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Thank you for replying. It's a shame any airing of concerns about capitalism per se trigger people so much. We need to air our concerns about the world in orde

Thank you for replying. It's a shame any airing of concerns about capitalism per se trigger people so much. We need to air our concerns about the world in order to discuss and hopefully solve them together. Your reply helped do that. I'm immediately convinced. OF course, socialism is just as much a machine too. So it's not the system, the problem is scale and 'overpopulation' relative to our evolutionary adaptation. Something for me to think about. I appreciate the correction.

Viliam1234 6y ago
I am happy that you found my comment somehow useful. I actually agree with lot of criticism of "capitalism", except for using the word itself, because the problems are more general than that. Marx made a lot of criticism of capitalism, and a lot of it is valid. (He underestimated the possibility of huge technological progress, but let's ignore this for the moment.) The problem was not with criticism, but with the proposed solution; the entire plan could be simply summarized as "1: socialist revolution; 2: ???; 3: all problems gone". And it turned out, you can organize a successful socialist revolution, but the problems will stay, and often get worse. Now you don't have a capitalist competing against a capitalist, but a politician competing against a politician. The workers are no longer exploited by private factories, they are exploited by state-owned factories instead. You are no longer afraid of losing your job and starving to death; you are afraid of men in dark coats knocking on your door after midnight. Your kids don't go to university not because they can't afford to pay tuition, but because they said a politically incorrect joke and someone reported them. (Not all things are the same: you probably get universal healthcare and free education, which is nice, but also universal censorship and ban on everything that was not approved by your political superiors, which sucks.) But this is even more general than politics. The best text I know written about this problem is: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ The second best is the first noble truth of Buddhism: "It sucks to be born, it sucks to become old, it sucks to get sick, it sucks to die; it sucks to not get what you want, it sucks to get what you don't want; briefly, everything you see sucks." (You can make some people applaud if you add "...in capitalism" after each clause, but that just offers a fake hope.) To really improve the world requires solving ten thousand independent problems. That is a lot of hard work. If only it was so simple that you merely need to abolish "capitalism" and then live happily ever after...

Viliam1234 6y ago

I am happy that you found my comment somehow useful. I actually agree with lot of criticism of "capitalism", except for using the word itself, because the problems are more general than that. Marx made a lot of criticism of capitalism, and a lot of it is valid. (He underestimated the possibility of huge technological progress, but let's ignore this for the moment.) The problem was not with criticism, but with the proposed solution; the entire plan could be simply summarized as "1: socialist revolution; 2: ???; 3: all problems gone". And it turned out, you can organize a successful socialist revolution, but the problems will stay, and often get worse. Now you don't have a capitalist competing against a capitalist, but a politician competing against a politician. The workers are no longer exploited by private factories, they are exploited by state-owned factories instead. You are no longer afraid of losing your job and starving to death; you are afraid of men in dark coats knocking on your door after midnight. Your kids don't go to university not because they can't afford to pay tuition, but because they said a politically incorrect joke and someone reported them. (Not all things are the same: you probably get universal healthcare and free education, which is nice, but also universal censorship and ban on everything that was not approved by your political superiors, which sucks.) But this is even more general than politics. The best text I know written about this problem is: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ The second best is the first noble truth of Buddhism: "It sucks to be born, it sucks to become old, it sucks to get sick, it sucks to die; it sucks to not get what you want, it sucks to get what you don't want; briefly, everything you see sucks." (You can make some people applaud if you add "...in capitalism" after each clause, but that just offers a fake hope.) To really improve the world requires solving ten thousand independent problems. That is a lot of hard work. If only it was so simple that you merely need to abolish "capitalism" and then live happily ever after...