?
Not that capitalism doesn’t have its share of this problem, but this is a massive centralization of authority and management. How can that be safeguarded against inevitable corruption?
Also, thoughts on how the ideal system would treat non-essential goods and best motivate innovation in “frivolities?” It’s one thing to want people to stop valuing excess wealth, but people are still going to want movies, video games, food ingredients from across the planet, etc.
A tall order, but I give away a portion of my wealth regularly and like Star Trek, so I get it. Lol.
Not just greed, but every negative human trait that can turn someone into a bad actor. Needing a system for dealing with bad actors and outside threats is how we got all these systems to begin with.
I’m arguing for literally anything that moves beyond capitalism. Whether it’s a Chinese-style mixed economy where haute capitalists are allowed but regulated, a NEP-style mixed economy where only small businesses are privately owned, a full-blown planned economy where no capitalists are allowed, a federation of co-ops…
Through democratic mechanisms, mostly. I won’t claim that democracy worked very well in USSR or China but it sure as hell is/was better for people living there than the capitalist “democracies” of the west.
Are you saying just the application of democracy was/is better or the overall living under those systems?
I think your argument finally convinced me. Before I believed that people are people and will find a way to game any system to build power/wealth. You’re right though. Our current structure rewards greed while it spits on hard work, helping your fellow man, and generally all the good things that make society work.
Tell me why a single person can be valued at a trillion dollars. Did that man really do that much work that progressed society? So much more than mine or my neighbor so that we deserve to barely get by?
I think we as a society need to sort of build “antibodies” against that, and be educated to look closer at how self serving the people looking for power are. And obviously that needs a prevailing ideology that is not glorifying greed.
I think that was sort of the idea with the second amendment in the United States, but things were different in the late 1700s. They didn’t havt roving squads of police, backed by swaths of AI detection cameras, who are willing to bomb and murder citizens to maintain order.
I agree, something else sensible needs to genuinely exist. I would like to think it’d be teaching morals and focusing on virtues again. Like making ethics a course as mandatory as science in schools, but the Milgram Experiment makes me wonder if that would even work.
I think the Milgram experiments show the power of authority to both change moral behavior, for ill but also potentially for good. And of course the participants learned from their experience. I’m sure just knowing and really understanding these experience changes people’s attitude towards authority and creates “antibodies”.
Knowledge is power. Just like we have now run the experiment and seen that capitalism is incredibly dangerous and can capture our whole global civilization and prevent action against an existential threat like climate change. Just education and full understanding how and why this happened would create “antibodies”.
Instead we’ve been taught over and over again how endless greed is good. Of course this is just speculation about how stable or unstable a better society could be against zero sum gaming.
I agree with that. Knowledge is a true good, I believe that. The challenge is currently, from my sample size at least, society is apathetic. The desire to put in the effort to learn and the difficulty to change their lives for the better if it inconveniences even for the short term does not really exist. I mean, people freaked out and bought all the toilet paper that existed basically during covid. That’s not a necessity and yet people hoarded it.
I also want a better, more knowledgeable future, and will do my part with the people around me, but I don’t even know how to begin with making a societal change. I tried to get people off Discord when I recognized I didn’t need them and they would do whatever they needed to breech your privacy, and no one left with me even though I gave plenty of equivalent alternatives.
There is a lack of vision of how it could be better. People are angry but are constantly misdirected and distracted, and no groups seem to exist to come up with a viable alternative. Or they are suppressed or I haven’t looked enough, but that is how it feels. It feels like we’re stuck with the current system. If there was a revolution today, what now? The only thing we hear is democratic socialists suggesting that maybe we could lessen the economic cruelty a little bit.
Even the communists on lemmy are mostly “conservative” communists who seem to be mostly talking about 50+ year old textbooks and want to rehabilitate Stalinism. Technology and science (political, psychological, IT, industrial) moved the fuck on you know.
About the selfishness - it’s now surprise because that is what has been taught. And you need education / accurate news, peace / security and modicum of prosperity. Then people can be expected to act with solidarity. You see the change now in Europe. Prosperity - gone, peace - gone. News? We still have better news media but even public broadcasters are somewhat captured by neoliberals, and social media is global. The memes transmit with lightspeed. The leaders don’t know how to do anything else than escalate neoliberalism.
