On the basic problem with Capitalism (Scarcity)

youtube.com/watch?v=r4Nd2pI-JoI

The problem with Capitalism is that it will never exist. Same goes for Socialism and Communism. Sounds good in a book but all fail to tackle the problem of humans and their diversity. If people really wanted them, where are they? Also, it would require that pretty much everyone in the society would agree to that one system, that will never happen. Hence, you will always get hybrids.

The problem with all philosophical or political ideologies is their inability and ignorance of human nature. So long as the proponent of human nature isn’t discussed nothing changes under any model.

The term “human nature” is bullshit, there is no 1 human nature.

There are more common natures that humans have, but there are also less common ones - human natures vary - potentially a lot.

What does exist are a variety of not necessarily harmonious behaviours that, according to game theory, will work successfully in certain situations. Selfish behaviours that come at the expense of others/competition, which you can get away with - they work, and they will win out more than those that don’t, so they will become more common as a result. But even altruistic behaviours that come at the expense of the self can later result in cooperation more to your benefit than those who are more selfishly competitive - there is no human nature, just trends varied in type and commonality.

As such there will always be some who thrive under a more capitalist distribution of wealth, and others who wilt due to it - and vice versa to a more cooperative economy with less mandatory inbuilt competition. Interestingly, they both wilt/thrive in a compromise under a mixed economy - where nobody fully wins (hence the impossible job of the politician that necessitates lies, failure and conman talk), and the unending oscillation between two sides of some averaged out centre). A compromise in economy breeds mediocrity, which we currently offset in favour of those who thrive under competitive conditions in the usual Western economic structure. Others think it’s offset in the other direction, but this is more reflective of perception than fact.

I don’t thrive under this structure. I love competition, I really do, just not constant manditory competition for everyone’s means to live - I like to be able to choose when/where/how I compete. To me, this is far from freedom, despite all the many appreciated social freedoms that we all happen to have - making what we have “free” to me but only in this respect. This is why I side with offsetting mediocrity in favour of those who thrive under cooperative conditions - along with a great number of others who really can’t endure the needless suffering of many just so the few can win almost without restraint. I like seeing people win to this extent, but not when it comes at the cost of those who could be granted relief through the same rewards funneled so intensely to so few. We live in a world of finite resources and knowledge, even if it is expanding all the time.

People like me just happen to be outnumbered, and the reasons why, I have explained above.

I am sorry but the belief in human nature pluralism, neutrality, or relativity is BS. All animals on this planet have a specific psychological nature objectively and human beings are no different in that when reduced we’re just another animal that can be analyzed objectively. There are clear objective manifestations of human behavior or nature.

For me human beings are naturally amoral, violent, inequal, conflicting, selfish, cruel, and hyper competitive (barbaric) which can only be minimized for the sake of social cooperation in greater collective social cohesion by mitigating interventionism of the state (That should always seek enlightenment over primitive impulses.) which should aim to force people to become better improving ourselves separate from our primitive original destructive animal nature. That is why the state and civilization was created to begin with historically because our original primitive nature is self destructive that leads to nowhere especially when people are left to their own vices.

It is why today we have nothing but decline, decadence, constant disasters,and social upheaval because once you destroy the collective social cohesion of society promoting an individual self centered one where people are left freely to their own vices without some kind of higher guidance or ideal such societies are always doomed to failure.

I never listen to any individual when they say there is no objective unifying human nature because they’re either clearly lying or are too ignorant to even know what it is they’re talking about.

The choice is clear discerning our future, either we choose civilization or barbarism. Either we choose a future for all people or we choose one where a few protected individuals at the expense of all others leads us into ruin.

Personal incredulity is not an argument.

For you, everybody is hyper-competitive and barbaric.
For me, some people like myself are not.
Who is right? You “know” you are, I “know” I am. Anecdotal and subjective.

It’s an objective fact that there’s more than one way to act. Obviously.
If you don’t listen to people who say this then you’ll continue to demand that everyone acts according to the same nature regardless. Obviously.

