cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/35986695
Who do you think made capitalism? Space aliens?
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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We live in a religious society that promotes a culture of bigotry. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame bigots?
We live in a patriarchal society that doesn’t take violence against women seriously. Does this mean that wife beaters aren’t to blame?
We live in a capitalist society that promotes selfishness and greed. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame selfish people? (Which is most of them.)
We live in a racist society… etc.
You are responsible for your actions and your beliefs. Step one to improving our society is accepting the reality that most humans have a poor (nearly non-existent) relationship with morality. They’re easily swayed by fallacious arguments because they are irrational and stupid. These are empirical facts about human beings that we ignore (with memes like this) at our own peril.
We should blame religion, patriarchy, racism and capitalism.
Trying to be as moral as possible will leave you alone and depressed. Hell even doing bare minimal stuff like not traveling much or not killing animals for your taste buds makes you an outsider and those are only two small things (nearly) everyone could without much struggle.
Humans are not able to be rational beings as we run quite literally on emotions and a lack of those does not leave us super smart and efficient but friggin depressed and in dire need of help.
Yeah but... Humans created capitalism, so again the root issue is that humans suck. Just think of it this way: No humans, no capitalism.
Humans are a product of evolution in nature. So nature sucks, right?
Nature is a product of atoms. So atoms suck, right?
Nature makes a lot of things that suck, including viruses
Point still stands. Nature doesn't owe anyone a logical explanation.
Its actually my point. Just because we dont like it, it does not mean that nature is wrong.
And it's not just capitalism, living beyond their means was rather common for many civilizations in the past and some of them paid dearly for it. And look at who ruled the area when the aral sea started to dry up, which fucked the entire area to hell. That wasn't capitalism, just a short-sighted communist (or "communist", but that definitely wasn't capitalism) regime.
It's definitely possible for humans to not suck in this aspect, but once you get to a certain level of technology and organization it gets pretty hard.
People often conflate capitalism with greed because the core of capitalism depends on people acting selfishly. But other systems can also reward the greedy.
I think it even goes beyond that. e.g. the sowjet union genuinely had issues with food security, but they still fucked up when they dried out the aral sea because they were acting shortsightedly.
For them is capitalism for other is the immigrants.
Some people just don't get nuances.
You don't need capitalism to suck, though. The Spanish conquistadores were slavers and genocidal murderers but they certainly weren't capitalists.
There's a bit of a fundamental difference between capitalism and other systems. Mercantilism sucked but conquistadors got some level of pushback for their atrocities. The Spanish crown fought a war over illegal slavery and the vast majority of conquistadors died poor or in obscurity.
Modern capitalism has no such brakes. Naked avarice is the mathematically correct play, exponentially growing the power of an individual at the expense of literally everyone else.
It's not likely that other economic systems could result in this level of global instability and ecological collapse. A king used to have some incentive to keep his society functioning; his personal power was tied to the power his kingdom could project, not his personal wealth. Our modern overlords have no problem destroying their country or environment, their wealth is fungible and can be taken wherever they want.
Every system finds ways to shift the blame. What they need are folks who drink the cool aide. Currently it‘s capitalism.
Plenty of bacteria and viruses are beneficial, and contribute to the overall health of their hosts.
If humans are diseases, then it is because through learned behaviors that we act in a deleterious manner towards the overall ecosystem. We are entirely capable of shifting those behaviors, of creating social structures that select for behaviors that promote co-existence and symbiosis with that ecosystem.
There are some symbiotic bacteria, but I'm unaware of any beneficial viruses. Their entire nature is to hijack cells to replicate themselves, typically resulting in the eventual death of the host cell.
Idk if we're gonna have fascism we might as well have eco-fascism.
But also we could have neither, fascism isn't a fatality
Redirecting blame attributable to human behavior to an abstract concept like “capitalism” is shortsighted and self-defeating. Analogously, the problem over the last 10,000 years hasn’t been slavery (the concept); the problem has been slavers.
There’s no period in human history that people weren’t unfathomably stupid, because people are literally just animals (and many would happily end the world in order to get access to cheeseburgers). They make bad choices because the average person is not capable of moral deliberation. All hyperbole aside, this is an actual empirical fact.
if the structure of society is set up in such a way that practically every action I need to take to keep myself fed and sheltered ultimately contributes to climate change, then it's fucking inane to say it is the fault of individuals being stupid.
Humans are selfish, and that’s precisely why we need an alternative to capitalism. Because if we don’t force people to act intelligently they’ll act like the animals they are and obliterate their environment until they are living on mountains of shit and corpses. This has happened throughout history over and over and over again, long before the advent of any economic ideologies.
Global warming can be fixed tomorrow if people stopped eating meat and stopped buying giant pickup trucks and stopped worshipping celebrities, and so on.
And every armed conflict in the world would end if everyone put down their guns right this instant.
We're talking about structures that reach across the globe, with a momentum that existed before either of us were born, and with a trajectory that will be traced long after we are dead. You don't shift that trajectory by Wishing Upon a Star that everyone Becomes Better overnight. That's not a practical approach.
And every armed conflict in the world would end if everyone put down their guns right this instant.
This is actually true. There’s an important lesson about human nature hidden somewhere in this sarcastic sentence.
The reason we need to get rid of capitalism is that it empowers people’s most horrible greedy impulses. However, that’s precisely because people are horrible and greedy. If people were saints, then capitalism wouldn’t matter because nobody would do dumb shit like buy pickup trucks or eat meat.
Again, long before the advent of any abstract “structures” and economic theories, before Hollywood and global communication networks, when humans were still living on random islands, they behaved like total and utter morons. They were not rational. Because 90% of humans are — and again, this is an empirical fact — incapable of moral deliberation.
That’s why we had slavery for 10,000 years. That’s why people torture billions of sentient animals to death in abattoirs every year to eat their carcasses. That’s why Donald Trump won the last election.
Because 90% of humans are — and again, this is an empirical fact — incapable of moral deliberation.
90% of humans. Really. Do you have a source for this claim?
funny you keep coming back to slavery when so much of it was justified by claiming huge chunks of people were, empirically factually, incapable of being fully human
standing in the middle of a system that incentivizes, necessitates even, that people act against our collective shared interest; a system that, half through deliberate intention and half through the selective pressure of market forces, makes sure they have just enough education to be profitable workers -- and to say, "We've always been this stupid. Just innate, innit?", well you're either missing the forest for the trees or for whatever reason you'd rather believe some people can just be written off altogether.
Also kings, gods, holocaust, slavery asf. So, we have to remind ourselves that we can take back anything we thought up. If humans are the problem it’s those that say we can’t do that.