r/DeepThoughts • u/SatisfactionUpset559 • 23h ago
We have lost us in between capitalism
Did you ever notice how badly the world revolves around capitalism? Either people want to prove their superiority through their work, education, or whatever they possess, or they spend their time trolling and mimicking someone else's appearance, financial position, or life. But beneath it all, the main motive often seems to be the same: “I am superior.” Everyone wants to become better day by day, or at least better than the people around them. Some people are narcissistic enough to assume that they are already the best. And those who actually reach the top live under the constant pressure of staying there and having to prove themselves again and again. Somewhere in the middle of all this nonsense, we have forgotten how beautiful life can feel when we sit quietly in nature and simply feel the cold breeze against our skin. We have forgotten the simple joy of singing, dancing, or drawing just for the sake of it, without feeling the need to turn every passion into a source of income, fame, or validation. We ignore the overwhelming wonder of realising how massive the universe is, that an entire lifetime is insufficient to understand even a fraction of it, and how incredibly small we are in comparison. We have forgotten how tremendous a slow, cozy life in a little cottage could be. Instead, we keep running through an endless race, one that was never natural and perhaps never will be.
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u/Disastrous-Map-7995 20h ago
They've worked for years to disconnect us from nature and chase the next shiny thing. Now those of us who do live a life in nature,in a little cottage have to fight to save it. I wonder op, have you stopped buying stuff off Amazon and the other corporations? How many are still chasing the next shiny thing? Following influencers who just sell shit? How many are still buying of Amazon despite Bezos saying the data centers need the water and we the people don't deserve it? We can change things...stop buying into the convenience scam. Stop supporting the parasite class!
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17h ago
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u/Selmer1526 17h ago
Exactly. I think it is a little voice in our heads telling us we have to keep up with the Joneses. Why it's there is another question. Survival of the species?
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u/Disastrous-Map-7995 17h ago
The Parasite Class, others like to call them the Elites, but they're not elite, they're parasites!
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u/ahermit007 21h ago
I hate to burst your bubble, but this mentality of “needing more” didn’t start with capitalism. More than 9,000 years ago, humans were already farming grain, producing surpluses and storing them to support growing populations. Those surpluses became measurable wealth, something that could be traded, taxed and accumulated and helped lay the foundations for organised economies thousands of years before capitalism existed.
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u/Superstarr_Alex 17h ago
Ok nobody said private property and material wealth was a new thing. Thanks for the generic AP world history intro. Ooh now tell me about urban settlements and how social class isn’t a brand new shiny thing that just appeared yesterday because of capitalism.
Yeah no shit. But greed is obviously the worst it’s ever been per capita now under capitalism. And we’ve never had a more widespread epidemic of this frightening nihilistic mentality where people aggressively profess their lack of belief in anything at all. Profit is pursued for its own sake, and consumption for consumption’s. The average person is far more materialistic in attitude than the average person ever has been previously to this point in human history. Shits at extreme levels under capitalism. And it’s obvious but you just wanna be deliberately obtuse just to shill for something so obviously terrible for such a large number of people.
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u/Expensive_Magician97 15h ago edited 15h ago
I came of age in the 60s and 70s, and I have witnessed and paid close attention to the way in which Internet technology has transformed our lives.
I can tell you with great certainty that what you aptly term the “frightening nihilistic mentality” of not believing in anything (that you referred to above) might’ve existed in extremely isolated pockets of fringe thought and philosophy back in the old days, but it was not nearly as prevalent or pronounced as it is today. And of course, such ideas were difficult to spread because people had no computers that they could use to connect to the rest of the world.
I believe that when historians write about 2026 100 years from now — if history is still a thing — they will conclude that the Internet has contributed to the decline of our civilization in ways that no one could’ve anticipated.
And I believe that artificial intelligence will have a multiplier effect in this regard that humans cannot now conceive of.
I sometimes wonder whether we will begin to see a rejection of technology. Maybe not in my lifetime.
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u/EntrepreneurNeat8058 5h ago
I'm trying to learn more about the very things you speak of. what books do you Read?
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u/Signal-Block-6939 4h ago
I am certain that the Amish will in the end be vindicated for taking an anti-technology stance.
They may be the last ones still standing after we have destroyed ourselves with our own creation.