Primitive, self-destructive nature exists. Arguably it exists in the majority of cases, arguably it’s dominant. That’s all it takes for these things to overtake the way that things tend to go - it’s not all or nothing, that’s a black and white fallacy. You need the State to moderate it whether it’s 100% of people or 51%. I’m not saying it’s 51, I’m just saying it’s not 100.

Honestly you just sound bitter and in need of such an exaggeration to justify it, even at the expense of probably plenty of people you’ve known who don’t accord to your interpretation of human nature. It’s possible, I suppose, that the occasional person somehow missed them out of bad luck, but they would be fools to conclude for certain that ALL people were such a way just because some were. Particulars are not universals.

Let’s instead look at the variety of ways in which societies and economies have conducted themselves historically in practice.

We’ve had Tribalism, we’ve had Feudalism, we’ve had Capitalism - they all involve revering the few over the many, but less and less so over time. Just extrapolate the tendency into the future. Whether or not you need to believe such a thing is out of amoral, selfish cruelty, history is telling us that at least it is becoming less so over time.

Everybody constantly partakes in social inequality or international military imperialism of the west just by living in its vicinity. Nobody is without some level of hypocrisy in being.

Those that call themselves altruistic pacifists and harmoniously peaceful are the ultimate hypocrites. If there is one thing that I cannot stand it is hypocrites.

That is our nature 100% of the time as I have outlined above and I’ve seen nothing to counter that. All other animals convey psychological behaviors that is inherent to their species objectively, human beings are no different. This whole belief human beings are somehow exceptional to the rule compared to all other species of animals is laughable. I do not share your rosy view of humanity or human nature. Less and less overtime? :laughing: I’ve never outlined a cut off point considering such behaviors are very much so persistent today.

No, I don’t believe things are getting better. If anything they’re getting worse.

Social inequality is fine. The extent to which it is currently unequal is not fine. People should be rewarded by society if they benefit it for the purposes of motivation, but not so much at the expense of those who can’t benefit it or just aren’t benefiting it - but this is happening. How do you solve this?

Well you don’t solve it by vacating its vicinity. More black and white thinking from you: you can be both supporting of customs with which you disagree by being involved in their practices, whilst also working to change them because you don’t support them. To you this is immediately dismissable as hypocrisy, and no doubt there are hypocrites who are partial to customs they think or claim they are against, but change is either going to come from the outside against the international military imperialism of the west (impossible) or from within. If you are going to choose the non-futile option, then you are going to be associated with that which you don’t support - thereby at least passively supporting it. But this is actually an advantage, because you can both take advantage of any of its relative benefits, spread your message with others as one of them, keep up to date with its machinations and develop a deep understanding of what they really are. You put yourself at a great disadvantage by dissociating yourself with which that which you don’t support - and if that makes me a hypocrite in your eyes, then I would rather be a hypocrite who was effective in undoing that which he does not support, than a non-hypocritical fool who will get nothing done in line with that which he supports. But it’s not actually hypocrisy, it’s practicality.

The only use for lumping all human nature into one maximally abstract set of behaviours is to compare us to non-human things, which you don’t even do - you count humans as no different to any other animals. You might as well use the term animal nature rather than specifically human nature, and maybe you don’t even see this nature as different to that of non-animal life: “the nature of life” is perhaps what you might as well be saying. Maybe just “nature”? Everything in nature, even the non-living is merely reacting to entropy in its own characteristic way that you might even argue is its bid for continued existence as itself…
I don’t even disagree with this generalised conception of the way things are, but in relation to Capitalism and humans, there are certain ways in which the nature of humans differs that is compatible with it and others which are incompatible. For example, Capitalism requires a desire to compete against others for their means to live, and I’ve never felt the need to do this. Maybe if my life took a terrible turn and I became desperate I would be forced to change the nature that I have come to identify with myself - perhaps you would call this my “true” nature: the same nature of all things. Go ahead, and maybe you’re right, but throughout my life my nature has never been this and as such is at odds with what Capitalism requires of me as a human and my nature.

