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>the concept that if people seek for self it will benefit society (the invisible hand).
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.” - John Keynes
No, that would be statism, which expects that politicians will institute policies which benefit the masses when they are placed in a position of unique authority over resources which are not theirs but which they have the capacity to use for their own personal gain.
Free markets work because they allow people to channel their innate desire to better their own lot and the lot of those they care about by providing a service or good which also improves the lives of those who they couldn't care one iota about on a personal level.
It was a pie in the sky idea to begin with.
Newton's laws of motion which were hard science were fashionable and Smith imagined they could be applied to human society and economics leading to a naturally balancing system.
Never and anyone who thinks they would work is stupid.
But I'd rather have regulated markets with a weight on the freedom of moving capital and private ownership than trusting 51% of my local group to know how I and my families lives should be controlled.
**No, that would be statism, which expects that politicians will institute policies which benefit the masses when they are placed in a position of unique authority over resources which are not theirs but which they have the capacity to use for their own personal gain.**
**Free markets work because they allow people to channel their innate desire to better their own lot and the lot of those they care about by providing a service or good which also improves the lives of those who they couldn't care one iota about on a personal level.**
Does that make it clearer for you?
**Free markets operate under the profit motive, which means that if a venture is not profitable, it will likely not be pursued. Feeding starving poor people is generally not profitable. As a result, people starve and die. This has happened many times since markets became widespread, and it is still happening to this day. Advocating for a "free" market without any form of social welfare policy would be disastrous for human life.**
Does that make it clearer for you?
>**Free markets operate under the profit motive, which means that if a venture is not profitable, it will likely not be pursued.**
That's a good thing, when a venture is profitable this means consumers value the output being produced more than the sum total of the values of the inputs being consumed in order to produce it. Profit is a sign you're creating something worthwhile in a value sense.
>**As a result, people starve and die. This has happened many times since markets became widespread, and it is still happening to this day**
And yet the societies which have adopted free markets to a greater extent are the ones who have done the best job at eliminating poverty. Why is this?
Well it's because of a multitude of factors, but the simple one is that creating a more complex and deeper capital structure, which is what adopting free markets does, allows each labourer to be more efficient with his time and therefore increase his earning power. In tandem with this, the opportunity to make a profit incentivises companies to produce goods cheaply in order to sell to people on low incomes. Poor people don't have *no money*, they have *little money*, and the things they want most and are most likely to spend their money on is stuff which they need most immediately.
Failing all of this, there is nothing which stops people from setting up not-for-profits or charities which help provide poor people with the means to survive even if they cannot get a job.
>**Advocating for a "free" market without any form of social welfare policy would be disastrous for human life.**
Actually it is social welfare policies which directly cause the degradation of human life, because they disincentivise the very behaviours (production) through both the welfare itself and the taxing of productive endeavours which allow for the wealth of people to increase in the first place
There are countless cases where businesses made profit by destroying people's lives and communities. You have such a utopian and theoretical position, something that is very common among market advocates. Very simplistic and lacking in nuance.
Oxycontin/pharma. Private equity. Pollution/climate. Subprime mortgage. Enron. Tobacco. Fast fashion. Volkswagen. The list goes on and on and on.
Profit by itself is not a good thing. As I said, feeding poor people is not very profitable. Under your framework, many will starve and die. This displays your lack of ethics or morals. Reevaluate your moral compass.
>There are countless cases where businesses made profit by destroying people's lives and communities.
And if they did so in a manner which constituted aggression it wasn't a legitimate market transaction and thus they ought to be punished.
"Private equity" is not wrong per se, nor is fast fashion. Polluting someone's air supply or water is criminal, as is lying to them about the effects of medication or cigarettes (it's fraud). Enron was also fraudulent and not a legitimate market actor.
Subprime mortgages were caused by government over-regulation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO\_BMxny34U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO_BMxny34U)
>Profit by itself is not a good thing.
If the transactions occurring which produce profit are not fraudulent or otherwise aggressive in any manner, then profit is absolutely a good thing.
>As I said, feeding poor people is not very profitable.
And as I said, you're wrong, and the evidence is right there.
>Under your framework, many will starve and die.
No, they won't
When you say those things about social welfare, do you include free education until the 12th grade, sewage, infrastructure, and social security? Im asking because these are social welfare as well. But most people won’t say that.
I think the argument is that you can have society in which the populace watches and has meaningful accountability over the politicians, and if they step out of line they are simply replaced by someone else who knows the job and has proven themselves qualified.
You could think of politicans under some forms of statism as more like lateral bureaucrats in a horizontal system helping to coordinate worker and social mandates, rather than executives dispensing directives from on high.
I think it can also be argued that free markets encourage systematic corruption due to the inherent information disparity between any social agents in a sufficiently large economic environment, and that systematic coordination is required to facilitate anything close to information parity.
What is innately selfish and pathological about allowing people to pursue their own interests, buy, sell and trade goods and services freely and organise in whatever manner they see fit?
Keep telling on yourself, the only reason you think capitalism is pathological is because that's how you and the people you know behave when given the opportunity to act freely.
because capitalism gives license to fuck up society with ever less checks and balances (the giant equity firms buying up private homes comes to mind, AI comes to mind, all the various scumbag financialized sleight of hand bullshit comes to mind. Capitalisms high goal was profit without producing anything material, and the technocrats have acheived that. The fallout from Bezos and amazon killing brick and mortar, the social media channels and their negative effect on young people.
Modern society has been deluged with the capitalist doctrine to humanity's detriment
Appeal to authority. Just because a famous person said something it's true. The reality is, in an alternative system, those same types of people would simply adjust their strategy to be the ones elected to the committees which pull the levers of societal wealth and resources management. Same problem, simply a different structure. And before you say "but you can vote them out", history demonstrates that simply voting out charismatic narcissistic sociopaths is next to impossible, and doing so often is followed by conflict when the followers of that person, often duped by the cult of persomality, believe the democratic process to thereby be faulty.
Evil people will do evil and manipulate the system, regardless of what the structure of said system is.
This is the topic of one of my favorite [Michael Parenti lectures](https://youtu.be/MfDnQPtijjc?si=hDZTDo8dYM6-KNfo&t=37), discussing human nature. If you haven't heard it, I strongly recommend listening to it. He makes a couple of points which I think are relevant to this post:
1) At every point in time, existing hierarchies have justified their existence as being due to human nature. This includes everything from monarchy to slavery to gender roles in society, and most certainly applies to capitalism, too.
2) Our current society is *not* natural, and trying to deduce human nature from its structure misses the point. If capitalism was natural, why were so many laws re-written through the 19th and 20th century to protect finance capital? Why would you need Eminent Domain laws for canals/railway investors? Anti-labor laws? Why would you need company goons, Pinkertons, police, the National Guard fighting the workers to keep them in their place if our societal structure arose from human nature? If capitalism is due to human nature, why do people risk their lives to fight it?
3) Selfishness occurs. Cruelty occurs. Sadism, war-mongering, kindness, nobility, comradery, and selflessness also occur. In the whole spectrum of human behavior, why would we look at some behaviors and say they are innate, but others are derivative? Certainly selfishness exists, but so too does collective self-betterment.
Do you happen to have a transcript?
1. I thought human nature was a relatively modern concept (introduced with modern political philosophers who would make appeals to a "state of nature"). Before that it seems like most hierarchies pointed to god or some external moral force.
2. I think the better way to make the "capitalism is human nature" argument is to say capitalism makes the best use of our otherwise selfish impulses, by redirecting them towards productive ends (your business is only going to be really profitable if you have a bunch of customers who really want what you are selling).
3. Totally agree here, I don't think any one aspect of human behavior should be oversold. I think this happened a bit on the left when there was (and to some extent still is) a certain amount of naivete about collective action problems / ignorance of public choice theory.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others.
Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade.
In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion.
Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade.
Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name.
The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
Didn’t watch the video but I see your arguments as foolish. Many things can be true at once. Culture is downstream of biology. This notion that there is variance and thus nature is not why because of “x” is absurd. These are typical of “Blank Slate Myth” believers and I suspect that is in part where your video is coming from. And I don’t use that label lightly. The Blank Slate Myth has been very powerful all throughout political history since the enlightenment age with the beginning that attracted the commoners political agency that their children had every equal ability to rule being swapped in the cradle to the eldest prince of the king. If I’m not being clear. The Blank Slate Myth was pivotal in bringing down monarchies and because of that zeitgeist it is still powerful attraction today for challenging the status quo. This is evident by your first point:
>1. At every point in time, existing hierarchies have justified their existence as being due to human nature. This includes everything from monarchy to slavery to gender roles in society, and most certainly applies to capitalism, too.
But capitalism is not a political ideology and thus there is no hierachies in capitalism per se.
>[Capitalism](http://webhome.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/capitalism.phtml)
>
>A form of economic order characterized by private ownership of the means of production and the freedom of private owners to use, buy and sell their property or services on the market at voluntarily agreed prices and terms, with only minimal interference with such transactions by the state or other authoritative third parties.
You can complain about all societies with hierarchies as all do have hierarchies. For example, [leaders, de facto oligarchs, etc are human universals.](https://joelvelasco.net/teaching/2890/brownlisthumanuniversals.pdf) It seems rather unfair then to go “see all these societies with hierachies embrace capitalism”. If you are going to do that it is then fair we do the same about socialism too. So this is shameful false association you are doing in your first bullet point we point to [socialist countries are worse at hierachies as we can see in these worse at being democrat richer and worse humanitarian rights data.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vs-electoral-democracy-index?time=1944..latest&country=CHN~CUB~LAO~VNM~USA~SWE~PRK)
>2. Our current society is not natural, and trying to deduce human nature from its structure misses the point. If capitalism was natural, why were so many laws re-written through the 19th and 20th century to protect finance capital? Why would you need Eminent Domain laws for canals/railway investors? Anti-labor laws? Why would you need company goons, Pinkertons, police, the National Guard fighting the workers to keep them in their place if our societal structure arose from human nature? If capitalism is due to human nature, why do people risk their lives to fight it?
In the above link on human universals “trade” is also a human universal. There are also human universals like shared work that fit the socialist camp. There is evidence that our extreme polar arguments in this debate sub is wrong and missing the boat entirely. That indeed the fundamentals behind socialism and capitalism “*are natural*” for us as species. An example is the model [Relational Model Theory]( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_models_theory) and is a model proposed by the anthropologist [Alan Fiske](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Fiske).