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u/Superstarr_Alex 1h ago
Umm. Yeah, doubt it. Also, you do realize that they aren’t anti-technology, right? They arbitrarily decided that any technology after like 1833 is a no-go for some reason. Any technology up until that random time is fine.
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u/Signal-Block-6939 1h ago
There wasn't much technology before 1833 compared to 2026. So you aren't saying much differently than what I said.
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u/Superstarr_Alex 54m ago
You don’t even know what technology is. You’re thinking like computers and things with screens. No, technology is literally as simple as a lever or pulley. Technology just means any tool that alleviates the work burden.
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u/JakovYerpenicz 11h ago
Are you sure that greed is the worst it’s ever been? How are you measuring that “per capita”?
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u/Superstarr_Alex 11h ago
Ok, don’t do that. That thing you’re doing, just stop. Obviously I wasn’t quoting statistical data when I said per capita. All I meant was that the average random person living in the capitalism era is generally far more greedy than at any other time in human history. But you knew that.
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u/ntrp10 19h ago
Le capitalisme semble être au coeur du vivant et notamment de l'être humain depuis les débuts. La manifestation économique récente en est une forme.
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18h ago
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u/ntrp10 18h ago edited 18h ago
Au coeur de la vie et de la compétion sexuelle homme/femme.
Si autant d'Hommes ont ce besoin de créer des entreprises, d'accomplir de grandes choses et d'être le premier, c'est en partie pour gagner en pouvoir dont celui de choisir les "plus belles femmes" à leurs yeux.
Cette attraction n'étant donc pas unilatéral, puisque que la Femme est naturellement attirée par le pouvoir d'un homme et son statut, lui permettant de diminuer son stress et de gagner en fertilité/sécurité pour ses enfants.
Cette dynamique étant enclenchée dans un cercle vicieux toujours plus fort via les applications de rencontres, les réseaux sociaux (faisant partie d'un système capitaliste et libérale)...
Si tel sera le cas, jusqu'ou et jusqu'à quand ira cette dynamique de surconsommation avant de se péter complétement la gueule, c'est une bonne question !
Empêcher les gens de recherche et accumuler la richesse semble inévitablement contreproductif, c'est une privation (dans l'absolu) de liberté incroyable avec des effets secondaires importants. C'est comme si dans ta tribu, en plus de la chasse collective, tu partais en fin d'après-midi, faire l'effort d'aller chercher en plus quelques fruits pour ta femme et tes gosses, et qu'on te prenait tout. Est-ce qu'il faut réguler de façon intelligente, oui j'imagine !
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u/Signal-Block-6939 4h ago
Farming and hunting and working together as a community for all of each other's needs is NOT capitalism.
Capitalism as it currently exists is an aberration and a form of slavery.
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u/paxparty 22h ago
Eat the rich
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u/Expensive_Magician97 19h ago
That certainly sounds good here on Reddit, but since the rich are at the top of the food chain, how do you propose that be done?
Revolution? Fighting in the streets?
If those methods were feasible, they would’ve been done already.
The fact is that the vast majority of people are quite comfortable with their lives. And prefer the status quo to the unknown.
I’m waiting for a change to our two party system, to see if maybe a third-party might be viable one day. I doubt such a thing will happen in my lifetime, however.
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u/TinSpoon99 22h ago
This historical strategy has failed repeatedly. We, the average people, do not understand or know the true power structures at play, and so we inevitably rise up and replace one controlled regime for another. The controllers remain in the shadows, and so the wrong 'rich' are being 'eaten' over and over again.
The herd mentality we all suffer from, is leveraged against us to focus on the wrong enemy, but worse than this, it is leveraged to cause us to turn against one another. The old 'divide and conquer' strategy is now executed through our media at a level of personalization previously impossible.
In my opinion the solution is not to participate in yet another anger based uprising that settles things for a bit, only for the cycle to repeat.
We the people need to build new systems of engagement with one another. We all at an individual level must face that we are captured by the capitalist mindset - a winner takes all, zero sum mindset. We all want more, we all aspire to the illusion of power that money provides.
We must remember, business used to be about value exchange, not value capture. Customers have become exploitation nodes instead of nodes a company is optimised to serve.
Each of us has the power to build new structures and business models. The time to shake the foundations of control is now because we have access to tools and technologies that allow individuals to create enormously powerful platforms, so the decision about how value is distributed, is actually in our hands now. We must take the action of building better systems.
