Pixel--Dude wrote: ↑October 16th, 2022, 3:47 am
Here are just a few reasons why I despise the ideology:
Freedom
First and foremost! Freedom is one of my core values and the artificial freedom granted in a capitalist system isn’t much freedom at all. This is something which is preached ad nauseum by advocates of capitalism, that we have freedom to choose our own path. To be what we want to be etc. The American Dream
In reality the only freedom you truly have is the freedom to choose which corporate masters you wish to serve. If I wish not to participate in the relentless and soul crushing rat race then I will lose my car, my home and if I have kids they will he abducted by social services, government approved kidnappers. So what freedom does one really have in a system which forces unwilling participants to go work for a living?!
If you wake up and you don’t want to go to work at a shitty job for 40 hours a week or whatever you cannot make the decision to stay at home and do something different. You go to work because you have no other choice. It is just clandestine slavery and not everybody is honest enough to admit it.
I am trying to remember where you are from. The UK, right? In the US, about half of employees are employed in businesses of 100 employees or less. Some small businesses are incorporated. It's easy to start a small corporation in the US. My wife and I have two or three LLCs that we aren't really using right now. I wanted to start something a year ago but my regular job offered extra work and the pay was decent for it....but I digress.
These small businesses aren't the same as the large corporations. If you can figure out a way to support yourself where you stay home, you have freedom to do that.
How is the social services type people coming and taking your kids related to big corporations? Did you find a one-off case of corporations lobbying for that? They will take kids away for living at the standard of living of our ancestors two or three hundred years ago. You could do some social action, start a movement, lobby parliament or a legislature for stronger parental rights. It's not 'capitalism' per se that does that. A communist regime could claim ownership over the children. That seems more like a 'left wing' perspective'--- for the state to own the kids, anyway. But there was 'Hitler youth' on the one hand, and now near-mandatory state schools brainwashing kids to think gay is okay and to think they have no gender on the left.
You don’t even have the freedom to be your authentic self in this society. Talk about how you don’t want to work and see how your peers react.
The problem here is not capitalism, but if you don't have resources and you think you can get by mooching off other people without doing something to support yourself... maybe that is the problem. Capitalism doesn't make that an option. Governments offering safety nets for lazy people is the problem. Why should tax payers keep you up?
If you lived in the middle ages and you told your mom and dad, or people around you you just didn't want to work and you wanted to be your authentic self, do you think you would have gotten a good reaction? I don't think that kind of talk ever went over well. If you had just inherited a large estate, it might not be an issue, but if you didn't manage it some, your manager might take advantage of you.
They make movies about the wealthy from ages gone by, but most people had to work for a living.
Tell your interviewer you only want the job because you need money to survive and feed your kids instead of falsifying absolute passion for the company and see how far that gets you.
Being honest and being too forthright are two different things. You need to cultivate a passion for work. It isn't always automatic. When you invest some energy into a certain field, you may care more. You can also think about the things you enjoy about different types of work and emphasize that.
I don't know that passion for the field is necessarily part of a professional interview. I think the STAR interview is pretty popular in some of the larger corporations. Situation, Task, Action Response. "Tell me about a time you showed leadership" or something like that that is a bit more detailed. Then you answer along the lines of the points of 'STAR'. The line manager's interview might be more along the lines of stupid questions like, "What is your greatest weakness?" or 'Where do you see yourself in five years?" You learn a bit about the company beforehand so you can give a feasible answer if you get hired.
Some fields may have case interviews, where they give you problems to solve. Corporations may also use psychometric type tests to figure out your personality type and check for consistency among answers for honesty.
Small businesses may be less likely to use the professional style tests. You may get 'What is your greatest strength?' or 'Where do you see yourself in five years?'
Another way our freedom is affected is through our so-called government representatives. People who we vote for in the theatre of democracy are nothing more than corporate puppets who travel to Davos every year to receive their orders from their corporate overlords like Bill Gates. If you don’t think this is true, then just look into how Bill Gates made the government of India pass legislation that forced Indian farmers to use Monsanto products.
We need to pressure the governments to pass laws that farmers can sue Monsanto if their copy-writed GMO genes get in the farmer's corn instead of the other way around.
