This is sorta why I think capitalism is both a useful pragmatic system and a terrible idea.
It’s the whole greed is good thing. It’s this clever little hack of “well let’s let the greedy sociopaths be that way, and we will just arrange the game so it benefits everyone.”
It sorta work in the beginning stages of capitalism. They realize that they can make profits exploiting workers and go to town and consumers reap the benefits of there being lots of stuff to buy to meet their needs.
Sure your boss is an amoral exploiter, but it means the widgets get made.
But capitalism is not static, it’s a game played over time where those least bound by morals and ethics trap greater and greater rewards. Leading to where much of western civilization finds itself today, beholden to a handful of the worst human beings.
The only mechanism to keep them in check is competition, and it’s a system that devolves over time to have little to no competition, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
I often wonder what the world could be if we took seriously the job of restraining the impulses of that 5% of the population. We teach young children to share and be kind and the golden rule. Then you reach adulthood and realize that all of that is still true but unrewarded, and the way to get ahead is to exploit people. The wealthiest and most “successful” amongst us in this society are those most willing to exploit their fellow man for their own benefit. You get a billion dollars by being willing to steal a billion dollars from your workers. No one can earn a billion dollars you have to have thousands of people working for you everyday, and for each one of those people you have to be willing to extract value out of them, what in any other context we would call theft.
I think we underestimated the harm that capitalism would do in terms of normalizing greedy sociopaths. It’s turned into a giant propaganda machine that serves to gaslight the masses into believing that the sociopaths are good and right and deserve what they’ve stolen.
And we’ve built a world that silos people away from other normal people so it’s even harder to use your community to fight back.
It’s going to be incredibly hard to do any sort of reset now. Most people refuse to even see any sort of problem with it.
Adam Smith agreed with you in the 1600s when he thought up the system. He specifically said that capitalism couldn’t be the end goal, but he wasn’t aware of what the end goal would be, just that it would necessarily benefit the people, not the rich.
This is sorta why I think capitalism is both a useful pragmatic system and a terrible idea.
It’s the whole greed is good thing. It’s this clever little hack of “well let’s let the greedy sociopaths be that way, and we will just arrange the game so it benefits everyone.”
It sorta work in the beginning stages of capitalism. They realize that they can make profits exploiting workers and go to town and consumers reap the benefits of there being lots of stuff to buy to meet their needs.
Sure your boss is an amoral exploiter, but it means the widgets get made.
But capitalism is not static, it’s a game played over time where those least bound by morals and ethics trap greater and greater rewards. Leading to where much of western civilization finds itself today, beholden to a handful of the worst human beings.
The only mechanism to keep them in check is competition, and it’s a system that devolves over time to have little to no competition, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
I often wonder what the world could be if we took seriously the job of restraining the impulses of that 5% of the population. We teach young children to share and be kind and the golden rule. Then you reach adulthood and realize that all of that is still true but unrewarded, and the way to get ahead is to exploit people. The wealthiest and most “successful” amongst us in this society are those most willing to exploit their fellow man for their own benefit. You get a billion dollars by being willing to steal a billion dollars from your workers. No one can earn a billion dollars you have to have thousands of people working for you everyday, and for each one of those people you have to be willing to extract value out of them, what in any other context we would call theft.
I think we underestimated the harm that capitalism would do in terms of normalizing greedy sociopaths. It’s turned into a giant propaganda machine that serves to gaslight the masses into believing that the sociopaths are good and right and deserve what they’ve stolen.
And we’ve built a world that silos people away from other normal people so it’s even harder to use your community to fight back.
It’s going to be incredibly hard to do any sort of reset now. Most people refuse to even see any sort of problem with it.
Adam Smith agreed with you in the 1600s when he thought up the system. He specifically said that capitalism couldn’t be the end goal, but he wasn’t aware of what the end goal would be, just that it would necessarily benefit the people, not the rich.
Well, comrade smith maybe fucked up.
He didn’t fuck up, and his work is important in early leftist literature.
The fuck up was everyone after him not listening except to the bits they wanted too.
I think on some subjects, when writing publicly, that really needs to be considered.
just got to reset it every 100 years or so. we may be overdue
Many ancient societies had recurring debt jubilees on approximately that time scale… for basically this reason.
Debt jubilee season comes, everyone’s debts are wiped clean.
Sucks for the lenders, great for the borrowers, but also everyone knows when it is scheduled.
That is pretty close to a reset of the playing field of your economy in many ways…
… though of course slavery did also exist in many of these societies, so… far from a perfect reset.
Capitalism might be the mechanism, but it’s not the root cause. Any system will eventually be corrupted in the same way without constant vigilance.
The worship of capitalism certainly contributed. Capitalism needs heavy controls.