not to mention all the progress traps capitalism stepped into
To be fair, what we have in most of the world isn’t actually raw/pure capitalism, most of the time called Laissez-faire capitalism. Most of the world has a mixed economy of different capitalism implantations across the board in different areas: state/regulated/corporate capitalism and best of all crony capitalism.
Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws. But I don’t have that much faith in human nature to not keep fucking it up like we’ve done so many times.
I dunno man. “Capitalism” exists because it’s what we as a people just kind of decided to do. We picked it out of all the options available. I’m pretty sure that we would be doing the same thing regardless of whether or not something called “Capitalism” was ever actually named.
If we want to change that, we have to find a way to entirely change human nature, and that’s a really big ask. I’d love it if it actually happened, but I’m not betting on it.
IDK if capitalism is evil on its own. It’s just an idea. I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t think if a better system is implemented in the future, that that would be a permanent solution for all of our problems either. It’s all just the same cycle repeating with different faces and places.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t still strive for a better life for those who come after, and to take care of this planet like we can and should, but I think it’s kind of silly to blame some ideas when we can just look in the mirror and see what the problem really is.
Okay but why does the picture look like someone put their phone on a flatbed scanner
Or they took a picture of another screen and the camera’s refresh rate caught the display’s scan line.
Do LCDs have scanlines? I thought that was a CRT thing.
I don’t know if it’s the reason for this but even with modern screens you can get screen tearing, which is why stuff like vsync exists. It happens when there’s a very brief mismatch in refresh rates.
Hammer and sickle … I grew up in post communist country, trust me, commies were raping the nature and people even more then capitalism. Find something else to blame.
It’s not capitalism per se. It’s the lazy, stupid populace that allows the system of regulatory capture we have.
The fossil fuel industry also gets a metric fuck ton of tax payer funded subsidies. That’s not capitalism. That’s a quasi state economy.
In a true capitalist system, we’d see more competitive forms of energy taking off, like solar and wind which are cheaper than fossil fuels at this point. But because the government keeps fossil fuels going, we’re not getting off them.
I think it’s inevitable of any human system that it eventually is undermined by greed and selfishness. Some systems are just more prone to it.
If a system were to work, it would have a way to deal with the psychopaths and other cluster b folks. It’s always been us vs them, throughout history.
Genuine question. how are the voters supposed to keep their leaders accountable?
By voting. The US has set term lengths at every level. If the leaders are not fulfilling their job properly, they get fired.
For representatives it’s every two years.
That requires having an informed and active constituency though, which we do not have.
And it will never happen because the people who control the resources also control the narrative. They promote their candidates, who change the laws in their favour, and progressively make things worse for your average person.
The system you describe is a pipe dream, and it’s a nice dream, but it’s not reflective of the world we live in today.
I hear the French have ideas
the fossil gas problem is only about 50 years old. before that, levels were increasing but still manageable. carbon taxes were designed to be a solution compatible with capitalism
Who knew that you could turn an entire planet into a gas chamber?
Venus.
How will we prove that we’re the pointy end of the food chain of we don’t completely destroy everything below us?
The planet won’t die, but we will
Not a fan of comments like this because it ignores all of the species that we are taking with us. Sure the planet will bounce back eventually but we really fucked the ever loving shit out of it.
Even if humanity doesn’t go extinct, we are one of earth’s big extinction events. If anything it could be argued that humanity being wiped out would save more species in the long run.
To e clear I don’t disagree with you, I just don’t see the point in enshrining species alive now as the most deserving over potential species in the future simply because they have emotional value to humans that will be dead.
The dragons will rise again! (But in all seriousness, this whole situation does really suck)
“Why…there oughta be a law!” /s
There oughta be enforced laws. There’s plenty of laws, just rich people have enough lawyers that they make prosecution onerous. Nobody has the balls to cut through the bullshit because rich people will apply all kinds of pressure to a system that has become more and more vulnerable to the pressures wealth can exert.
once you control a large percentage of a given currency, you become above the law
200 species a day!
Let’s be fair, we’ve made plenty of species extinct just for the love of the game.
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.
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.
“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.
- how many capitalist societies do you think there are?
- is there some issue with the term indigenous people?
- do you think that if one (or multiple?) societies have capitalism, that growing and evolving will always result in capitalism?
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.
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?
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.
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
As a transgender, black , height-disadvantaged man I fully agree with with his argument and find that it has changed my life as well.
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.
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.
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.
Until there are plenty of wonderful examples of that working out well, long term, in large nations with large economies
I like how you keep having to add qualifiers.
It’s like we can see the strata of all of your previous lost arguments.
Because when they started gaining momentum, they got crushed by powerful states.
Sure, but if a thing isn’t viable in the real world then it’s not a very meaningful theory. It sucks, and I wish it wasn’t the case, but we don’t have many lists of utopian societies that worked out and became secure members of the global community.
If the awful people currently in power in the world are just going to burn your civilization down and you can’t account for and stop that then you’re not going to succeed at making something better.
Good news! China lifted 800 million people out of poverty in the last 40 years using socialism!
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.
No they don’t lol, fucking hell you tankies are hilarious.
Yes they do, fucking hell you dumbfucks who just get your information from the news are embarrassing. Do some googling before you open your mouth to me next time.
You guys aren’t hilarious, it’s fucking terrifying the level of confidence you have in your propaganda laden brains.
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
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.
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Huh, isn’t this common knowledge? Wikipedia or something
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.