So I don’t see a sensible way forward either, except a gradual but unstoppable collapse and then rebuilding. But there is always hope, and we need to be clear about the reasons. None of this was inevitable. It’s just that the power inequality is immense now. A group of billionaires are vastly more powerful than millions of people. Just compare how much money either group can spend on propaganda and class warfare.
What we should be focusing on now is a better political and economic ideology for the future. And ideally technology that enables higher “tech level” without requiring a global hyper-complex supply chain and pollution, like genetically engineered plants producing biofuels, plastic precursors or bioplastics, medicines, building / insulation materials. Maybe even biocomputing. Solarpunk but by doing actual research and development and preserving knowledge.
As a transgender, black , height-disadvantaged man I fully agree with with his argument and find that it has changed my life as well.
I don’t want to take any credit for the argument, I’m mostly paraphrasing Marx. I personally love this rendition of it by Andrew Collier:
Unchecked greed is not capitalist tho it isn’t exclusive to any system this argument is just lazy. “this behaviour” is “more likely under capitalism” what behaviour?
What is exclusive to capitalism that is causing this can you articulate it?
One can argue that capitalism is not a zero-sum game because prioritization and valuation of resources is not the same for every individual.
However, from the point of view of financial gain, it is a zero-sum game. In a transaction, only one party gains money (generally). In a zero-sum game where you have the options of share, steal, and give, the optimal strategy is to steal as dictated by game theory. Therefore, capitalism encourages greed.
In contrast, under an economic model such as socialism or communism, financial gain is measured across the entire system rather than any individual. In this scenario, transactions may be a nonzero-sum game because multiple parties can benefit more from working together than competing. Therefore, non-capitalist economies encourage less greed than capitalist ones.
If you’d like any sources about the game theory, let me know.
Cheating to gain an advantage is not exclusive to capitalism :/
Yet another day where no one can articulate what is actually wrong with competing_political_propaganda because it was never the problem it is the distraction.
You are correct. Cheating to gain an advantage is exclusive to zero sum games, not capitalism. Capitalism just happens to be a zero sum game, while other economic models happen to not be zero sum games. In which, cheating to gain an advantage is not a winning strategy. The optimal strategy in those cases is to cooperate
Edit: To phrase this differently: under an economic system where sharing is more beneficial than cheating, having more than your fair share becomes a losing condition instead of a winning condition because it decreases the value of future trades and harms the collective valuation of resources. Under capitalism, cheating is encouraged because having more than your share is a win condition.
That is oligarchy/corruption it’s absolutely not exclusive to capitalist countries.
Okay, let’s try the numbers route:
To be clear, “cheat” or more commonly “take” doesn’t necessarily refer to actually cheating the system, it refers to reducing the amount of resources the other player has.
Let’s imagine that in each transaction you gain ‘points’ depending on how the transaction went.
If 1 player cheats and the other shares, the cheating player receives 1 point (this is your standard transaction of giving money for goods or services or working for money). If both players share, they both receive 0.5 points (this is a transaction where both parties gain money, like a brokerage account). If both players cheat, both players get 0 points (this is when you say “fuck it I don’t want it it’s too expensive” or they say “sorry you can’t afford that”). This is the standard point assignment for a capitalist system or a zero sum game. (Assuming the paying party pays an equivalent sum to that gained by the receiving parties. Failing to do so is usually called Fraud lol)
In this scenario, the optimal solution is to always cheat because it offers the highest average point return. Assuming the other player plays randomly (ie, you are a company selling your stocks to an irrational population like in reality), the average is (1+0)/2 or 0.5. Someone who is kind and always shares has an average point return of (0+0.5)/2 or 0.25. Thus cheating is encouraged.
Contrast this with an economic system that is not a zero sum game - one where creating value for other players also increases your value. The exact mechanism of rewarding “share” over “take” is specific to the economic model in question. As an example, let’s pretend you get an extra 0.6 points from Big Brother when you pick the share option. Now, your average point return is (0+1.1)/2 In this scenario, cheating is discouraged because the total points created on average are lower than sharing and in the case of repeated interactions, cheating reduces the likelihood that the other player will choose share in the future.
