greed undone slowly, and silently

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

like blender, the tech world grows from its users, and follows its own paradigm

The sleeping tiger purs,

Change is the only constant as they say. History is littered with people who did everything they could to stop change and to this day the worlds most powerful armies have consistently proven powerless to stop it.

There’s always going to be greed, as it is more a moral issue rather than something that can only be enabled by money.

For instance, you can create perfect income equality where Tim Cook and Bill Gates make the same income as your ordinary McDonald’s cashier and yet people will still find ways to bilk each other for personal gain. To blame an object is ignoring the root cause of the inherent evils of human thought.

If you never encounter scarcity, how wpuld that effect your drive for money?

what if people exercised, had fun, and then contributed to forums when not getting more educated?

what if the pace of technology outpaced our needs?
Could the catylist for true technological evolution begin with technological unemployment?

what happens when the least educated in the future, is better educated then the average now?

The nuances of human thought would remain. Again, you are advocating another magic bullet solution for society, human behavior is not going to become perfect because we move on to a post-monetary society (people will find other ways to acquire more at the expense of others).

It’s much like the idea of how getting rid of the confederate flag is going to magically cause all forms of racism to disappear, or how getting rid of guns is going to magically eliminate all forms of violent crime.

The only way otherwise would be technology that causes humans to lose self-awareness and essentially become robots, but then we end up like the Borg from Star Trek and are no longer ourselves (not to mention causing the death of all things innovative, creative, and unique).

The article itself didn’t really seem to suggest that this “post-capitalism” economic model is good or bad for the human condition, just that it is up and coming. Regardless of whether the article’s conclusions are true or agreeable by me or not I think that change is inevitable. Capitalism, and communism for that matter, will not last forever. Like all systems that have come before they will be succeeded by something eventually and whether their demise comes on the heels of some earth shattering cataclysm or they just slowly fade from one thing to the next remains to be seen.

Sometimes these changes are rather cataclysmic and sometimes they’re not, but nonetheless things change one way or another. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but the day will come when we move past all of what we have today. And at some point after that the day will come when we move past all we have on that day too.

greed is culturally imparted, and has little to do with scarcity so much as modeled behaviors.

‘I am what I am because of who we all are’

Ubuntu

It’s nice to think positively I guess.

But greed is part of human nature,
capitalism is just one way to acquire it

I could expand upon what Ace said earlier. You know guns are just inanimate objects, they don’t make people violent, however when a violent person aquires a gun his potential for causing havok is increased many fold.

The same could be said for capitalism, it doesn’t make people greedy, but it increases the potential of an inherently greedy person to act upon that greed a great deal.

That’s not to say that communism doesn’t bear the same issue, it’s only that the means by which that issue presents itself is different. For instance I volunteer at a food pantry here, the way they do it is that people who come in for food are given a number and wait until someone is available to show them around the pantry.

Anyway the other day one of the visitors told me that not long ago there was a lady who volunteered there that would always make sure her friends could cut to the front of the line, were given all the best stuff and more of it than anyone else.

That’s where greed is given what it needs to flourish in communism, the community leaders abuse their positions for the the personal gain of themselves and their friends while everyone else waits in line to get what’s left.

At the same time people tend to assume that because they don’t know someone they are not friends, but they never stop to think that maybe they would be friends if they did know one another.

Greed is an inevitable conclusion. There is no human nature that can be changed or affected- it’s just logic. Humans are born as blank slates: we know only that we are alive and it is best to stay that way, but we do not know why. Over the course of our lives, we just refine those ideas. How can we live our lives better? I don’t like pain, so how do I best avoid it? Money gives me the things I want, so how do I earn more of it? You get my point. It’s all just logical processing.
But we also have to put empathy into the equation. Again, humans don’t have the ability to empathize because it is innate, but because it’s the next logical step. I don’t like pain, so that person must not either. And over time throughout humanity’s short existence, we have established laws and ideals of right and wrong that have been largely consistent throughout all human cultures across the world. So now we have law and fear of humiliation/ punishment to reinforce the sometimes lacking ability to empathize. Religion has also played a part as we tack on the promise of eternal damnation for your transgressions.
So now it comes down to people deciding if greedy or indecent acts benefit them more than the punishment hinders them, be it moral, justice, or eternal.
This may not seem too relevant but what I mean to say is this:
A man without greed is a man without free will, and a man without free will is not a man at all. A greedless society is a society of nothing more than skeletons walking around in bags of meat. But remember- a greedy society is also very much capable of empathy.

Guns make it easier to kill, sure, but it’s not what makes it possible for someone to be violent.

In some East Asian martial arts, people have perfected the concept of killing with nothing other than the human hand. Anyone who can make a fist has a potentially deadly weapon that is part of them. So what do you do if that becomes an issue, chop off everyone’s hands (to note, using a computer becomes impossible as well)?

You can also obtain a deadly weapon at any sporting goods store in the form of a heavy wooden baseball bat, but we don’t hear any calls to require waiting lists and other regulations to control purchases.

Then there’s the super sharp flesh-stabbing knives that you probably have in an easy to access position in your kitchen drawer for when you cook a steak, should those be taken away?

