Capitalism
Regulates
Instantiates itself as
The Free Market
Surveillance Capitalism
Social Media
Money & Wealth: 1. A medium of exchange, 2. A unit of account, 3. A store of value (Aristotle)
Emblematic of
Meritocracy
The GAFA tetrarchy (google, amazon, Facebook, apple)
The problem of Bigness (which Kant called the 'Sublime', and which Louis Brandeis remarkably presciently warned in 1912 was 'the evil of Bigness')
A democratic threat in which vast megapolis are unelected and therefore unimpeachable. They are not only too big to fail, but too big to control, and therefore too big to resist
Resolves the concerns with
Fuedalism
Economics: the science of human choices in a world where resources are scarce, and humans are rational maximisers of their own self interests
Adam Smith: When self interested individuals pursue selfish ends, it creates efficiencies in the free market by maximising utility for everyone
Commentry on
Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham)
We are simply repeating the class inequities we tried to escape in
Ethics
Hedonistic Consequentialism
Pluralistic Consequentialism
did not have
Equality of opportunity
aimed to create
Licking on the dopamine lollipop
Drug dealers and social media companies are the only businesses to refer to their customers as "users"
Commodify colossal amounts of digital exhaust to sell certainty to businesses who would like to know with certainty what we do: 'surveillance capitalism' (Shoshana Zuboff)
'bad feelings machine'
Privacy
Flexibility with commodified by
We willingly conscript ourselves into neurological slavery to our devices
Virtue ethics
Religion
Consumerism
Is America's
Pluralistic monoculture of conformity
The motley crew of the ship Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby Dick yielded to conformity in the service of a mission without meaning (i.e chasing the white whale). America, similarity, have a common creed: consumption.
Conformity
kills
Creativity
Art
Fashion
Music
Moral philosopher Alisdair Macintyre in his 1968 book Christianity and Marxism observed that capitalist society engages a full pedagogical machinery to manufacture the sort of political subjects and moral bodies that are capable of succeeding within capitalism. We do not, it seems to me, naturally thrive within capitalism, we need to be remade to come to value the practices and dispositions that have, for nearly all of human history, were great vices (namely lack of self control).
Capitalism was about not about the power and will of the state to fashion us into a certain kind of human being, but instead allows us to discover ourselves or some version of ourselves, or be influenced by a series of intersubjective encounters in which we pursue our own interests, but actually no one is in charge of it. Hence America’s promise overseas that once you overthrow the dictator, what lies beneath is american capitalism.
Lack of creates
The circumstances of poverty perhaps inspire questions of the meaning of life, but preclude an opportunity to discover meaning IN life, due to limited opportunity. Suffering, due to difficult circumstances, for instance, intersects with our attempts to make sense of our lives in this universe. We can wonder if there is an intelligible, existentially satisfying narrative in which to locate - make sense of - our visceral experience of suffering and give us solace or hope. Evil in a meaningful universe does not cease from being evil, but it can be more bearable within these hospital conditions