Hot take: corporatism and infotainment. You control money and information, you control the world.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
937 points (100.0% liked)
> Greentext
77 readers
1 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Capitalism
Pitchshifter warned us.
This is the coldest take on Lemmy. Not that it's wrong, though.
Don't vote Conservative
Can say the same for progressives! They progressed us so far, we ended up going backwards!
Progressive to me means fair wages, medicare for all, tackling climate change, defending civil rights, protecting against authoritarianism, tackling the wage gap, making government work for all people, etc.
Conservative means insurrection, praising authoritarianism, banning books, attacking public education, idolizing the ultra wealthy, culture wars, gerrymandering, preventing fair elections, etc.
I know what I prefer.
i'm an insurrectionist anarchist and i'd appreciate if you don't associate me with the misguided patriots that follow trump.
Can you? Examples, please.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the system we've built to buy and sell products, owning, trading and hoarding capital? No, that can't be it...
Everything is about money, not about having an actual human experience.
Human experience is still there, everywhere. You have to make the effort to get out of your burrow and do things outside with physical people.
It's hard to make an effort when all your energy goes into survival. Wasn't the point of "civilization" to not have to worry about all of that?
Yes it should, but modernity also made us less reliant on the group and I think it made use more introvert and more social risk averse. This is something that can be worked on with reasonable cost.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Like we can afford burrows.
Your local gardening association should have shovels.
I think this varies from place to place. In some places, I've definitely felt like going out and interacting with physical people was too dangerous, since the culture was along the lines of "everyone for themselves" and "don't trust anyone". That being said, I've also lived in places where the people around me were extremely friendly, so for many people that opportunity still does exist.
For the people who feel like going out and interacting with strangers is dangerous, I think it might help to go to specific places where the kinds of people you want to meet would also go to (and the kinds of people you want to avoid wouldn't go to), although that can be hard to find.
Welcome to being poor .... I mean poor poor ... not the kind of poor where you can't afford a Lamborghini ... the kind of poor where you no longer have any luxuries like being able to go to the movies.
Where life is a constant hassle and struggle to survive. And where you constantly have to fight to stay above water. A kind of life where someone is constantly either trying to screw you, is screwing you or has screwed you. A kind of life where you no longer trust the people you see, the people you meet, or the people you live with. A kind of life where you know from the time you are born that everything and everyone will be hard.
I grew up like that and it became a normal part of life.
I learned to make a bit of money and survive and I've done good but not great ... good enough to travel the world. It gave me the insight that the majority of the world is poor ... I thought that before but after traveling, I realized just how true that really is.
The world we're complaining about now is the world that most of the world already knows.
Welcome to being poor and hopeless.
I once described this to someone as:
You know you're poor when you realize how bad powdered milk is compared to real milk. You know you're really, really hungry when powdered milk tastes good.
Is this supposed to be a "the world has turned into shit" take, even though it's been like this for ages (way before the 4chan poster, or anyone alive for that matter, was born)?
I’ve gone through a lot of crap to learn and really believe that happiness and contentment can only come from within. The outside world has a lot to offer, but it will never give you that.
Unfortunately the outside world and circumstances CAN make it pretty damn difficult or impossible.
It’s a cliche to think of a monk or philosopher saying stuff like “if you want to be happy, be happy,” but that’s a lot of how I I’ve come to see it. And obviously it’s not that simple, we are pretty damn complicated, but that’s the spirit behind it.
We consume pseudo-food, watch pseudo movies and participate in pseudo sports, heck even pseudo politics. Why pseudo? Because everything is made as cheap as possible and to distract us from the suffering that capitalism brings us so that we won't rise up.
Examples:
- Our vegetables are genetically modified so that they grow bigger but they can't reproduce anymore and the seeds are copyrighted.
- The movies that are watching are catered to the mainstream and don't even really get a message across. Marvel movies try to tell us that rich people with power will save the world
- Football games are there to distract people "give them bread and games and they will never revolt"
- The people at power, through massive propaganda, seperate our people into left and right. These two parties will then fight eachother instead of realizing who is really opressing us
It was leaving the trees that did it, really.
Nah we should have stayed in the water.
bet a month's rent anon doesn't exercise and their sleep is fucked. I was this doomy too, before I fixed my shit.
Talking a big game but you're only really healthy if you can accept the good and the bad for what it is.
I'm a string bean on Lemmy at 4am and I have a better outlook than anon
Hmm.