There’s nothing I can do to stop you from not seeing this, most likely refusing to see this, or at least rationalising it away to justify your negative perception of humanity. All I can do is tell you what I see both first hand in myself and second hand in others, and give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe you’ve somehow not come across anyone like me or others like me. No doubt you will deny our existence and demand that we are what you want to see for the sake of holding onto your worldview, despite apparently not wanting to see only your worldview. Mine is hardly rosy, it’s just not as conflicting and rigid as yours. Perhaps relative to yours its rosy, but it’s far from the rosy perception of life that the optimistically naive may hold.

With regard to “less and less over time” I meant centralisation of power. Monarchies had one autocratic ruler, Feudalism devolved power to Feudal lords, Capitalism devolved power to Capitalists, and Socialism is the further devolution of power to Society as a whole - it’s just the continuation of an inevitable pattern that is going to occur with organising more and more people in the world. Lots of things are getting worse, and there is certainly a great deal of power left in the hands of very few, but in this way they are getting better even if they haven’t got to where they need to be yet. Don’t hate the messenger, I’m just telling you what’s been happening over the course of history…

In this conversation Silhouette do not forget that I am a socialist that believes in employee trade unions, universal healthcare, free universal public education, and freely accessed government funded work style occupational apprenticeships. I also believe in wages where everybody has some common standard of basic living or what others refer to as a livable wage. I understand that inequality will always persist but I believe that we must minimize it as much as possible for greater social, cultural, racial, economic, and societal cohesion. Too much social inequality rampant will completely destroy any society, nation, culture, or civilization in a matter of generations, this always happens every time in history. While my viewpoint of human nature is a purely negative one compared to others where I certainly don’t have a rosy picture of human nature or human beings ourselves I firmly believe that the solution to human nature’s many faults is an enlightened state of government that helps us transcend our natural petty basic primitive impulses. A capitalist government of course doesn’t do this but instead commodifies this human weakness or nature within the project that it calls the free market, it doesn’t transcend human nature at all but instead makes sure that it doesn’t where it is locked away in material vice.

Centralization isn’t the problem, it’s the specific kind of centralization we have now that is the problem. Decentralization is chaos and anarchistic, it always amazes me when people who support decentralization complains about criminal lawlessness in the highest echelons of government where my retort is almost always, what the hell did you expect to happen differently?

Your world view where you see things getting better historically I just don’t see. Such a position is incomprehensible to me.

Also, yes I am autocratic and I don’t see how your individualistic atomization of political democracy will solve or deliver anything at all especially in the libertarian- capitalistic western sphere of the world.

As far as political reform in modern democracies it is a moot point because the wealthy, banks, corporate conglomerates, and special interests controls it all. It is all rigged and there will never be any kind of political reform. They control the pocket books of presidents, prime ministers, senators, congressman, and the like. No, if we’re to change anything we will need an army with firearms and bayonets pointed at all the bastards and bitches of the world where we say to them you blink when you’re told to where if you do not comply we will pull the trigger. Revolutionary uprising is the only answer and democracy is an ideal of fools.

Right so you want trade unions, universal healthcare, free universal public education and freely accessed government funded work style occupational apprenticeships, the living wage, greater social, cultural and racial cohesion, less inequality and revolution, but you believe it is in the nature of all people without exception to be amoral, violent, unequal, conflicting, selfish, cruel and hyper competitive.

How in the hell do you marry these things such that these animals are going to want, never mind enact and maintain all these things you want in a society? Forced enlightenment?

It sounds to me like you are actively anti-human and at war with our nature, wishing for a state army to threaten all civilians with death should they step out of line and act too much in line with their very nature. Who do you want to be your autocrat? You fancy yourself as the reincarnation of Stalin? What is your plan to cause this vision to come about and to maintain it in the long term? How are you going to rally the necessary resources from the pool of barbaric animals available to you? Without a specific workable plan, your fantasy is just a kind of mental revenge against people for doing whatever it is they’ve done to you that’s made you so negative about them.

