8 billion minds thinking freely are immensely better than 2-300 in competition.
Capitalism is often defended with the argument 'competition breeds innovation', and this is of course true. However given the alternative, that of building a utopian post-scarcity society where people contribute exactly as much or as little as they wish to, the net effect of 8 billion idle minds would vastly outweigh the current specific employees tasked with finding solutions per-problem.
In fact it could vastly accelerate innovation since solutions found wouldn't need to be commercially profitable to be realised. We could actually build the products that people have thought of, but then got bought out and buried so as not to disrupt the profit flow of existing market players.
We could even keep the competition aspect by having rival teams work simultaneously on a product/tool, with the 'prize' being the renown and satisfaction of achieving the goal more successfully than the other team.
Everything we're supposed to believe about why we need capitalism is the same reason as above: so that we don't disrupt obscene profit flows from private interests. "Humans need to keep busy"; "hard work builds character"; "humans are innately selfish and can't share". All total indoctrinated bullocks.
Competition might spark innovation, but it also kills a ton of good ideas the moment they threaten existing revenue streams
Yes, I think competing ideas is inherently good, but when competition is filtered through increasingly unregulated profit-driven companies it leads to stagnation. We see all the time how innovators are squashed or bought out or lobbied against. Enshitification cannibalizes good services until they are shells of themselves.
Yes exactly - I think I mentioned precisely that also.
Not to mention it also means researchers only ever investigate solutions to problems that can generate new revenue streams, rather than ones that help humanity advance.
Also monopolies and oligopolies will fight competition from ever rooting in their fields, so capitalism is maybe breeding innovation in the easy to enter areas, but in the high cost entry businesses, like automotive, pharma, chemistry, oil and chip industries for example, you probably have to have a couple of million just for a chance to try. And if your innovation for example is that you found a solution that is half the price of your competition, they will gladly take a loss until you give up just to get rid of you.
I like capitalism, but it is not the lala land that neo libertarians want you to think it is.
I think capitalism has done great things. And some terrible ones.
Likewise religion did some great things, but also some terrible ones.
At some point we have to take stock of things and ask whether a certain process has run its due course: feudalism and monarchies; tribal dwellings; nomadic families.
All we can really do is keep looking for new solutions. And we will only find those new solutions when we remove the current survival imperative and allow people to dream for the sake of it, rather than for a profit purpose.
e.g., the Kodak company and digital cameras immediately comes to mind
Slows down innovation being brought to the masses. Im sure the next 20 generations worth of mobile phone upgrades are already invented but are drip fed into new phones one by one to squeeze every last drop of money out of people before they release thier next "upgrade"
That's true, and also: in a post-scarcity world where bleeding-edge tech wasn't important for status or rivalry, it wouldn't make the slightest difference how fast our phones acquired new features....
Also, some of the innovation is not good. For example, health insurance companies innovate new ways to create loopholes so people expect their care to be paid for when they need it, but so they don't actually pay. When they don't just straight up ignore the contract and then eat the cost if they get sued, because most people don't realize they can sue or have the means to sue, so they end up making more money from straight up ignoring legal obligations than if they actually paid out.
I do think having some economic rewards for working/doing a good job at what you do are beneficial, but I don't think basic necessities should be part of a 'reward', they should be something that everyone is ensured access to.
*rewards*, yes; there's no reason they need to be *economic* in nature; that goal is merely a result of our economy-driven system.
True, but I think a money-based system works fine for luxuries. It gives you a chance to pick out what kind of thing would motivate you and work toward a goal of getting that thing. It's just terrible for necessities because people realistically don't have any negotiating power when they need something to live, and then you end up in a situation where less skilled jobs aren't paying people enough to live even though it's a job that needs to be done.
It does make some sense to keep some form of luxuries-for-labour exchange when all basic necessities are fulfilled. This is actually the key point that exposes hardcore capitalists: they don't just want market economy, they want people to literally be in indentured servitude with no options but to sign their lives away.
A *real* market economy means both buyer and seller have complete free choice and never have to take a bad deal out of necessity. And it's utterly embarrassing that in our "advanced" society we have literally gone backwards from the wild average.
I absolutely agree. This is why I find libertarians frustrating, because they try to argue that if you just don't regulate things, people will somehow be able to negotiate fair wages and fair prices for necessities, even though we've seen time and time again that when it comes to things people need to live, it's extremely easy for people to be exploited.
Also, very few people need their life to be on the line to be motivated to work. Most people I know have at least one hobby that they have to engage in some level of consumerism to engage in, whether it's playing video games, LARPing, DnD or mermaiding. There is absolutely no reason we should be telling diabetics that they have to work if they want their insulin, or telling anyone that they have to live on the streets and go hungry if they can't get a job in a country that has as much empty housing and excess food production as we do.
For example:
https://preview.redd.it/lijjk41zxq9g1.jpeg?width=753&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e2f7d8c7a97f8cadede5ba8a570bdcf2f9e8733e
If a socialist country can go from a feudal, agrarian society to launching satellites and space probes in a matter of ~50 years, I think that’s a good enough economic system.
do you? have you ever spoken to someone who lived in the USSR?
That stat capitalist imperium was part of the problem and not at all socialist.
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I understand the want so badly to have a good dog here to root for in the ring or romanticize in a larger grand narrative. It’s not behind us though. We gotta work together to build it today and tomorrow. Only thing I hope makes it through if nothing else.
Not socialist. Communist. There's a difference.
The USSR was not communist and never claimed to be.
