What happens when a culture is driven by the need for money to make more money
I love this article. It definitely hits on a bunch of really important points with regard to the tendency for capital to accumulate more capital, and for capital to remain in place rather than flow once it has established a large bolus. I would prefer things discussed in these terms rather than &quot;banks on every corner in Manhattan&quot; because it strikes at the heart of the issue rather than a symptom of the issue. The heart of the issue is that our society has been warped to accept capital as its only philosophical value, and, as a result, we have come to worship large accumulations of capital despite their extremely deleterious effect on many other aspects of society. The mitigation and eventual mending of the wounds caused by late capitalism is probably going to be the work of an entire generation of people. Thankfully, people have begun to recognize the problems of capital accumulation and stagnation, so we have perhaps only twenty or fourty years before we can make meaningful headway on this issue-- maybe even only five to ten years if there&#x27;s some major rattling of the cage, but it hasn&#x27;t materialized yet.<p>&quot;At some point in the past ten years, selling out lost its stigma. I come from the Kurt Cobain&#x2F;“corporate rock still sucks” school where selling out was the worst thing you could ever do. We should return to that. Don’t sell out your values, don’t sell out your community, don’t sell out the long term for the short term. Do something because you believe it’s wonderful and beneficial, not to get rich.&quot;<p>In the past ten years, the tension between &quot;not selling out&quot; and &quot;feeding myself and paying my student loans&quot; has reached a breaking point where increasingly few people can maintain an acceptable standard of living and not take lucrative opportunities. In other words: the opportunity cost of &quot;not selling out&quot; has skyrocketed to unsustainable levels. This is caused by many factors, and will not reverse itself until we have some form of major scale resource redistribution. The realistic summary is that doing wonderful and beneficial things leads to the poorhouse, and &quot;selling out&quot; for most people leads to a middling barely-financially-secure existence that falls far short of getting rich and still doesn&#x27;t have enough resources to plan for the long term.<p>&quot;Don’t sink into the morass of “industry standards.” Don’t succumb to the inertia of the status quo. Don’t stop exploring new ideas. A small number of people can change how society works. It’s happened before and it will happen again.&quot;<p>I doubt that many of us want to sink to the median, but the status quo has a way of smashing down people who try to explore new perspectives, and the economics of this fact are especially fierce right now. This is part of the problem, of course: the accumulated capital has an overwhelming interest to maintain the status quo of their wealth, and has many resources to kneecap change. Then (because this is related to Kickstarter, I am obligated to write this) there&#x27;s the fallacy that inventing a new toy or app will change society-- sometimes it&#x27;s possible, but on average it doesn&#x27;t happen. I&#x27;d like an app for social change, but even something as simple as an app which lists what companies to boycott on a given day would probably run into legal trouble very quickly.<p>&quot;Look at the language on that cover: “be paranoid,” “go to war.” Its violence suggests that being ruthless is the only way to survive. We all hear this tone all around us.&quot;<p>Yes, I have noticed the terms of violence &#x2F; natural selection being pushed in order to make people more vicious toward each other in their pursuit of making a living. Largely, this language-shifting effort has worked, and people view each other as competitors for resources rather than potential allies to increase the wealth of the community. I will state that this kind of anarchistic worldview benefits employers and corporations a tremendous amount, and benefits the public not at all. I suspect this is one of the contributing factors to reduced mental health in the US, and also one of the contributing factors toward people shunning union work. And yes, the prioritization of money above all other considerations is one of the major problems that has almost always existed in America. The people with the most money have lived here through the modern era, and have shaped the USA to funnel money into their coffers. Rather than lament about how we can&#x27;t kill these people and take their cash, I think it&#x27;s more productive to think about the policies we can specifically ask for which would prevent radical wealth accumulation in the first place.<p>Right now I think the best path forward is to come up with a scheme which redistributes capital downward and breaks up the largest clumps of stagnant money. I have no idea how the math on this is going to work out, but the sooner we get the political wheels in motion (Bernie Sanders is a good start, but we need about 300 more of his type before we can make headway) the sooner we can start to undo the damage caused by the crony-capitalism economic policy of the last 40 years.  Rather than prioritizing the ability for people to make vast sums of money (and make no mistake, we have prioritized this), we should prioritize raising the standard of living of the median citizen and ensuring equality of opportunity. I guess this means either a negative income tax or UBI.