I'm worried. And I hope you are too. Ever since the end of the Second World War, America has been the world's leading nation, in the sense that whatever comes from America will soon spread all over the globe. And right now that doesn't bode well...
source: PxHere
American society is bursting at the seams, and I'm afraid that the rest of the "civilized" world will soon follow. You may have noticed that, for the longest time by now, I've been putting words like "civilized", "civilization" and "western civilization" between quotation marks in my posts, and you may have also noticed why: in my opinion we're not civilized at all. On the contrary, we cover up with a veneer of modern technology, MacDonald's restaurants and Nike sneakers a highly uncivilized society in which we fail to provide large numbers of people with the basic necessities of live. We've build for ourselves a system of predatory capitalism that prioritizes short term profits above everything else. "Predatory capitalism" is a tautology in fact, because "predatory" is capitalism's nature. Its models are built around a caricature of homo sapiens as homo economicus, and we're taught that it functions best when we all conform to that caricature: humans as agents who are consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally. "Narrowly self-interested" being the key words here.
All of capitalism's traditional models fail because of this assumption; we are after all complicated beings that are driven by a myriad of social, psychological and economical motivations, we're equally capable of egoism and altruism. Unfortunately we've been living under a socioeconomic paradigm that incorporates only self-interest, that rewards only greed. If you're capable of looking around, beholding the world in the year 2021, and not see how this system has had only negative effects on our "civilization", I must congratulate you on your naivete. Sure, there are a handful of individuals for whom the system works perfectly, but for the overwhelming majority all that's been achieved is a live of hard work with nothing to show for it at the end. And that's without reckoning with the way this system preys on the environment and all other living things on Earth. I've said it here many times before; we're perfectly capable to feed, house and educate every soul on the planet, and to do so while preserving the environment and without causing yet another mass-extinction. But for that to happen, we need a global paradigm shift.
Wall Street 30th Anniversary - "Greed is Good" Clip
And that's why I'm so worried. I'm afraid that too few of you are ready to give up on capitalism. Being an anti-capitalist is a rather lonely position to have, especially here among my crypto brothers and sisters, who are mostly of the libertarian capitalist and anarcho-capitalist persuasion. Many among you will claim that "true capitalism" without government intervention in the marketplace will be our savior; I strongly suspect that is the very reason why many of you are so interested in crypto currencies and blockchain technology. And I agree that adapting crypto currencies and cutting out the elitist middle men at the banks is a good first step towards a better world; that is after all why I myself am so invested in this space. But blockchain technology in itself will do nothing to heal capitalism's deep imprint on our collective and individual psyches. It'll do nothing to get rid of the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" mentality, nor will it diminish the belief that helping others is a form of weakness. It won't suddenly make us care more for starving people in the global south, and that's a problem. America is now breaking up under he weight of a paradigm that has us actually believe in Gordon Gekko's words: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good". But it isn't. And contrary to what Gekko says, greed did not save America, it destroyed all cohesion in American society and damn nearly destroyed its democracy. We should have long ago grown past the individualistic interpretation of "survival of the fittest", but now it's of the utmost importance that we soon focus on "survival of the species"and "survival of the planet".
Maybe a good fist step can be made by listening to the below linked interview with Sam Bowles. Here's the introduction:
Human beings, notes Sam Bowles, a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, are complex, psychological beings given to all sorts of motivations well beyond naked self-interest. That might be news to the economics profession, which posits a one-dimensional image of ‘homo economicus’, a rational, utility-maximizing agent, largely driven by the so-called “invisible hand” of the marketplace. Incorporating the disciplines of a multiplicity of social sciences, Bowles produces compelling evidence that self-interested financial incentives can in fact produce behavior that is inefficient and violates a society's morality.
"A society's morality"; our society as a whole has the morality of a homo economicus, lives by 100% self-interest and money and profits as its only incentive. That's why I place "civilization" between quotation marks, and it's high time we finally become civilized, and for that to happen, homo economicus needs to die...
The Death of ‘Homo Economicus’
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