The ends are largely the same, they differ primarily in the means they use to achieve it
Just leave people alone, they figure things out without "facilitation". Open source works like that.
The only real problem is lack of UBI or smth.
UBI is only necessary when two things are both true:
a) wages are needed for survival; and
b) wages don't cover survival..
UBI is a mitigation of a widespread disaster, not a solution in and of itself. The real solution is ensuring that basic survival is ensured, with luxuries/enhanced facilities arising from at-will, fairly-negotiated labour exchange that cannot be extorted in a race-to-the-bottom.
I don't care about specifics, and i also don't think that UBI, if implemented, should cover only survival.
You don't care why UBI does or needs to exist? So you run superficial and don't care what happens as long as you don't see anything?
We already have a basic UBI, it's called govt. Our aim must be to gradually, but as much as possible, increase the coverage. Right now it doesn't cover survival. A following version might cover just survival. A later version than that may cover survival+minimum healthcare.. etc etc. It's all a gradual increment, not a thing we turn on from one day to the next; regardless of what fancy name someone puts on the project.
I said i don't care about specifics.
How in the world govt = universal basic income?
There is also no reason for it to necessarily be a gradual increment. A lot of things in this world happen overnight.
edit: also, i'm in europe. So "minimum healthcare" sounds outlandish to me. Like why "minimum"? Just do normal universal healthcare.
How in the world is govt *not* UBI?
Ask yourself what you think UBI actually is? It's a system whereby the govt provides a reasonable minimum level of service/support to meet basic needs. Well.. that's exactly what govt is by definition. The fact that we know the term in a monetary context rather than social or structural, doesn't change the base operation: Govts exist to ensure a reasonable minimum standard of social functioning. A UBI payment is just a direct financial instance of that functioning.
Govts creating roads,funding hospitals and subsidising important industries - all of which are Universally avaiable and benefit everyone - is all simply Universal deployment of resources, just as products rather than financial outlays. It's exactly the same concept at the base.
Sure, we should jump to whatever level we can currently manage. But we can only jump as far as we can manage. So the question is what can we manage today? And what can we manage tomorrow? If it's different, we should again deploy what we're able to.
Yeah I'm also in Europe. The point is that, e.g. 100 years ago there wasn't 'minimum healthcare' - now there is. So the offering has gradually increased over that time - as availability has allowed it.
Stop redefining commonly used terms if you want people to understand what you're saying.
It's not "the offering". It's a fucking distribution. Governments don't create, they only distribute. People create.
What are roads, plumbing, school systems? Are they distributions? No.
*UBI* is the disguised terms. It's jsut a tiny fraction of the total govt 'offering' that you finance with your taxes.
Results of people's labor.
People both finance and build them. Government doesn't build anything, it's just a middleman that distributes common resources (and fucking sucks at it).
By that reasoning, companies don't create anything either. Projects don't create anything. Only people. True, but kinda pointless as a definition.
Govt is a project. A collective operated by the people involved. A company is also a project. Projects have deliverables, and those deliverables can be said to have been 'created' by the project.
This is kind of arbitrary, not sure what this line of thought is supposed to achieve..? Call it a different word other than 'create', if that makes you happier.. the result is the same.
But how do you get people, especially people who hate one another, to cooperate?
Well you start by asking people why they hate each other. And 99 times out of 100 it will be some artificially-constructed animosity over a historical belief or notion of ownership or righteousness. Humans don't hate by default; we learn it, and there is no intrinsic reason we should hate *anyone*.
A perception that "those guys" are "taking what is ours" is purely and completely a symptom of a scarcity-centric world, which literally could not exist if there were no perceived constant battle for survival/success (i.e. capitalism).
We live in a post scarcity world, but thats only been the case for under 50 years. Tribalism and the "us vs them" mentality is how life has been for the entirety of human civilization. I wish it could be as easy as you make it sound, but this year of organizing has proven to me just how ingrained tribalism is in us.
Convince people a demilitarized Jerusalem is best for both Isreal and Palestine. Convince them to support any solution to a hot button topic other than what they've been saying for decades.
We still die if we dont'work.
We still compete for housing, resources, food, opportunity.
That's scarcity. Not sure how else you think you're slicing it.
And that's without even mentioning the 80% of the world that doesn't live in western standards and lifestyles.
"Ingrained" is an excuse to keep teaching hatred, nothing more. Take those children and raise them in china, they will know *Exactly Nothing* of the tension and hatred between the peoples in Gaza etc. Ingrained only means that we keep passing down to the next generation; stopping it is as easy as simply *NOT TEACHING THE NEXT F***** GENERATION TO BE SO HATEFUL!* Sorry for shouting, but that's kinda the whole deal. The next generation only ever knows what they are taught. There is no 'gene memory' for hating a socially-constructed and arbitrary concept of division.
It's synthetic scarcity. Since the early 90's we became a post scarcity society. There is now more empty homes than homeless people and more food getting thrown away than gets eaten. Globally and just in the USA. There's many reasons for why various countries are under developed, most of them include corruption and tribalism.
Tribalism is a matter of nurture over nature, but so is most psychiatric issues. Nurture is a complex topic that involves alot more than just not teaching kids what you don't want them learning. Kids aren't computers, parents don't get 100% control over all input to their lives. They are children, not a build a bear.
History matters. Ignoring it makes all civilizations problems easily solvable overnight. History is as complicated and messy as the problems rooted in it.
Well yes but that's kinda exactly the point: it's artificial, yet we all still live in it. We can't suddenly decide, 'nope, not participating in this scarcity thing anymore.
