07-10-2022, 05:51 PM
(07-09-2022, 03:01 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: The cause of our problems is not that we have a capitalist system. It's that we looked to an economic system to tell us what our morality should be, rather than viewing it as a tool, and a means of organizing labor and resources. Americans as a people are prone to impatience and simplistic, black-and-white thinking. The concept of "necessary but not sufficient" is not understood by enough people.
Capitalism is amoral. It is all about making stuff and selling it with the difference of cost and sales price being profit. If restraint of trade ensures higher prices but more unemployment or underemployment, or real poverty to a captive clientele, then so be it.
Some Americans are prone to impatience and simplistic, black-and-white thinking. Maybe some patience (as in impulse control) and shrewd calculation (do I really enjoy what I spend money on?) would make people better able to cope with the amorality and immorality of some of their spending. Visits to the strip-club are something that you can't relate to Mr. Prude or Ms. Feminist, but you can show them photos of Tahquamenon Falls or of the Van Gogh exhibit with impunity.
We would be better off if we got our values from the old-fashioned liberal arts that taught promising youth what is right, fair, true, and beautiful. Such allows people to know that life is more than "sex&drugs&rock-n-roll" with sides of class privilege or peasant-like sentimentality.
Speaking of Vincent...
I just saw this in Grand Rapids on Thursday
https://vangoghexpo.com/miami/
It's expensive, but it's stronger than a drug trip with none of the harm. Of course one needs to know who Vincent van Gogh was. It is more a light show (a revival of the old magic-lantern show popular about when Vincent died). It's just unfortunate that Vincent was so full of self-loathing without a legitimate reason, as we now have less than we would. Van Gogh is the most attractive achievement of expressionism, and artists could have learned from him.
We have a conflict between truth and the profit motive. The profit has its value in inducing genuine productivity and service, but that is far from enough to create human happiness. Slaves, zeks in the Gulags, and inmates of KZ-lager could produce and serve without significant joy in life, and that is rightly called exploitation. Much of the essence of freedom is the quest for happiness, as overall happiness over extended time is the measure of a wholesome life. If you hate what you are doing or feel cheated, then there might be something wrong with what you are doing. We cannot reduce life to productivity except for the dimwitted and cruel.
My solution is to promote at least two years of liberal arts education to anyone smart enough to use it . That effectively transforms K-12 education into K-14 education, and in view of the complexity of our world even in choices of entertainment, let alone the cunning of the worst expressions of politics and religion, we need it. Philosophy, economics, psychology, freshman comp, statistics and probability, art appreciation, music appreciation, world literature, comparative religion, and comparative political systems would enrich people's lives by making them less gullible, more coherent in personal expression, and less provincial.
The people who now dominate Big Business have come to the conclusion that no human suffering can be in excess so long as such leads to their personal gain, indulgence, and power. Such is grossly immoral as well as amoral, and taken to its logical conclusion it leads only to monumental suffering from exploitation, resource depletion, wars, and ultimately revolutions. We Americans should know the consequences of a leader devoid of any moral virtue, but nearly 40% of people act as if they are in his personality cult. You know who. Should he disappear, then someone else will take his role and do it harder, more ruthlessly, more cleverly, and even murderously.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.