I'll agree with you that corporations have a lot of power. They can press evil social agendas for this trans garbage, also. There is also a disturbing idea that corporations are supposed to be used for the social good instead of follow the law and make money for shareholders. I prefer the latter because I don't trust the heads of corporations not to be evil left-wingers who think they are do-gooders--- using the shareholders money instead of their own to push some evil left-wing social agenda.
But laws can hem in the corporations. Putting all those people together and organizing their activity toward a common objective can be a very powerful thing if a company is well-managed. We have seen this with technology. Making a bunch of plastic waste garbage that fills landfills to meet the demands of consumers is a negative.
But 'capitalism' is not the problem. You can have capitalism without the large corporate version of it, with small private vendors. The problem is, if a country wants to get rid of corporations, other countries have them, and it is difficult for small countries to be competitive on the global arena.
Some countries, like the US, have diverse national resources, so if its economy was cut off from trade, it's people could probably survive off the products produced in the country. The cost of living would go way up as compared to a freer trade situation. But the UK would probably experience more restrictions. And countries that produce no petroleum of their own would face other difficulties. I do not think the UK produces enough food to feed itself a the moment, but it probably could if there were no free trade. Food would be expensive.
So imagine one country gets rid of corporations, and there is free trade or trade within blocks of countries, where other countries have corporations. The anti-corporate country would probably lose out, and the whole trading block would be less efficient due to the lack of corporations. Trying to get the world to opt for a simpler lifestyle could be difficult.
Capitalism is superior to communism, certainly the soul-crushing totalitarian atheist Marxist varieties. Communist revolutions could wipe out capitalism. A world dictator might be able to do it if he could secure the globe under his power. When Jesus comes back and rules everything, He may make some huge changes to the economic system.
Aside from something major that changes the world, how are you going to get rid of it in the short-term without some awful revival of Communism?
We can have governments put limits on corporate power. I think that is the most practical route. Outlawing single-serve plastic? Outlawing corporations from using their resources to push social agendas? Not allowing them to give to charities, forcing them to give that money as dividends, but then the state giving tax breaks to stockholders who give that money to charity? That makes more sense to me.
Education
This is another one that pisses me off. Education. Why do I know several people who are “educated” but never anyone who is intelligent?! The answer is because there is a difference between knowledge and intelligence. Knowledge is simply retaining information. You either know something or you don’t. The people I referred to as “educated” simply retained a lot of information from school. Whereas intelligence is something different entirely. Intelligence is how someone processes information.
So who is more intelligent really? The university student who blindly accepts everything he is told from authority figures? Or the drop out who thinks the system is bullshit and questions everything he is told by authority figures?
To your last question, I suspect both individuals could lack proper intelligence since both are excessive extremes. Is mathematics wrong? Some so-called 'education' is actually indoctrination into idiotic ideologies. There are fields of study on the Humanities side of things that are basically that. Some of this may creep into the social sciences. There is bunk in the social sciences, and wrong theories in the hard sciences also. But that doesn't mean it is all wrong.
Maybe lacking intelligence isn't the right word either. We can be intelligent in different ways. Someone could be good at learning facts. That's an aspect of intelligence. Some people have intelligence that can help them grow crops or do art, but are poor at other fields of study. Higher education should result in critical thinkers. And some educators complain that students who graduate high school now do not know what previous generations knew.
In school you are taught to sit down and shut up, to listen to the teacher as they “educate” you with everything you need to know to advance into the corporate world.
They teach very little of that in high school. High school education doesn't typically teach finance. My economics course was very light. It might provide suitable education to be a factory worker or to be a sales clerk which can be cogs in a corporate machine....but not much for advancement in the corporate world. A business degree would more likely teach skills for advancement. High school might provided a loose general education that could be a basis for higher education in numerous fields of study.
I confess I found the whole prospect very daunting at a young age. I was very depressed because of it. But to most of my classmates it all came naturally sitting down and folding their arms like little drones. I think this is the true essence of a capitalist education system, one which instills mindless conformity into children and prepare them with all the compliance they need to get by.
I don't know that those who own the means of production are getting what they need out of the educational system. The government people and education specialists behind all this aren't that directly connected into the corporate world in a lot of cases.