That was kinda exactly the whole point of my post. We do have enough resource and production to cover everyone in the world - including all less-affluent countries. But we manufacture artifical scarcity so that leaders can justify semi-indentured servitude.
We should absolutely learn from history. BUt we mustn't be *bound* to it.
We are more bound to history than we are bound to our parents. You can leave your family, but your past will always follow you. That leads back to my original reply.
Whats your plan?
No thats'exactly wrong. A child from Korea adopted into Denmark has exactly 0 knowledge, link, connection, influence from the original culture. History is exactly nothing on an individual level.
History f**ks up societies precisely because we go around thinking our individual organisms have some relevance that history. It's utter lunacy.
Whitewashing is a colonizing trauma unto itself. Everytime that child looks in the mirror they will know they aren't danish and they while ask why.
Thinking you need to look the same as people around you in order to be accepted is a cultural indoctrination...... as is equally the people around thinking you have to look like them in order for you to accept them.
It's divide and conquer 101.
I'm answering the nurture topic separately because this is a particular area of interest for me.
We need to think of genetics as a framework, a set of maxima and minima, while environment determines where on the ranges each characteristic falls. Not to mention, humans are supremely flexible; what may be expressed one day in one situation may be the poalr opposite, or at least vastly different, from the expression three days later under different conditions. There is no such thing in humans as a "core self"; we are **always** only a product of all three of our genetics, experience and situation. As Ive discussed elsewhere in this topic, even **walking** is not strictly hard-coded; we have to learn it; we can learn it incompletely and ineffectively; and we can forget it if we suffer damage, requiring us to re-learn it.
Perhaps the best example is language. Genetically, we have vast capabilities in terms of range of production, sounds, rhythm etc. When we're born we're capable of expressing all of it, but with traning and familiarity, we 'fix into" the subset of sounds and actions that we're exposed to during our growth. By the age of 10 or so (approx) we will never again be able to learn a language entirely and perfectly fluently; the 'internalisation' that happens that causes us to 'feel' our native language(s) is no longer possible. No chinese child has genetic propensity for Chinese; no French child has genetic propensity for French. Nurture entirely determines the final expression of our language ability.
So think of every human capacity in the same vein. Walking is an easy corrollary. We usually learn it well, and easily, and we think nothing more of it; but it's possible to lose this ability (as well as speech, for that matter) or learn it poorly, from which we stuggle to later recover.
Kids are not computers and parents don't get 100% control; but we have **so little** understanding of how this process works that really the only thing we can say with complete confidence is that it would be foolish to rule anything out. They are, in fact, build-a-bear - just infinitely more complicated. We just haven't deciphered the contructions - not by a long shot.
This is the same reason 'child prodigies' excel at things they seem to be 'natural' at - *always*, the common factors are 1) starting at a young age, and 2) significant parental encouragement at that young age. It's no coincidence for example that 'football legends' often produce football dynasties: no-one in their right mind would argue that they have a genetic disposition for football. Football is not a genetically programmable operation. ;)
Taking a child with English parents and raising him Chinese is, literally, as simple as putting him in China instead of in England. This is how we learn *everything*.
Yes, but that entirely ignores the larger historical and cultural issues. Everyone around the English kid treats him as a foreigner. English adopted kid in China knows they don't look like their adopted parents and eventually learns history. That knowledge has a huge effect.
If you want to take this all to a more meaningful level apply it to African Americans. Slaverys reverberations are still long felt and a black kids adopted by white people will have alot to think about and some unresolved anger in this late teens/early 20's.
The key there is "treats him as". He is treated according to their expectations; if they had been taught differently, he would also be treated differently.
Again, we are clearly talking about an entirely cultural/envinromental phenomenon.
My great-grandfather could have been kidnapped by sharks, raped by pigs, sold as meat to a butcher. That has exactly 0 bearing on my operation as a 20th-century organism. *Literally nothing*.
The belief that is does, is once again the poison of cultural indoctrination - 100% learned.
Your grandfathers experience may not effect you if you have no familial contact, but hos entire generations experience certainly will. I get that you are looking for simple answers, but simple answers are typically wrong for obvious reasons when you look at real world case studies.
Capitalism is good under specific circumstances
The further away from these you get the worse it gets. Healthcare has no elasticity for example.
If you're making poop emoji pillows capitalism works great. If you're making plasma screen TVs it works great. If you're trying to grow more food it works pretty well until the food companies all merge together.
If you're selling heart transplants it doesn't.
That's the defense for capitalism. It enables asynchronous cooperation networks by establishing a more generic representation of value for ease of exchange.
Solutions to what? If it's not profitable, is it fixing anything? Do people want it? If people do want it, why are they not willing or able to pay for it? Is it too expensive compared to what benefit it offers? Do people have better alternatives, already?
The number one way to get rich is to create some novel solution to a real problem that offers demonstrable value beyond what it costs.
If you can't imagine how anything could be useful if it doesn't provide profit then there is exactly 0 point to engage this dialogue. 🤡
You only think 'getting rich' is important because of our artificial scarcity.
No, really, I'm serious.
What's a solution to a real problem that you think absolutely no one would pay for?
I will give you your examples but first you are getting my spiel as to why this line of thinking is fundamentally misguided.
You come across a lion, or a dog, in a park, in an obvious state of hunger. You indicate to the animal, 'I can feed you, but you have to pay. How much is it worth to you?'
