> What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease.
If you think deeper, to first principles, it’s clear that disease is capitalism. I am not advocating socialism/communism, but isn’t it strange that capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? In 100 years, about 100 countries tried it, and not one country can report a harmonious society. It’s always with inequality and suffering.
Every science has new advancements and discoveries, every single one except political sociology. Why is more advanced and modern political economic system never seriously discussed? On what assumption is capitalism still being implemented? It was never working yet still it is referred as something like “word of god” that cannot be argued with.
If this was a situation in an IT company and methodology company uses constant change, it ends in disaster. After about one such cycle, management will be looking into changing processes and choosing something else instead of Agile or Waterfall or whatever is used.
For about 30-40 years now, we produce enough to feed and house everyone. Henry Ford introduced a five-day work week, which should be down to one workday by now. But instead, we got “bullshit jobs,” which are about 50% of employment in unnecessary made-up jobs to keep people occupied (marketing, finance).
And still in the AI age, a person who is born now is brainwashed into capitalism and has to find an occupation, study, and work till retirement.
Capitalism does not accept you for who you are. It only accepts you if you have some kind of occupation that brings value.
> capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science
about anthropology, sociology, and economics?
If taking a human-science view, then one interesting take on
capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a
thing. It's a positive freedom. There can be no "science" of
capitalism.
It allows the direction of excess human psychological energy. It is
the absence of regulation of anti-social criminal behaviours, by
creating an allowable "grey area" between moral and wicked behaviours
- what so many business people like to call "amoral". But that same
energy is innovative, creative - the destruction of what is old and
weak is part of any finite-sized system. The need to destroy, dominate
and exploit is strong in a significant percent of the population. Any
decent study of criminology is continuous with "business".
William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War [0] suggested that we
coped with this in the past by having every few generations of males
kill each other in wars - and of course implied that it's mainly a
gendered issue. During frontier times, as the European settlers
conquered America and other lands, there was ample "space" for
exploitation as that energy was directed against "nature" (and the
indigenous folks who were considered part of "nature" as opposed to
"civilisation"). Now we've run out of space. The only target left for
that energy is each other.
Social-"ism" etc are projects to try controlling that nature by
reducing "individualism" (and insecurity-based consumerism is an
obvious first target). It's major fault is that the anti-social
criminals tend be want to be the ones doing the controlling - just
wearing the mask of civility and preaching the primacy of "the group".
If we cannot change human nature we must find a new outlet for that
energy. Space exploration as a new frontier always looked good, but in
reality it's something we are unlikely to achieve before
self-destructing the technological civilisation needed to support it.
That leaves little else but a kind of cultural revolution. The
pharmaceutically catalysed version of that in the 1960s is worth
studying to see where and why it went wrong. See Huxley.
Any realistic systematic change would need to address this "problem"
of the individual ego, creating some new focus that is the "moral
equivalent" of war.
Capitalism is a positive choice to grant the positive right of extreme property ownership.
Light property ownership is when this toothbrush is mine. Normal property ownership is when my house is mine. Extreme property ownership is when your house is mine, that section of airspace over there is mine, precisely four tenths of the revenue generated by the billboards on the Eiffel tower is mine - using a heavy dose of the legal system to artificially extend the principle of ownership to all sorts of things that aren't naturally property and things that would naturally be someone else's property. This is a positive action done on purpose by the legal system, not merely natural default like me owning my toothbrush.
---
Did you know one of the common pesticides in the USA but banned in the EU interferes with hormone levels in certain species, making them way more individualist? One of those species is humans. Still a positive freedom?
> capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom.
This is very wrong. Capitalism fundamentally requires abstract property rights (i.e. someone can own a thing they have never even held or seen, much less used), and it requires a state to provide very strong protections for those abstract rights.
In the absence of the state imposing such a property right regimen, you wouldn't have capitalism, since it'd be impossible to accumulate capital if the only way to own property is to physically use and/or occupy it.
Importantly, capitalism is not the same as free markets! Humanity has had free markets in one form or another for most of its history, but capitalism is very recent historically speaking.
The notion that socialism is always anti-individualistic is also wrong. Left-wing libertarianism is a thing, and goes back to the earliest anarchist writers (who literally invented the term "libertarian" as a political label - and they didn't have the likes of Ayn Rand in mind when they did that). There's even free-market left-wing anarchism.
We're talking about two views of "capitalism". I think you're talking
about the kind in textbooks on economics and Marxism etc. I'm talking
about the lawless, insane festival of destruction and human misery we
see today. To my mind, it is a an absence; the absence of law and
reason.
We're talking about the same thing, actually. To be clear, I'm not pro-capitalism, quite the opposite. But the "festival of destruction and human misery" that you're talking about is caused by massive for-profit entities that only exist because the property rights system in capitalism allows and even encourages unbounded accumulation of capital (hence the name!), and with that, economic and eventually political power. That power is why megacorps can bend the law, and why their ignorance of reason does not lead to their immediate demise (as it would be in an actually free market, meaning the one with numerous meaningfully competing actors). Capitalism taken to its logical conclusion is the absence of free market because everything is monopolized.
I like your ideas and suspect we're far more on the same page than
not.
Nonetheless I compare what we call "capitalism" to chameleon music
artists like David Bowie (no disrespect intended to that wonderful
artist), who change radically with time, constantly shapeshifting and
reinventing. Our grandfather's "capitalism" is unrecognisable from
its namesake today.
People often level the accusation against communism that "it has never
actually been tried in practice", and I think the same is also true of
capitalism. Maybe in the years before just before 1929.
Anyway, what I see today is not a recognisable ideology. It's just a
bunch of criminals getting away with it and an effectively lawless
USA.
You’re right and those are interesting books. And yes, people will not be able to live with alternative to Capitalism.
That’s why, I think the only way for human race to survive is to have multi-generation transition plan, people must understand that in their life time it’s not going to get better and fair. It would happen in maybe two generations, or over 50-100 years time span.
And it would have to happen in one country first and then propagated to others.
If you think deeper, to first principles, it’s clear that disease is capitalism. I am not advocating socialism/communism, but isn’t it strange that capitalism was never reviewed or updated according to new science about anthropology, sociology, and economics? In 100 years, about 100 countries tried it, and not one country can report a harmonious society. It’s always with inequality and suffering.
Every science has new advancements and discoveries, every single one except political sociology. Why is more advanced and modern political economic system never seriously discussed? On what assumption is capitalism still being implemented? It was never working yet still it is referred as something like “word of god” that cannot be argued with.
If this was a situation in an IT company and methodology company uses constant change, it ends in disaster. After about one such cycle, management will be looking into changing processes and choosing something else instead of Agile or Waterfall or whatever is used.
For about 30-40 years now, we produce enough to feed and house everyone. Henry Ford introduced a five-day work week, which should be down to one workday by now. But instead, we got “bullshit jobs,” which are about 50% of employment in unnecessary made-up jobs to keep people occupied (marketing, finance). And still in the AI age, a person who is born now is brainwashed into capitalism and has to find an occupation, study, and work till retirement. Capitalism does not accept you for who you are. It only accepts you if you have some kind of occupation that brings value.