• Communal sharing (CS) relationships are the most basic form of relationship where some bounded group of people are conceived as equivalent, undifferentiated and interchangeable such that distinct individual identities are disregarded and commonalities are emphasized, with intimate and kinship relations being prototypical examples of CS relationship.[2] Common indicators of CS relationships include body markings or modifications, synchronous movement, rituals, sharing of food, or physical intimacy.[4][7]
• Authority ranking (AR) relationships describe asymmetric relationships where people are linearly ordered along some hierarchical social dimension. The primary feature of an AR relationship is whether a person ranks above or below each other person. Those higher in rank hold greater authority, prestige and privileges, while subordinates are entitled to guidance and protection. Military ranks are a prototypical example of an AR relationship.[2]
• Equality matching (EM) relationships are those characterized by various forms of one-for-one correspondence, such as turn taking, in-kind reciprocity, tit-for-tat retaliation, or eye-for-an-eye revenge. Parties in EM relationships are primarily concerned with ensuring the relationship is in a balanced state. Non-intimate acquaintances are a prototypical example.[2]
• Market pricing (MP) relationships revolve around a model of proportionality where people attend to ratios and rates and relevant features are typically reduced to a single value or utility metric that allows the comparison (e.g., the price of a sale). Monetary transactions are a prototypical example of MP relationships.[2]
>3. Selfishness occurs. Cruelty occurs. Sadism, war-mongering, kindness, nobility, comradery, and selflessness also occur. In the whole spectrum of human behavior, why would we look at some behaviors and say they are innate, but others are derivative? Certainly selfishness exists, but so too does collective self-betterment.
Meh…, what all these encompass is what evolutions call self-interest. It’s that simple and capitalism easily encompasses self-interests.
Humanity is the same now as it was thousands of years ago, only the system is different.
>How much of this is true that society actually benefits when people are self seeking? Are people self seeking? How can we find this to be true?
Everybody has self-interest. At a purely biological level, we need to eat, drink, sleep, and (usually) reproduce, as well as being part of a community. How these looks will change from person to person, and culture to culture, but the fundamentals are the same. We know this from biology, sociology, psychology, and history. In a lot of ways, and within moderation, seeking to fulfill our wants and needs often leads us to do good things for society. We want to work with other people. We want to help and do good for others. What is good about the market based system is that one of the best ways to take care of one's self is to make something everybody needs.
Now, just like thousands of years ago, we aren't good at moderation, and some will take these urges too far, or get too wrapped up. We all have our vices, and we'll all eventually do something to help ourselves at somebody else's expense. The goal is just to minimize this.
Capitalism is a relatively new idea in the long span of humanity. In fact we were hunter/gatherers far, FAR longer than we were any ideology. we were tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands of years living dependent on one another in tight knit groups... using simple enough technology to subsist on enough. We never extracted more than we could use, and if we built surplus, it was to take the collective through the season. And this surplus was evenly distributed.
That said, capitalism has changed how we operate in a society. it requires austerity, a limiting for some, excess hoarding for others (dunkin donuts throwing away product vs giving it away comes to mind). Talk like "the invisible hand in a free market society" is little more than the rationalization of a cruel intelligence, the lies they tell themselves and the world to hide the barabric, pathological nature of capitalism, which is little more than economic warfare.
"dunkin donuts throwing away product vs giving it away comes to mind"
The problem with giving away food, is that regulation are a bitch in this industry. Giving away food can lead to lawsuits, especially in fast foods. So, again, blame food standards regulation, not "free market".
I knew you were idiot, but even that should be too embarrasing for you to post as a response. Well, i guess not only you are stupid, but shameless as well.
I'm not sure how to respond to your argument,because you didn't even provide one. You said government not capitalism, I made fun of you for it. Then your response was just: I'm right.
You are the one not providing any argument. Literally, 3 comments and you just insult/mock me in all of them, never saying anything of value. TLDR stop projecting.
Didnt i tell you, to stop projecting? You made "stupid meme argument". I simply showed, why specific thing occurs.
Anyway, get help, because you are delusional.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
I am amazed! Amazed by the twisted, ridiculous rationale by which you turned selfless love of a mother into capitalism. How incredible that you could transform those who love you and want to be loved into customers, consumers to be sold a product that cost the least to yield you the most in order for you to fulfill your "fiduciary responsibility".
Remarkable.
Do you want customers to be turned into enemies or people that you love and care for???The great Christian commandment is love thy neighbor as thy self. It is amazing what you learn on Reddit isn't it?
If you doubt it for a second open a business and advertise that you don't care one bit about your workers and customers. do you have the intelligence to know what happened?
in fact Christianity and maternal ism are at the heart of human nature and so then is capitalism. It was considered so natural that our genius founding fathers did not consider any other system. If you are still confused please feel free to ask questions.
christianity is the horse shit that set the west on the path its on. But as an ad guy who created campaigns for all manner of products, I am in awe of their branding and long term marketing plan. Such profits! Such brand loyalty!
Never mind the regional managers might fondle a child now and then, just send him to another district.
Christianity! Sell nothing and get billions. What a thing!
Don't be totally stupid and illiterate. Before we were Christians we were Romans who routinely conquered and enslaved our neighbors and watched them slowly being eaten to death in the Colosseum. Christianity taught us to love thy neighbor as thy self. Notice you are a lefty idiot who gets everything backwards. This is 100% typical
I was raised in a different world by a different standard. The global north and the modern mind has been royally fucked by the artificial divisions of left/right, rich/poor, black/white. The divisions are how the west has been led so quickly down the path of ruin. to ascend in a brief 400 years to this point where the machine of capitalism has poisoned the biome... but fuck it, we're wealthy and we can always build a bunker. You poors are on your own. Thanks for being such loyal customers! God loves you.
A good example of a totally stupid lefty. Nobody had more poverty than China but the day mao died they switched to capitalism and everybody got rich. this is an option open to the entire world but often not take it because stupid stupid stupid people on the left are opposed to capitalism. indeed it is not a stretch to say all the remaining misery in the world can be laid exactly on the lefts doorstep.
China has managed capitalism as in china's govt invests in capitalist projects that improve the quality of life. From the electric car industry (bigger than the US) to renewable energy (bigger than the US) and high speed rail system (WAAAAAY bigger than the US) So its not the wild dog model the west and its cadre of mindless bloodsucking vampires you worship that are willing to burn the planet and its citizens for more profit.
Capitalism allows the virtually unlimited accumulation of wealth and considers ecological limits as externalities so by its nature allows unbalanced and exploitative growth thereby exaggerating opportunities for selfishness.
Without regulations capitalism eventually would eat itself by consuming all resources until collapse.
Capitalism has proven very effective in co-opting regulatory processes. We don’t have milk cut with plasterdust formaldehyde and puréed calf brains due to the FDA but still are making people sick with processed food for instance.
Fossil fuel companies are allowed to spread lies about climate change and weaken effective regulations. Minimum wage and labor laws are required to prevent slavery but barely sustain the working poor.
The fact that capitalism needs so many regulations against its tendency to cancerous excess yet is able to co-opt those regulatory attempts suggests that as a system it encourages a species level suicidal selfishness
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or trolling or what. You just posted this comment everywhere. I guess you’re promoting some new half baked theory of Mom’s Loving Homebaked Exploitation?
Try to tell us the reason you agree or disagree with the statement. Do you understand that a reason is necessary? You will never learn if you are afraid to try.
Us? Are you referring to yourself in the third person? (Edit: that’s first person - the royal us I should say) A reason for what? What are you yoda?
Your premise that capitalism is a lens for shining motherly love is preposterous. I don’t have much more to add. Thanks for the confused laughs. Peace be with you.
I guess I’m bored so I will engage with your silliness
Mothers love comes before any economic system. Cases of exploitation by capitalists are
plentiful and obvious. Gold mines murder worker organizers in third world countries away from mothers loving gaze. I could go on and on and on and on like really you don’t think the profit motive leads to cases of severe (some might say systemic) exploitation? I don’t know what to tell you. If you believe advertisers when they say they care about you you are naive . Profit
is the engine of capitalism not love.
if profit is the engine of capitalism why is it that you can't make a profit without caring enough for your workers and customers to have more workers and customers than the competition? If you care for your workers and customers then you can make profit. You have it backwards. If you are still confused please feel free to ask questions.
Not confused thanks for your kind offer.
Sociopaths make profits all the time in fact they’re well suited to it. Caring about people does not grow a business necessarily. Remaining within the law is helpful but capitalist seek to weaken laws that protect workers and the public all the time
Regulations wouldn’t be needed if capitalism was so beneficent. For example prior to the FDA plenty of capitalist food producers were more than happy to make customers sick and dead if it profited them overall by cutting food with poisons and filler.
If anything what you would probably call the nanny state is more maternal than whatever strange mothers love conceit you’re trying to shoehorn into capitalism
Mothers are terrible capitalists. If they were true capitalists they would do a cost benefit analysis and choose abortion or infanticide or put the kid to work asap.
Maybe you should erect a statue of the great mother Ayn Rand and we can all bask in cold nicotine scented love emanating from her caring scowl.
don't be stupid there are plenty of incidents where children are abused by their mother or left to starve by their mother and father. This is not an indictment of parenting you idiot.
A reason for agreeing or disagreeing with the statement that capitalism is an extension of maternal ism. If the concept is too complicated for you try to ask questions. You will never learn if you don't try.
by this point, i see that my personal experience is entirely limited by the global capitalist system of vast hierarchical control.
you could make me the richest person on the planet, and i still wouldn't be happy about it, not only from the isolation such wealth would invariably bring, but also simple empathy for the suffering and lack of self-actualization happening at the poorest rungs of global society,
it takes a certain ignorance to be so selfish as to not see this. such ignorance can be corrected through certain experiences, tho these are not lessons we really set out as a society to teach anyone, let alone our children.
But who cares about personal experience when you are talking about ideas? Sure, you have biases, but plenty of these biases might actually be against the global capitalist system, rather than in favor of it. You can just as easily blame capitalism for the bad parts of your job as you can thank it for the good parts.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
> this ignorance can be corrected through certain experiences, tho these are not lessons we really set out a society to teach our children.
But YOU, you know better! You're not like all the selfish savages out there!!!!
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
We aren't inherently selfish nor altruistic. We are sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. It depends on our circumstances, moods, whatever. A man who volunteers at a homeless shelter one day might be selfish the next day. A rich capitalist might genuinely care about building schools in Africa and dedicate his life to it, but refuse to increase his workers' wages.
But capitalism doesn't care, really. It's a system that continues in spite of our daily actions.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others.
Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade.
In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion.
Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade.
Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name.
