Re: Covfefe-19: We Can Handle Slight Inconveniences. Part 8.
Unlike you, I believe in the social contract. I believe I am responsible for the health and well-being of society. I don’t believe anarchic tribalism is a better life.
Social norms reinforce the dominance hierarchy in every society. For the last half century in America control of institutions by the Plutes has made atomistic competition the sacred ideology. The pandemic response is the perfect illustration: hopelessly corrupt and inept, "small government" political leadership has no public policy solution but Die for Wall Street.
Enough people are finally seeing "
the curtain pulled back to reveal the blank wall."
You cannot base a thriving, democratic political order on survival of the richest. It destroys everything: values, ethics, the social fabric, and eventually humans themselves.
The way to create a vibrant, supportive human society is through socially aware, nurturing left liberalism. We've made that work before, with FDR and the New Deal. Many advanced democracies have made it work since the end of WW2.
The capitalist model doesn't work. As it destroys the planet in the long term it destroys human compassion and empathy in the short term. Like failed systems before -- despotism, feudalism, racialism, theocracy, colonialism -- we must kill it. As with those other obsolete systems, its beneficiaries will fight us all the way, and millions of people raised in its cultural superstructure to defend it will have to be convinced or at least out-voted.
The question is not if we will move past capitalism, but
how. If we do it democratically and peacefully that gives us a good chance at a democratic successor which feeds a prosperous and kind society, cares for those in trouble, and also has room for civil liberties and personal freedom. If it is dynamited by tyrants and violence, that may replay the hard lessons of the French, Bolshevik, and Maoist Revolutions.
