Perhaps. But I do know a great deal about hastily constructed illustrations to demonstrate a point.
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According to Ugnellion, in the future there is a moon, it is the best moon, made from solid gold and studded with diamonds and golf courses, it is called Moon Base Alpha, and only the VERY BEST people get to go there, they have to take a test and everything, and only the top 5% can pass the Voight-Kampff test and gain admittance, and there they have conferences and play golf and make the BIG DECISIONS, free from all petty annoyances of those pesky betas, those losers can’t go to Moon Base Alpha, except to drop off the new intake of the BEST PEOPLE for Hazing Week, the electrified satellites and minefields orbiting the moon are there to keep the losers out.
Meanwhile, free from the destructive greed of the Alphas, society continues to womble quietly along, on the shoulders of midgets, taking baby steps, treating each other like human-beings because, as some of us have discovered, it makes life easier and more pleasant.
By the way Ugnellion says you are being racist against future human names. 
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So capitalism is like … an abusive alcoholic spouse. You can’t change him. Just do what he says.
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I was about to argue with you, but you actually have a point. We are shackled to human nature.Capitalism is the system that at least attempts to harness the negativity of human nature and make it useful.
Married to an alcoholic abuser? What if you could harness that anger w/ a punching bag the generates electricity?
Can’t argue with that. That’s quality work. I approve of the satire even if I cringe a bit at the implication.
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Blimey, I hope your environment perks up, dude, that sounds sucky as fuck.
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Makes you appreciate hearth and home a great deal. Nothing in life is more precious than the people you have around you that love you. Not gold, not status, not luxury. Being in a cardboard box with a spouse/family that love you, and you love them, is better than being alone in the grandest castle in all the world.
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Other than “well, actually…” contrarianism, I’m genuinely not sure of your point here. Yes, human beings are and will remain subject to the same flaws that have existed since there have been humans. And yet, as you recognize, societies change. Hawking was talking about a choice that society will be presented with quite soon re: a society in which robots perform the majority of labor.
So are you disagreeing with his recognition of the choices facing society? His preference that society make the choice that benefits more people?
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Goodness, how dare you drag the conversation back to its original topic!
Honestly, can’t even remember where it all started. So I’m going to gracefully concede the field and live to argue inanely another day.
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As have I. I was raised by some of those thieves and abusers of both substances and people. You might have more experience with these things than the average person, as may I, but that doesn’t mean that either of us have any kind of special or privileged vantage point on human behavior. If anything, being exposed to those things tends to distort, rather than enhance the clarity of one’s observations.
Your thesis about human nature? That’s demonstrably false unless you’re splitting some pretty fine hairs about how you define “human nature.” My point is that human nature is a noisy generalized category of “ifs” that we have pretty arbitrarily defined, rather than some static, codified thing. The set of things that we include in “human nature” now is different than what people 100 or 1000 years ago would include if asked to do the same.
I fear that you’re confusing “human nature” with capitalism. Capitalism and capitalists like to claim that lots of negative behaviors are “human nature” and then claim that capitalism “uses them for good.” Capitalism isn’t right, and it also doesn’t do that. Capitalism simply says those things are human nature, and therefore unchangeable, and therefore all horrors that occur as the direct outcome of capitalist endeavors are nobody’s fault because “humans will be humans.” In the grand scheme of things, capitalism is a pretty new idea, and prior to it, humans tended to live in much more communal ways.
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If I were trying to promote the free market to a bunch of lefties, I suppose I could start with
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Capitalism is just like patriarchy, misogyny, and domestic violence
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That’s why capitalism is obviously proper and correct
but then again this might not actually be my first choice as an argument.
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That is laissez-faire capitalism, of an extreme sort. Anti-capitalists like to tar with a very broad brush!
But if we are going to use sweeping, false generalizations to characterize capitalism, we may as well characterize socialism as being about ethnic pogroms and oppressing religious minorities. It won’t be true, but it will be truthy.
A well regulated capitalism is the most efficient and scalable resource distribution method known to man. Every other economic system breaks down before it reaches global scale.
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He’s feeling the bern in heaven
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No doubt, capitalism is deeply flawed leads to negative outcomes, and has created inequality. Hands down it is the worst system possible for the conduct of human financial affairs…
except for all the others.
Not just that, but capitalists have conditioned people to the point where they literally cannot imagine a world that isn’t ruled by capital. There is no goddamned reason why in 2018 anybody should have to worry about having a place to live, clean water to drink, or food to eat–these are actually really simple problems to solve. That is, unless you’re only capable of thinking in terms of capitalism. That puts blinders on people that they don’t even realize are there, the question of what’s right and what’s wrong suddenly correlates with money. It completely clouds peoples’ judgment, leading otherwise decent folks to say asinine things like, “well if I have to work to survive, everybody should” and “nobody will work if they don’t have to.”
The great lie of capitalism is that competition is the pathway to progress. Competition is almost always wasteful and destructive compared to collaboration, and collaboration tends to produce better results, but capitalism as a system needs people to fight each other constantly to work–not because that’s how progress is made, but the opposite, that’s how the people who are “winning” keep the riff-raff occupied. I mean, gosh, if those people stopped fighting each other for the bourgeoisie’s table scraps for too very long, they might start asking questions like, “wait a minute, now why is it exactly that I need to rent at least a third of my life to a business in order to be alive at all?” and “hey now, why is it effectively impossible for a person to survive without money? How are we justifying that? I mean, nobody chooses to be born, right?”
To somebody swayed by capitalism, even if they themselves aren’t consciously greedy or even try not to be greedy, a statement like, “well if there are people starving to death, why don’t we give them some food” is somewhere between heretical and repulsive. “What?! You can’t just GIVE PEOPLE STUFF!” is an common immediate response, then you ask them why, and they say because it cost money, so you ask if a person’s life is worth less than the food it takes to sustain them and then they get reaaaaaal uncomfortable.
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Surround yourself with assholes and you’ll think everyone’s an asshole. That however is the fallacy of composition where you take what is true for a part must be true for the whole. Research and empirical examples during disasters indicates that the Hobbesian view of human nature isn’t quite right.
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I think that what many folks tend to deem as “human nature” is in fact millenia of self centered and unsustainable socialization.
Negative traits like greed and apathy may be ‘natural’ in every individual, but they don’t have to consume and dominate our lives; they can be overcome via teaching and socializing our offspring in a different manner.
Real talk.
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I guess it depends on how you define “socialism.” If nationalized health care is socialism, then it hasn’t failed in most industrialized nations. You could say the same about labor unions, public education, and pretty much any government organization that has public oversight of business, from the SEC to OSHA to the EPA. Conversely, if socialism is prison camps and censorship then throughout history there have been a lot of “socialist” countries with free markets. In fact, capitalism has never worked very well either, particularly if you think the only “true” capitalism is completely unfettered and unregulated free markets.
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I really didn’t mean this to turn into such a debate, but I’m gratified that so many people want to talk about ideas.
For my purposes, “socialism” in its modern, non-communist, non-gulag form to me is pre-Thatcher Britain, circa 1969-1978. Strikes everywhere, depressed economy, general malaise and economic misery.
“Capitalism” in my mind is a lightly regulated system of free enterprise where people are allowed to pursue their economic self interest to the greatest extent practical, w/ government keeping hands off in all but the most extreme circumstances.
Repeat after me: Nasty, Brutish, Short.
What an unbelievable, and immensely harmful crock of shit. Fuck Malthus with a broken spoon.