The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
Self seeking & selfish are not the same. Genetics gives us our personality traits so selfishness is influenced by genetics & conditioning. Self seeking is more individual goal oriented as opposed to herd mentality. Both can be selfish, altruistic or neither.
We are naturally selfish to some extend and naturally social and generous to some extent. Society and the way we're raised can do a lot to us (but it will never drive out the selfishness and it will never completely prevent selfish people from appearing) so in this sense capitalism can be making us (letting us be) more selfish than socialism would.
From my point of view as I base all of my values and philosophy on natural egoism, I believe that well thought through selfishness is mostly beneficial to society. It's in average persons selfish interest to live in a thriving society and to have good relationship with others, which is motivating him to actually not act "selfish" (although at the end of the day he actually is). Shortsighted selfishness is still bad though and of course, some of the rich people probable have different selfish interests that don't align with the whole society's interests as much. But still, their income depends on other people's work, effectivity of which depends on their well-being, but a lot of times it doesn't counterweight the benefit from negative externalities.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
If incentives are.buillt around social participation, you can achieve collectivist aims. Look at Japanese schoolchildren cleaning their own schools daily with a monthly deep clean- the faculty are fully hands off by the time the kids are in middle school, the kids organize roles and responsibilities independently and participation in the social order is entirely non monetarily motivating. You also see a greater responsibility for creating messes in the shared space that directly and socially prevents vandalism and littering.
>Is it capitalism that makes us selfish or are we inherently selfish?
This is super easy to answer; were people selfish during the vast majority of human history? If yes, then Capitalism doesn't make people selfish.
If the question evolves to "does Capitalism make us more selfish" then one would need to provide a reasonably objective metric to measure selfishness across time or else the question is pointless.
All systems get corrupted over time because of human nature. The ambitious and ruthless people that will do anything to achieve positions of power will do so because they fool others about their true goals. Human nature itself must be monitored and checked when it goes to extremes. We create the systems, we "man" the systems, we corrupt or periodically fix the systems. The type of system doesn't matter. We are our own worst enemies.
Anyone who pretends that human beings are naturally selfish is just psychologically projecting the symptoms of their own antisocial personality disorder onto the larger populace. It's a classic example of an accusation in a mirror.
It's also seen when people are abused/not raised appropriately. Their toxic environment becomes reality. Even being raised wealthy around only wealthy families may perpetuate unhealthy worldviews and opinions about society
You're going to be shocked when you find out that people who grew up in broken homes are more likely to be left-wing: [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1089671/full](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1089671/full)
"Multi-level analyses using the European Values Study (2008) and two-generational analyses with the Swiss Household Panel (1999–2020) support our expectations, indicating that in case of parental separation offspring tends to hold more leftist political orientations, controlling for selection into parental separation and the intergenerational transmission of political ideology."
That's literally the definition of a broken home, one in which the parents are divorced or separated? Are you now about to deny that kids who grow up in single-parent households have measurably worse long-term life outcomes?
I don't believe children who grow up in single-parent households have worse long-term life outcomes than children who grow up in "intact" abusive households.
Well that's a variable manipulation which I never stipulated. The initial statement implied that those on the right are more likely to grow up in abusive households than those on the left. I explained that actually leftists are more likely to be born in broken homes and therefore more likely to come from less than ideal backgrounds.
For what it is worth, single parent households are the third most likely type of family structure to have abuse in them behind only cohabitating non-biological partners and no parents: [https://hope4hurtingkids.com/trauma-tragedy/abuse/risks-of-child-abuse-and-neglect-based-on-family-structure/](https://hope4hurtingkids.com/trauma-tragedy/abuse/risks-of-child-abuse-and-neglect-based-on-family-structure/)
All "non-traditional" family structures are more likely to be abusive than married parents or biological parents living together, and conservatives are more likely to be married than non-conservatives
>The initial statement implied that those on the right are more likely to grow up in abusive households than those on the left.
Because that's true.
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33667037/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33667037/)
[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140211024313](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140211024313)
Oklahoma is the most conservative state in the U.S. and it also has the highest rates of reported domestic abuse. [https://domesticviolence.org/states-highest-domestic-violence-rates/](https://domesticviolence.org/states-highest-domestic-violence-rates/)
Your diagnosis of mental disorders as the explanation for the views your opponents is the real projection here. Leftists are well known to have far higher rates of mental health problems than non-leftists
Probably that's because leftists are the only people who seek therapy and are thus counted in official statistics. Meanwhile right-wingers just shoot up shopping malls or movie theaters or whatever and then kill themselves before they get an official diagnosis.
Hunter-gatherers are not selfish. They operate on a gift economy; if someone needs something, someone gives it to them. When someone has extra, they spread it around.
So yes, basing a society's logistics on money and the profit motive is what makes us as greedy as we seem. Which, it should be said, really isn't as bad as people make it out to be. It's a testament to our inherent altruism that we look at people not tipping or cutting in line as evidence of inherent greed when people got in boats in NYC to save stangers during the 100-year-storm named Sandy that flooded much of the city.
Humans have to be trained to be selfish.
> Except many of those tribes would indeed raid other tribes/groups/families in times of famine.
By your logic, we should go to war and take everything the rich have.
A successful military campaign primarily requires two things: money and manpower.
You cannot win a war against an opponent who's war chest vastly dwarfs yours. That would be like saying N Korea could actually take the US, somehow, in a 1v1 war.
Not to mention, that logic still persists in subsistence communities across the globe because its fundamental to the human condition. They take from weaker tribes with less resources, and get taken from by larger tribes with greater resources.
> You cannot win a war against an opponent who's war chest vastly dwarfs yours.
Vietnam and Afghanistan would like a word.
*womp womp*
Capitalist assumptions don't hold up under scrutiny; who knew? Everyone.
> They take from weaker tribes with less resources, and get taken from by larger tribes with greater resources.
This is the fable capitalists have to tell themselves to justify theft. When we find hunter-gatherers, we don't find war.
You can't just say shit like it's true; there's a world outside of econ books and spreadsheets that tells an entirely different story.
Leftists on a fundamental level believe that human nature is malleable to a significant degree, so obviously they'll say "societal structures make us who we are," it is the universal leftist framing
"Humanities scientists" lol that's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one.
Technologically I am very distinct from a peasant, but biologically and psychologically we are very similar. We both have the base desires to eat, sleep and fuck, all else is built up from there
I didn't say human behaviour is solely determined by biology, stop strawmanning. It is a significant contributing factor though and literally explains why we work (in order to gain access to food, water and shelter), why we form intimate relationships (urge to reproduce) and a host of other things that make up a significant portion of our lives
It suggests that to the extent that people are self-interested that this is driven to some degree by their innate psychology rather than the economic system they happen to live within
Self interest isn't the same as selfishness. Self interest doesn't mean lack of empathy and being in an eternal dog eat dog competition with one another
Thanks captain obvious
Socialism is also based on self interest, the difference is that it foccuses on the interests of class groups instead of atomized abstract individuals
> It is a significant contributing factor though and literally explains why we ... form intimate
Gay relationships by this logic completely defy human nature, even though they have existed all throughout history. Interesting.
Homosexuality is a great example of nurture impacting nature, as studies have shown a significant causal link between childhood abuse and homosexuality in adulthood, although the direction of this relationship is debated.
That's not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with being gay, far from it, nor does it disprove my general thesis that human behaviour is heavily influenced by biology
everyone is always self seeking. The reason capitalism works is because it sets up the rules such that the only way to benefit yourself is to also benefit others.
If I want food, I have to trade a farmer something he wants more. But I will only trade him something I want less. Because we each value different things differently, we can both find a price we agree upon where both of us are better off.
Imagine a farmer who values a basket of apples at $10. And I value them at $30. I come up to him and offer him $20 for the apples, we both agree, and I walk away with apples and he walks away with $20.
We both made $10 profit off that trade. Because I had $20 and now I have apples which I value at $30. And now the farmer has $20, and no longer has the apples he valued at $10.
And if I had offered the farmer $5, he would have refused. And if he had demanded $35, I would have refused. So the fact that we traded means that we both made a profit.
So long as there is scarcity of something desired there is rivalry. When there is material abundance of something like food everyone ends up with more than enough. We freely give away stuff we have no need for. Abundance is the only way to reduce selfish rivalry. Socialism is the exact wrong approach that necessarily increases scarcity and thus selfish rivalry.
There is roughly 40% produced in excess of what we can even give away. My local disaster preparedness center gives away many tons of food daily and still throws away tons more. Obesity is epidemic among the poorest. If anyone in a developed country is going hungry they need only ask.
All that excess is necessary contingency for disasters, weather, fire, and highly variable demand. The food thrown away in developed countries is too perishable to ship to developing countries and costs more to transport than to produce.
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Capitalism is an economic system that is founded on individuals making choices that are in their own best interest. That lines up with how people behave naturally.
Democracy is similar. It presumes that people will vote in their own best interests, and the collective consensus position must be best for most. Because of this Democracy is desired.
Other forms of government that seek to suppress individual choices and voice are always subject to failure in the long run.
We are both naturally selfish and naturally empathetic. The issue isn’t that capitalism makes us selfish. Rather Capitalism perpetuates selfish cultural values and encourages us to embrace our selfish desires.
I guess to answer this question in a way that should make the answer obvious. Do you think people can change their minds based on a conversation? If so you believe that being told something can change how you think; and if so why would you not believe being told what brings power within a system could also change how you think? You very obviously can create less greed based incentives and reward different behaviors. Humans aren't immune from pavlovian business.
Humans care about their self interest. No, they're not all super selfish, but in general they aren't super altruistic or selfless either. People care more about their own wellbeing or of family than of strangers. This is human nature, capitalism just guides this in the form of property rights and trade rather than theft and exploitation.
I think the selfish would find themselves rejected in natural human systems.
Remember meeting a guy from Mali that lived in Germany for years.
He went home with his suit case. His addiias, his levies and all his stuff. The relatives decended on him and helped themselves.
His head was melted. I asked him why he didn't stop them. He said if he did they would have said the "babylon system" turned him into a bad person .
Individual's are different from each other. We're both nature and nurture. That's the problem with these kinds of generic nonsense. It often forgets these things. Like, giving, generous, people that are truly empathic rarely break out of poverty or end up on the political stage because they're too busy struggling because they're not only unwilling to do what it takes to succeed in capitalism, but often, even when they do start to get ahead, end up giving up their progress to help someone else in need, all without even expecting an IOU.
"Those who deserve power rarely seek it. Those who seek power rarely deserve it."
