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It's almost like our social bonds are being broken in the same way chemical bonds get broken when we digest food. Like our capitalist society is a higher-order

It's almost like our social bonds are being broken in the same way chemical bonds get broken when we digest food. Like our capitalist society is a higher-order organism that is extracting energy from our societal bonds.

codetrotter 7y ago
I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted. Sun Tzu wrote about humans acting as a bigger organism when an army work together as one. And with that in mind, and with your comment on top of that, I wonder: We generally agree that self-awareness is a sign of general intelligence, right? So if a group of people see them selves as one, in some sense, and act as one in some sense, then could we say that we are witnessing an organism that is built from people and that is elevated over the mind of just each of the individual people? In the same way that we people are made of what I will very scientifically refer to as “a bunch of smaller stuff” but yet we are more than just the individual bits of stuff we are made of because as a whole each of us have our self-awareness and all that. That is, something of higher general intelligence than its parts.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  > I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted. Many HN users seem to have a strong knee-jerk reaction against criticism of capitalism, however gentle or thoughtful.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Well perhaps the issue is that the comment had no justification to attach it to capitalism? Capitalism has been around much longer than the decline of these social bonds.
    - spappletrap 7y ago
      Has it though? The roman empire was a command economy, but there are obvious vestiges of the empire in our society still
adamrezich 7y ago
Not saying capitalism is devoid of fault but it seems like consumerism is more directly to blame
- Kaze404 7y ago
  Isn't consumerism caused by capitalism?
  - rayiner 7y ago
    No?
    - claudiawerner 7y ago
      Consumerism, at the least, is dependent on capitalism's core feature, generalized commodity production. So far, that seems true - was there any consumerism in pre-capitalist societies? I'd hazard a guess and say no. If consumerism is further driven by advertising, it depends on capitalism even more. This paper[0] persausively argues that consumerism is a consequence of specifically capitalist society, considered in its historical development. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog099 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978047067059...
      - rexpop 7y ago
        I find it so difficult to understand the mental gymnastics necessary to "shift blame" over certain types of suffering from "capitalism" to "consumerism" or "cronyism" as though those ideologies (and accompanying institutions) were independent tragedies, liable to manifest in any cultural substrate. There's no cancer in bricks, and no commodity fetishism in a socialist economy. edit: truly bewildering to me folks think they're doing a service to themselves of their society by silently downvoting me.
        kick 7y ago
        News Guidelines: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Commenting on votes will only make you get downvoted more, regardless of how virtuous your comment was.
rexpop 7y ago
What a fascinating analogy. There's certainly a well-explored conception of Capitalism's benefiting from particularly "alienating social relations," but as I conceive if it, that benefit's not so much about deriving "energy" from breaking social bonds, as it is about lowering the cost of coercion. After all, social bonds can give us the self-confidence to stand up to our bosses orders, and to re-organize our work along lines less profitable to them and more profitable to, e.g. our church, community, family, selves, etc. Is the Firm energized by alienating one worker from another? Is there, from that event, free energy? I don't think so. In fact, it's energetically costly to dis-organize social bonds, but for the Firm it's an investment in a more alienated--and therefore more vulnerable--future workforce. If the firm extracted energy from social bonds, it would collect well-bonded groups, and "spend" them. Oh, wait. That's what acquisitions do, isn't it?
- edflsafoiewq 7y ago
  It's a commonplace today that people are defined by what they choose to consume; that one asserts their personal identity by what brands they buy and what media they watch. The ones who are selling membership in these "sub-cultures" therefore stand to gain from the destruction of any form of belongingness that they cannot sell as a commodity.
  - rexpop 7y ago
    > people are defined by what they choose to consume And are they not, also, affected by what they do not choose but nonetheless consume?
fipar 7y ago
I think that’s spot on and relates with what I understood after reading Pirsig’s “Lila: An inquiry into morals”, where he talks about inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual patterns, when introducing his Metaphysics of Quality[1]. Capitalism would be a social pattern that is made of us, as we’re made of our cells. And just the same, what’s best for the organism as a whole does not have to be the best for a specific individual cell. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Quality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qu...
jmastrangelo 7y ago
But a central tenet of Communism was dismantling all other social structures like religion. Modern technology under capitalism may be destroying these social structures over time, but communism did actively. This whole comment just reeks of fanciful anti-capitalism with little real substance.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  Pretending that the only alternative to modern capitalism is full-on Soviet-style communism does no one any good.

