Agreed. People blame capitalism but our problem isn’t economic: it’s social, psychological, cultural.
That financial obesity is a symptom, but the root is the issue of cooperating with immense amounts of total strangers: no animal is wired for it, almost no one is wired to truly, deeply, emotionally care for nameless and faceless people: strangers who, you feel, won’t help you when you have a fever, but who raise the price of potatoes because they need them too. We say we do care, maybe we even donate 5€ to some cause, but a stranger is a stranger and our day goes on.
That antagonism is even more heartfelt if you were a child who wasn’t give the love they should have been given… Like way too many of us. Burning the village to feel its warmth.
No animal before us had the option, once they had abused the trust of their pack, to easily move hundreds of miles away and start from scratch with a clean reputation.
No animal before us fell into the trap of the paradox of tolerance: if a pack member intentionally and repeatedly damages other members, other animals do not spend a lot of time writing books about feel-good, entirely theorethical principles.
No animal is as detached from themselves as we are: since we have such complicated language with abstract concepts, we can forget the truth of our bodies and live in a fantasy world. We can even deceive ourselves, and make decisions informed by that deception. Even worse, we can deceive others a lot better than other animals: a lying gazelle might maybe sound the “lion!” alarm when there is no lion, but it’s soon discovered; humans instead can brainwash others into standing against their own best interests, and the victim might believe it was their own opinion until their very last breath.
Capitalism creates competition with its advanatages and disadvantages, but I’m not sure it has great alternatives within the current system: incentives are necessary in a society of strangers, although I think the details -such as the amounts and the safeties- should be re-thought.
Again, within the current system. But I believe we will witness big changes in our lifetime (climate, biodiversity, AI, mass surveillance, military drones, a multipolar world, life extension, pandemics…), and who knows, maybe the entire framework might change.
Capitalism doesn’t hold a monopoly on financial obesity, it can manifest in many economic models.
Agreed. People blame capitalism but our problem isn’t economic: it’s social, psychological, cultural.
That financial obesity is a symptom, but the root is the issue of cooperating with immense amounts of total strangers: no animal is wired for it, almost no one is wired to truly, deeply, emotionally care for nameless and faceless people: strangers who, you feel, won’t help you when you have a fever, but who raise the price of potatoes because they need them too. We say we do care, maybe we even donate 5€ to some cause, but a stranger is a stranger and our day goes on.
That antagonism is even more heartfelt if you were a child who wasn’t give the love they should have been given… Like way too many of us. Burning the village to feel its warmth.
No animal before us had the option, once they had abused the trust of their pack, to easily move hundreds of miles away and start from scratch with a clean reputation.
No animal before us fell into the trap of the paradox of tolerance: if a pack member intentionally and repeatedly damages other members, other animals do not spend a lot of time writing books about feel-good, entirely theorethical principles.
No animal is as detached from themselves as we are: since we have such complicated language with abstract concepts, we can forget the truth of our bodies and live in a fantasy world. We can even deceive ourselves, and make decisions informed by that deception. Even worse, we can deceive others a lot better than other animals: a lying gazelle might maybe sound the “lion!” alarm when there is no lion, but it’s soon discovered; humans instead can brainwash others into standing against their own best interests, and the victim might believe it was their own opinion until their very last breath.
Capitalism creates competition with its advanatages and disadvantages, but I’m not sure it has great alternatives within the current system: incentives are necessary in a society of strangers, although I think the details -such as the amounts and the safeties- should be re-thought.
Again, within the current system. But I believe we will witness big changes in our lifetime (climate, biodiversity, AI, mass surveillance, military drones, a multipolar world, life extension, pandemics…), and who knows, maybe the entire framework might change.
This is true, but since many of us live under the concepts of capitalism, I felt it was a good point of reference.
Pretty much all the glorified billionaires that I’m aware of are from capitalistic economic models.