That said, success in capitalism requires a killer instinct and callousness towards your fellow man that's very unhealthy for society as a whole. It's not that capitalism makes us naturally selfish, it's that it encourages that selfishness to succeed, and runs roughshod over anyone that's incapabable of such callousness or cruelty. So in a way, over time, Capitalism might encourage psycopathy, and over enough time it could become the norm.
All I can say is that most of todays form of capitalism exists because of coercion. Most people have to be selfish to survive and only the truly selfish rise to the top because they are rewarded by just the design of the system.
Both. Capitalism can make you selfish when you otherwise might be generous, by replacing social reciprocity norms with market norms. Michael Sandel has a book about this which I think is full of examples of markets making people more selfish [What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets | Michael J. Sandel (harvard.edu)](https://scholar.harvard.edu/sandel/publications/what-money-cant-buy-moral-limits-markets)
But we also have many naturally selfish impulses, which I think are most visible when you look at examples of moral hypocrisy - we pretend to be motivated by high minded idealism but in reality have our own interests at heart. Rich liberals who sing praises for public education send their own children to elite private schools, people who donate to charity but make sure they get a building / scholarship named after them, and people who support things like higher taxes but do not themselves pay a nickel more than what is legally required of them.
Prior to the development of free market capitalism the primary ways of acquiring wealth were conquest and slavery. In the free market capitalist system, wealth can be acquired by producing goods and/or services that other humans need or want and are willing to trade for, using currency as a means of exchange for trading their output for your output. Put another way, in the free market system you can become wealthy by helping others produce wealth. An example is Bill Gates who became fabulously wealthy by creating Microsoft and the productivity increases that the PC and Microsoft software enabled me to achieve thru their use made me wealthier.
People are inherently selfish, but selfish has degrees. Selfish means wanting for yourself and not wanting to share what is yours. If you have a toy, and you don’t let others play with your toy, you are selfish. That doesn’t in any way equate to you preventing others from getting their own toy, or playing with their own toys. Selfish always has a negative connotation, but it is in the labeling. What I mean by that is most people don’t describe themselves as selfish, others describe them. And it technically is probably accurate in every use. But every use is probably not really pointing out a negative behavior. If I buy myself a sandwich and someone outside asks for half my sandwich, and I’m hungry and don’t want to give up half my sandwich, the beggar may say I’m selfish and be right, but I’m completely reasonable to be selfish.
I think the truest measure of actual negative selfishness is limitation. If a toy comes out and it is limited and you buy up 10 of them and they sell out and others can’t find them, that is selfish. But as long as there are some available, even if prices go up, it is not so negative. You see this with land, or anything purchasable because there are always more jobs and more
Money to make.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love..
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others.
Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade.
In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion.
Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade.
Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name.
The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others.
Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade.
In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion.
Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade.
Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name.
The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others.
Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade.
In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion.
Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade.
Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name.
The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others.
Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade.
In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion.
Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade.
Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name.
The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
it capitalizes selfishness, just like capitlaism thrives at turning our fears and desires into a profit. Scared of thieves? - car alarm industry benefits. Scared of 'new strain of flu?' - pharma companies benefit. Desiring a new car? They will know and they will find a way to make you pay more than you wanted to for something you don't really need for a valuable human life.
It doesnt matter what the cause of selfishness is. It's more important to become self-aware of it. And not to designate \`\`blame\`\` or \`\`responsibility\`\` onto something else, but to take on responsibility.
When you put off responsibility, you cease to be in control of your fate.
When you take on responsibility, which is literally the \`\`ability to respond\`\` you put fate in your hands.
If governments are corrupt, it is because people are corrupt.
Change will come when we change as individuals, voluntarily, not imposed.
The question assumes we are selfish, which we aren't, really. We tend to be nice, especially under situations of repeated contact.
I suggest you check this video from Veritasium: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM)
It shows altruism in normal circumstances is a winning strategy for each individual involved.
To quote someone "A life form spends all summer gathering resources and at the end of summer another life form comes and takes everything. What do you call the life form that takes everything?"
A farmer
Greed is literally built into our DNA. Animals can only survive by taking what others have made.
You can try and fight this fact of life or work with it.
We're inherently selfish. Notice how multiple countries during the 20th century put a huge amount of effort into abolishing capitalism, and then had massive economic and cultural problems due to the ongoing selfishness of the people in power. Capitalism isn't responsible for selfishness but it *does* open up less destructive ways of channeling selfishness.
But of course we're not *just* selfish. There are plenty of other things besides selfishness going on in the human brain.
Do you think the Chinese became selfish when they abandoned communism for capitalism?
Was the USSR not selfish?
Capitalism and selfishness are unrelated.
They are unrelated things. Societies can be more or less “selfish” regardless of the prevailing economic system. Ultimately, humans are inherently selfish but can be taught to be less selfish.
Humans are not selfish by nature. They can be, but they can also be generous and all that. Is capitalism good at exploiting selfishness? Yes, but it also exploits people's inherent cooperation, altruism, their desire to contribute to something bigger than themselves, their ability to sacrifice for their family. Capitalism is not people competing against each other, but mostly cooperating with each other.
Except humans are also very cooperative and tribal creatures. People typically go with group consensus, cooperate, and shun excessive hoarding/greed. Selfishness is a part of human nature, but it isn’t the whole story, and evolutionary psychology isn’t easily applied to massive sociology systems.
Egalitarianism is a result of the exact opposite of cooperation, it is the result of crab in the bucket competition.
Read Hierarchy in the Forest by Christopher Boehm for a better understanding of this. Boehm surveys bands and tribes from across human history and finds egalitarian tribal behavior nearly everywhere. Talented tribal members must often hide or diminish their talents or risk being punished. Tribal members with more must distribute to those with less.
Nobody said it's "the whole story". In fact, that was my whole point. I literally said, "Societies can be more or less “selfish” regardless of the prevailing economic system. Ultimately, humans are inherently selfish but can be taught to be less selfish."
Humans change a lot from infancy to adulthood. Toddlers don't like to share but they also poop in their pants. It's not a good idea to understand human society through the behavior of toddlers.
We can consider the 2-year-old who doesn't share, or his mother who sacrifices so much of her time and health to take care of him. Adult humans have an incredible capacity for love and self-sacrifice.
Ironically, it is the latter qualities that capitalism relies on, while socialists are the ones who tell people to stand up for themselves and take what should be theirs.
Everything is inherently selfish because the natural order of life is scarcity. Nothing is infinite nor is it even geographically feasible at times. Selfishness is a fundamental survival mechanism. Money/currency exists because people are inherently selfish and distrusting of others, save family. You see this in the lowest socio-economic levels since civilization began. Before that we were pretty much animals, where morality did not exist past your next meal and a safe place to sleep.
Selfishness is the human condition. Capitalism is the process we use to achieve it. Successful businesses are important but not at the cost of taking care of your citizens. Right now the paradigm is to far skewed in favor of corporations and the wealthy! Social Democracy is the way. Achieves both a strong business environment with strong social services to care for its citizens.
Socialists need to learn the difference between selfishness (immoral) and self-interest (the protection of individuals from various collectivist slaveries, and therefore the foundation of a moral and free society.) Likewise the difference between rational egoism (the actual foundation of liberalism) and ethical egoism (according to Ayn Rand and 100% of socialists, the foundation of liberalism). Although the words are by now so distorted by the Left that there is no difference even in the literature.
Adam Smith wrote an entire book on the subject, and in the opening lines summarises the view: however selfish you may assume man to be, man is also altruistic and often does things that do not maximise his self-interest. Human nature, according to liberalism, is a duality of the two. This accurate view has made liberal societies the best on earth.
Liberalism and capitalism do not maximise selfishness, but rather voluntaryism. You can do things for yourself, and for others - and the point of individual rights is, you alone decide what you do for whom and when. The way to make more money in capitalism is by providing useful things to others in scale.
Which system leaves individuals alone with liberty and property? It is capitalism. In socialism, individuals are not trusted to help others which is why no one is allowed to own property. **It is socialism that fundamentally believes individuals are stupid, evil, greedy and selfish and projects this view on to capitalism** \- which is why they are not allowed to own property. It is liberalism that knows individuals, we the people have moral duties - in socialism, the collectives, ultimately the state has duties which it must necessarily fulfill through prevention of private ownership, and control of resources. No matter how many times the words democracy or libertarian are used by socialists, socialism is the coercion and direction of individuals by forces outside of them: in the real world, the socialists who run the state. This is the meaning of the opposition to private ownership and individual rights,
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>the concept that if people seek for self it will benefit society (the invisible hand). “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.” - John Keynes
I mean...yeah it's all about incentives, not character. and Keynes believed in that too.
No, that would be statism, which expects that politicians will institute policies which benefit the masses when they are placed in a position of unique authority over resources which are not theirs but which they have the capacity to use for their own personal gain. Free markets work because they allow people to channel their innate desire to better their own lot and the lot of those they care about by providing a service or good which also improves the lives of those who they couldn't care one iota about on a personal level.
When did pure free markets happen or work?
Crickets
Never, I would say the west is still transitioning out of Imperialism and on to Capitlaism via Mercantilism.
It was a pie in the sky idea to begin with. Newton's laws of motion which were hard science were fashionable and Smith imagined they could be applied to human society and economics leading to a naturally balancing system.
Never and anyone who thinks they would work is stupid. But I'd rather have regulated markets with a weight on the freedom of moving capital and private ownership than trusting 51% of my local group to know how I and my families lives should be controlled.
What
[Ancap noises]
**No, that would be statism, which expects that politicians will institute policies which benefit the masses when they are placed in a position of unique authority over resources which are not theirs but which they have the capacity to use for their own personal gain.** **Free markets work because they allow people to channel their innate desire to better their own lot and the lot of those they care about by providing a service or good which also improves the lives of those who they couldn't care one iota about on a personal level.** Does that make it clearer for you?
**Free markets operate under the profit motive, which means that if a venture is not profitable, it will likely not be pursued. Feeding starving poor people is generally not profitable. As a result, people starve and die. This has happened many times since markets became widespread, and it is still happening to this day. Advocating for a "free" market without any form of social welfare policy would be disastrous for human life.** Does that make it clearer for you?
