If humans weren’t greedy dicks then capitalism or any other form of government would work perfectly. You can’t force humans to not be greedy dicks. No matter what system is being instituted it is susceptible to greedy dicks.
Yes we can, via laws. You have no clue about what unrestricted greed does to people especially, on the recieving end
We can regulate greedy dick behaviour
There are human societies were greed is not accepted.
I welcome you to inform us of this utopia you speak of.
Which ones? Which ones don’t damage their land or steal children from enemies or rape or steal? Please don’t try to say any indigenous tribes because they are all guilty of one or more these.
Any indigenous tribe. But seriously it was not long ago that no professional fishermen anywhere would ever overfish.
duck chasing meme Which human societies?
Sometimes I get frustrated with people and I think this. But then I quickly snap my mindset out of this because I know really what’s the problem. Capitalism.
humans invented capitalism, soooo…
humans also invented socialism, communism, fascism, monarchy, democracy so on and so fourth.
like, you can’t just take the worst and be like “you see this is why we need to get rid of them!”. its literally the point of the post. thats what is going on right now in the US with literally any person below the top square on the family guy race card. Would you say just because less than 1% of immigrants that are in the US have committed violent crimes, that all of them are violent criminals? If you do, I have bad news for you.
on the other hand when a virus like flu or covid replicates, it produces thousands of its variants but it is only defined by the one that causes the most damage
That metaphor doesn’t work. It be more accurate to compare humans to in general bacteria and most bacteria are not harmful, there are even some know useful viruses
Right… so less than 1% of immigrants being violent criminals, makes them equivalent to a virus?
I mean sure. yeah. You have an opinion. I won’t be continuing this conversation.
As we all know, communist countries would never harm the environment for productivity.
Of course, thanks for admitting it
Yep, those are all capitalist states.
Gotta hand it to China. They’re a few years away from being coal free. A decade at most if they stay on course.
Unfortunately they don’t seem to be on course at all, with coal production and new coal power plants rising in 2024 to an all-time high.
While they have been implementing green energy, which is laudable, they aren’t phasing out coal at all. China seems to crave energy and has no bias about where it comes from.
A bunch of people thinking they outsmarted the meme by asking “who made capitalism”.
A better question is “when you say humans are a virus, which humans exactly do you propose to exterminate in the name of saving the planet?” Because the bunker-state ethnonationalist, the trumpists, the Peter Thiels and the Mark Andreesens, the Dark Enlightenment and Network State and Tech Zionism neofascists, they know exactly what they mean.
The earth is big enough to support modest human life. It’s not big enough to support billionaires’ delusions of singularity. So they imagine to purge the parts of humanity that are not their particular version of white.
Don’t fall for their fascist propaganda.
Can I achieve something by exterminating myself? It should do something, right?
Maybe not having to live in depressing world itself would be a great achievement.
When I said “humans are the virus,” I think people heard “so we should kill the people I don’t like,” and missed the part where I don’t like all humans.
I don’t say it anymore, because I don’t want to be overlapped with fascists who apparently say the same thing.
I’m sure the rhetoric stems from propaganda, I won’t disagree there. But I don’t think that trying to logic the analogy itself is the way to outline the problem with it.
Calling humans a ‘virus’ may not mean an extermination is the intention of the person regurgitating it. You can control a virus instead of just exterminating it, for example. It’s just a term people are familiar with that they associate with abusing resources and multiplying beyond a sustainable level, thus creating a toxic environment around them.
Ah, so just exterminate the correct people. Got it.
Nobody has to die if we just make billionnaires millionnaires again.
I disagree, there are some psychotic people in power and they don’t care one iota about anyone but themselves and maybe a small handful of like minded people. To me they should be wiped from the earth.
You are correct that the planet can support a certain number (whatever that number is), but not with these people in power.
Now will we be able to truly figure which ones are the correct ones, probably not but we need to keep looking and root them out, expose them to the world and then let nature take its role once they are all hanging from the highest most visible place for all to see what happens when you are the virus that is continuously trying to destroy the world.
Good that you clarified that :D
Why do I need to put guard rails on things? People can just choose to not fall off. All people are perfectly rational/knowledgeable and other physical pressures do not exist, so people must want to fall off of cliffs!
There actually is no way to change this. We can’t do anything about it because we’re just too stupid. People create systems of violence, and there’s just nothing that can be done to help that because there is no way to change that. No sir, no way at all. It’s pointless to even try.