The question is nonsense because 1) the animal has no concept of 'pay', and even if it did, it literally could not pay you anything, because it cannot earn money.
Our notion of 'worth' only exists because we raise people in a society that teaches them that everything has a cost; that everything must be an exchange, and that you will get nothing for free.
Cats and dogs don't have that concept. Their entire existance is getting things for free, enabled by us, without complaint - so we fully understand the concept. You might argue, 'well they give us something in return!', and yes, they do - but not *consciously*, and _we_ are deciding the terms of that bargain entirely on our own.
Our understanding of the transactional nature of our society is the source of anything being "worth" anything. Ask a Kenyan tribesman to pay a toll to cross a bridge, he will look at you as perplexed as the dog did.
People "will" pay to have their problems solved because that's the only means we currently know of for solving problems. It used to be that cooperation and joint manpower was the necessary item. Hell, that's literally what the foundation of society is: co-operation for the betterment of everyone. Your question is essentially asking, "If you convince people that the only way to get something is to sing, tell me something you want, that you wouldn't sing for. It is a nonsenical position to take.
=>> Now to your question. What's a solution to a problem that no-one will pay for?
Well the obvious one is medicine. In every other country in the world, healthcare is provided by the state. No-one pays for it and people would be aghast at being asked to do so; *except*, of course, in countries where people grow up expecting to pay for the ability to get treatment. And quite literally people die because they don't have sufficient means to acquire said treatment. Which is even worse, because they are rejecting the service not because they don't want it, but because they want it, but cannot afford it.
Another example is education, for the exact same reason as above.
Another example is literally every societal problem that is not currently being funded. It's not being funded because the bean counters did the math and decided that it wouldn't be profitable. Go to any country with broken roading, missing signage, potholes, insuffuicient flood drainage, deiapidated infrastructure not being repaired, ineffective street cleaning.. hell even teachers are underfunded in the vast majority of the world.
I was going to add 'breathing clean air and water', but obviously people can be made to pay for that too if you give them no choice.
And let's not even get started on the US drug industry. "Medications" built for calming of symptoms, but not for actually treating the condition. Because curing sickness isn't profitable; repeat customers are. Would the people pay for a solution if there was one? Of course, but that doesn't serve the purposes of the service provider.
The value to a society of addressing in issue is **not** how much profit it makes the person providing the solution. At least, it shouldn't be. It should be measured by how many lives are better off as a result. People can't ask for solutions they don't know exist.
I do not want to devalue the length and thought put into you spiel, let me start with that. I actually really enjoy these kinds of deeper conversations with differing perspectives, and I appreciate the time and thought you put into this.
Your example of domesticated animals rings a little hollow, because a big reason why animals are largely subject to the will of humanity is because they lack the same cooperative mechanisms, such as money. In the wild, cooperation is rare, and violence is far more common. In comparison, domesticated animals are both greatly advantaged, in that their usefulness to us means we are also heavily invested in their survival, as well as them now being heavily dependent on us, as many will no longer survive without human intervention. They lack any conception of money, but the ones we successfully domesticate still have some necessary conception of cooperation, which is the underlying essence of money.
Even tribal societies often have currency, and it's a little perplexing that you seem to suggest a more "primitive" human can't even conceptualize the concept, yet you are also arguing against it's efficacy for cooperation. Our economic systems have evolved a lot, but the idea of currency, abstract units of value to provide easier trading over bartering, is surprisingly old, as well as ubiquitous.
Your two examples of things people won't pay for being education and medicine are genuinely shocking. You don't think well sourced, expertly taught knowledge and life saving medication are worth paying for? And, beyond even that, even if you genuinely believed that, the whole of society simply disagrees with you.
Medical debt and student loan debt are arguably some of the most commonly held forms of debt, and while we can argue about if this money was spent effectively and if the products are of appropriate quality, it simply is not up for debate that people are unwilling to spend their own money on it, and thus the systems are not profitable. Not buying these two things could alter your entire life path or even cut it short, there is really no rational reason to believe profit can't be made selling it.
(Also, countries where it is provided by the state are a bit of a non sequitur, because 1: They DO pay for it, it's just involuntary through taxes, and 2: it's quite possibly the exact opposite of an argument that people would be willing to pay for it, given they are and have established it as a basic expectation of every capable citizen.)
I genuinely think you need to reconsider how you view things like "profit", because I think you have some very serious misconceptions that are causing you to reach some really wild conclusions. A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved, and I don't think you have properly diagnosed the problem. There is plenty of willingness to purchase education and medicine, and you even accidentally admit as much:
We are still, unfortunately, talking at somewhat crossed-purposes.
We built a society that demands payment/exchange for every activity. This is fundamentally necessary *in our case* because we created a society based on scarcity, and limited demand.
My base position is that cooperation of 8 billion people would lead to solutions that entirely negate the existence of scarcity. You are not wrong that looking back on our history, you find repeated examples and mirrors of things we still do today. OK, but so what? Past performance is no guarantee of future utility. The whole reason we have such discussions is to locate alternative ideas that may lead to a development that renders some such historical feature to, well, the pages of history.
Economic trade and a survival imperative based on scarcity are a *current* feature of our society, but they are by no means a *necessary* or even natural one. We literally don't even have real scarcity; we have *constructed* scarcity in order to maintain the economic order.
So while we can probably agree that in our current social infrastructure, anything that is worth having, is worth paying for, that does nothing to address the easily-imaginable scenario whereby simply replacing food production costs with autonomous free labour in the way of robotics, we remove the scarcity component of survival and suddenly "value" takes on an entirely different meaning. It does nothing to argue "but today people will pay for it" when the effects of undermining basic need are untold and essentially unimaginable for people who have only ever known a scarcity-based situation.