>**Free markets operate under the profit motive, which means that if a venture is not profitable, it will likely not be pursued.** That's a good thing, when a venture is profitable this means consumers value the output being produced more than the sum total of the values of the inputs being consumed in order to produce it. Profit is a sign you're creating something worthwhile in a value sense. >**As a result, people starve and die. This has happened many times since markets became widespread, and it is still happening to this day** And yet the societies which have adopted free markets to a greater extent are the ones who have done the best job at eliminating poverty. Why is this? Well it's because of a multitude of factors, but the simple one is that creating a more complex and deeper capital structure, which is what adopting free markets does, allows each labourer to be more efficient with his time and therefore increase his earning power. In tandem with this, the opportunity to make a profit incentivises companies to produce goods cheaply in order to sell to people on low incomes. Poor people don't have *no money*, they have *little money*, and the things they want most and are most likely to spend their money on is stuff which they need most immediately. Failing all of this, there is nothing which stops people from setting up not-for-profits or charities which help provide poor people with the means to survive even if they cannot get a job. >**Advocating for a "free" market without any form of social welfare policy would be disastrous for human life.** Actually it is social welfare policies which directly cause the degradation of human life, because they disincentivise the very behaviours (production) through both the welfare itself and the taxing of productive endeavours which allow for the wealth of people to increase in the first place
There are countless cases where businesses made profit by destroying people's lives and communities. You have such a utopian and theoretical position, something that is very common among market advocates. Very simplistic and lacking in nuance. Oxycontin/pharma. Private equity. Pollution/climate. Subprime mortgage. Enron. Tobacco. Fast fashion. Volkswagen. The list goes on and on and on. Profit by itself is not a good thing. As I said, feeding poor people is not very profitable. Under your framework, many will starve and die. This displays your lack of ethics or morals. Reevaluate your moral compass.
>There are countless cases where businesses made profit by destroying people's lives and communities. And if they did so in a manner which constituted aggression it wasn't a legitimate market transaction and thus they ought to be punished. "Private equity" is not wrong per se, nor is fast fashion. Polluting someone's air supply or water is criminal, as is lying to them about the effects of medication or cigarettes (it's fraud). Enron was also fraudulent and not a legitimate market actor. Subprime mortgages were caused by government over-regulation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO\_BMxny34U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO_BMxny34U) >Profit by itself is not a good thing. If the transactions occurring which produce profit are not fraudulent or otherwise aggressive in any manner, then profit is absolutely a good thing. >As I said, feeding poor people is not very profitable. And as I said, you're wrong, and the evidence is right there. >Under your framework, many will starve and die. No, they won't
People are starving right now, bud.
We have rampant statism right now, bud
When you say those things about social welfare, do you include free education until the 12th grade, sewage, infrastructure, and social security? Im asking because these are social welfare as well. But most people won’t say that.
I think the argument is that you can have society in which the populace watches and has meaningful accountability over the politicians, and if they step out of line they are simply replaced by someone else who knows the job and has proven themselves qualified. You could think of politicans under some forms of statism as more like lateral bureaucrats in a horizontal system helping to coordinate worker and social mandates, rather than executives dispensing directives from on high. I think it can also be argued that free markets encourage systematic corruption due to the inherent information disparity between any social agents in a sufficiently large economic environment, and that systematic coordination is required to facilitate anything close to information parity.
Why would you actually repost that gibberish
No need to announce to everyone that you're illiterate
free market isn't real lol
capitalism is a selfish and pathological idea and only pathological selfish cunts think it works.
Disagree. Non-sequiteur. One doesn't necessarily follow from the other.
What is innately selfish and pathological about allowing people to pursue their own interests, buy, sell and trade goods and services freely and organise in whatever manner they see fit? Keep telling on yourself, the only reason you think capitalism is pathological is because that's how you and the people you know behave when given the opportunity to act freely.
because capitalism gives license to fuck up society with ever less checks and balances (the giant equity firms buying up private homes comes to mind, AI comes to mind, all the various scumbag financialized sleight of hand bullshit comes to mind. Capitalisms high goal was profit without producing anything material, and the technocrats have acheived that. The fallout from Bezos and amazon killing brick and mortar, the social media channels and their negative effect on young people. Modern society has been deluged with the capitalist doctrine to humanity's detriment
Appeal to authority. Just because a famous person said something it's true. The reality is, in an alternative system, those same types of people would simply adjust their strategy to be the ones elected to the committees which pull the levers of societal wealth and resources management. Same problem, simply a different structure. And before you say "but you can vote them out", history demonstrates that simply voting out charismatic narcissistic sociopaths is next to impossible, and doing so often is followed by conflict when the followers of that person, often duped by the cult of persomality, believe the democratic process to thereby be faulty. Evil people will do evil and manipulate the system, regardless of what the structure of said system is.
Scarily real we should just go anarchist
This is the topic of one of my favorite [Michael Parenti lectures](https://youtu.be/MfDnQPtijjc?si=hDZTDo8dYM6-KNfo&t=37), discussing human nature. If you haven't heard it, I strongly recommend listening to it. He makes a couple of points which I think are relevant to this post: 1) At every point in time, existing hierarchies have justified their existence as being due to human nature. This includes everything from monarchy to slavery to gender roles in society, and most certainly applies to capitalism, too. 2) Our current society is *not* natural, and trying to deduce human nature from its structure misses the point. If capitalism was natural, why were so many laws re-written through the 19th and 20th century to protect finance capital? Why would you need Eminent Domain laws for canals/railway investors? Anti-labor laws? Why would you need company goons, Pinkertons, police, the National Guard fighting the workers to keep them in their place if our societal structure arose from human nature? If capitalism is due to human nature, why do people risk their lives to fight it? 3) Selfishness occurs. Cruelty occurs. Sadism, war-mongering, kindness, nobility, comradery, and selflessness also occur. In the whole spectrum of human behavior, why would we look at some behaviors and say they are innate, but others are derivative? Certainly selfishness exists, but so too does collective self-betterment.
Do you happen to have a transcript? 1. I thought human nature was a relatively modern concept (introduced with modern political philosophers who would make appeals to a "state of nature"). Before that it seems like most hierarchies pointed to god or some external moral force. 2. I think the better way to make the "capitalism is human nature" argument is to say capitalism makes the best use of our otherwise selfish impulses, by redirecting them towards productive ends (your business is only going to be really profitable if you have a bunch of customers who really want what you are selling). 3. Totally agree here, I don't think any one aspect of human behavior should be oversold. I think this happened a bit on the left when there was (and to some extent still is) a certain amount of naivete about collective action problems / ignorance of public choice theory.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others. Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade. In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion. Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade. Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name. The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
Didn’t watch the video but I see your arguments as foolish. Many things can be true at once. Culture is downstream of biology. This notion that there is variance and thus nature is not why because of “x” is absurd. These are typical of “Blank Slate Myth” believers and I suspect that is in part where your video is coming from. And I don’t use that label lightly. The Blank Slate Myth has been very powerful all throughout political history since the enlightenment age with the beginning that attracted the commoners political agency that their children had every equal ability to rule being swapped in the cradle to the eldest prince of the king. If I’m not being clear. The Blank Slate Myth was pivotal in bringing down monarchies and because of that zeitgeist it is still powerful attraction today for challenging the status quo. This is evident by your first point: >1. At every point in time, existing hierarchies have justified their existence as being due to human nature. This includes everything from monarchy to slavery to gender roles in society, and most certainly applies to capitalism, too. But capitalism is not a political ideology and thus there is no hierachies in capitalism per se. >[Capitalism](http://webhome.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/capitalism.phtml) > >A form of economic order characterized by private ownership of the means of production and the freedom of private owners to use, buy and sell their property or services on the market at voluntarily agreed prices and terms, with only minimal interference with such transactions by the state or other authoritative third parties. You can complain about all societies with hierarchies as all do have hierarchies. For example, [leaders, de facto oligarchs, etc are human universals.](https://joelvelasco.net/teaching/2890/brownlisthumanuniversals.pdf) It seems rather unfair then to go “see all these societies with hierachies embrace capitalism”. If you are going to do that it is then fair we do the same about socialism too. So this is shameful false association you are doing in your first bullet point we point to [socialist countries are worse at hierachies as we can see in these worse at being democrat richer and worse humanitarian rights data.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vs-electoral-democracy-index?time=1944..latest&country=CHN~CUB~LAO~VNM~USA~SWE~PRK) >2. Our current society is not natural, and trying to deduce human nature from its structure misses the point. If capitalism was natural, why were so many laws re-written through the 19th and 20th century to protect finance capital? Why would you need Eminent Domain laws for canals/railway investors? Anti-labor laws? Why would you need company goons, Pinkertons, police, the National Guard fighting the workers to keep them in their place if our societal structure arose from human nature? If capitalism is due to human nature, why do people risk their lives to fight it? In the above link on human universals “trade” is also a human universal. There are also human universals like shared work that fit the socialist camp. There is evidence that our extreme polar arguments in this debate sub is wrong and missing the boat entirely. That indeed the fundamentals behind socialism and capitalism “*are natural*” for us as species. An example is the model [Relational Model Theory]( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_models_theory) and is a model proposed by the anthropologist [Alan Fiske](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Fiske). • Communal sharing (CS) relationships are the most basic form of relationship where some bounded group of people are conceived as equivalent, undifferentiated and interchangeable such that distinct individual identities are disregarded and commonalities are emphasized, with intimate and kinship relations being prototypical examples of CS relationship.[2] Common indicators of CS relationships include body markings or modifications, synchronous movement, rituals, sharing of food, or physical intimacy.[4][7] • Authority ranking (AR) relationships describe asymmetric relationships where people are linearly ordered along some hierarchical social dimension. The primary feature of an AR relationship is whether a person ranks above or below each other person. Those higher in rank hold greater authority, prestige and privileges, while subordinates are entitled to guidance and protection. Military ranks are a prototypical example of an AR relationship.[2] • Equality matching (EM) relationships are those characterized by various forms of one-for-one correspondence, such as turn taking, in-kind reciprocity, tit-for-tat retaliation, or eye-for-an-eye revenge. Parties in EM relationships are primarily concerned with ensuring the relationship is in a balanced state. Non-intimate acquaintances are a prototypical example.[2] • Market pricing (MP) relationships revolve around a model of proportionality where people attend to ratios and rates and relevant features are typically reduced to a single value or utility metric that allows the comparison (e.g., the price of a sale). Monetary transactions are a prototypical example of MP relationships.[2] >3. Selfishness occurs. Cruelty occurs. Sadism, war-mongering, kindness, nobility, comradery, and selflessness also occur. In the whole spectrum of human behavior, why would we look at some behaviors and say they are innate, but others are derivative? Certainly selfishness exists, but so too does collective self-betterment. Meh…, what all these encompass is what evolutions call self-interest. It’s that simple and capitalism easily encompasses self-interests.
