a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by scarp
scarp  ·  4430 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ask Hubski: How will history judge us?
Massive, reckless consumerism.




NotPhil  ·  4429 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  x 2
I suspect our entire economic system will one day come to been seen as one of the most perverse attempts at social engineering we've ever foisted on ourselves.

No-liability ownership of imaginary legal properties called corporations required to compete with each other for growing profits by chewing up resources at a rate that's created the greatest mass extinction since the Cretaceous period. Pollution from industrial processes that threatens entire oceans and the climate of the whole planet.

Sweatshops populated by people working around the clock for starvation wages who churn out disposable, meaningless, goods which we end up burying in the ground after a few days or years. Middle class debt slaves running around and around in a rat race to avoid bankruptcy.

Colonization, warfare, and coerced "free trade" treaties to force the system on everyone on the planet and create bigger markets.

Our economics has to be the most depraved thing to come out of the Enlightenment.

thenewgreen  ·  3269 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, it all seems pretty bleak when you put it that way. The system will NEVER CHANGE itself though, it needs to implode or be over-run by force. What do you think the catalyst will be? Will there be one or will we just run that rat race right in to our own annihilation?

NotPhil  ·  3260 days ago  ·  link  ·  

We've made the economy our dominant institution. If we wish to regain control over it, or replace it, we'll have to strengthen our other institutions, which will mean making them independent of the economy first.

It'll happen, but who knows what will spur the change or when it'll occur.