codetrotter 7y ago

I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted. Sun Tzu wrote about humans acting as a bigger organism when an army work together as one. And with that in mind, and with your comment on top of that, I wonder: We generally agree that self-awareness is a sign of general intelligence, right? So if a group of people see them selves as one, in some sense, and act as one in some sense, then could we say that we are witnessing an organism that is built from people and that is elevated over the mind of just each of the individual people? In the same way that we people are made of what I will very scientifically refer to as “a bunch of smaller stuff” but yet we are more than just the individual bits of stuff we are made of because as a whole each of us have our self-awareness and all that. That is, something of higher general intelligence than its parts.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
> I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted. Many HN users seem to have a strong knee-jerk reaction against criticism of capitalism, however gentle or thoughtful.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Well perhaps the issue is that the comment had no justification to attach it to capitalism? Capitalism has been around much longer than the decline of these social bonds.
  - spappletrap 7y ago
    Has it though? The roman empire was a command economy, but there are obvious vestiges of the empire in our society still

adamrezich 7y ago

Not saying capitalism is devoid of fault but it seems like consumerism is more directly to blame

Kaze404 7y ago
Isn't consumerism caused by capitalism?
- rayiner 7y ago
  No?
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    Consumerism, at the least, is dependent on capitalism's core feature, generalized commodity production. So far, that seems true - was there any consumerism in pre-capitalist societies? I'd hazard a guess and say no. If consumerism is further driven by advertising, it depends on capitalism even more. This paper[0] persausively argues that consumerism is a consequence of specifically capitalist society, considered in its historical development. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog099 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978047067059...
    - rexpop 7y ago
      I find it so difficult to understand the mental gymnastics necessary to "shift blame" over certain types of suffering from "capitalism" to "consumerism" or "cronyism" as though those ideologies (and accompanying institutions) were independent tragedies, liable to manifest in any cultural substrate. There's no cancer in bricks, and no commodity fetishism in a socialist economy. edit: truly bewildering to me folks think they're doing a service to themselves of their society by silently downvoting me.
      - kick 7y ago
        News Guidelines: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Commenting on votes will only make you get downvoted more, regardless of how virtuous your comment was.

rexpop 7y ago

What a fascinating analogy. There's certainly a well-explored conception of Capitalism's benefiting from particularly "alienating social relations," but as I conceive if it, that benefit's not so much about deriving "energy" from breaking social bonds, as it is about lowering the cost of coercion. After all, social bonds can give us the self-confidence to stand up to our bosses orders, and to re-organize our work along lines less profitable to them and more profitable to, e.g. our church, community, family, selves, etc. Is the Firm energized by alienating one worker from another? Is there, from that event, free energy? I don't think so. In fact, it's energetically costly to dis-organize social bonds, but for the Firm it's an investment in a more alienated--and therefore more vulnerable--future workforce. If the firm extracted energy from social bonds, it would collect well-bonded groups, and "spend" them. Oh, wait. That's what acquisitions do, isn't it?

edflsafoiewq 7y ago
It's a commonplace today that people are defined by what they choose to consume; that one asserts their personal identity by what brands they buy and what media they watch. The ones who are selling membership in these "sub-cultures" therefore stand to gain from the destruction of any form of belongingness that they cannot sell as a commodity.
- rexpop 7y ago
  > people are defined by what they choose to consume And are they not, also, affected by what they do not choose but nonetheless consume?

fipar 7y ago

I think that’s spot on and relates with what I understood after reading Pirsig’s “Lila: An inquiry into morals”, where he talks about inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual patterns, when introducing his Metaphysics of Quality[1]. Capitalism would be a social pattern that is made of us, as we’re made of our cells. And just the same, what’s best for the organism as a whole does not have to be the best for a specific individual cell. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Quality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qu...

jmastrangelo 7y ago

But a central tenet of Communism was dismantling all other social structures like religion. Modern technology under capitalism may be destroying these social structures over time, but communism did actively. This whole comment just reeks of fanciful anti-capitalism with little real substance.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Pretending that the only alternative to modern capitalism is full-on Soviet-style communism does no one any good.