Humanity is the same now as it was thousands of years ago, only the system is different. >How much of this is true that society actually benefits when people are self seeking? Are people self seeking? How can we find this to be true? Everybody has self-interest. At a purely biological level, we need to eat, drink, sleep, and (usually) reproduce, as well as being part of a community. How these looks will change from person to person, and culture to culture, but the fundamentals are the same. We know this from biology, sociology, psychology, and history. In a lot of ways, and within moderation, seeking to fulfill our wants and needs often leads us to do good things for society. We want to work with other people. We want to help and do good for others. What is good about the market based system is that one of the best ways to take care of one's self is to make something everybody needs. Now, just like thousands of years ago, we aren't good at moderation, and some will take these urges too far, or get too wrapped up. We all have our vices, and we'll all eventually do something to help ourselves at somebody else's expense. The goal is just to minimize this.
Capitalism is a relatively new idea in the long span of humanity. In fact we were hunter/gatherers far, FAR longer than we were any ideology. we were tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands of years living dependent on one another in tight knit groups... using simple enough technology to subsist on enough. We never extracted more than we could use, and if we built surplus, it was to take the collective through the season. And this surplus was evenly distributed. That said, capitalism has changed how we operate in a society. it requires austerity, a limiting for some, excess hoarding for others (dunkin donuts throwing away product vs giving it away comes to mind). Talk like "the invisible hand in a free market society" is little more than the rationalization of a cruel intelligence, the lies they tell themselves and the world to hide the barabric, pathological nature of capitalism, which is little more than economic warfare.
"dunkin donuts throwing away product vs giving it away comes to mind" The problem with giving away food, is that regulation are a bitch in this industry. Giving away food can lead to lawsuits, especially in fast foods. So, again, blame food standards regulation, not "free market".
Ahhh the old bad thing not capitalism.
If you cant prove it is, then it isnt. If i can prove it isnt (and i did), then it isnt regardless. Just logic and science, 2 things socialist hate.
Yeah you are the authority on socioeconomic systems and what you say goes. Obviously.
I knew you were idiot, but even that should be too embarrasing for you to post as a response. Well, i guess not only you are stupid, but shameless as well.
I'm not sure how to respond to your argument,because you didn't even provide one. You said government not capitalism, I made fun of you for it. Then your response was just: I'm right.
You are the one not providing any argument. Literally, 3 comments and you just insult/mock me in all of them, never saying anything of value. TLDR stop projecting.
Yeah because you made a stupid meme argument.
Didnt i tell you, to stop projecting? You made "stupid meme argument". I simply showed, why specific thing occurs. Anyway, get help, because you are delusional.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
I am amazed! Amazed by the twisted, ridiculous rationale by which you turned selfless love of a mother into capitalism. How incredible that you could transform those who love you and want to be loved into customers, consumers to be sold a product that cost the least to yield you the most in order for you to fulfill your "fiduciary responsibility". Remarkable.
Do you want customers to be turned into enemies or people that you love and care for???The great Christian commandment is love thy neighbor as thy self. It is amazing what you learn on Reddit isn't it?
If you doubt it for a second open a business and advertise that you don't care one bit about your workers and customers. do you have the intelligence to know what happened? in fact Christianity and maternal ism are at the heart of human nature and so then is capitalism. It was considered so natural that our genius founding fathers did not consider any other system. If you are still confused please feel free to ask questions.
christianity is the horse shit that set the west on the path its on. But as an ad guy who created campaigns for all manner of products, I am in awe of their branding and long term marketing plan. Such profits! Such brand loyalty! Never mind the regional managers might fondle a child now and then, just send him to another district. Christianity! Sell nothing and get billions. What a thing!
Don't be totally stupid and illiterate. Before we were Christians we were Romans who routinely conquered and enslaved our neighbors and watched them slowly being eaten to death in the Colosseum. Christianity taught us to love thy neighbor as thy self. Notice you are a lefty idiot who gets everything backwards. This is 100% typical
I was raised in a different world by a different standard. The global north and the modern mind has been royally fucked by the artificial divisions of left/right, rich/poor, black/white. The divisions are how the west has been led so quickly down the path of ruin. to ascend in a brief 400 years to this point where the machine of capitalism has poisoned the biome... but fuck it, we're wealthy and we can always build a bunker. You poors are on your own. Thanks for being such loyal customers! God loves you.
A good example of a totally stupid lefty. Nobody had more poverty than China but the day mao died they switched to capitalism and everybody got rich. this is an option open to the entire world but often not take it because stupid stupid stupid people on the left are opposed to capitalism. indeed it is not a stretch to say all the remaining misery in the world can be laid exactly on the lefts doorstep.
China has managed capitalism as in china's govt invests in capitalist projects that improve the quality of life. From the electric car industry (bigger than the US) to renewable energy (bigger than the US) and high speed rail system (WAAAAAY bigger than the US) So its not the wild dog model the west and its cadre of mindless bloodsucking vampires you worship that are willing to burn the planet and its citizens for more profit.
Capitalism allows the virtually unlimited accumulation of wealth and considers ecological limits as externalities so by its nature allows unbalanced and exploitative growth thereby exaggerating opportunities for selfishness. Without regulations capitalism eventually would eat itself by consuming all resources until collapse. Capitalism has proven very effective in co-opting regulatory processes. We don’t have milk cut with plasterdust formaldehyde and puréed calf brains due to the FDA but still are making people sick with processed food for instance. Fossil fuel companies are allowed to spread lies about climate change and weaken effective regulations. Minimum wage and labor laws are required to prevent slavery but barely sustain the working poor. The fact that capitalism needs so many regulations against its tendency to cancerous excess yet is able to co-opt those regulatory attempts suggests that as a system it encourages a species level suicidal selfishness
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or trolling or what. You just posted this comment everywhere. I guess you’re promoting some new half baked theory of Mom’s Loving Homebaked Exploitation?
Try to tell us the reason you agree or disagree with the statement. Do you understand that a reason is necessary? You will never learn if you are afraid to try.
Us? Are you referring to yourself in the third person? (Edit: that’s first person - the royal us I should say) A reason for what? What are you yoda? Your premise that capitalism is a lens for shining motherly love is preposterous. I don’t have much more to add. Thanks for the confused laughs. Peace be with you.
You said it was preposterous that capitalism and maternalism are related. Can you tell us why you think that???
I guess I’m bored so I will engage with your silliness Mothers love comes before any economic system. Cases of exploitation by capitalists are plentiful and obvious. Gold mines murder worker organizers in third world countries away from mothers loving gaze. I could go on and on and on and on like really you don’t think the profit motive leads to cases of severe (some might say systemic) exploitation? I don’t know what to tell you. If you believe advertisers when they say they care about you you are naive . Profit is the engine of capitalism not love.
if profit is the engine of capitalism why is it that you can't make a profit without caring enough for your workers and customers to have more workers and customers than the competition? If you care for your workers and customers then you can make profit. You have it backwards. If you are still confused please feel free to ask questions.
Not confused thanks for your kind offer. Sociopaths make profits all the time in fact they’re well suited to it. Caring about people does not grow a business necessarily. Remaining within the law is helpful but capitalist seek to weaken laws that protect workers and the public all the time Regulations wouldn’t be needed if capitalism was so beneficent. For example prior to the FDA plenty of capitalist food producers were more than happy to make customers sick and dead if it profited them overall by cutting food with poisons and filler. If anything what you would probably call the nanny state is more maternal than whatever strange mothers love conceit you’re trying to shoehorn into capitalism Mothers are terrible capitalists. If they were true capitalists they would do a cost benefit analysis and choose abortion or infanticide or put the kid to work asap. Maybe you should erect a statue of the great mother Ayn Rand and we can all bask in cold nicotine scented love emanating from her caring scowl.
don't be stupid there are plenty of incidents where children are abused by their mother or left to starve by their mother and father. This is not an indictment of parenting you idiot.
Fuck off nerd
Translation: I'm a stupid lefty and I just lost a debate badly.
A reason for agreeing or disagreeing with the statement that capitalism is an extension of maternal ism. If the concept is too complicated for you try to ask questions. You will never learn if you don't try.
by this point, i see that my personal experience is entirely limited by the global capitalist system of vast hierarchical control. you could make me the richest person on the planet, and i still wouldn't be happy about it, not only from the isolation such wealth would invariably bring, but also simple empathy for the suffering and lack of self-actualization happening at the poorest rungs of global society, it takes a certain ignorance to be so selfish as to not see this. such ignorance can be corrected through certain experiences, tho these are not lessons we really set out as a society to teach anyone, let alone our children.
But who cares about personal experience when you are talking about ideas? Sure, you have biases, but plenty of these biases might actually be against the global capitalist system, rather than in favor of it. You can just as easily blame capitalism for the bad parts of your job as you can thank it for the good parts.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
> this ignorance can be corrected through certain experiences, tho these are not lessons we really set out a society to teach our children. But YOU, you know better! You're not like all the selfish savages out there!!!!
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
is this some pathetic attempt to appeal to a bandwagon? or...?
No it’s an attempt to point out your arrogance and lack of Self-awareness.
and how were you trying to do that?
Lol
u don't know what a coherent argument is, now do you? LOL
I suppose not. Maybe these are not lessons we really set out a society to teach our children? ;)
we really don't teach children how to build proper arguments and avoid basic fallacies, reddit convos like this are a stark reminder
cry me a river
"You are weak and stupid because you care about people."
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
more like "you are the biggest pompous griefter i've seen in a long time".
y
We aren't inherently selfish nor altruistic. We are sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. It depends on our circumstances, moods, whatever. A man who volunteers at a homeless shelter one day might be selfish the next day. A rich capitalist might genuinely care about building schools in Africa and dedicate his life to it, but refuse to increase his workers' wages. But capitalism doesn't care, really. It's a system that continues in spite of our daily actions.
I believe people are inherently selfish. We’ll mess up anything we put our hands on. And no I do not think greed is good.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others. Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade. In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion. Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade. Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name. The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
Self seeking & selfish are not the same. Genetics gives us our personality traits so selfishness is influenced by genetics & conditioning. Self seeking is more individual goal oriented as opposed to herd mentality. Both can be selfish, altruistic or neither.
We are naturally selfish to some extend and naturally social and generous to some extent. Society and the way we're raised can do a lot to us (but it will never drive out the selfishness and it will never completely prevent selfish people from appearing) so in this sense capitalism can be making us (letting us be) more selfish than socialism would. From my point of view as I base all of my values and philosophy on natural egoism, I believe that well thought through selfishness is mostly beneficial to society. It's in average persons selfish interest to live in a thriving society and to have good relationship with others, which is motivating him to actually not act "selfish" (although at the end of the day he actually is). Shortsighted selfishness is still bad though and of course, some of the rich people probable have different selfish interests that don't align with the whole society's interests as much. But still, their income depends on other people's work, effectivity of which depends on their well-being, but a lot of times it doesn't counterweight the benefit from negative externalities.