It's like telling an english speaker, 'ok speak chinese now'. We know they have the capacity for it; all humans are born with the same language capacity after all. But the exact nature of their language capacity has been strongly moulded based on the environment they were raised in. They can now no longer even acquire the ability to speak Chinese to a fully fluent, native-sounding degree. This is because skills learned completely, embed into our being and are essentially 'assimilated', while skills learned partially remain superficial and conscious.
So imagine all food is harvested and transported by robots, and all housing and infrastructure is constructed and maintained by robots. You literally have no obligation to do *anything* except occupy your days in whatever way you see fit. *Now* how much is a 40-hr week "worth" to you? How much is it worth to spend 70% of the week away from your children and partner(s)? It would still make sense to devise industries that allow people to commit their time for practical advantage and personal gain; however the operations that would be avaiable would literally be limited to those that hold a fundamental value in human life outside of personal gain (otherwise no-one would reward the production of the service).
In such a situation, no-one would be willing to pay for something that they have expected to receive as a natural course of existing. I guess the same can be said of children coming of age; realising that everything they had obtained up to the point of leaving home was financed by parents (likely they realised a bit earlier...), while an unavoidable progression at present, is still always met with something like disbelief and/or resistance; if for nothing else other than the mere realisation that things were not as they first seemed. But such a child would of course happily continue existing with everything being provided without question, were such thing a possibiity - as evidenced by the countless trust-fund-babies who live lives of opulence without ever dreaming of stepping foot in a trade school, much less a remunerated profession.
I understand what you are saying about future possibilities neither being fully predictable nor representative of the current status quo, but you are jumping a billion lightyears ahead of the topic while acting as if this is drilling back down to basics.
Here's the problem: You are talking about far flung hypotheticals and high concept ideas that rely on fundamental assumptions about reality. Such things might - MIGHT - be feasible if all those fundamentals are correct, even though that might not necessarily be the case for a variety of reasons. But if even some of those necessary fundamentals are wrong, talking about post scarcity via full automation or the study of languages are completely and utterly moot. It's all built on falsehoods and will collapse when colliding with a reality which exists on different principles.
That's why I'm focusing on this one, individual claim you made: that a solution exists which can't generate profit. Not that people sometimes profit off of negative things. Not that some countries diffuse their costs through different models. Specifically, I'm contesting the idea of solutions that are somehow desperately needed, but unprofitable. It is something you said was easy to imagine, but which I can't imagine at all, because I see profit as one of the most objective indicators of need.
Your two answers were education and medicine. People profit off of providing medicine. People profit off of providing education. This happens at multiple levels and through varying institutions all across the globe, and though results may vary, if we are only addressing if profit is possible when providing adequate solutions in these areas, it's indisputable that these solutions are profitable.
We can continue if you convince me otherwise on this point, or if you concede. In either case, we would then be on the same page. But until one of those things happen, it's pointless to proceed when we are speaking two different languages that assume entirely different things about reality.
The problem with your objection to education and medicine is that, precisely, they don't *need* to be profit-generating; and never were, for the longest time in our history - they were instead subsidised by our collective insitiutions. We have made them profit-bearing, now, as a result of our continued march into abject economic servitude. This certainly doesn't justify it, and in fact is exactly the problem: things that we consider, as humans, to have fundamental rights to receive (education, good health) are now being withheld behind a paywall. That's a definite step backwards.
People create enterprises out of these services precisely because we have constructed an economy that requires people to be remunerated for their labour. There is literally nothing about healing or teaching that intrinsically requires a transaction for the act of healing or teaching. That is entirely a social construction.
To argue that we can find these things in profit-bearing guises, is a refelction of the system we live in, not of the nature of the activity.
"If profit is possible" is the exact wrong way to approach any scenario.
Who said anything about need to be? I said they are, or can be, as needed, and that attribute is a major indicator that they are valid solutions to real problems. They have enough demand that one could make profit off them, and that's entirely separate from if someone decides to build another Trump University cash grab, or provide the education for free at their own expense. That part is entirely a personal choice, and is no way hindered by other people making their own, similar choices.
Is this your roundabout way of agreeing with me? That education and medicine are profitable, and there are no solutions that come to mind which are not profitable?
Good things are done DESPITE capitalism, not because of.
That cannot be said categorically. Some are direct results, even if unintended or not specifically desired. This is still 'as a result of', not an 'in spite of'.
The 'in spites' may well outnumber the 'as a result of'; I would certainly find that believable. What's surely not correct however is to state categorically one way or the other that *every* outcome is uniform.
Unfortunately, it’s not in our nature to be sharing and caring about everyone. Capitalism works as well as it does because it allows a place for our greedy behaviour. We are greedy assholes. Give the power and opportunity, every one of us would gladly put our share of the labour onto others. If you won the lotto l, would you keep working? Hell no. We would let others toil to build us things, bring us food etc.
This is why communism historically goes hand in hand with authoritarianism: we need to be threatened by violence and imprisonment to behave this way. Meanwhile, those at the top end up corrupt as fuck. They were given the power and opportunity to take a little more for themselves and they took it. You would too. We all would. Because we are greedy assholes. Your genetics don’t care about what’s fair or just. Survival is what’s important to our deepest nature. We are the progeny of those that stood on the bodies of others to reach the higher fruits.
