Capitalism - Good or bad ?

[Mairead]

51. VERY Bad.

"Human nature", contrary to what some believe, is nothing more (or less) than personal adaptability.

People adapt their behaviors, and then, because of the need to resolve cognitive dissonance, their beliefs, to the social situation they're in. If the situation is healthy and pro-social, they become healthier and more pro-social. If it's pathological and anti-social, they become more pathologised and anti-social.

Any social, developmental, or clinical psychologist will tell you the same, unless their doc was really in rat-bothering (which, unfortunately, some have been).

The natural form of human socioeconomic organisation is a non-hierarchical gift economy. Any anthro
will tell you the same. We know it's natural because people chose it independently all over the world, and it's is still visible in many places.

Capitalism, which is the latest coat of paint on classism, is not natural, except in the same sense that cancer, AIDS, murder, baby-fscking, etc. are "natural". Those pathologies appear by action of nature, but they're abnormal.

Reptile-like self-centeredness will show up in a few percent of individuals in every generation because of cosmic randomness. Such people are called "psychopaths" in English, "kunlangeta" (q.v.) in Yupik. In natural human societies, the elders made/make sure that the obligative psychopaths didn't/don't survive to adulthood.

When human communities grew too big for the elders to cull the psychopaths, the socioeconomic form shifted to chiefs and redistribution rather than equality and sharing. The psychopaths made themselves the chiefs and priests. The chiefs and priests eventually made themselves kings or popes, and the rest of us became their property.

There is nothing special about Capitalism except that it provides a new excuse for the psychopathic few to exploit the rest of us. It doesn't provide the rest of us anything we'd want that egalitarian sharing couldn't provide just as well.

There's compelling evidence of that fact: Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa. In 60 years, without exploiting anyone, it's grown from 5 young engineers making paraffin stoves in a shed under the guidance of a one-eyed socialist priest to a gigantic conglomerate (ca. €33G assets) doing everything from tertiary education and basic research to selling retail groceries.

We don't need Capitalism. It's unhealthy for children and other living things. So if we don't want most forms of life on Earth including us to go extinct, we must get rid of it.