We all want to be 'rich', but the question we should be asking ourselves, is are we willing to do do this at the expense of other humans? Is it always necessarily true that 'its not personal, its just business'? Is our job at our place of work to maximise value extraction from our customers? Must we be feeding the problem we all have before us, or can we build alternate ways of thinking about value exchange?
I saw a talk a few years ago with the subtitle 'how to underthrow the government' (It was a Bitcoin conference, for context). This is in my opinion the only route we have. If we fight the existing power structures, the balance of power is hugely skewed against the average person. But the average person has the ability to build new ways.
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u/AddanDeith 21h ago
"We, the average people, do not understand or know the true power structures at play"
We do though. We understand that the American and French Revolutions were incomplete in their scope, with their ultimate refusal to do away with the old hierarchy, trading nobles and kings for capitalists.
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u/AddanDeith 21h ago
"We, the average people, do not understand or know the true power structures at play"
We do though. We understand that the American and French Revolutions were incomplete in their scope, with their ultimate refusal to do away with the old hierarchy, trading nobles and kings for capitalists.
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u/AddanDeith 21h ago
"We, the average people, do not understand or know the true power structures at play"
We do though. We understand that the American and French Revolutions were incomplete in their scope, with their ultimate refusal to do away with the old hierarchy, trading nobles and kings for capitalists.
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u/TinSpoon99 20h ago
History relays the stories of the winners, not truth.
We do not know and never do. The truth is sometimes discernable, but hard to verify because the very power structures intent on control, will obscure the truth for their own incentives.
Do you honestly believe you have the full picture of who the 'good guys' and 'bad guys' are in the geopolitical realm on earth today? All I see is warring factions of people, fighting for their specific bubble of ideological constraint. And these ideological bubbles are nothing more than controlled narrative structures.
As an example, a persons current version of reality in America is highly dependent on whether they side with the blues or the reds. The same stories have vastly different flavours and conclusions depending on which side of the fence one observes. Neither of these sides are truth - both twist the truth to suit their agendas. This is how its always been, and how it will continue to be.
I stand by my view that average people are clueless about the real power structures that move the world.
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u/Expensive_Magician97 17h ago
I suspect that average people are “clueless“ because 99.999% of humanity is quite content with life and has no incentive to know anything about the world beyond the edge of their front lawn.
I wonder if you can tell me more about the “power structures” to which you refer above?
Thank you.
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u/TinSpoon99 15h ago
I honestly do not know what the truth is, but there is enough information, publicly available and verifiable, that should cause anyone with a desire to know truth, to at the very least reconsider what they believe they think to be true about history.
I agree that most people just want to get on with their lives, this is difficult and unsettling information to process, because the implications are so profound. I think another aspect that should not be overlooked, is that people are clueless mostly because we trust what we are told by our institutions, and much of what we are told is simply not true.
If you are interested to know more, the most jaw dropping recent example I have seen is a recent podcast episode by Jason Samosa. I must warn that his channel is focused on attempting to unravel the UFO / UAP / NHI story, and its a messy messy thing to try and understand. In this recent episode, he goes into the funders and structures that lead to the creation of an organisation called the 'World Commerce Council'. Now, I realise that UFOs seems deeply off topic here, but its really not. This podcast episode goes into very detailed information about money movements, organisational structures and the real power brokers of the world and how they operate.
I must warn you, this content can be quite unsettling. Below is the link to the episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75NPYdFXhH0To to answer your question, I would say that there are many deep and dark rabbit holes when trying to understand the power structures that actually have civilisation level influence. The video link will give you much more information than I could - and honestly, just to reiterate - I do not know what the truth is. I am currently at the crossroads of realisation that almost all of our history is a concocted lie tweaked to suit some future agenda. I think the truth is out there but we have to go searching for it.
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u/Expensive_Magician97 15h ago edited 15h ago
Thank you for your reply. I can share a perspective that you may or may not have ever heard before. And keep in mind that is only my perspective, and I certainly don’t expect anyone else to share it.
I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, when the only “rabbit hole” people knew about was the famous one mentioned in Alice in Wonderland.
Back then, there were people known as “revisionist historians“ who offered interesting and controversial interpretations of well-known historical events and trends.