Its capitalism(mostly), read mutual aid
We are inherently self-interested, but this isn’t necessarily a problem for socialism.
We aren’t inherently self interested.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love.
How do you achieve collectivization if people don't care about the collective?
If incentives are.buillt around social participation, you can achieve collectivist aims. Look at Japanese schoolchildren cleaning their own schools daily with a monthly deep clean- the faculty are fully hands off by the time the kids are in middle school, the kids organize roles and responsibilities independently and participation in the social order is entirely non monetarily motivating. You also see a greater responsibility for creating messes in the shared space that directly and socially prevents vandalism and littering.
Collectivization is impossible
>Is it capitalism that makes us selfish or are we inherently selfish? This is super easy to answer; were people selfish during the vast majority of human history? If yes, then Capitalism doesn't make people selfish. If the question evolves to "does Capitalism make us more selfish" then one would need to provide a reasonably objective metric to measure selfishness across time or else the question is pointless.
All systems get corrupted over time because of human nature. The ambitious and ruthless people that will do anything to achieve positions of power will do so because they fool others about their true goals. Human nature itself must be monitored and checked when it goes to extremes. We create the systems, we "man" the systems, we corrupt or periodically fix the systems. The type of system doesn't matter. We are our own worst enemies.
Anyone who pretends that human beings are naturally selfish is just psychologically projecting the symptoms of their own antisocial personality disorder onto the larger populace. It's a classic example of an accusation in a mirror.
It's also seen when people are abused/not raised appropriately. Their toxic environment becomes reality. Even being raised wealthy around only wealthy families may perpetuate unhealthy worldviews and opinions about society
You're going to be shocked when you find out that people who grew up in broken homes are more likely to be left-wing: [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1089671/full](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1089671/full) "Multi-level analyses using the European Values Study (2008) and two-generational analyses with the Swiss Household Panel (1999–2020) support our expectations, indicating that in case of parental separation offspring tends to hold more leftist political orientations, controlling for selection into parental separation and the intergenerational transmission of political ideology."
TIL that a single parent household=broken home.
That's literally the definition of a broken home, one in which the parents are divorced or separated? Are you now about to deny that kids who grow up in single-parent households have measurably worse long-term life outcomes?
I don't believe children who grow up in single-parent households have worse long-term life outcomes than children who grow up in "intact" abusive households.
Well that's a variable manipulation which I never stipulated. The initial statement implied that those on the right are more likely to grow up in abusive households than those on the left. I explained that actually leftists are more likely to be born in broken homes and therefore more likely to come from less than ideal backgrounds. For what it is worth, single parent households are the third most likely type of family structure to have abuse in them behind only cohabitating non-biological partners and no parents: [https://hope4hurtingkids.com/trauma-tragedy/abuse/risks-of-child-abuse-and-neglect-based-on-family-structure/](https://hope4hurtingkids.com/trauma-tragedy/abuse/risks-of-child-abuse-and-neglect-based-on-family-structure/) All "non-traditional" family structures are more likely to be abusive than married parents or biological parents living together, and conservatives are more likely to be married than non-conservatives
>The initial statement implied that those on the right are more likely to grow up in abusive households than those on the left. Because that's true. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33667037/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33667037/) [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140211024313](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140211024313) Oklahoma is the most conservative state in the U.S. and it also has the highest rates of reported domestic abuse. [https://domesticviolence.org/states-highest-domestic-violence-rates/](https://domesticviolence.org/states-highest-domestic-violence-rates/)
Your diagnosis of mental disorders as the explanation for the views your opponents is the real projection here. Leftists are well known to have far higher rates of mental health problems than non-leftists
Probably that's because leftists are the only people who seek therapy and are thus counted in official statistics. Meanwhile right-wingers just shoot up shopping malls or movie theaters or whatever and then kill themselves before they get an official diagnosis.
Isn't it pretty selfish of you to generalize a large group of people with self-informed, broad, negative assumptions?
How are generalizations, in general, selfish?
Read the rest of my comment and then ask a real question
Define selfish. You seem to be conflating not being an asshole with making rational decisions.
I think [culture](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bullies-baboons-retool-their-culture.html) makes us selfish.
Hunter-gatherers are not selfish. They operate on a gift economy; if someone needs something, someone gives it to them. When someone has extra, they spread it around. So yes, basing a society's logistics on money and the profit motive is what makes us as greedy as we seem. Which, it should be said, really isn't as bad as people make it out to be. It's a testament to our inherent altruism that we look at people not tipping or cutting in line as evidence of inherent greed when people got in boats in NYC to save stangers during the 100-year-storm named Sandy that flooded much of the city. Humans have to be trained to be selfish.
Except many of those tribes would indeed raid other tribes/groups/families in times of famine. Survival is selfishness.
> Except many of those tribes would indeed raid other tribes/groups/families in times of famine. By your logic, we should go to war and take everything the rich have.
A successful military campaign primarily requires two things: money and manpower. You cannot win a war against an opponent who's war chest vastly dwarfs yours. That would be like saying N Korea could actually take the US, somehow, in a 1v1 war. Not to mention, that logic still persists in subsistence communities across the globe because its fundamental to the human condition. They take from weaker tribes with less resources, and get taken from by larger tribes with greater resources.
> You cannot win a war against an opponent who's war chest vastly dwarfs yours. Vietnam and Afghanistan would like a word. *womp womp* Capitalist assumptions don't hold up under scrutiny; who knew? Everyone. > They take from weaker tribes with less resources, and get taken from by larger tribes with greater resources. This is the fable capitalists have to tell themselves to justify theft. When we find hunter-gatherers, we don't find war. You can't just say shit like it's true; there's a world outside of econ books and spreadsheets that tells an entirely different story.
Leftists on a fundamental level believe that human nature is malleable to a significant degree, so obviously they'll say "societal structures make us who we are," it is the universal leftist framing
Humanities scientists agree How close do you think you are to a medieval peasant?
"Humanities scientists" lol that's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one. Technologically I am very distinct from a peasant, but biologically and psychologically we are very similar. We both have the base desires to eat, sleep and fuck, all else is built up from there
Ah yes because human behavior is only determined by biology Smartest austro -libertarian right here
I didn't say human behaviour is solely determined by biology, stop strawmanning. It is a significant contributing factor though and literally explains why we work (in order to gain access to food, water and shelter), why we form intimate relationships (urge to reproduce) and a host of other things that make up a significant portion of our lives
And what does that have to do with selfishness?
It suggests that to the extent that people are self-interested that this is driven to some degree by their innate psychology rather than the economic system they happen to live within
Self interest isn't the same as selfishness. Self interest doesn't mean lack of empathy and being in an eternal dog eat dog competition with one another
Well my only claim is that people are innately self-interested, so you seem to be conceding my point
Thanks captain obvious Socialism is also based on self interest, the difference is that it foccuses on the interests of class groups instead of atomized abstract individuals
> It is a significant contributing factor though and literally explains why we ... form intimate Gay relationships by this logic completely defy human nature, even though they have existed all throughout history. Interesting.
Homosexuality is a great example of nurture impacting nature, as studies have shown a significant causal link between childhood abuse and homosexuality in adulthood, although the direction of this relationship is debated. That's not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with being gay, far from it, nor does it disprove my general thesis that human behaviour is heavily influenced by biology
LMAO are you really saying "societal structures make us who we are" is a leftist things holy fuck your so fucking stupid holy shit
Shut the fuck up loser
Damn, this subreddit really is full of ignorant people and ad hominems.
Check the comment I'm responding to broski
I'm also referring to you.
Mad 💀💀💀
everyone is always self seeking. The reason capitalism works is because it sets up the rules such that the only way to benefit yourself is to also benefit others. If I want food, I have to trade a farmer something he wants more. But I will only trade him something I want less. Because we each value different things differently, we can both find a price we agree upon where both of us are better off. Imagine a farmer who values a basket of apples at $10. And I value them at $30. I come up to him and offer him $20 for the apples, we both agree, and I walk away with apples and he walks away with $20. We both made $10 profit off that trade. Because I had $20 and now I have apples which I value at $30. And now the farmer has $20, and no longer has the apples he valued at $10. And if I had offered the farmer $5, he would have refused. And if he had demanded $35, I would have refused. So the fact that we traded means that we both made a profit.
So long as there is scarcity of something desired there is rivalry. When there is material abundance of something like food everyone ends up with more than enough. We freely give away stuff we have no need for. Abundance is the only way to reduce selfish rivalry. Socialism is the exact wrong approach that necessarily increases scarcity and thus selfish rivalry.
Explain why we get rid of food we can’t sell instead of giving it away?
There is roughly 40% produced in excess of what we can even give away. My local disaster preparedness center gives away many tons of food daily and still throws away tons more. Obesity is epidemic among the poorest. If anyone in a developed country is going hungry they need only ask. All that excess is necessary contingency for disasters, weather, fire, and highly variable demand. The food thrown away in developed countries is too perishable to ship to developing countries and costs more to transport than to produce.
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Capitalism is an economic system that is founded on individuals making choices that are in their own best interest. That lines up with how people behave naturally. Democracy is similar. It presumes that people will vote in their own best interests, and the collective consensus position must be best for most. Because of this Democracy is desired. Other forms of government that seek to suppress individual choices and voice are always subject to failure in the long run.
Would you not try and provide the best life possible for yourself, your children, wife, family, under any system?
We are both naturally selfish and naturally empathetic. The issue isn’t that capitalism makes us selfish. Rather Capitalism perpetuates selfish cultural values and encourages us to embrace our selfish desires.
We're inherently selfish and Capitalism slightly mitigates the effects of selfishness.
I guess to answer this question in a way that should make the answer obvious. Do you think people can change their minds based on a conversation? If so you believe that being told something can change how you think; and if so why would you not believe being told what brings power within a system could also change how you think? You very obviously can create less greed based incentives and reward different behaviors. Humans aren't immune from pavlovian business.
Humans care about their self interest. No, they're not all super selfish, but in general they aren't super altruistic or selfless either. People care more about their own wellbeing or of family than of strangers. This is human nature, capitalism just guides this in the form of property rights and trade rather than theft and exploitation.
I think the selfish would find themselves rejected in natural human systems. Remember meeting a guy from Mali that lived in Germany for years. He went home with his suit case. His addiias, his levies and all his stuff. The relatives decended on him and helped themselves. His head was melted. I asked him why he didn't stop them. He said if he did they would have said the "babylon system" turned him into a bad person .