I would rather be realistic and objective about working with what we’ve got - people don’t take kindly to oppressive control, and most of them are dumb and many are barbaric. How are you going to enlighten them? Our current government is aimed at bullshitting them to keep them feeling disenfranchised and Capitalism is designed to turn their blame on themselves rather than on the system itself. Honestly, at the moment I think this is the best that we can hope for - my problem is with everyone else getting caught up in this as collateral. The silver lining is that if you’re lucky, you get to own a lot of material stuff and maybe even have some influence, but to me this is no silver lining. I’m not interested in money and power, and I am against those who are. The solution to this is spreading out the power through increased pluralism. The intention is for individual power to be diminished and spread out, watered down, reducing inequality. The historical tendency is moving in this direction whether you can comprehend it or not - I’m not saying it’s gone far enough, but I am saying it used to be a lot lot worse.

People in the West aren’t desperate enough for revolution, even if you did have a detailed plan to bring it about. The vast majority certainly don’t want to replace what we have with an even more oppressive regime, and there’s definitely not enough trust going around for people to be happy with who runs it. Many do want social mobility and curbed inequality, and I’m siding with them. In the meantime I am waiting on technology to take over low skilled jobs, and potentially higher skilled ones in future, because this puts Capitalism in mortal danger. Creating so many jobs for low skilled people once all the low skilled work is relatively suddenly automated, without resorting to the equivalent of digging holes and filling them back in, is not going to be acceptable. A living wage without having to work for your income will become necessary - a government that doesn’t enforce this will not be tolerated. The alternative of starvation is what brings around the kind of revolution you’re hoping for - so there you go, step one in your plan. I’m not rallying to your cause though, I would rather be left alone, not forced to work, and able to work and create what I want to work on and create in my own time in my own way - that’s all I want. And if this has to be funded at the expense of all the capitalists in power then so much the better - with all this untapped creativity and desire for purpose in a newly unemployable chunk of our population, we can instead devote our energies to increasing pluralism instead of numbing most of our waking life in 9-5 monotony. If capitalists don’t want to be taxed, they will be forced by government to offer things for free - antithetical to the profit incentive, and hopefully a motivator to not desire such a role. This is realistic, your ideas are not.

I like your term forceful enlightenment Silhouette as I may have to borrow that for myself. :mrgreen: What people are unwilling to do on their own independently I very much believe an outside state must be established to force them into check and that’s how I reconcile these opposing viewpoints you illustrate in bridging the gap. If people are unwilling or incapable of changing society on their own which for me that is where we’re at now then the state must intervene instead forcing that change onto society militarily if necessary. Reincarnation of Stalin? No, I equally detest communism as much as I do with capitalism. I am am an alternative third positionist. I believe in creating a third platform in opposition to both communism and capitalism simultaneously. Who would the leader be? I don’t know, such a leader of a movement has yet to present themselves in world history but I do believe it is a sort of inevitable manifested destiny that such a leader will present themselves eventually as every historical crisis individuals come forward where all others fail. I know ideally what such a leader would represent and be however. I am not anti-human as the goal of civilization would be to take the raw primitive form of humanity fashioning it into something better than itself where it transcends its original nature and I believe that the state I have in mind would do just that in facilitating. Yes, it is a very dark enlightenment I embrace.

The west in my mind is on the verge of total collapse and that is how my political proclivities will enact itself. When nations reach economic collapse, massive starvation, political social upheaval, infighting, and civil war that’s when my politics will be realized where the interesting component to all of this is that it will be your useless corrupted sham of a democracy that will bring that all about. It is from the ashes or those ruins the third position will rise with fury and bring about the necessary world change we so desperately need. We will rise and purge all communist or capitalist influences out of the world enacting our own political agenda. Both are blights on humanity that must be eradicated.

Also, technological transhumanism and A.I. is not the answer. As I was telling somebody else in another thread that is just another form of elitist entrapment and is a garbage perception of looking at things that should be disposed of. Technological enslavement of humanity is not the ideal future.

i’m more like you, Norepic types → rarer (especially due to assembly line miseducation), true, you’re right about plurality of human nature, nothing could be more absurd than the idea of “1 type: homo sapiens sapiens” (ref: youtu.be/OdhBRSF6fIE) …
and of course, the real divide is not “racial/national” etc.