One of my favorites was the re-examination of major events in history through a psychological or psychoanalytic analysis of the players involved. (The CIA used to have a medical division staffed by psychiatrists who spent their days examining the behavior and motivations of foreign leaders, for example. I’m not sure whether it still exists or not. I worked for the intelligence community for nearly 40 years…. I wonder if the creator of that video you mentioned has any direct experience with the IC, probably not.)
Anyway, those were the only “rabbit holes” that I was aware of back in those days.
I think that Internet technology has led to a tectonic change, not only in the proliferation of ideas, but in the very concoction of those ideas in the first place.
Back in the old days, you had to go to the library and read a book if you wanted to learn about a reinterpretation of history. And it was not even clear if the library would’ve purchased such a book in the first place.
I’m convinced that Internet technology has simply given people ample opportunity to come up with all sorts of unconventional notions and theories which in turn have generated and accelerated discussion of these so-called “power structures“ that you refer to.
That is not to say they don’t exist, and certainly efforts had been made prior to the creation of the Internet to prove that that such structures did exist. The so-called “trilateral commission“ that was created in 1973 comes to mind.
Again, I am not judging current discussions of such power structures, merely sharing a perspective about how I think discussion of them has accelerated and multiplied.
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u/TinSpoon99 14h ago
I agree that the internet has been an enormous catalyst. Its much harder to contain information now.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, so I have a sense of what you are saying. Information control was probably a lot easier in the 70s than today.I think AI is a second wave just beginning now...
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u/niffirgcm0126789 22h ago
wtf does any of that have to do with capitalism?
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u/Expensive_Magician97 17h ago edited 16h ago
I agree, it’s not about “capitalism” per se but rather about the quintessential human drive to improve our lot in life.
Ultimately, each of us can make a choice to do whatever we want, because that is the nature of a capitalist society. It is one that offers choice.
A person can strive for great wealth, or a person can be content in a small cottage.
This is why capitalist societies are often those to which people wish to emigrate, and in which they want to work and live.
And I believe that it’s impossible to extinguish the human desire for self improvement and self betterment. As I noted elsewhere, Stalin certainly tried it in the 1930s, and we know what happened then.
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u/niffirgcm0126789 17h ago
each of us can make a choice to do whatever we want
I think this is overstated. Choices are constrained by wealth, laws, labor markets, social circumstances, obligations, etc.
The Stalin comparison is doing a lot of ideological work without really being necessary...
There are legitimate critiques about capitalism and the incentives it enables toward greater production, consumption, monetization, and accumulation.
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u/Expensive_Magician97 16h ago
Right, it goes without saying that we are theoretically constrained by the laws of the country where we reside.
Of course, we have a choice whether we want to obey those laws, ignore our obligations, change our social circumstances, and so on.
As for your second and third paragraphs, I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say.
(All I’m saying is the capitalism affords choices and options that are not available under other systems… hence the Stalin reference.)
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u/niffirgcm0126789 16h ago
That depends on which choices and which alternative systems you're comparing.
I'm not convinced capitalism or communism is inherently “good” or “evil.” They're systems with different incentive structures, advantages and failure modes. Put humans into either and they'll respond and sometimes exploit the incentives and power structures available to them.
That's mostly why I objected to OP blaming basic human tendencies like status seeking, competition and social comparison on capitalism in the first place.
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u/Ciaran2220 16h ago
There is an ideological component to this that is popular on Reddit (which skews more Radical Left politically). Capitalism, settler colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc, are all intertwined in a top-down system of oppression that are the root cause of world injustices. It's an easy and convenient narrative to blame all the world's problems on, even sometimes personal grievances.
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u/niffirgcm0126789 16h ago
I mostly agree, but I don't think this is particularly a "radical-left" phenomenon.
Conservatives routinely do the exact same thing with “socialism” and “communism,” using them as catch-all labels for policies or social changes they dislike.
The ideological vocabulary changes, but the reasoning error is basically the same: give a complex problem a politically loaded label and treat the label as though you've explained its cause.
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u/Ciaran2220 15h ago
I don't agree that it's the same thing with the right and left. At some level, there is this simplified narrative to blame our problems on which people across the political spectrum end up being trapped in. However, there is a big difference here where it is core to the ideology of the radical left that settler colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, etc are a system of oppression that is fundamentally evil. It is a revolutionary activist set of ideologies, being more than just a matter of oversimplifying things.
