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2 months agoOne of the most maddening parts of modern life under capitalism is that when you are young you are taught things like
- share with others
- don’t be selfish
- don’t take advantage of others
- treat others how you wish to be treated
Then you get into the “real world” and capitalism goes
- be selfish
- exploit people for profit
- take as much advantage of the market as possible
And you are just supposed to go “ok makes sense”
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.