There are many genetic different species of foxes that exist all throughout the world however the universal underlying theme of their social behavior is the same everywhere that constitutes their nature. They can all be said in a rudimentary fashion to live and act identically to each other despite adapting to different environments.

to say so is a sort of reductionism which is only acceptable (i guess) to the mediocre majority

Elaborate.

Sil wrote

I’m not sure what to make of this statement. Known resources on earth are finite, okay. Knowledge here is finite which logically makes sense, limited until discovered verifiably, so new resources may be discovered but they too will be finite. Knowledge everywhere would be finite by the same token, the lack of originality or newness and all that (the proverbial well of content, ideas, has long since run dry). Could you say then that formal logic/reasoning makes knowledge finite? In other words, there are a limited number of thoughts in existence ever. Have we as sentient beings reached the apex of thought already? I believe so. Sure we can keep advancing technologically, but those are revisions of already formulated theories/premises simply elevated to new levels not new in and of themselves. Even if the supernatural and paranormal become normalized, there would be nothing new there other than a realization that it always existed although undetectably, ahead of the revealing gaze of science’s technology.

The true scarcity is of novel ideas.

Nor am I, reading back. Fortunately it doesn’t affect my point, which was more to do with finite resources (the earth is spatially finite and has a finite number of atoms - indisputable) and you seem to be ok with that. Finite knowledge? I guess the current amount of knowledge each person has is finite, the amount of knowledge in a finite number of receptacles of knowledge is also finite: knowledge is currently finite. Is it potentially infinite? I would say yes, given that knowledge is just an interpretation of our experiences, and you can interpret things in a potentially infinite number of ways - although practically speaking, as you say, this requires novel thinking, which isn’t a common occurrence. I might also say no, given that no knowledge is certain. Knowledge can be better or worse making it a sliding scale, along which presumably there is a threshold of whether it is sufficient to be deemed knowledge, meaning that knowledge doesn’t need to be certain to be regarded as knowledge - so I don’t think I might say no in this way…

Anyway, tangent.

How does this work, though? A state is just a bunch of humans going to work. How do you persuade them to do this? A lot of manpower is necessary to effectively oppress an entire population, so even if the current army were ok with just following orders, it probably wouldn’t be nearly enough people for what you have in mind. Perhaps you are relying on the same kind of consent to do terrible things as we saw in Nazi Germany, given that you probably think it’s just human nature to act in such a way - maybe the incentive is to join the state military just so you can do the oppression rather than be oppressed. The required discipline to be in the military is oppression in itself, though perhaps less so compared to what you might have in mind. Who oppresses the oppressors? I guess they just need to oppress themselves into dishing out oppression… I can tell you though, that the reported mental toll of people “just following orders” and doing terrible things was significant - I’m unconvinced that the majority of the population would be able to oppress in the long term. Psychopaths sure, but they’re only about 1% of the population.

In short, I don’t think “get the state to force people into check” is a notion that you can just throw around.

It really does sound like Stalinism, what you’re suggesting. Or at least a kind of North Korea. Not a model society in practice at the very least. And who said anything about Communism? Perhaps you didn’t read the various things I’ve been saying about what Communism was originally designed to be (as opposed to the bastardised use of the term that we hear the uneducated masses using today). It’s a decentralised working class run economic model, not a centralised authoritarian oppression of social freedoms like Stalinism - that’s literally the exact opposite.