We are all sinners filled with sin so anything that we do is bad. There is no hope. Your grandmother is a virus actually.
I really don’t get this positive attitude some people have.
No, there is no way to change this. Have you read any part of history? This is naive at best.
Wolves observed within the conditions of captivity organize under so-called “alphas” who maintain leadership through frequent bouts of violence. This is not their inevitable state, as wolves in other conditions commonly organize into family structures and exhibit little infighting. Were one to observe wolves only in captivity, one might conclude that their system of violence is unchangeable.
Humans have the capacity to shape their own environment. Our imagination of the future is often (but not always) constrained by our environment as it exists. History displays a non-exhauative sampling of societal configurations, each of which is influenced by past configurations and that which was beyond human capacity to change.
The inevitability of tyranny may seem likely, but cannot be known. Likewise, we cannot know that a better world is or is not possible. This does not mean that we should not try.
source (fake) source (real (jk its fake too)) source (haha got u again)
So, let me get this straight: animals work like this, we work like this, there is not a single example in 10000 years of human history that proves it otherwise but “cannot be known” if we are pathetic evil creatures.
Right right… well, text me when it works ok? I rather not wait for “other conditions” but point my finger at the problematic people today and work from evidence.
Yeah I hope that we get there some day (and double hope that I might still be alive to see it). It seems like we have so many terrible people today, and they’re quite prominent.
Yeah I know what you mean man. I gave a bunch of children some knives and the one with the biggest knife coerced the others into hurting a bunch of people. They still would have found a way to do that without knives! Don’t you know that rocks exist?? Them having knives is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the outcome!
Yeah but… Humans created capitalism, so again the root issue is that humans suck. Just think of it this way: No humans, no capitalism.
Thank you for putting it well, I had similar thought that I wanted to express but I can never write it so coherently.
And it’s not just capitalism, living beyond their means was rather common for many civilizations in the past and some of them paid dearly for it. And look at who ruled the area when the aral sea started to dry up, which fucked the entire area to hell. That wasn’t capitalism, just a short-sighted communist (or “communist”, but that definitely wasn’t capitalism) regime.
It’s definitely possible for humans to not suck in this aspect, but once you get to a certain level of technology and organization it gets pretty hard.
People often conflate capitalism with greed because the core of capitalism depends on people acting selfishly. But other systems can also reward the greedy.
I think it even goes beyond that. e.g. the sowjet union genuinely had issues with food security, but they still fucked up when they dried out the aral sea because they were acting shortsightedly.
Supporters of socialism/communism/anarchism/whatever-ism don’t believe that their system will never make mistakes or that it prevents all bad people from having power. But it lessens it, hopefully. If a capitalist nation were in charge during the time the aral sea disappeared, you can bet your sweet ass it would have just the same or faster.
There are a lot of people who do believe that these systems could do no wrong or repeat the narcissist’s prayer to justify any wrong doing.
True. But I suppose I should have clarified it as “intelligent, thoughtful supporters of those ideas”
But it lessens it, hopefully
It’s true that capitalistic societies don’t do any better for the environment (which was the point of my comment, they’re BOTH bad in this aspect), but at least in capitalist Europe the common people got relative wealth out of it. In the soviet union, people were oppressed by the state, poor, and got their environment destroyed.
And now that is happening in capitalist societies.
We have many decades to go until our common people are as poor as they were in the soviet union (at least in countries that were on the capitalistic side of the iron curtain), though that does seem to be the general trajectory. But soviet poverty went beyond not being wealthy - there was always a very distinct risk that the local store was out of basic necessities, and I really don’t think this is going to be common in most western european countries in this century.
Humans are a product of evolution in nature. So nature sucks, right?
Nature makes a lot of things that suck, including viruses
Point still stands. Nature doesn’t owe anyone a logical explanation.
Its actually my point. Just because we dont like it, it does not mean that nature is wrong.
Nature is a product of atoms. So atoms suck, right?
For them is capitalism for other is the immigrants.
Some people just don’t get nuances.
You don’t need capitalism to suck, though. The Spanish conquistadores were slavers and genocidal murderers but they certainly weren’t capitalists.
There’s a bit of a fundamental difference between capitalism and other systems. Mercantilism sucked but conquistadors got some level of pushback for their atrocities. The Spanish crown fought a war over illegal slavery and the vast majority of conquistadors died poor or in obscurity.
Modern capitalism has no such brakes. Naked avarice is the mathematically correct play, exponentially growing the power of an individual at the expense of literally everyone else.