I think capitalism isn't the problem nor is liking and consuming a product or experience. We have great products turned into entire experiences here in the US, and I'm not terribly upset anymore about it.
The problem is the late stage unchecked capitalism running rampant. I think allowing individuals the freedom to pursue their ideas and allow others to even build livelihoods from it works great. But there's gotta be checks and balances, its what the USA was founded on.
What you are referring to is called socialism. And yes, it's a good thing.
Yeah buddy.
Capitalism with checks and balances is not socialism.
It literally is.
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community
So regulation of the market by the people (aka people democratically deciding where capitalism should be limited/regulated).
If there is another word that fits better though please let me know.
My family wasn't rich and I didn't have many luxuries, but I still claim to have been much happier than many children who live in this hectic world where everything is so superficial. 90% of ordinary people don't even dare to have an opinion anymore if it's not exactly what the mainstream represents.
He’s not wrong
This isn't greentext
I am with Anon. It’s all kinda surreal now. But I’m gonna live it up the way I know how.
About 300,000 years ago, when the first humans were born.
The problems being described in this post are the result of the greed of the wealthy, and that has been menacing humanity for as long as there's been humanity.
Not at all. For the vast majority of our time as a species we lived in small hunting and gathering bands wherein the accumulation of personal wealth and property wasn't really possible and one's status instead depended on merit. It's only with the dawn of agriculture, about 10k years ago, that the accumulation of personal wealth and private property becomes a thing. For better or worse, for reasons I don't have the time to go into here, agriculture is a kind of ratcheting trap, and once we embraced it we could never go back and never will.
The thing now is to recreate the small-scale egalitarianism that we evolved to live in, but how we do that in the material world we've created is far beyond me.
Did the strongest tribesman not beat the shit out of all the other tribesmen, take their stuff, and bang their women?
Generally, no. Hierarchy is not the natural order, it's an ideological virus that has been shoved down our throats.
No human is so strong they can face a group, and everyone can be killed with a knife while they sleep. The group can kick someone out or even kill them, but the leader can't just go around like a dictator (if they even had a leader, generally power was not in the hands of just one person). A tribe is like an extended family, you'd have a lifelong personal relationship with everyone - you'd have to be a real asshole to even have to worry about that
Bad stuff happened obviously, but generally people lived like animals - they had territory and would fight other groups over it, but people didn't live in fear and chaos
It takes agriculture and specialization to do the truly terrible stuff. If you don't have people dedicated to being soldiers or guards, you can't wage war (bloodfeuds just aren't in the same ballpark) or impose your will by force. If you don't have agriculture, you don't have much stuff, so it's probably not worth raiding you.
And yeah, people might be stolen or enslaved, but generally there's a path to integration - again, no dedicated guards, so how long can they really keep you in line through force before it gets old?
No, we don't see any evidence of this at all in the ethnographic literature. To the contrary, what we tend to see is antisocial actors being socially ostracized or killed by the larger group. This is evidently a very old behavior since we absolutely see it in chimp bands as well which means that it goes all the way back to our most recent common ancestor which existed 6 million years ago.
Not if they wanted loyal tribesmen companions. And not if they wanted to avoid being killed in their sleep.
Then what's stopping post-agricultural people from being disloyal to the rich and killing them in their sleep? What makes you think the same tactics could not be used by pre-agriculture tribal chiefs to ensure loyalty among the tribesmen they abused?
Damn dude, who beat the shit out of you, took all your stuff and banged "your" women?
How is that going to work when you live in a group of around 30 to 50 people, all of whom are closely related either through blood or marriage, and all of whom have known you for your entire life?
What we see in all of the ethnographic literature on small-scale hunting and gathering societies is that you absolutely cannot rise to a position of power and influence simply on the basis of strength. To the contrary, the way you gain power and influence is by being a good and wise and generous provider for the group, not by beating your fellow tribe-mates down.
If you know of an example that demonstrates your idea, please do tell, since I am unaware of any such case in the existing anthropological literature.
Anon has an existential crisis
Give into the hate, anon. Join the sixth.
How bout we tear it all the fuck down!? I've got the nukes.
It seems to me that Anon is a whiny little bitch.
Of course, the big question with the line "I'm tired of being told to hate my fellow man" is whether they're referring to the constant fearmongering being pushed by conservative news and politicians against everyone who isn't in their in-group.
Or are they referring to non-conservatives calling out the bigotry being pushed by conservatives and doing that calling out is "pushing hatred on your fellow man" in this person's eyes?
Since a lot of 4chan is the latter while actively being a part of the former.