The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism

For me there is no choice. I have children. Their survival is more important to me than my own.

Their survival depends upon a habitable future environment.

If I were running the world ..... I would immediately discontinue all of the unnecessary aspects of the economy. Recreational jet travel ? Coca cola and fritos in plastic packaging ? They would get the ax. Electricity intensive crypto mining would disappear.

I would not discontinue the use of ALL fossil fuels. We need them to feed everyone and fossil fuels are necessary for that.

We don't all need our own automobiles which sit idle for 23.5 hours / day. We can live with community fleets.

The jobs of the future will be in environmental restoration and conservation, health care, local food production, education, agriculture, resource distribution, community organizing, etc.

National borders would disappear and with it the need for enormous military investment.

Okay I was addressing your moral point. I'm not arguing that capitalism dying is going to solve climate change

It's certainly possible that we've already gone so far down the road that solving climate change (with respect to it's wrecking human civilization) is no longer possible.

But just to be clear .... I don't have any moral points that I am trying to make. I don't intend to make any pretenses about morality. I don't subscribe to any notions of morality myself.

I simply have a hardwired preference for life > death. That's not a moral choice. It's not a choice at all. That's just my nature.

I'm not into the doomer scenario but if I were I'd probably agree with your remedy.

Based on how I see worst case scenarios, one possible solution is fairly straightforward: ask women to have only one child to avoid a tragedy of the commons.

Consider taking morality more seriously.

It seems like you’ve reached the end of your self. Pessimism about the status quo and existential dread are indicators.

What is ultimate reality?
Is life more real than death?

Learn to contemplate through feeling rather than thinking. More wisdom, fewer facts. Make a stand in the truth of despair and see what emerges. On the other side you’ll eventually realize this is the best thing you could’ve done for your children.

Again, there is no economic or political solution to these problems. They only offer bandaids, even after the future wake-up-call when “we have to get our act together now”.

Reality requires more from each of us.

Morality is best not taken seriously because its man made bs.

Nature is not a moral place. Survival of the fittest is not a moral concept. We do not have control of our fitness to survive.

Humans are like zombies. Nature has historically rewarded hoarding and tribalism as qualities which have been positively associated with survival. So, it's no surprise to look around and find oneself surrounded by tribal hoarders. Those are not immoral qualities.

We are simply living in the rare moment when those qualities pivot from being an asset to being a cancer.

We've had moments like this before. The Treaty of Versailles was a moment when the victors became detached from the consequences to themselves of their willingness to let Germans starve to death. That led to a war in which 60 million people died and a bitter Holocaust took place.

Capitalism is like the Treaty of Versailles. It is indifferent to the starvation of the losers. It leads to a Holocaust. That's neither moral nor immoral. It's the law of the jungle.

Despite our veneer of sophistication .... we're just animals who live in concrete jungles. We are not good and bad ..... just animals acting according to our nature.

Nut nut, given you understand we act for our own self interest as defined by our pulsions then perhaps instead of advocating for a societal organization system that goes counter those pulsions and so is absolutely impossible to install and keep for long, you should look for solutions that dont deny or go counter our pulsions.

Btw if at the end we can solve the problems of climate change with mass genocide (I utterly disagree with your assessment but I am entertaining the idea it is correct for the conversation), then it's clear every country has to position itself to be the one who conducts the genocide and not the victim of one and no other consideration is relevant.

I act on my self interest which is consistant with a strongly socialist view. Its why I have socialist views

Your arguments is simply false

Chez, have you met a single person on earth who happened to stumble on the belief that anything left of socialism...Marxism > communism ... is the most +ev economic system for the bottom 99% of people, regardless of environmental impact, who wasn't a rabid anti American?

You are stuck in hell and there’s nothing you can do about it. In fact, you don’t even give yourself permission to accurately describe it as hell because of the moral implications.

This is your life. While everyone else is a zombie, at least you have reality all figured out though, right? Intellectual greatness achieved. Never mind that you’re stuck in hell.

I shouldn’t be snarky. Even though the Joker is a villain, he is a victim at the same time. He remains so certain the truth is on his side even when reality checks him.

Sure. Most of the ones I meet aren't rabid anything

The most rabid group on the 'left' I've ever encountered were the kids from P

Where do I say that I'm not a zombie like everyone else ?

Einstein understood that we don't have free will. We are all slaves to our nature.

I think we all define "hell" differently. For me, hell would be a situation where I refrained from being honest. For me, honesty is like breathing. I breathe well. My sense of romance is alive and well.

I'm not afraid of capitalism collapsing. It creates an opportunity to replace it with something better and more durable.

So you’re okay with all the destruction and suffering that awaits, indicated by your unwillingness to judge it as either good or bad. (Even though you use “should” multiple times in your OP.. why did you use should multiple times?)

You are simply sharing your prophecy not as a warning — since the destruction ahead is neither good nor bad — but for.. what purpose?

Are you sure you’re not confused? Life surviving and thriving is not a moral good? Is this your final answer?

Human life surviving and thriving either ultimately matters or it doesn’t.

If it ultimately matters, then it has truth value and is morally good in as far as being in alignment with truth / reality is better than not.

If the survival of human life ultimately doesn’t matter, then there are no shoulds. And you are a villain.

The irony is that Marx wasn't really anti America. Then again:

It is my nature to wish for life to survive and thrive. It is my purpose to fight for its preservation.

But that's just my nature. It's clear that other people don't share that nature.

Does that make me good and them bad ? I don't think so.

The world is not made up of good and bad people. We're all programmed to follow our nature.

Take Luciom for example. Is he bad ? No. He's just ignorant of the interdependence of life on Earth and consumed by his personal survival. He doesn't possess the competence or curiosity to understand the world. But he's not bad because he didn't choose to be stupid. He was born that way.

In your mind, everyone is a slave to their nature? No one in the history of humanity has ever overcome their nature? Not even once?

Socialization and rehabilitation are illusions?

And you feel secure enough in this view to call someone else ignorant and claim honesty for yourself? How old are you?

I’m curious your thoughts on the idea of equality. Given how diverse human nature is and your view that we are fixed in our nature, you must view the desire for equality as a joke, right?

History will show that our brand of capitalism will not survive.

You are correct. In my mind, no human has ever overcome their nature.

Nature guides us to survive. If "socialization and rehabilitation" are necessary for us to survive, then that's an adaptation people make in order to survive.

Take an alcoholic who gives up drinking for example. We can consider that person rehabilitated or we can see that he has competing impulses and that the survival impulse won out.

Suicide is an adaptation people make to survive?

Life on Earth has been with us for 4 billion years.

Humans have been here for a tiny fraction of that. Less than 1/10,000th of that.

The survival of human life matters to me .... a human. I'm sentimental about my species and attached to my kind. But we're not the focal point of life. Bacteria have been around for billions of years and will outlast us.

I've discovered that I'm unusual in caring about my species. Most members of my species are like Luciom. They care only about their families and the people who they perceive (wrongly) have a positive influence on their personal survival.

If that's the definition of a villain .... then the world is chock full of villains.

I have a more compassionate view of people like that. They are selfish, myopic and ignorant. But that's the way nature made them.

Evolution groomed most people to blindly follow their tribal leaders. To pit oneself against the tribal leader is to court death. We in the west are a capitalist tribe. So we follow along blindly. Marching ignorantly toward a steep cliff.

Unfortunately all this good talk kinda ceased with consciousness.