It’s not likely that other economic systems could result in this level of global instability and ecological collapse. A king used to have some incentive to keep his society functioning; his personal power was tied to the power his kingdom could project, not his personal wealth. Our modern overlords have no problem destroying their country or environment, their wealth is fungible and can be taken wherever they want.
Every system finds ways to shift the blame. What they need are folks who drink the cool aide. Currently it‘s capitalism.
We live in a religious society that promotes a culture of bigotry. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame bigots?
We live in a patriarchal society that doesn’t take violence against women seriously. Does this mean that wife beaters aren’t to blame?
We live in a capitalist society that promotes selfishness and greed. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame selfish people? (Which is most of them.)
We live in a racist society… etc.
You are responsible for your actions and your beliefs. Step one to improving our society is accepting the reality that most humans have a poor (nearly non-existent) relationship with morality. They’re easily swayed by fallacious arguments because they are irrational and stupid. These are empirical facts about human beings that we ignore (with memes like this) at our own peril.
Blaming individuals is ok of course, but after we’re done we should look what situation gave their lacking personalities power to have any individual impact upon our society. And change that. The blaming of actors is one thing, but there are shitty scripts, too, you know?
We should blame religion, patriarchy, racism and capitalism.
And this right here folks is why nothing will ever change. Because phantasmagorical ideological abstractions get blamed instead of actual features of reality, such as psychopathy, ignorance, greed, selfishness, and so on.
So how have things changed?
Moral progress! It takes a long, long time to convince average people to accept moral claims, such as the badness of slavery. There’s a kind of tipping point when normative facts are FINALLY absorbed into the culture and propagated through non-intellectual means (such as media and social pressure).
Democracy is actually the best vehicle for moral progress in that respect, as democratic scholars have been pointing out for the last century or so.
Democracy is great. We should really aim for it, instead of giving political power to the wealthy.
Those are perpetuated by the stupidity and gullibility described above.
Gullible to believe that we can‘t change anything? Who told you that? Capitalists!
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“it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
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How dare you say something that requires self-reflection in a meme thread made by for ideological-purity testing.
How dare you say something that requires self-reflection in a meme thread made by MAGA-style ideological-purity-testing imbeciles.
Who do you think made capitalism? Space aliens?
It was a stop on our journey. Historians say it was a better stop than the before. But it doesn’t have to be our last one!
Lizard people, obviously
The funniest thing about the Lizard people conspiracy, which started as an antisemitic dogwhistle, is that David Icke by all accounts just believes in literal lizard people.
If I’m not mistaken, Marx describes capital as “dead labour”. So, to answer your question: who made capitalism? Vampires, zombies, liches. The undead.
Marx certainly didn’t see capitalism as merely metaphorical. Marx recognized that capitalism existed in material reality, that it was a system constructed and operated by real, flesh and blood human beings.
Humanity: Living with nature and not causing global ecosystem crisis for thousands of years. Capitalism: Starts the industrial revolution and the need for eternal Exponential growth, resulting in massive environmental destruction over the last ~250 years. “Clearly, the humans are the problem.”
I think you vastly underestimate exactly how much impact humans had on the enrollment environment all the way back to the stone age.
Any animal causes changes to an ecosystem. The bigger the numbers, the bigger the changes. In general, it never reaches crisis because something else comes along and shifts things into balance.
But the current crisis wasn’t, and isn’t, solely caused by the industrial revolution. We caused issues with megafauna waaaaaaay back. We shifted waterways and changed ecosystems during the earliest agricultural development. Everything today is stacked up on top of that, not some kind of distinct thing.
Our distant ancestors weren’t some kind of noble and mystical race, perfectly balanced with all around them.
Capitalism wasn’t even around as a distinct system back when we first started dumping pollutants and waste into the world. Money wasn’t always in place.
The industrial revolution changed the scale, but it would have happened without capitalism because us monkeys have always refined our tools and technology over generations. Stone, bronze, iron, steam, petroleum, silicon, it’s a progression that was damn near inevitable.
I just don’t buy the idea that human ingenuity and technological progress would have just stopped when factories were imagined and built. Best case, maybe it would have been slower, more careful under something like an anarchist structure (or lack thereof). But there’s nothing saying it wouldn’t have been worse either. It’s a big game of what if, and there’s no current way to test technological progression theories. We can’t just set up an experiment somehow on mars and let it play out while preventing capitalism to see what happens.