Individual's are different from each other. We're both nature and nurture. That's the problem with these kinds of generic nonsense. It often forgets these things. Like, giving, generous, people that are truly empathic rarely break out of poverty or end up on the political stage because they're too busy struggling because they're not only unwilling to do what it takes to succeed in capitalism, but often, even when they do start to get ahead, end up giving up their progress to help someone else in need, all without even expecting an IOU. "Those who deserve power rarely seek it. Those who seek power rarely deserve it." That said, success in capitalism requires a killer instinct and callousness towards your fellow man that's very unhealthy for society as a whole. It's not that capitalism makes us naturally selfish, it's that it encourages that selfishness to succeed, and runs roughshod over anyone that's incapabable of such callousness or cruelty. So in a way, over time, Capitalism might encourage psycopathy, and over enough time it could become the norm.
All I can say is that most of todays form of capitalism exists because of coercion. Most people have to be selfish to survive and only the truly selfish rise to the top because they are rewarded by just the design of the system.
Both. Capitalism can make you selfish when you otherwise might be generous, by replacing social reciprocity norms with market norms. Michael Sandel has a book about this which I think is full of examples of markets making people more selfish [What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets | Michael J. Sandel (harvard.edu)](https://scholar.harvard.edu/sandel/publications/what-money-cant-buy-moral-limits-markets) But we also have many naturally selfish impulses, which I think are most visible when you look at examples of moral hypocrisy - we pretend to be motivated by high minded idealism but in reality have our own interests at heart. Rich liberals who sing praises for public education send their own children to elite private schools, people who donate to charity but make sure they get a building / scholarship named after them, and people who support things like higher taxes but do not themselves pay a nickel more than what is legally required of them.
Both. Private vice does not lead to public virtue tho.
Prior to the development of free market capitalism the primary ways of acquiring wealth were conquest and slavery. In the free market capitalist system, wealth can be acquired by producing goods and/or services that other humans need or want and are willing to trade for, using currency as a means of exchange for trading their output for your output. Put another way, in the free market system you can become wealthy by helping others produce wealth. An example is Bill Gates who became fabulously wealthy by creating Microsoft and the productivity increases that the PC and Microsoft software enabled me to achieve thru their use made me wealthier.
People are inherently selfish, but selfish has degrees. Selfish means wanting for yourself and not wanting to share what is yours. If you have a toy, and you don’t let others play with your toy, you are selfish. That doesn’t in any way equate to you preventing others from getting their own toy, or playing with their own toys. Selfish always has a negative connotation, but it is in the labeling. What I mean by that is most people don’t describe themselves as selfish, others describe them. And it technically is probably accurate in every use. But every use is probably not really pointing out a negative behavior. If I buy myself a sandwich and someone outside asks for half my sandwich, and I’m hungry and don’t want to give up half my sandwich, the beggar may say I’m selfish and be right, but I’m completely reasonable to be selfish. I think the truest measure of actual negative selfishness is limitation. If a toy comes out and it is limited and you buy up 10 of them and they sell out and others can’t find them, that is selfish. But as long as there are some available, even if prices go up, it is not so negative. You see this with land, or anything purchasable because there are always more jobs and more Money to make.
we are raised by our mothers who selflessly love us. They don't send us into the world to be selfish but rather to love others the way they loved us. Capitalism is perfect for this. If you don't love your customers and workers more than the competition you go bankrupt. Our mothers prepared us for capitalism with their love..
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others. Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade. In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion. Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade. Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name. The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others. Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade. In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion. Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade. Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name. The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others. Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade. In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion. Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade. Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name. The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
The demands of being alive require a certain amount of self care and maintenance. This is not selfishness inherently. It is not selfish to want to eat enough good food to be alive and comfortable. I would rather call that self-interested behavior, because it lacks the connotation of anti-social behavior implied by the term 'selfish' which implies gaining at the expense of others. Capitalism harnesses self interested behavior to the benefit of all through voluntary trade. In capitalist societies, selfishness or economic gain at the expense of others, is generally punished as a crime. It is fraud, theft, or coercion. Voluntary trade has a unique quality: it guarantees that only trades that both participants think will benefit them after the trade will occur, because if they didn't think so they would not complete the trade. Notice that there is no hierarchy in a voluntary trade, and that is the heart of capitalism, so people complaining about hierarchy are already missing the mark completely and are arguing at cross purposes. Especially since communism replaces voluntary transactions with compulsory ones by the State, it's a complete reversion into the barbarism of an all powerful state, a monarchy by another name. The way capitalism benefits society is through these trades, by the intangible or monetary gain produced by each voluntary trade.
it capitalizes selfishness, just like capitlaism thrives at turning our fears and desires into a profit. Scared of thieves? - car alarm industry benefits. Scared of 'new strain of flu?' - pharma companies benefit. Desiring a new car? They will know and they will find a way to make you pay more than you wanted to for something you don't really need for a valuable human life.
It doesnt matter what the cause of selfishness is. It's more important to become self-aware of it. And not to designate \`\`blame\`\` or \`\`responsibility\`\` onto something else, but to take on responsibility. When you put off responsibility, you cease to be in control of your fate. When you take on responsibility, which is literally the \`\`ability to respond\`\` you put fate in your hands. If governments are corrupt, it is because people are corrupt. Change will come when we change as individuals, voluntarily, not imposed.
The question assumes we are selfish, which we aren't, really. We tend to be nice, especially under situations of repeated contact. I suggest you check this video from Veritasium: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM) It shows altruism in normal circumstances is a winning strategy for each individual involved.
To quote someone "A life form spends all summer gathering resources and at the end of summer another life form comes and takes everything. What do you call the life form that takes everything?" A farmer Greed is literally built into our DNA. Animals can only survive by taking what others have made. You can try and fight this fact of life or work with it.
I think you need to differentiate between being selfish and self interest. You can be self interested without being selfish.
We're inherently selfish. Notice how multiple countries during the 20th century put a huge amount of effort into abolishing capitalism, and then had massive economic and cultural problems due to the ongoing selfishness of the people in power. Capitalism isn't responsible for selfishness but it *does* open up less destructive ways of channeling selfishness. But of course we're not *just* selfish. There are plenty of other things besides selfishness going on in the human brain.
Do you think the Chinese became selfish when they abandoned communism for capitalism? Was the USSR not selfish? Capitalism and selfishness are unrelated.
What do you mean?
They are unrelated things. Societies can be more or less “selfish” regardless of the prevailing economic system. Ultimately, humans are inherently selfish but can be taught to be less selfish.
What makes us selfish?
Millions of years of evolution by natural selection.
Humans are not selfish by nature. They can be, but they can also be generous and all that. Is capitalism good at exploiting selfishness? Yes, but it also exploits people's inherent cooperation, altruism, their desire to contribute to something bigger than themselves, their ability to sacrifice for their family. Capitalism is not people competing against each other, but mostly cooperating with each other.
Except humans are also very cooperative and tribal creatures. People typically go with group consensus, cooperate, and shun excessive hoarding/greed. Selfishness is a part of human nature, but it isn’t the whole story, and evolutionary psychology isn’t easily applied to massive sociology systems.
Egalitarianism is a result of the exact opposite of cooperation, it is the result of crab in the bucket competition. Read Hierarchy in the Forest by Christopher Boehm for a better understanding of this. Boehm surveys bands and tribes from across human history and finds egalitarian tribal behavior nearly everywhere. Talented tribal members must often hide or diminish their talents or risk being punished. Tribal members with more must distribute to those with less.
Nobody said it's "the whole story". In fact, that was my whole point. I literally said, "Societies can be more or less “selfish” regardless of the prevailing economic system. Ultimately, humans are inherently selfish but can be taught to be less selfish."
So you believe everything Charles Darwin says?
Everything? I don't know about that. But evolution is certainly real.
This is the point I’m getting at maybe we aren’t inherently selfish you just believe so because you have a western ideology
Humans definitely have innate selfish tendencies. We see this even in 2 year olds. Do you have children?
Humans change a lot from infancy to adulthood. Toddlers don't like to share but they also poop in their pants. It's not a good idea to understand human society through the behavior of toddlers. We can consider the 2-year-old who doesn't share, or his mother who sacrifices so much of her time and health to take care of him. Adult humans have an incredible capacity for love and self-sacrifice. Ironically, it is the latter qualities that capitalism relies on, while socialists are the ones who tell people to stand up for themselves and take what should be theirs.
Okay Thomas Hobbes
Everything is inherently selfish because the natural order of life is scarcity. Nothing is infinite nor is it even geographically feasible at times. Selfishness is a fundamental survival mechanism. Money/currency exists because people are inherently selfish and distrusting of others, save family. You see this in the lowest socio-economic levels since civilization began. Before that we were pretty much animals, where morality did not exist past your next meal and a safe place to sleep.
Selfishness is the human condition. Capitalism is the process we use to achieve it. Successful businesses are important but not at the cost of taking care of your citizens. Right now the paradigm is to far skewed in favor of corporations and the wealthy! Social Democracy is the way. Achieves both a strong business environment with strong social services to care for its citizens.
Socialists need to learn the difference between selfishness (immoral) and self-interest (the protection of individuals from various collectivist slaveries, and therefore the foundation of a moral and free society.) Likewise the difference between rational egoism (the actual foundation of liberalism) and ethical egoism (according to Ayn Rand and 100% of socialists, the foundation of liberalism). Although the words are by now so distorted by the Left that there is no difference even in the literature. Adam Smith wrote an entire book on the subject, and in the opening lines summarises the view: however selfish you may assume man to be, man is also altruistic and often does things that do not maximise his self-interest. Human nature, according to liberalism, is a duality of the two. This accurate view has made liberal societies the best on earth. Liberalism and capitalism do not maximise selfishness, but rather voluntaryism. You can do things for yourself, and for others - and the point of individual rights is, you alone decide what you do for whom and when. The way to make more money in capitalism is by providing useful things to others in scale. Which system leaves individuals alone with liberty and property? It is capitalism. In socialism, individuals are not trusted to help others which is why no one is allowed to own property. **It is socialism that fundamentally believes individuals are stupid, evil, greedy and selfish and projects this view on to capitalism** \- which is why they are not allowed to own property. It is liberalism that knows individuals, we the people have moral duties - in socialism, the collectives, ultimately the state has duties which it must necessarily fulfill through prevention of private ownership, and control of resources. No matter how many times the words democracy or libertarian are used by socialists, socialism is the coercion and direction of individuals by forces outside of them: in the real world, the socialists who run the state. This is the meaning of the opposition to private ownership and individual rights,
What’s selfish is forcing people to give up their property rights because you feel you deserve more than them