Capitalism looks good on paper but it doesn’t work in real life. It’s just human nature. These academics talk about supply and demand curves, but after hundreds of years they still can’t even provide evidence that one exists. I’d love it if markets were free and efficient. It would make society so simple and everyone would get what they needed most. But people aren’t robots, you know? They don’t consume rationally and all the money ends up going to the guys at the top who use it to make themselves more powerful. It’s called tragedy of the commons. Markets can start out efficient, but people steal shit and force people to stop competing, which fucks the markets up even more.

  • @lightstream
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    3 years ago

    If strong and weak are meaningless, then so is fitness - in the context of genes, evolution selects genes which give their owner greater chance of reproducing, therefore causing those genes to survive over many generations. In other words, “survival of the fittest” merely says “those best at surviving will survive”.

    There is also no requirement, in nature, to be in balance with the environment. The fossil record tells countless tales of species which have caused their own downfall by over-exploiting the environment.

    The point I’m trying to make is that we can’t look to nature for guidance on morality. It can be easy to daydream of days gone by, when we humans lived peacefully in smaller groups, in harmony with nature, happily singing songs in the firelight. Those times never really existed - there was no harmony with nature, nature is red in tooth and claw, and we have always had to steal our survival by spilling the blood of others. Never was that blood freely given.

    So we can’t find easy answers in nature, we can’t simply step back to a rosy-tinted past of harmony, we have to move forward. We have to take what we have, look objectively at its faults, and equally its benefits, and strive to make small incremental changes to push the system towards one which is more fair and just.