It’s bleak, but it true.
Any system we try to dream up that doesn’t appreciate at its core that we are greedy assholes is destined to fail. As it’s a fantasy with no place in reality. Yes, we need to strive to do better. But we need to first come to terms with what we are before we can grow from that.
Capitalism literally enables and incentivizes and generates our cynicism for change and our greed and desperation for money at every turn as a self sustaining mechanism. There’s nothing that natural about this kind of misanthropic alienation that you are speaking from given that it’s an incredibly recent invention relative to our entire hominid evolution. Civilization itself was literally only made possible through our cooperation with each other as a highly social tribal species. One that even in the cave-dwelling days cared for the sick and the old that couldn’t forage for themselves, one that for thousands of years raised children communally and often becomes depressed and psychotic when deprived completely of contact with other thinking beings.
We can only survive together. The current course of more alienation, more division, more American Psycho style behavior, is literally killing us by the billions and for zero justifiable reason. The 1% aren’t even exactly happy or prospering under it either, it’s just all they know to be because it got them that far and they carry your bleak mindset.
Communism has nothing to do with authoritarianism other than the buzzwords and the themes being used as an enticing rhetoric tool for people pretending to stand for common interests just chasing their own power. Which, of course. No one sells a bad thing to you by saying ‘this is going to be bad’. They bait and switch you by advertising kittens and rainbows and just a little bit of racial animus for a treat and then delivering more controlling hierarchical bs. Those regimes were less socialist than North Korea is democratic. Even the Nazis adopted the faux left-mimicking rhetoric of populism only to turn around and privatize the hell out of their own systems.
Communism is an economic theory. Capitalism is an economic theory. You can have any combination of economic structure and political structure you want, we've just only ever seen one type of attempt at something like communism. Authoritarianism is bad regardless of the economic structure the society has. Communism or capitalism may not be inherently good or bad under different circumstances. The hyper capitalism or late stage capitalism or capitalism where a democracy has degraded into an oligarchy is something that's pretty bad and that's where we are right now.
Well communism, like, the actual classless nationless society idea doesn’t have the material conditions to really be an obtainable target in any of our lifetimes and probably not for a few lifetimes. It’s like any vision of utopia is- more like an abstraction to keep in mind regarding what direction you’re trying to push in today.
Capitalism was the next more preferred alternative for its time after feudalism and slavery, but now we’re running up to the actual tail ends of where capitalism leads and it apparently snakes back around to awfully closely resembling the prior systems it usurped. There’s a ton of Marxist and other analysis behind why that is and one of the tl/dr versions of it can be that what it failed to do was fundamentally restructure the hierarchies that power naturally pools into when the means of production are not actually controlled by the majority who run them. Democracy and capitalism coexist swimmingly…… to a point. And only to a point. Past that point? Things start getting really ugly and really quickly.
While true that our civilisations only were created through cooperation thats still too simple. Yes, we cooperated. But we cooperated with people within or close enough to our tribe in order to fend off outsiders or gain something for ourselves. Even within our societies there have always been fights - fights for power, fights for resources, fights for influence - because humans aren't inherently peaceful and that far outdates any kind of capitalism or socialism or whatever. Communism is and will always be an utopia even though I like the general idea of it. It's the same with peace people that think when we demilitarize our countries there'll be no more war. But at some point someone will come around and bully you into whatever he wants if you don't want or can't fight back
Yeah, I get this. Tribalism and murder and exploitation of our own and other species were also ingrained strategies in us that facilitated our dominance over our competition and predators too. My original point was more in the slapping down of this knee-jerk “nothing matters why even try we’re all horrible anyway” or “the concept of original sin but without the religion” misanthropy that really grinds my gears. The really special thing about us is not that we don’t have same flaws as the screaming cannibal chimpanzees we share so much dna with, but we have the miraculous privilege and burden of our rational abilities to actually acknowledge, analyze, and try to direct those tendencies and biases in less self-destructive ways.
We, collectively, learn and adapt, and it made civilization itself possible in spite of the worst within us. And we have to keep doing that forever to keep civilization from collapsing as a whole experiment. You know no other species on the planet actually engages in third party punishment? Humans invented the idea of correcting others for violating norms when it doesn’t even hurt you individually (imprisoning a thief who robs your neighbor but has never wronged you). That’s gotta count for something pretty neat.
it is entirely natural. look around you. we don't live in a world awash with altruism. human exploitation is a recurring theme throughout all of history. if this wasn't our nature, how did we get here? you can see an entire history of the oppressed throwing off their opressors - then installing the same system again with themselves as the benefactors. the landlords/capitalist class etc aren't aliens imposing their crazy unnatural system on us; they're humans. we did this. this world we live in is of our making. the 1% are just people who were given the power and opportunity to be where they are.
our greed and shittiness came first. we built around it.
when you go shopping and you see a nice pair of shoes that are cheap, this is you being given the power an opportunity to be the benefactor of human exploitation. and if you need shoes, or even just WANT shoes, you'll take that opportunity.
give us some examples where communism has worked long term for a group of more than, let's say 60 people. give us an example of where it wasn't hand in hand with authoritarianism. if it would work so well, why aren't we doing it?
the system you want to create doesn't just need to work for everyone actively contributing and sharing. it needs to work for the people who would actively seek to exploit it to their own advantage. those people aren't going to just go away when your new system is implemented - unless you imprison or murder them.
Hell yes I'd keep working!
