RE: Is basing society around selfishness wise (Adam Smith etc)
October 13, 2020 at 2:23 pm
(This post was last modified: October 13, 2020 at 2:25 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(October 13, 2020 at 1:30 pm)Lawz Wrote: The "invisible hand" in economics is a familiar concept to most around here no doubt. It is the force whereby free market capitalism "works" - essential to its functioning is that people and firms act in their own selfish best interest.
Is it really any wonder there's so much unrest/depression/substance abuse/loneliness etc etc etc when we are centrally presumed to be, and encouraged to be, fundamentally selfish in our working lives and all our interactions with goods and services (also known as the extant economic paradigm)? Doubtless for most these interactions and work make up the majority of a life - and the economics shrieks and revolves around the concept that we are and need be, that most distasteful and universally maligned (and rightly so) of human dispositions, selfish above all else.
WOW how I detest the Tory/GOP mindset and economic policy...now more than ever....death to majority free market capitalism says I :Hack Spit:
Thoughts?
The question is not “is it wise to base society around selfishness”. The question is “is it feasible to based any durable society around anything other than selfishness”. The answer in my opinion is fundamentally no.
However, societies can be ordered in different ways such that the selfishness of different parts of society is given Greater or less degrees of structurally controlled differences in the probability of fulfillment. I think the Anglo-american model of capitalism is ordering the society increasingly towards maximizing the probability of fulfillment of the selfishness of a few, at the expense of fulfillment of the selfishness of the many, while offering ideological bullshit and other shabby flimflam to the many to prevent them from rising up to lynch the few.