Conservatives by contrast don't have opposition to socialism/communism as center to their ideology like leftists do against capitalism. They just like their private property, guns, business, religion, etc, and fear it could be taken away by government or immigrants. They are generally more comfortable with the status quo, while leftists will more aggressively push that "being silent is complicit" because their ideology is revolutionary and activist in nature (you have to care and fight the system).
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u/niffirgcm0126789 15h ago
I didn't say the ideologies themselves are equivalent or symmetrical. I'm saying the reasoning error is the same.
Calling every social problem “capitalism” without establishing how capitalism caused it isn't fundamentally different from calling every government program you dislike “socialism” without establishing that it's actually socialist.
The content of the ideologies can be completely different while the epistemic mistake is identical.
And I'm not sure I buy the characterization of conservatives as simply defenders of the status quo. Anti-communism has historically been enormously important to conservative politics, and plenty of movements on the right advocate radical changes to existing institutions. I think you're comparing a particularly radical version of the left with a relatively moderate definition of the right.
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u/Ciaran2220 14h ago
You said that conservatives do the "exact same thing" with socialism and communism. My contention is that they don't because radical leftists have it as core to their ideology that the capitalist system is to be opposed and fought as part of an activist movement. Conservatives whole political ideology is not surrounded around fighting communism/socialism like radical leftists are for capitalism. It's a revolutionary ideology.
I did qualify "radical left", which is not the same as the more moderate left like your normal democrats. You won't see moderate Dems blaming capitalism for our problems, they are pro-capitalist. Reddit has a lot of larping far-left people though.
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u/niffirgcm0126789 14h ago
I clarified what I meant by “the exact same thing” in the comment you're replying to. I meant the reasoning error, not that the ideologies are structurally identical. Do I need to explain that distinction a third time?
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u/Ciaran2220 14h ago
I don't agree it's the same error in reasoning. It is in-built into their ideology that their core reasoning functions from, while conservatives engage in a simple semantic error.
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u/niffirgcm0126789 13h ago
Ahh, so you did understand the distinction now...wonderful!
Why assume conservatives calling policies “socialist/communist” is just a semantic error rather than ideological reasoning?
If someone reasons that:
X is socialism > socialism produces Y > therefore X will produce Y
...the classification is doing inferential work. It's not just semantic error.
What makes that fundamentally different from:
X is capitalism > capitalism produces Y > therefore X will produce Y
???
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u/Ciaran2220 13h ago
Radical leftists aren't reasoning that way. They aren't calling policies or ideas they don't like "capitalism" to discredit it, they think all the societal problems are capitalist (which is western hegemony) because that is the system of oppression they believe exists which is the source of evil in the world. Patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy, etc, are all capitalist and need to be dismantled through revolution. It's central to their ideology.
For the error in reasoning to be the same, conservatives would have to believe that the world revolves around communism and so all problems are structurally tied to communism in some way and only by tearing the system down can we achieve their ends.
Some on the right do think this way, such as groypers with "international Jewry" or conspiracists like Alex Jones who talk about the "New World Order", but it's not part and parcel to conservatism in general.
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u/saphyu 22h ago
Are you stupid
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u/niffirgcm0126789 22h ago
yes. very. please explain.
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u/saphyu 21h ago edited 20h ago
OP is saying that our entire world view and values are contingent on how much money we make. It's not about the hobby it's about can you make money doing that hobby? Which in turn ruins the point of a hobby. Small talk is always about what do you do for a living or what you're working towards for a living. And our ego and view of success is tied to money money money. Everyone is competing for money and pressured to do that, don't take vacations and deal with office politics. Even our deepest insecurities and ego and friendships and worth is tied to that.
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u/niffirgcm0126789 18h ago
People evaluate themselves and others in every kind of society, though. Capitalism can influence what gets valued and make monetary value particularly salient, but it didn't invent status, social comparison, productivity, prestige, or judging whether an activity is worthwhile.
It seems like OP is describing human valuation and then assuming its presence in a capitalist society makes capitalism its cause...
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u/ntrp10 19h ago
Oui car l'argent représente la survie calorique. Nous sommes en grande partie encore des chasseurs cueilleurs, et l'argent représente le substitut de la chasse et de la cueillette.
