Comment by immibis2
8 hours ago
What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.
8 hours ago
What's wrong with that? Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible. If you aren't greedy while your adversary is greedy, you give up everything you have.
The wrong part is fooling yourself that you are above those principles while actively devoting all your energy too them.
And I'm not talking food, water, medicine here. I'm talking entertainment and general internet stuff.
If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
The current global power imbalance was shaped to a large part by us not being greedy while the rich people were being greedy. It only resulted in them owning all of our stuff. It's about time we tried to own their stuff, to restore balance.
>If you aren't being maximally greedy in all things, including entertainment and general internet stuff, you aren't doing capitalism right.
It transcends capitalism (or really free markets, I haven't bothered so far in this thread to make the distinction) and is just kind of base human behavior. You can watch animals in the wild and they have the same "maximally greedy" behavior. Your groundhog won't leave any carrots in your garden for you.
Communism unwinds exactly because everyone is there little own min-max engine working to ultimately serve themselves (not to be confused with colloquial selfish behavior, group good can be in ones best interest). At least with free market capitalism, this idea is embraced and turned back on itself to act as the natural mediator. The friction of the mediation though, obviously, is pretty uncomfortable for everyone. And more over, worse for some more than others.
1 reply →
Seems like people who try to argue that Capitalism creates greed are almost always just narcissistic looking for something to blame their greediness on.
> Capitalism is about everyone being as greedy as possible.
Depends on what you mean by "capitalism". The current definition, at least among the big-time capitalists, seems indeed to be "do whatever it takes to get me more capital, by hook or by crook".
But that's not what actually built most of the wealth in the modern world. What built most of that was cooperation, specialization, and positive sum trades, in which everyone involved became better off, but nobody obsessed about counting down to the last penny exactly how much better off they were than the next person, and complaining about unfairness if things didn't balance out exactly the way they thought things should. In other words, focusing on creating wealth, not on grabbing whatever you can, or making sure you grabbed more than anyone else.
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