this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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Late Stage Capitalism
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The issue isn't that I don't like socialism as most proponents describe it. I also like Hogwarts as the books describe it. The issue is I still think trying to build Hogwarts is dumb. Just like trying to implementing socialism the way people described it to me. It just clearly wouldn't work, because people don't magically stop being selifsh and greedy for money and power when you change economic systems.
I've said this a few times before, but it's wrong to think that most people are greedy/selfish. The capitalist class and the political figures they buy are extreme outliers. We over-index on them due to a mix of negativity bias and the fact that they say everyone is greedy to justify their own positions of power.
Just think about it: Humans are an inherently cooperative species. We developed language so that we could work more effectively in groups and slowly built up complex social relationships that lead to us becoming wildly successful. The fact that some psychopaths learned to take advantage of our group dynamics shouldn't damn everyone they are exploiting.
This isn't even about being selfless/altruistic: The vast majority of us just straight up do better when we support each other. Even if the other person doesn't directly reciprocate, living in a society where it is the norm to help others comes around to help you at some point.
But beyond that, there just isn't a lot of value in essentializing people like that. Very little about modern society is natural. We aren't born knowing how to do math or drive cars, but we have the capacity to learn those things. We've grown through social evolution, not biological. That's why a critical part of building socialism is raising class consciousness. We aren't just changing the structure of society, we're changing the people to be able to create that new structure. Just as serfs learned that they need not be subservient to their lords before they were able to self govern, we must teach people that they have the power and the right to turn over the current hierarchy and create something better.
So much word salad and none of it is relevant. Who cares if politicians and bilionaiers are extreme outliers or not? They exist. Capitalism as we have it now does not deal with them properly. But every socialist system I have ever seen concentrates power even more than capitalism. At least there is some split of interest between billionaiers, politicians, and milionaiers. Plus billionaiers are not a very cohesive group as their interests also do not align with each other perfectly.
In pretty much every socialist system I have seen proposed, all power is handed to elected politicians. And by human neture, the outliers will get elected, just like they do currently. No magical fix for gullible voters in socialism. That is why you never have "real socialism" in history. It turns to autocracy because of how the system interacts with human nature.
"No matter what points you make I'm dead set in my beliefs and I'm never changing them no matter what."
There, I shortened your walls of text for you.
I am very concerned by the number of liberals on lemmy who seem adamant about not wanting to read more than a tweet's worth of text. It's not like I write books. In theory they're adults. They should be able to read a couple paragraphs if they want to have a serious conversation.
Ah, thank you! So much more readable than the 4 pagaraphs from darthelmet.
I dont disagree with the notion that a "changing of the guard" won't fix everything. It just means there's different people that risk being corrupted, assuming they weren't already. Like how after the French Revolution it just meant there different rich people in control.
But to say something we shouldn't even try because a certain percentage of the population is greedy, or psychopathic, or whatever other trait you want, isn't that great of an argument. You could say capitalism will never work because people are too dishonest and will lie to fool investors. Which is something that actually happens right now. Enron. FTX. Theranos.
This is THE issue imo. How do we deal with these people? I dont think ANY political philosophy can address that effectively. The original idea of splitting power into three houses wasn't bad, but these past two years have shown it wasn't enough.
Billionaires go to prison and get executed in China, because power is concentrated in the Party and politics are in command.
That seems pretty fucking good to me.
Executions without fair trial sound good to you? Yep, .ml
Believing billionaires deserve to live? Yup, reddit.world
Just say you hate democracy and you love boot.