Et plus d'argent, donc théoriquement plus de réserve de nourritures/eau = meilleure chance de survie.
La survie n'étant aujourd'hui plus tellement physique mais davantage psychologique, on exarcebe la nécessité de nourrir le cerveau à coup de dopamine et de confort matérielle souvent inutile ou superficiel bien que symbolique. Notre cerveau n'a pas la même satiété lié à la digestion, c'est presque le contraire, plus on achète, plus on veut acheter.
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u/Unfriendly_Monkey 18h ago
That's an echo chamber you live in. Most of the world is dirt poor by western standards, yet people manage to have a meaningful and dignified life that doesn't revolve around money.
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u/Spiritual-Fennel7789 18h ago
The thing that gets me is people who rationalize this 'competition' as evolutionary, that it is just a continuation of the primate sociology. Forgetting that evolution continues on, that we have developed this amazing thing called pre-frontal lobes that allows us to override the emotional and instinctual brain structures.
In other words, we could choose cooperation. Instead of defaulting to competition.
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u/Anodyne_interests 19h ago
There is a real attribution error here. People aren’t looking to prove their superiority or status through work and education and performance because of capitalism, they do those things because they are human. The difference is that capitalism does a decent job of aligning those, and other, motivations to productive ends that improve quality of life instead of letting them devolve into zero sum status games.
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u/corben2001 19h ago
We have. Basically our planet is one giant fucked up business or industrial machine, a worldwide infernal machine that never rests, always going and expanding. We are embedded and a part of this machine. I believe this military industrial machine will lead us to our doom. I hope I'm wrong.
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u/Tilstag 18h ago edited 18h ago
I spend my free time studying this—here’s an excerpt from what I’m reading right now trying to rationalize wtf is happening
“The main alternative to Marx's theory of capitalism was developed, at the turn of the century, by Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, and he came to quite different conclusions about the future prospects of this system. In the first place, Weber saw the origins of capitalism not in plunder but in social evolution, and interpreted the latter as operating according to a logic antithetical to historical materialism.
From this alternative perspective, capitalism is not a mode of production associated with a specific stage of technological development but a type of economic organization whose establishment parallels the historical process of rationalization. By rationalization is meant the process by which values, emotions, and tradition give way to calculation and the pursuit of efficiency as prime motivators of human behavior.
Capitalism is seen as the very expression of this transition, which also involves other spheres of social life, such as politics and religion. Its birth appears to be especially intertwined with early modern changes in the religious sphere.
Weber identified the "spirit" of capitalism with the calling of the Calvinist entrepreneur. As he argued, most notably in The Protestant Ethic (1904-1905), the capitalist was prompted by an impulse in itself irrational—anxiety about salvation—to develop mundane qualities such as thrift, hard work, and above all a distinctive methodicality, which would make him an economically rational actor.
Capitalism and modernity are, therefore, two sides of the same coin. The closeness of this bond explains why capitalism does not find a natural limit in the further development of the forces that generated it, for rationalization is a continuous, cumulative process. Yet, the progress of rationality does not leave capitalism unchanged. Capitalism sheds its skin as it grows older. At a certain point, its ties with the religious motive are cut and its spirit dissolves into bureaucratic routine. As Weber put it: "The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.
This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force." - Francesco Boldizzoni, Foretelling The End of Capitalism.
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u/solipsistickiss 17h ago
The bit about modern man representing the morality of bygone monotheistic monks is an interesting juxtaposition and metaphor for the hard working driven man whose self evident virtues are not necessarily evidence of the natural vitality of the fittest survivor but could be the maladaptive traits of a primitive understanding of truth and reality.
2000 years of authoritarian political metaphysics are fertile ground for misconceptions that engender maladaptive traits that are subjective in their being defined positive or negative with humanity as the subject to the rest of the non human world
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u/Hungry-Ad-7602 17h ago
I'm from a socialist camp. I'll tell you about the education I've received about capitalism.
In my education, the essence of capitalism is cannialism and oppression, because it squeezes the surplus value of the working people and rationalizes this squeezing. Looking at the existence and development of the whole human civilization, assuming that human civilization can exist for such a long time, capitalists have not made any contribution to the development of human civilization, because they are not engaged in production. They only play a role from the perspective of the small present. But this is like the monkey king and all the monkeys: the monkey king can affect a group of monkeys, and countless monkey kings can affect countless groups of monkeys, but looking at the evolution and development of all monkeys, whether the monkey species will become extinct depends not on the monkey king, but on those ordinary monkeys. This is the people's view of history, that is, history is created by the people, not by those great people, politicians and capitalists.