So basically you’re waiting on a world leader to emerge, convince enough people to forcefully enlighten civilians (a dark enlightenment? Was that an intentional contradiction? Perhaps an endarkenment :sunglasses: ), like I’m waiting on technological advances to replace at the very least unskilled jobs. How long do you expect to wait? You think the state of our democracy is on the verge of total collapse, starvation and civil war. Given how things are in the worst places in the world right now, never mind even worse places historically, there’s a longer way to fall for things to get really really bad than I think you’re appreciating. Honestly I don’t think primitive humanity can be transcended - the way that the brain is structured, it’s basically moderated and imperfectly channeled into socially acceptable behaviour, and I believe it’s based on necessary tendencies for humanity to endure. I think if you transcended it, you’d end up weakening and killing off humanity… I’m not saying I support what you mean by your reductionism of human natures, I just accept that it could be no other way. Technology though? It can be built to be foundationally different to the human brain, which cannot so easily be fundamentally rebuilt. Computers, the internet, mobile phones, GPS, technologies tend to be passed down to the masses and not just kept by elites. This is at least one good thing about Capitalism that you can rely on, there’s simply more money to be made if you make technologies available to the plebs. Self-driving cars is basically a dead-cert, it’s happening and it will be soon that huge numbers of people will be made redundant - forcing a response that will shake the core of capitalist workings and its fundamental assumptions and tenets. This is far from transhumanism and technological enslavement and it’s already threatening the status quo significantly - I’m not talking that far into the future.

How does any kind of state persuade people? It’s the same for any kind of government.

There’s always manpower in every kind of nation or government to keep people in order and check. Dark enlightenment for those that are uninitiated to understanding the greater implications at work here or the understanding of the realization of what human nature is.

Human nature is very dark but under the right kind of existential discipline that can be changed for the better under the directed leadership of an enlightened state. Human nature cannot be changed or altered but it can be controlled and restrained. With it under direct control it can be molded into something better than itself left to its own vices.

The enlightenment I speak of is about rooting out human nature helping it transcend itself so that all people have the opportunity to have a much better quality of life. For me the end justifies the means in that when specific goals are met there is a net benefit for all individuals.

This of course requires the enforcement of a different kind of social order but once again overtime will be worth it.

I have no intention creating needless oppression but I will not tolerate an out of control minority that seeks to impose themselves on everybody living at the expense of a majority of people. Those people are my real targets concerning social order enforcement. Those people deserve no quarter or mercy, those people will either fall in line or be thoroughly destroyed.

Your belief that artificial intelligence, fully automated society, or technology will save us all is naive. It is utter foolishness. You seem to have an inability of understanding the dehumanization that you suggest or how advanced technology can be used to oppress people.

The government I suggest is for people by people not machines.

Technology will free us all? So naive. No, only we can save ourselves.

The world will change once a massive enlightenment sweeps the world which I view more realistic than your technological wave taking over things.

Who said technology will free us all?

Of course that’s naive. I just say the next round of technological progress will cause a major disruption to the fundamental tenets of Capitalism.

Disruptions such as these have happened many times in the past, but I believe the magnitude and frequency of them, along with the lack of remaining options for humans is getting to a point where simply being required to find new innovative niches where human work is still relevant is no longer viable.

Does this mean that technology can’t be used to oppress people? Of course not.
Talking of naive, how about the idea that people can be forced into being enlightened? Have you no idea how human psychology works? You need to fool people into thinking that they were free to choose to be enlightened. Politicians and moreso businesses are already advancing this line of coercion by abusing loopholes in human psychology to make them think they freely chose to obey and/or consume in line with what the the politicians/businesses just so happen to want. It’s the height of all evil, but it’s in line with the methods you seem to advocate - except it works. Forcing people at gunpoint never worked.

It sounds to be like what you want to happen is already happening, just in a way that far outsmarts what you’re thinking of, and is ironically what is motivating you to react against it by using the same philosophy but dumbed down to the conspicuous.

You really ought to watch who you’re calling naive.

What would happen if everyone had everything they ever wanted?

What would these things amount to?

What is the world that everyone, as a collective, all contradictions inclusive, wants?

I believe that scarcity exists only because of this demonic formula. To keep us in check, as we are mad.

I dont think any of the noble sirs here present will deny that fact.

So scarcity helps the self preservation of the species.
A species that selects among its ranks the most lucky and vigorous, always occupied, always ready to destroy the threats in its environment and prevail.

If we would be nice to each other we would all be doomed.