Shit, there were non capitalist systems in place during the industrial revolution, and they didn’t exactly reject it all.
The good old slavery and crusade days.
Plenty of bacteria and viruses are beneficial, and contribute to the overall health of their hosts.
If humans are diseases, then it is because through learned behaviors that we act in a deleterious manner towards the overall ecosystem. We are entirely capable of shifting those behaviors, of creating social structures that select for behaviors that promote co-existence and symbiosis with that ecosystem.
There are some symbiotic bacteria, but I’m unaware of any beneficial viruses. Their entire nature is to hijack cells to replicate themselves, typically resulting in the eventual death of the host cell.
Researchers are looking into bacteriophage that infect gut bacteria. It seems that over time, the viruses select for and introduce genes to bacteria that play nice with our intestinal health, rather than run amok.
Redirecting blame attributable to human behavior to an abstract concept like “capitalism” is shortsighted and self-defeating. Analogously, the problem over the last 10,000 years hasn’t been slavery (the concept); the problem has been slavers (the people).
There’s no period in human history that people weren’t unfathomably stupid, because people are literally just animals (and many would happily end the world in order to get access to cheeseburgers). They make bad choices because the average person is not capable of moral deliberation. All hyperbole aside, this is an actual empirical fact.
There are games that don’t cause brain damage in students and there is American Football.
What progress do you get by blaming humanity instead?
Reality is always the best starting point.
if the structure of society is set up in such a way that practically every action I need to take to keep myself fed and sheltered ultimately contributes to climate change, then it’s fucking inane to say it is the fault of individuals being stupid.
Humans are selfish, and that’s precisely why we need an alternative to capitalism. Because if we don’t force people to act intelligently they’ll act like the animals they are and obliterate their environment until they are living on mountains of shit and corpses. This has happened throughout history over and over and over again, long before the advent of any economic ideologies.
Global warming can be fixed tomorrow if people stopped eating meat and stopped buying giant pickup trucks and stopped worshipping celebrities, and so on.
And every armed conflict in the world would end if everyone put down their guns right this instant.
We’re talking about structures that reach across the globe, with a momentum that existed before either of us were born, and with a trajectory that will be traced long after we are dead. You don’t shift that trajectory by Wishing Upon a Star that everyone Becomes Better overnight. That’s not a practical approach.
And every armed conflict in the world would end if everyone put down their guns right this instant.
This is actually true. There’s an important lesson about human nature hidden somewhere in this sarcastic sentence.
The reason we need to get rid of capitalism is that it empowers people’s most horrible greedy impulses. However, that’s precisely because people are horrible and greedy. If people were saints, then capitalism wouldn’t matter because nobody would do dumb shit like buy pickup trucks or eat meat.
Again, long before the advent of any abstract “structures” and economic theories, before Hollywood and global communication networks, when humans were still living on random islands, they behaved like total and utter morons. They were not rational. Because 90% of humans are — and again, this is an empirical fact — incapable of moral deliberation.
That’s why we had slavery for 10,000 years. That’s why people torture billions of sentient animals to death in abattoirs every year to eat their carcasses. That’s why Donald Trump won the last election.
Because 90% of humans are — and again, this is an empirical fact — incapable of moral deliberation.
90% of humans. Really. Do you have a source for this claim?
Yes. Of course. But I get the sense that you guys are in this weird ideological-purity-testing mode right now. If you actually seriously want to engage with this fascinating research topic in good faith, feel free to message me.
- asks for a source to a claim
- gets called maga
- ???
I’ll have you know I despise trump.
Oh, but since you brought up good faith. In response to simply asking for a source, you attacked my character, tried to gaslight me into thinking I’m in the wrong, and then tried to move the topic into private DMs so nobody else can see it and so you can look like the adult here. This wasn’t even a real offer though, because nobody is going to politely DM you after getting their character attacked out of nowhere like that.
The fact that you’re not willing to publicly show your source about the things you’re claiming in bold are empirical facts tells me that you don’t actually have a source, and are in fact the one not engaging in good faith.
funny you keep coming back to slavery when so much of it was justified by claiming huge chunks of people were, empirically factually, incapable of being fully human
standing in the middle of a system that incentivizes, necessitates even, that people act against our collective shared interest; a system that, half through deliberate intention and half through the selective pressure of market forces, makes sure they have just enough education to be profitable workers – and to say, “We’ve always been this stupid. Just innate, innit?”, well you’re either missing the forest for the trees or for whatever reason you’d rather believe some people can just be written off altogether.