@Ace: I agree with you, like Albert Einstein once said “Atomic weapons have not created a new problem, they have only made more urgent the need to solve an existing problem.”

In other words, atomic bombs don’t kill people, people kill people. The problem that needs solving is not how to keep people away from atomic bombs, guns, but why people choose to use them against one another.

@Rainstar: I do not think greed is an inherent quality of the person, instead I believe people become greedy because they don’t care about the needs of others. They don’t care about the needs of others because over the course of their life others have treated them poorly so they see little use in keeping them around.

The problem here compounds itself because the more people treat each other poorly the less they desire not to treat each other poorly.

You see people are actually quite beneficial to have around because they are quite capable. If one were really greedy, as in desiring to have more, then that person would do well to know that helping others and/or leaving them enough to thrive equates to an even greater return for him because more people can produce more stuff and more stuff means he can feed that greed.

Somewhat of a paradox because could you even define that as greed? The greedier one becomes the more he would help others in order to obtain a greater return.

So anyway, again, the problem is not really greed, it’s why people want to use it against others. Greed itself benefits not from taking from others, but in giving to others, but today it seeks more to take which actually hurts it and that has to do with the way people view their peers. They don’t like them and they wish to express that disdain in different ways. Some choose to take from them and/or refuse them assistance others pick up an automatic weapon and make their mark on world headlines.

We like to think that we are generally cognisant but the behavioral sciences wouldn’t agree. Greed is a myth. Hoarding is a natural response to perceptions of scarcity. Our behavior in general is responses to environmental stimuli. Humans are not inherently greedy no matter how many celebrities claim it. That is just justification for an exorbitant life style. Remove the perception of scarcity and the general “greed” goes with it.

I honestly don’t think that a social paradigm is enough to combat perceptions of scarcity. If that were the case, the Agrarian Revolution would have been the answer. The need for efficient storage and distribution, however allowed us to impose our prior dogmatic belief in scarcity to the system. It’s what we experienced in tribal times and therefor what we expected from civilization.

Technology has always been the emergent factor that has raised the standard of living. If there is to be a lack of scarcity, it’s likely to come from some technological advancement. Crowdsourcing and digital distribution just don’t seem to be enough of a systemic dictation to faze out markets. DARPAs implementation of Drexlarian Nano-Tech does have a great deal of potential to do so though. Where households are self sufficient, scarcity is defeated. This in turn defeats “greed”.

This fails to explain why we are not seeing every man, women, and child below the poverty line hoarding things as a result. All of those people in that category experience scarcity, yet only a tiny fraction of people actually hoard stuff (and likewise can be taught to let go of those things).

Also, by this logic, murder, genocide, and assault is also a myth because of it’s all natural. Let’s let everyone out of prison then, get rid of all laws, and let nature take its course (only the strongest and those most experienced with survival will live to see their next birthday). In fact, some issues in society has been exacerbated by the idea that men are just another species in the animal kingdom (leading some to think it’s perfectly okay to act like them as a result). If you think that is a badly done argument, consider the state of discussion on the internet where the ideas of etiquette, civility, and even coherence have seen a truly epic breakdown on various websites (people are lobbying against Reddit now because they’re not allowed to talk about committing violent acts against women, no joke).

You’re cherry picking evidence. Look at how many have bank and savings accounts. Look at all of the garages that are full of useless junk.

You’re also being childish. The legal system doesn’t work but it’s still no excuse to put people in danger by releasing those who have no real access to clinical psychology. These people rather, are drugged and told to get back to their minimum wage jobs that may or may not support them.

You like to think that you have an oppressed religious view but you’re just willfully ignorant to promote your own cynicism. “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Bank and savings accounts are not a natural reaction to scarcity, it’s simply the execution of sound financial advise that everyone should follow because it ultimately leads to situations like a better retirement. Otherwise, you can argue then that everyone is a hoarder regardless of whether or not they have acquired everything they ever wanted (because apparently the very act of storing something for later use is all that it takes to fit the definition now).

On the messy garage front, a lot of people in that situation would know that they don’t need all that stuff in there, but they don’t clean because they’re lazy. It’s again not really a reaction to scarcity and eliminating scarcity is not going to be that magic elixir that solves all of the world’s problems. In contrast, if you want to see a reason why the lack of scarcity can actually be a bad thing, head on over to a mobile store like Google Play to see just how quickly the good quality products get buried (because of recent developments where everyone can now make their own video game at no cost).


You’re also being childish. The legal system doesn’t work but it’s still no excuse to put people in danger by releasing those who have no real access to clinical psychology. These people rather, are drugged and told to get back to their minimum wage jobs that may or may not support them.

If everything is due to natural instinct and we’re no more self aware than the plastic men companies are making in Japan, then there is no morality and likewise you have no authority to say to even a hardened criminal what he can and can’t do. There is simply no room for the idea of moral decisions in the realm of naturalism.

I’m just making the claim that you are being willfully ignorant and childish. It’s your responses that I’m providing as evidence. Stop putting words in my mouth and address my arguments like an adult or sell it to someone else.

Then once again, I don’t have to entertain discussion with the side that almost always pulls out the tried and true practice of name-calling when discussion gets to an undesirable point.

Have a nice day.

Politics. You guys know better.

Closed.