Now, I wouldn't do some soul-crushing "job". But would I continue to work on open-source projects that I thought might be useful to people, and maybe even use some of those lottery winnings to help fund ones that I think are particularly cool? You bet I would.
I would find that far more satisfying than just sitting on a beach all day or something. Now, sure, I might occasionally sit on a beach, or go see places I've always wanted to see, but I wouldn't want just that to be the rest of my life.
I would do work that I actually enjoy and is actually useful, rather than to "make the quarterly numbers". But you better believe I would still be working.
And that's not just me. Hell, look at Linus Torvalds. He's not as rich as Bill Gates, but he could live very comfortably without ever doing a bit of work again. Yet, he continues to help build and maintain the Linux kernel. He doesn't have to. He'll still have a place to live and food to eat if he stops today. But he still does it.
i would make bonsai trees all day. and that helps nobody
Well that's very nice. Not everyone is like you. Many of us like to know that we've helped someone.
But even that hobby could be helpful. Maybe you could teach a bonsai class at a library, or more generally volunteer to help people learn gardening.
Look at the room around you. You’re surrounded by stuff made in sweat shops or underpaid third world workers. All of your clothing, electronics, everything. You’re not carrying your fair share of the labour for any of that. You are the benefactor of human suffering and exploitation. Winning the lottery and spending time doing interesting projects isn’t going to increase your share of the labour that goes into providing the lifestyle you live in. And funding those things with the money you would have from the lotto doesn’t increase your share of the labour either.
Yeah we evolved in a social environment where we have a better chance for survival when we're part of a community and helping one another, but we have the best chance of survival when we are a selfish person within a community like that where we can cooperate enough or manipulative enough or subtle enough to stay part of the group.
Intelligent adults can recognize their own flaws and the places where they've made mistakes and grow from their past. We need to find a way not to play into the negative parts of our psychological makeup that made our individual survival more likely as a way to motivate productivity, but to tap into the more positive aspects of it. It's much harder from my perspective to do in a large community because you lose that connection. If you have a disabled child, a grandparent that helped raise you and is now unable to care for themselves, even someone you went and fought to get food alongside that got injured you're a lot more likely to care for them than if you have no connection to the person on disability that your tax dollars are going to support. Recognizing and accepting our nature is the first step though to starting to try and find solutions and the change happens one person at a time.
For as long as we actively promote that selfish nature in us we are going to have a hard time building something that promotes the good in us.
This is exactly what I’m saying. We can’t pretend like we are good people because it’s the right thing to do. We need to identify and accept that we are greedy assholes first. We can’t start from a point of fantasy and try build from there. We need to start at where we are in reality and build from there.
See the whole big problem with everything you’re saying is we’re not “greedy assholes”, we are self-interested apes that also possess skills of cooperation and coordinated action unmatched by anything else in the entire animal kingdom save ants. And the good news is that the things I want to push for are better for you AND me in the long run. It’s not a zero sum game but again, capitalism literally has its own vested interest in making sure it’s difficult for you to conceive of any way to live that isn’t one.
Communism ends up with a labour class that carries all the work while the elite few at the top get to live lavish lifestyles while doing no work. Sound familiar? It’s the same cat skinned differently. Both end up with a majority of people doing a majority of the work earning just barely enough to survive so we can work more. All our systems end up at the same outcome because it’s our nature to push it to this scenario. How else did every culture on earth end up at the same conclusion?
No person who actually studies political theory calls that communism except authoritarians who are trying to sell you a bridge.
Thats why I ditch the bs and just call regimes like the USSR state capitalist or red-fasc empires that weaponized and then hijacked the momentum of pre-existing socialist interest in their populations. Lenin probably at least believed in what he was doing but definitely screwed the pooch with the vanguardism stuff. Even the Nazis pretended to be populist on the campaign trail and then aligned with capital and privatized the shit out of their public industries at first opportunity. Fast forward to the modern GOP basically following the same paint by numbers. It’s a very, very old playbook.
Your last two sentences though, literal vibe-take and generalizing. “Well here’s where we ended up ergo it’s our fundamental nature” what kind of evo-psych thought train is that? Staying awake after sundown is deeply against our actual observable biology and yet it’s also become a modern norm to doomscroll at 3 in the morning. Multiple conflicting material conditions and our ingrained responses to them can be at play at the same time. Plus natural doesn’t even immediately mean inevitable or good. It took us millennia to start making genuine widescale attempts at democracy as a political concept and I don’t give a shit if that was against nature or not, I think it was fundamentally a better direction for us ethically and materially than to cling to older systems like monarchal feudalism.
I mean you also haven’t tried to ask out once what my actual positions here are. I don’t even adopt communist as a label, but if you think I want to snap my fingers and suddenly everyone just basket weaves and does book club all day and magically all the food still gets made and all the sewers clean themselves like, obviously it’s not that.
I never advocated that it was good. It just is. Good and bad are just intangible inventions. And are more opinion than universal truths.
Communism as a theory looks great on paper but the execution is never in line with the intentions. Same goes for capitalism or socialism. As well as political structures like democracy or feudalism or any of the isms. In the end, our nature corrupts the ideas and it all degenerates into what it always degenerates into.
We learn everything.
We learn to walk. We learn to speak. We learn to be selfish.
Capitalism and selfishness reinforce each other so that we believe it's a natural progression. But if we had created a different society we would simply believe that that was the natural order of humanity instead.
Humans learn what we're taught and we learn selfishness for survival because we live in a scarcity-induced capital system that pits individuals against each other. And who would be the only ones who benefit from artificial scarcity (it's artificial, because we know we have more than enough food and resources to supply every human on the planet... )? We only have scarcity because people with influence wanted a way to justify their selfishness.
