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Democracy, Capitalism - Coggle Diagram

- - - - People
- - - - The power of self-determination
    - - A form of self-mastery
        
        Liberation from the tyranny of base desires
        
        Attained by developing the virtues of wisdom, courage, and temperance
        
        Much of moral philosophy revolves around an inescapable tension between certain bodily desires, appetites and longings and other higher dispositions (like spiritual or intellectual aspriations). And to some extent, any form of moral advance involves fashioning, constraining and chastening the will so that it longs for the right things and higher virtues are cultivated, rather than giving ourselves over to mere appetites.
- - - - Individualism
        
        values
    - - Modernity
        
        Emphasises the importance of a rupture from continuity in the name of
        
        Progress
        
        Leads to a change in the interpretation of traditional
        
        Virtues/Vices
        
        Modern western society has turned almost every vice into a virtue, quite deliberately. Greed, for instance, has been celebrated in capitalist narratives as a driving force for innovation and economic growth, while lust is sometimes portrayed as an expression of personal freedom.
- - - - Moral practice/Moral reflection
        
        Is especially critical in the
        
        Youth
        
        To uphold
        
        Societal values
        
        A vice that is endemic in contemporary western society is the complete disrespect and shameless disregard for the truth – seen even in the presidential leaders of the western world. If the “low-hanging fruit” values of society like commitment to truthfulness, working for the common good and honesty are not continuously reaffirmed by elders, future generations may be headed for moral decay.
        
        Which defines how we interpret
        
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        Are influenced and guided by their
        
        Elders
        
        Who, through their experiences gain
        
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        While we see our development through life from infancy to childhood, adolescence and adulthood as presenting unique opportunities to grow and engage meaningfully with the world, we lack the understanding to embrace development in later life. Much of our knowledge and framework about elderhood revolves around the concepts of retirement and withdrawal. As such, our society lacks a structure that allows older peoples to thrive and contribute meaningfully.
        
        Driven by powerful socialising emotions (particularly negative ones) like
        
        Shame
        
        Which is applied differently in
        
        Eastern vs Western contexts
        
        In Western contexts, shame is often employed as a tool for political purposes. The way we express our political polarization is to effectively shame those who transgress some kind of moral political line that we have established. It seeks to diminish and ostracize others. This form of shame misses the moral value that shame has in fostering personal character development.
        
        In Eastern traditions – like Buddhism and Confucianism – shame is utilized as a constructive tool for moral formation. Rather than applying shame in a diminutive sense, Elders use shame to highlight undesirable dispositions in the youth, encouraging them to recognize and rectify these traits, and helping them internalize the virtues of their moral community. Through each passing generation, the inculcation of moral values is then perpetuated through this process.
    - - Harm
        
        The inculcation of liberalism has caused society to displace the idea of morality being concerned with a person's character and their internal dispositions. Rather than evaluating morality based on the nuances and intricacies of virtues and vices, morality is reduced to being assessed almost exclusively through the lens of an action’s ability to cause harm.
- - - - Globalization
        
        Results in proliferation of new information
        
        Technology
        
        The ubiquity of which influences
        
        Humanity
        
        The ubiquity of technology in our day to day lives has brought about an inversion of the Turing test. Increasingly, human behaviour has become to mimic the sort of behaviour we expect of machines. Our thinking patterns, consumption patterns, language, habits and even the way we judge human thinking is by the standard of machine output.
        
        Development of technology has resulted in large innovations in
        
        Social media
        
        Enables
        
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        in our capitalist world relies on the obsolescence of older tech
        
        Transmits European ideals, lifestyles and technologies, resulting in changes in societal values of other nations
- - - - Cult of the self
        
        The moral decay in Western society, where the cult of the self is celebrated, erode the virtues that make justice possible (empathy, criitical thnking, etc). This exclusive and obsessive focus on the self - often driven by a system of corporate totalitarianism - diverts the public’s focus from social, political, and economic inequality to the trivial, the sensational, and the superficial.