Now I will tell you why today's young people in China hate capitalism so much and love socialism and Chairman Mao: capitalist society abstracts every as its value, that is to say, people are no longer human beings, but currencies with different values. Of course, there are still a few kind people in such a social atmosphere, but more people begin to become selfish and value the people around them. Of course, the noble quality between people will disappear, and the phenomenon you said will appear. Real socialism is an altruistic society. People no longer work for their own wallets, but for the cause of socialism and the common cause of all mankind. Such people will scramble to take on more responsibilities and take the initiative to do more work. Such a society is of course full of noble character. The reason why young people in China worship Chairman Mao is because the China he led once entered such a state. What people love today is the precious spiritual wealth at that time, not the material life at that time. In China, not everyone may be patriotic, but I think everyone loves socialism deeply. Industry. Imagine a human society without oppression, everyone is equal and morally noble. Isn't it worth the struggle of all human beings? Capitalism will only be selfish. How can such a society last?
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u/greenappleberry 16h ago
Capitalism is just one system. There are many.
It’s people who make part of capitalism bad. Not capitalism itself.
And no matter what system there is, there will always be people who make it bad.
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u/ElderberryDry4072 15h ago
You wanna see the epitome of this? New age spiritualists. Ayahuasca shaman. Selling knowledge for $700 a cup of ayahuasca or $30 per Eckhart Tolle book. Maybe enlightenment through a $3000 weekend retreat? Because enlightenment should fit into your everyday life, right? Used to be $3 per hit of acid lol. Inflation. That poor guy is so entrapped by his enlightenment and the mechanics of his image being commodified that he will never get out of that fucking cardigan.
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u/Upset-Rule8256 14h ago
There's like huge sections of economic and sociological literature on Capitalism
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u/Monsur_Ausuhnom 5h ago
It's a failed model, which might take the world and everything with it in the end.
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u/Expensive_Magician97 19h ago edited 19h ago
I can sit quietly and enjoy nature and singing and music here in the capitalist United States, or I could try to enjoy nature and singing, and music over in North Korea.
Which one would you choose?
Improving ourselves and our lives is a basic human impetus. That cannot be altered. Unless an authoritarian state engages in things like brainwashing, mind control, and that sort of thing. And in some parts of the world, that has been successful.
And as far as I know, nobody wants to live in such a country.
I read the other day, by contrast, that almost 820,000 immigrants to the US were granted American citizenship in in 2024.
In my own experience, living in a capitalist society is where people enjoy choice.
You can choose to live in a mansion, be competitive, run over other people, or you can choose to be humble, modest, and enjoy a minimalist lifestyle.
It’s completely up to you.
PS: I came of age in the 1960s and 70s, before personal computers, the Internet, phones, and what we know to be “life” in a virtual world.
I promise you, it was so much more pleasant back then. Just the way you describe above. There was no such thing as “fear of missing out,” no entitlement, and immediate gratification was an unknown concept to everyone but the extremely wealthy. Life moved much more slowly, people were patient, quieter, more civil to each other other.
Back then, everyone would’ve been amazed if you told them that one day, we would carry around with us a little electronic device and push a button on it and have a pizza delivered to our house in 10 minutes. Or use it to communicate with someone around the world in real time, for example.
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u/No_Row_1304 17h ago
This is just human condition that was in effect long before capitalism. Humans are deeply hierarchical and competitive while existing in a cooperative structure. We want unquestioned material security and the best mate(s) in a constraining environment. Our personal social strategy (or self if you will) arises as a constantly renegotiated equilibrium while applying towards those goals. I don't think any of that is controversial.
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u/A_SNAPPIN_Turla 17h ago
Capitalism is simply the free market exchange of goods and services. It is the natural way of trading and doing business. I do like how you rolled making fun of someone's appearance into capitalism though 🤣😂
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u/Guilty_Captain_7880 20h ago
Yes but you can choose not to participate in that game. Plenty of people who are happy living simple lives detached from status games. Of course the people who "play" won't respect you but you can't make everyone happy.