Selfishness isn’t just learned. It’s in our genetics. Genetics who are predisposed to sharing everything - guess where those are? Extinct. The selfish took everything they had and left them to starve.
Capitalism and communism end up at the same place: an elite few who get to sit back and do no labour while the lower classes toil away to provide them a lifestyle they will never have the chance of seeing. Under communism, this is corruption. Under capitalism, it’s celebrated. They’re both just different ways to skin the same cat.
That's exactly what they want you to think. 🙄
Listen. Walking is not even genetic, we have to learn that too - and we can forget it.
Genetics don't mean shit. If they did we'd still be raping and eating meat raw. And yet here we are discussing communism and capitalism. 🤷🏻♀️
The idea that something that worked 100,000 generations ago to get us eventually where we are today, must therefore be the one and only true possible future for humanity, is utterly absurd. Our whole existence is based on adaptability, not instinct. Selfishness worked in primitive times, just like rape did. Today we have better options.
Who is they? Other humans? Again, the landlords/capitalist class etc aren’t some aliens that are subjugating us to unnatural ways of living. They’re us. They’re people. Don’t think for one second that your lifestyle isn’t provided by the exploitation of others. You’re one of “them.” When you buy clothing, electronics shoes etc, you’re being one of “them” exploiting others for your own benefit. Look at the room around you and the things you own. Do you honestly think you carried your fair share of the labour that went into producing that?
Your comments on scarcity are missing the point. It’s not a resource scarcity or perceived scarcity that drives this. It’s labour. We want to enjoy a lifestyle and have benefits that we don’t want to share the labour costs of.
Also, we don’t need to be taught how to walk. We do that naturally. Toddlers start practicing standing and walking long before they have any idea what they’re being told and before they even have any concept of permanence. That’s wired behaviour.
When raised amongst people doing the same. That's imitation. 🙄
Feral children raised by animals generally don't learn to walk upright, and if they are later reintegrated into society, they still never learn to walk naturally.
Walking is learned. Everything is learned.
Feral children raised by animals? Like in the jungle book? There are like 2 plausible stories of this ever happening in history. And they can walk upright.
The only way to study true 'free of society' situations is to study the ones who literally grew up without society. Without that control there is literally no assertion you can make.
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Documented Cases of Feral Children Studied in Relation to Locomotion
The most frequently studied and relatively well-documented cases of feral (or severely isolated) children where locomotion and reintegration outcomes are discussed include the following. Note that "feral" often overlaps with severe neglect/abuse rather than literal animal rearing.
Victor of Aveyron (France, discovered ~1800, aged ~12): Allegedly lived wild in forests.
Amala and Kamala (Midnapore, India, discovered 1920, aged ~1.5 and ~8): Allegedly raised by wolves (widely considered a hoax or exaggeration).
Oxana Malaya (Ukraine, discovered 1991, aged 8): Neglected and lived with dogs.
Genie (USA, discovered 1970, aged 13): Severely confined and abused (isolated, not wild/animals, but classified as feral due to extreme deprivation).
Other cases like John Ssebunya (Uganda, monkeys) or Marina Chapman (Colombia, monkeys) are mentioned in literature but less rigorously documented for motor outcomes.
Summary of Success in Developing Upright Walking After Reintegration
Outcomes for upright (bipedal) walking vary based on age at rescue, duration of deprivation, preexisting conditions (e.g., disabilities), and intervention. Human bipedalism has a biological basis but requires practice and social modeling during critical early years; prolonged quadrupedal movement or confinement can lead to muscular/joint adaptations that hinder full recovery.
Victor of Aveyron: Initially moved chaotically, trotting or on all fours. After years of education and therapy, he learned to walk upright with a more normal (though not perfect) gait, showing moderate success through persistent training.
Amala: Died shortly after rescue (~1 year); no significant progress in upright walking reported (remained quadrupedal).
Kamala: Initially exclusively on all fours (knees/palms calloused). After several years, she learned to walk upright to some extent (noted progress by 1926), but gait was awkward/unsteady; she often reverted to quadrupedal movement for speed. Partial success, limited by possible underlying underdevelopment.
Oxana Malaya: Crawled/barked like a dog initially. After rescue and therapy, she learned to walk upright as her primary gait, speaking fluently and living semi-independently; occasional reversion to all fours when alone/stressed, but overall high success.
Genie: Due to prolonged confinement (strapped to potty chair), had weak muscles and a characteristic "bunny hop" gait (hands forward like claws, hesitant/shuffling). Improved somewhat with therapy but never achieved fully normal upright walking; remained unsteady with poor endurance and integration of sensory/motor skills.
Overall Patterns Across Cases:
Children rescued younger or with shorter deprivation (e.g., Oxana) showed greater success in adopting upright walking, often becoming functional bipeds.
Older rescues or longer periods of atypical locomotion/confinement (e.g., Kamala, Genie) had partial or limited success: awkward gaits, reversion under stress, or persistent abnormalities.
Full, fluid bipedalism was rare if deprivation extended past early childhood critical periods (~age 5–7 for motor refinement).
Success depended on intensive rehabilitation; without it, quadrupedal preferences persisted.
Confounding factors (e.g., potential neurodevelopmental issues preexisting abandonment) often limited outcomes, highlighting that bipedalism is partly learned/socially reinforced despite biological predisposition.
So yep. It's learned.