almax wrote:The reality is Capitalism is all about profit and for profit you need scarcity, if there was an abundant supply of diamonds, they wouldnt be worth squat. We currently live in a society that produces Scarcity. The consequence of this scarcity is that human beings must behave in self preserving ways, even if it means they have to cheat and steal in order to get what they want. It can be concluded that Scarcity is one of the most fundamental causes of aberrant human behavior, while also leading to complex forms of neurosis in other ways. If you take a statistical look at drug addition, crime and incarceration statistics, you will find that poverty and unhealthy social conditions comprise the life experience of those who engage in such behavior.FoundationStepper wrote:why do you believe that capatilism has hurt more than its helped? on what grounds do you believe this?almax wrote:pfft
yet destroyed the lives of billions more, supressed the economic advances of other countries, perpetuated war, famine etc etc
Human beings are not good or bad... they are running, forever changing compositions of the life experience(s) that influence them. The "quality" of a human being ( if there was such a thing ) is directly related to the upbringing and thus belief systems they have been conditioned into.
This simple reality has been grossly overlooked and today people primitively think that competition, greed and corruption are "hardwired" elements of human behavior and, in turn, we must have prisons, police and hence a hierarchy of differential control in order for society to deal with these "tendencies". This is totally illogical and false.
I was under the impression that the current free market is run by supply and demand, and that scarcity is only a small part of a bigger picture. Also, competition IS hardwired into us. Our ancestors didn't crawl out of the primordial ooze because they were altruistic, they did so to avoid predation and take the lion's share of what was until then an untapped resource. Same thing occured again and again throughout evolutionary history... being successful and passing your genes on to the next generation has meant not just being competitive, but being good at it (and this is where the concept of 'greed' comes into play).
I don't buy into the hippy airy-fairy 'if we all had a group hug, things would be cool' bullshit.