The broad concepts with little substance are not convincing me. I understand the nature of capitalism I just don’t understand how it is exclusively responsible for all bad things in the world today. I’m being a little facetious but come on I have directly asked you to tell me how capitalism is exclusively responsible for climate change and you hit me with what I have to assume is someone else’s words that aren’t actually answering the question. How would any other system stop oil?
Ideology (or religion) has a strong influence. How many people around you or in power believe in solidarity? Empathy? How many in “greed is good” or that it’s perfectly natural to be self serving? What we’re seeing now is not “natural”.
Oh? What is the “unnatural” force exerting influence over human behavior and belief? You can’t try to argue that human thought, human ideology, and human beliefs aren’t natural to humanity.
What we’re seeing is entirely natural human behavior.
It’s ideology, or religion. Or “culture”. You could say that a large percentage of the population mostly thinks, says and does what it’s told to think, say and do.
Just because we haven’t successfully created a system that does not trend towards zero sum optimization of greed, there are examples of certain things working much better than others, and being more stable than others. It’s not just people.
I do believe we need to develop more tools, both social tools but maybe also technological tools to help us prevent purely self serving people from rising to power. Not just in politics but economics too.
Because that is where I agree with you, hierarchical systems to filter for those who are most focused on advancement and nothing else. This selects for sociopathic traits and single minded focus (=uneducated in anything but gaining power/wealth). What we glorify as competition is a selector for the worst of the worst. And the larger the hierarchy, the worse the results. But knowing this, we could design tools and systems to combat it.
Most people, if given good education (e.g. taught about solidarity and empathy not just greed), who live in peace (not terrorized by “War on X” or emotional abuse hurled at them) and who have enough prosperity to raise their family without financial stress will be perfectly content and agreeable people. They are not like the predators that rule us, the ones we selected to be the worst of the worst.
PS: I previously edited my message but you replied to fast and I reverted it now.
There’s a whole school of political ideology about explicitly not centralising power in the hands of a few people
Stalin and Mao aprrove this message. But their approval is irrelevant, it’s not they they have any power…
Until there are plenty of wonderful examples of that working out well, long term, in large nations with large economies then it’s as relevant as the Spiderverse.
Because when they started gaining momentum, they got crushed by powerful states.
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I like how you keep having to add qualifiers.
It’s like we can see the strata of all of your previous lost arguments.
Good news! China lifted 800 million people out of poverty in the last 40 years using socialism!
The people’s socialism of billionaires? Please.
China is a authoritarian state with capitalism tied in…
Every state is authoritarian. The workers participate in democracy, and own the majority of production in China. Like I said, 800 million in 40 years.
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Hence why we should stop giving power to individuals
Individuals may be dumb, but they’re even dumber in large groups.
Sounds very Randian.
For most of human history power wasn’t given to the most shit, rewarding shit behavior. The last 12000 something years are relatively new
Humans lived quite egalitarian, matriarchal, and some indigenous societies have managed to somewhat stay that way
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Huh, isn’t this common knowledge? Wikipedia or something
Damn, if only we hadn’t invented agriculture, we would have been much better off.
I’m not sure if that’s the link that led to capitalism, but I’m not an expert
No, agriculture lead to civilisation.
What history have you been reading?
They just said human history. Work on your reading comprehension, bro.
Well shoot. And here I thought they were reading up on Martian history. My b.
Rofl
Seriously I love how far up their own asses some people have their heads.
Yeah rofling at history 101
I saw a documentary once and the supreme leader was chosen by a woman in a lake throwing swords at you. Times were better then. No one had to get on the dead carts until they were ready.
Societies went splendidly and were all utopian paradises before Capitalism was invented, that’s why Ghengis Khan and the bulk of old timey figures we know the names of were all renown for their diplomacy and love and those floral crowns they passed out.
People’s complacency is what really makes it work.
You can make strong arguments that our Soma is just the pervasive bullshit that is hoisted on us in a constant torrent. Everything at our fingertips even when a shitheel like Trump is in power.
I came in to this comment section knowing I would find this stupid ass comment.