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That is a sensible criticism. I agree that the human race is wasting absurdly vast quantities of oil and that they seem to display no more awareness of this is

That is a sensible criticism. I agree that the human race is wasting absurdly vast quantities of oil and that they seem to display no more awareness of this issue than the average monkey. I'm not sure if "capitalism" is the problem though, since greed and waste existed long before its ideas were articulated. I sometimes thing our economic system should be overhauled with better accounting techniques so we actually count the expenditure of resources as a loss rather than as a profit as we currently do, under the rather dubious assumption that more consumption is always better. I guess we'll find out how badly we have erred when the future teaches us. I hope its lessons are gentle...

gonvaled 13y ago
It has nothing to do about articulating the ideas of capitalism. Capitalism exists whether or not we articulate it , the same way that the Andromeda Galaxy existed before we saw it in our telescopes. My point is that human nature seems to be very much correlated to capitalism. And the important question is whether this is a fundamental characteristic of life, or is it just a feature of this particular version of intelligent life that we have in planet Earth? Or maybe is just a consequence of the evolution of our social system? To state it clearly: is it possible to conceive an intelligent society collaborating by other means than the ones that we are currently using? Could catastrophe be averted by working together in other ways? Are we humans at all capable of this? Currently, the answer seems to be no, but who knows.