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not to mention all the progress traps capitalism stepped into
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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It is done by people, living and being shaped by a capitalist system.
Sure, that can happen in any society. The difference with capitalist societies is that this behavior is the socially encouraged one. Capitalism (or, more accurately, liberalism in its classical form) is taking the natural human greed, amplifying it a thousandfold and putting it on a pedestal. It is only natural that people in power in a capitalist system will be much more likely to try this behavior, and much more likely to succeed at it as well.
I think your argument finally convinced me. Before I believed that people are people and will find a way to game any system to build power/wealth. You're right though. Our current structure rewards greed while it spits on hard work, helping your fellow man, and generally all the good things that make society work.
Tell me why a single person can be valued at a trillion dollars. Did that man really do that much work that progressed society? So much more than mine or my neighbor so that we deserve to barely get by?
I think we as a society need to sort of build "antibodies" against that, and be educated to look closer at how self serving the people looking for power are. And obviously that needs a prevailing ideology that is not glorifying greed.
I think that was sort of the idea with the second amendment in the United States, but things were different in the late 1700s. They didn't havt roving squads of police, backed by swaths of AI detection cameras, who are willing to bomb and murder citizens to maintain order.
I agree, something else sensible needs to genuinely exist. I would like to think it'd be teaching morals and focusing on virtues again. Like making ethics a course as mandatory as science in schools, but the Milgram Experiment makes me wonder if that would even work.
I think the Milgram experiments show the power of authority to both change moral behavior, for ill but also potentially for good. And of course the participants learned from their experience. I'm sure just knowing and really understanding these experience changes people's attitude towards authority and creates "antibodies".
Knowledge is power. Just like we have now run the experiment and seen that capitalism is incredibly dangerous and can capture our whole global civilization and prevent action against an existential threat like climate change. Just education and full understanding how and why this happened would create "antibodies".
Instead we've been taught over and over again how endless greed is good. Of course this is just speculation about how stable or unstable a better society could be against zero sum gaming.
I agree with that. Knowledge is a true good, I believe that. The challenge is currently, from my sample size at least, society is apathetic. The desire to put in the effort to learn and the difficulty to change their lives for the better if it inconveniences even for the short term does not really exist. I mean, people freaked out and bought all the toilet paper that existed basically during covid. That's not a necessity and yet people hoarded it.
I also want a better, more knowledgeable future, and will do my part with the people around me, but I don't even know how to begin with making a societal change. I tried to get people off Discord when I recognized I didn't need them and they would do whatever they needed to breech your privacy, and no one left with me even though I gave plenty of equivalent alternatives.
There is a lack of vision of how it could be better. People are angry but are constantly misdirected and distracted, and no groups seem to exist to come up with a viable alternative. Or they are suppressed or I haven't looked enough, but that is how it feels. It feels like we're stuck with the current system. If there was a revolution today, what now? The only thing we hear is democratic socialists suggesting that maybe we could lessen the economic cruelty a little bit.
Even the communists on lemmy are mostly "conservative" communists who seem to be mostly talking about 50+ year old textbooks and want to rehabilitate Stalinism. Technology and science (political, psychological, IT, industrial) moved the fuck on you know.
About the selfishness - it's now surprise because that is what has been taught. And you need education / accurate news, peace / security and modicum of prosperity. Then people can be expected to act with solidarity. You see the change now in Europe. Prosperity - gone, peace - gone. News? We still have better news media but even public broadcasters are somewhat captured by neoliberals, and social media is global. The memes transmit with lightspeed. The leaders don't know how to do anything else than escalate neoliberalism.
So I don't see a sensible way forward either, except a gradual but unstoppable collapse and then rebuilding. But there is always hope, and we need to be clear about the reasons. None of this was inevitable. It's just that the power inequality is immense now. A group of billionaires are vastly more powerful than millions of people. Just compare how much money either group can spend on propaganda and class warfare.
What we should be focusing on now is a better political and economic ideology for the future. And ideally technology that enables higher "tech level" without requiring a global hyper-complex supply chain and pollution, like genetically engineered plants producing biofuels, plastic precursors or bioplastics, medicines, building / insulation materials. Maybe even biocomputing. Solarpunk but by doing actual research and development and preserving knowledge.
I don't want to take any credit for the argument, I'm mostly paraphrasing Marx. I personally love this rendition of it by Andrew Collier:
Honest question: What would you base an alternative system on? I think any economic system needs to appeal to something as basic as self-interest to survive long-term. If a population exists, there's a sum total amount of labor that needs to be done to sustain them. How do you motivate the labor?
Socialism provides an easy answer to this. Democratizing the means of production doesn't mean that everyone gets shit for free, quite the contrary. Socialism just means that the surplus labor is no longer given for free to (well, more like "stolen by") a capitalist, but gets somewhat fairly distributed to everyone by being invested in science, industrial development and social programs through the state. All able-bodied citizens must still work in order to get paid.
I think the critical part related to that discussion is that socialist cultures don't glorify individual wealth (which directly incentivizes greed), instead focusing on the values of honest labor, mutual aid, societal progress, and the common wealth. This may be a path to eventually remove individual self-interest as a motivator completely, and instead switch to social expectations and the feeling of belonging as motivators to perform labor - "from everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs", a.k.a communism. It wouldn't be an easy road for sure, especially looking at it from the perspective of modern humans scarred by capitalism, but I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility.
I'm also personally quite attracted to anarchist ideologies, which don't have as cohesive of an answer for dealing with greed but do promise an even more awesome society, with no central authority to be greedy whatsoever. If we could get something like that to work, that could indeed be the end of history.
Just to check, are you arguing for pure socialism or a blended system?
Not that capitalism doesn't have its share of this problem, but this is a massive centralization of authority and management. How can that be safeguarded against inevitable corruption?
Also, thoughts on how the ideal system would treat non-essential goods and best motivate innovation in "frivolities?" It's one thing to want people to stop valuing excess wealth, but people are still going to want movies, video games, food ingredients from across the planet, etc.
A tall order, but I give away a portion of my wealth regularly and like Star Trek, so I get it. Lol.
Not just greed, but every negative human trait that can turn someone into a bad actor. Needing a system for dealing with bad actors and outside threats is how we got all these systems to begin with.
I'm arguing for literally anything that moves beyond capitalism. Whether it's a Chinese-style mixed economy where haute capitalists are allowed but regulated, a NEP-style mixed economy where only small businesses are privately owned, a full-blown planned economy where no capitalists are allowed, a federation of co-ops...
Through democratic mechanisms, mostly. I won't claim that democracy worked very well in USSR or China but it sure as hell is/was better for people living there than the capitalist "democracies" of the west.
Are you saying just the application of democracy was/is better or the overall living under those systems?
I'd say that democracy was/is applied better in those countries. I wouldn't say the overall standard of living was higher in USSR than in the US, but there also definitely were many advantages in workers rights and human rights in general. Nowadays I'd say for a working-class person China provides a better overall standard of living than the US.