Easy dogma. And also untrue. Consider: a collection of selfish, self serving intelligent primates. The last thing you'd expect from any of those monkey bastards is cooperation! But what truly is amazing about the human species is the ability of a bunch of them to coordinate and create something truly amazing, literally something greater than the sum of their individual parts. Something like, oh a technically superb feature film; an enormously expensive mission to the moon (and bring the astronauts back alive!); the eradication of dreadful diseases in the poorer regions of Africa; the building of staggeringly large and complex sea-going vessels; suspension bridges; skyscrapers; and so on.
Of course, what all these monumental endeavours of cooperation requires is Capital. In other words, money, time, effort, calories, resources, and, most important, the political and personal Will To Succeed.
It is this concept of "Capitalism" that strikes terror into the minds of the terminally suspicious (or terminally ignorant). Socialism tends to defeat the very aspirational aspect of humankind that allowed it's proponents to arrive at the point where they fight the "cause" in the first place. However, it is this same aspiration that encourages the levels of cooperation and capitalism to build the very things that drags humankind out of the Dark Ages.
In the latter decades of human civilisation there have been social breakthroughs that have nothing to do with the military, with the politicians, with the bankers, with any of the usual suspects. Consider some geeks that managed to unify an emergent world-wide computer system with a single, easy to use, Operating System (hint: Windows 3.1). It meant that all the nascent computers in the world could talk together using a common language. Geek innovation followed geek innovation with the Internet. Truly, a Species Changing Event.
So why in the world did we need Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows 8, etc. etc.? A simple evolution from 3.1 to XP would have satisfied the most ardent user or gamer. And does anyone think that Microsoft Office 2125 will be any way more useful than Office 2003, a Word program that was so universally perfect to anyone who wanted to write a professionally-looking, well-spelled letter of complaint to their local town council, that hundreds of iterations later, each one costing a gullible public more than the last, serves no one other than a bloated Corporation?
And therein lies the problem with "capitalism". It becomes territorial sans frontiers. It becomes a self reproducing, self reaffirming, self replicating entity. Oh, not in the way that village/nation states are territorial, or even in the way that religious dogmas are territorial. No, in this modern, complex world the multi-national corporations (let's call them "Transnats" for ease of reference), these supra-geographical entities with such good ideas, need to dominate all their competitors' economic and ideological space with extreme aggressive prejudice. They are the true predators of the Information Age. And this predation aspires to influence and control the behaviour of all who are plugged in to the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e. radio and TV and computer streaming). The western world has been programmed into a greedy, avaricious species of parasite: homo consumer!
So why in the world did we need Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows 8, etc. etc.? A simple evolution from 3.1 to XP would have satisfied the most ardent user or gamer. And does anyone think that Microsoft Office 2125 will be any way more useful than Office 2003, a Word program that was so universally perfect to anyone who wanted to write a professionally-looking, well-spelled letter of complaint to their local town council, that hundreds of iterations later, each one costing a gullible public more than the last, serves no one other than a bloated Corporation?
And therein lies the problem with "capitalism". It becomes territorial sans frontiers. It becomes a self reproducing, self reaffirming, self replicating entity. Oh, not in the way that village/nation states are territorial, or even in the way that religious dogmas are territorial. No, in this modern, complex world the multi-national corporations (let's call them "Transnats" for ease of reference), these supra-geographical entities with such good ideas, need to dominate all their competitors' economic and ideological space with extreme aggressive prejudice. They are the true predators of the Information Age. And this predation aspires to influence and control the behaviour of all who are plugged in to the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e. radio and TV and computer streaming). The western world has been programmed into a greedy, avaricious species of parasite: homo consumer!
We need Capitalism. We need Intelligent Cooperation to, say, develop clean fusion power, then to colonise and harvest He3 from the moon to fuel that technology; to transfer fresh water ice from the polar Circles to the equator; to build aqueducts to irrigate the desert regions of Africa or the Middle East; to provide all the health and education that the West enjoys to the poorer, more ignorant countries of the world to prevent the rise of desperate death cults; to grow stronger, healthier crops that will defeat the depredations of global warming and therefore feed the 10 billion that will inevitably inhabit the Earth!!! So what do the Transnats do?
They design a better mobile phone!!! At great cost to the Earth's diminishing wealth of rare metals. Why? So that the most stupid primates can chatter incessantly to one another over even greater distances that their monkey forebears ever did from one treetop branch to the next! They design a better TV so that more screaming, hysterical nonsense can be paraded unto the multitudes in a manner that the old Roman Master of the Gladiators would have a wet dream about! Imagine his delight. Millions of howling spectators giving the thumbs down to some poor unfortunate who "slipped on the ice" or otherwise had his/her dreams of fame broken. Off the Show! Off with her Head!
Responsible cooperative capitalism is probably the best solution for the human race out of a bad bunch of ideologies. Socialism/Communism does not work. It dehumanises aspirational humanity by adhering to a central Plan that demands enforcement, sometimes brutal, to make it work. Cooperative capitalism requires consensual agreement. The main flaw here is that homo consumer is a dumb species. Cooperative capitalism requires the spirit of an educated, intelligent, informed, selfless, self aware populace. Everyone needs to participate in this government as equal citizens of a civilised world. And for that to happen, every single member of that society has to take personal responsibility for . . .well . . . just about everything.
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