Saturday 12 October 2024: Is Our World Broken
This is a response to
Is Our World Broken. I considered including
the transcript here for reference, then decided my audience of
(charitably) one would refer as needed.
Response follows.
Capitalism was not supposed to work this way. That
said, camel-case should be illegal, too. A lot of it has to do with that
economics wasn’t a formalised thing before about the turn of the 19th
century, Sure, there were generalised ideas of value and transfer of
same, but the actual study of market-based economics in its own right
happened well after the invention of the concept. I would know, I’ve
done some amount of it.
But as the ideas of a market, an individual and
having value started to intertwine, what ended up happening was that the
idea of the individual took on the concept of the value – rather than
the product. This has steadily gotten worse in the hundred years since,
with the return to individuals being prioritised over the absolute value
of a product to its consumers.
So, although I would argue it’s a leap to say that
we are at the high point of a species, its not wrong to say that we are
currently doing better than ever before, and all health metrics (for
white people) are better than they’ve ever been before. The rest – who
cares, right?
This is perhaps another consequence of market-based
economics. Products are aimed at the people willing to pay for them, and
the people willing to pay for them have money. So, instead of being a
world that is about the betterment of the whole, we instead become a
world that is about the optimisation of the individual, seemingly
without realising that the individual is a piece of the whole – and
misinterpreting it as that the whole is an extrapolation of the
individual.
Having any kind of empathy in this world is rather
difficult, the individualist world-view does not care about the units
outside of the self. Especially as the official metrics for wellness and
quality of life continue to increase in theory, while in practice,
material abundance is a very real issue for all but the very top of a
system that seems to be pulling itself apart at the middle. Some degree
of re-balance is necessary, but would be met with a large degree of
division.
Because division is the key to a system like this.
And maths.
If a group of people are divided then they can be
controlled. By whom? The people with the money. Because, apparently,
money = power. Or at least that’s what your Utilities provider will tell
you.
The video then goes on to sanctimoniously quote
Pratchett at me, which, as a Discworld fan, I won’t dignify with a
response. What I will say is that I can get the general tenor of the
video from here on. Terry Pratchett is all about doing what’s right –
even if it is not what’s kind. About short term pain to make things
right in the long run. And about being the one to stand up and change
what is possible to be changed.
I would argue that ‘what is possible to be changed’
is you. Other people will follow. But that by necessity means that the
way to change the world is in the micro, not the macro. Fitting then,
that the video talks about the history of human evolution from the cell.
So there is a long way we have come, and surely some format of a future
exists as well. With the world, and eventually humanity at large,
getting more complex at each iteration through history (like an Agile
sprint, but at 2 million year intervals) until we had systems for how to
live and cognizance to see that we were, in fact, living.
But that brings me back to one of my earlier
comments. ‘Capitalism was not supposed to work this way.’ How then? The
reality is that it was implemented to formalise the idea of Reward. And
every Reward gets stale over time – see social media and its affect
throughout the day. Tan action at 7am would be enjoyable because of the
temporary dopamine hit – the same action at 10pm not so much, assuming
frequent checking throughout the day; the dopamine isn’t being provided
and the action has lost its value.
In the case of capitalism, then we maximise profits
more, make the value provided to people seeking Reward higher and, by
necessity, make the value being provided by the people that provide the
Reward lower. So, the hunger for units that will provide Reward becomes
insatiable as time goes on. The fact that this then turns the Earth
itself in to a unit that produces Reward is lost on most people.
We have changed the Earth. That is inarguable.
Species made extinct as a result of human activity stand (or not) as a
testament to that. The climate is harsher than, seemingly, ever before
in human history. That’s not to say these patterns have been caused by
humanity, but in the absence of better evidence, we must at least
entertain the possibility. And then consider – if that is the case, and
the Earth is ours, then we have broken it. So how can it be fixed? Not
‘can it be fixed’, but ‘how’. ‘How’ is the most important word in the
present time.
Yes, humanity is still at base – tell stories,
gather food, etc – the same as its always been. But the systems we have
put in place and the propensity for these systems to be misused still
exist and must exist as part of the solution we reach. So, I disagree on
both levels, with assumptions that everything is fine, and with the
assertion that everything is broken. These two viewpoints illustrate
exactly the kind of division that keep the people with money and power
in, well, money and power. Praise be to the Utilities providers.
Although I’ve already done that joke.
So, the world is broken. But it was never anything
else. We’re just seeing later iterations of systems that have been left
unchecked because of other systems with a vested (or cardigan-ed, up
to you) interest in leaving them unchecked. But then the question
becomes – do you accept the world as it is, or try to change it? And if
you try to change it, how?
See, there it is again.
And people do try to change the world, and succeed.
This is a world where having a perspective and knowing the actionable
steps to a result will most likely put you on a path to achieve that
result. Quickly, maybe not. You may not even get there. But you could –
and that’s the point. Every person that contributed to a system that has
made amess in the current world thought they were achieving something
good. And maybe they were at the time. But humanity is prone to
miscommunication, so later iterations of successful systems may not have
the same ideological basis as the earlier ones. And if a system is
entrenched, then it becomes hard to change.
So, this isn’t a question of whether the world is
broken or not. It’s a question of whether there is an interest in
finding a niche that can be improved, fixed, changed or added to – and
then doing that. This is the fundamental concept of work, at least
originally – whether to improve the lives of the collective or the self.
As long as it doesn’t also contribute to the degradation of other groups, then it’s probably fine.
The only question is how.