this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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And even more specifically, hyper consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism more than just capitalism itself.
Well regulated and not utterly greed-driven capitalism that gets fairly taxed to support the societies infrastructure that it feeds off is not so bad. If that would ever happen.
Well, you see, the thing about capitalism is it empowers exactly the people who don't want that to happen. Consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism is the in-built trend of capitalism itself, not an unfortunate variant - even government regulation doesn't solve these problems.
True that. Sociopaths always win. This is pretty much true of any form of society though.
That's not exactly my point, it's more that our current political economy penalises pro-social behaviour (a business is more likely to be out-competed and fail if they actually treat their workers and customers well, so it's an exceptional thing to see) and sociopaths are rewarded for profiting in this system, their gain comes at our exploitation so they're effectively rewarded for hurting us.
If we can restructure our political economy so that sociopaths are rewarded by contributing to society, then their own competitiveness and greed is much less of a problem. For lack of another better developed-world example, look at how China keeps their billionaires on a leash^[https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/#fnref14]. Now obviously there's plenty of problems in their political system and some would say they their billionaires are still a problem despite them being dominated by the government, but it's an example of an alternative to the oligarchical system we know, proof that there are successful ways forwards which are applicable to our economies, even if we don't copy them exactly (that would be silly).
(On top of this, a society is certainly capable of detecting and ostracising or punishing anti-social people such as sociopaths. The problem is that the most important ones are effectively out of reach in our society since they have a police force protecting them and we have a more alienated, disorganised society)
I don’t think “not so bad” is the best phrase for that. Not as bad, certainly, but I have a difficult time saying “not so bad” about any kind of capitalism that isn’t already transforming into something like market socialism.
True, not AS bad would have been a better wording.
Unfortunately I firmly believe that any form of society is always going to be at the whim of sociopaths getting into power who will fuck up whatever the system is in place. it's one of the defining scourges of our species, we are easily led like sheep.