Nothing practical is taught in schools. There is no self defence or martial arts training to obtain knowledge on how to survive a violent attack from some asshole trying to hurt you.
If they taught that, who would be the most dedicated students? The kids wanting to hurt other kids? There are private martial arts classes. I am glad they don't teach this in schools. Have you seen Cobra Kai? Imagine that first-season school fight scene in every school. We don't need that? They do have after-school wrestling teams as an after-school activity in the US. It may be that most public schools in the US have that. (American) football, basketball, and baseball are the three top American sports, but they have lots and lots of other teams.
No first aid training so you might know how to help someone in need.
I had that in health class, but we may have had to go another day on Saturday to get a certificate, or something like that. They didn't actually certify us. But you can get certified from a weekend course. These are available in society. In the US, the American Heart Association offers it. Another organization does, too. Maybe the Red Cross.
No philosophical lessons on morals or ethics or how to treat other human beings.
That could exist in some school system here. But I don't want some of the teachers teaching my kids morals. We do have churches out there teaching Sunday school classes.
I mean, for f**k sake they don’t even give you lessons on how to manage finances
In my school, the more 'remedial' kids who didn't want the college seal or whatever they called it could take a personal finance class. Back then, I think they taught balancing a checkbook. If you were more advanced, you took other maths-- trig or whatever, and you didn't have room in the schedule for that class unless it was an elective.
or how to deal with depression and things like that.
Do you want someone with a bachelors in education teaching psychology to kids? Do you want people with a high schoolers knowledge of depression teaching a class on that? What percentage of the population has depression?
They do offer psych classes in school. That happened after I graduated, so I don't know the content. My college psych 101 did not deal with how to manage depression. I've had PhD psych seminars and I have never learned how to deal with depression in a seminar. I did not study clinical psychology.
Honestly, most people don't have it, and those who do find specialists. Isn't depression as a medical condition something a minority of people experience? They don't teach us how to deal with dyslexia. Most people don't have it. Isn't it better that there are specialists that deal with this, rather than people spouting pop psychology they learned in school? We've got enough armchair pop psychologists without our school systems churning out more of them.
Then there is the trap of further education. Tuition fees costing thousands and thousands (my brother went to university and I think his tuition fees are somewhere in the realm of 44K) and all the hoops you have to jump through just to get a decent job are ridiculous.
In the US, I think the problem is the US allows students to borrow massive amounts. Students are 18 and have no idea how hard it is to earn the money back. So they borrow huge amounts. So schools can keep raising the prices without pushback. It's kind of like how if an insurance company pays one's medical bills, the patient doesn't care as much about the cost, so the costs can go up and up.
Plus, there is no equality in society anyway when rich assholes like Boris Johnson can get into private boarding schools because their parents are rich. Where is the equality in that?!
Why is equality the issue here? If you work really hard and earn a lot of money, shouldn't the state protect your right to pass that on to your children, and their right to pass it to your grandchildren, and their right to pass it to their great grandchildren?
Creating 'equality' by stealing people's property and distributing it equally is unjust.
Even this trans agenda being pushed in schools is part of this bullshit drive for profit and power and yet again it is Big Pharma who are raking it in with the influx of gender confused teens who are taking hormone blockers and transitioning without being made aware of the dangers.
Big pharma can benefit, but I suspect that is just a small part of what is happening. Society has largely rejected God and God's order of things. With the sexual revolution, accepting of free sex and divorce, then accepting homosexuality, and the state's rebellion against God by allowing for gay marriage.... this was going to happen. I figured allowing incest or maybe pedophilia or zoophia was next, but the trans thing was the next step. My guess is incest is next. Or maybe polygamy, which probably isn't as bad as this gay junk anyway. Gay incest doesn't make babies, so maybe that will be the next bit of perversion.
Advertising
TV shows and movies are interrupted with adverts everyone finds annoying trying to annoy you into buying shit you don’t want. YouTube has been saturated with annoying adverts (some of them advertising YouTube premium) which are designed to make you buy some subscription based service which people used to enjoy for free.[/quote]
I find the ads annoying at times. They can also target ads based on what I watch, so occasionally I watch an ad for something I am interested in. But a lot of the ads you can click away from in five seconds. Remember the 15-minute ads on TV? Maybe the UK never had them. But they sure had them in the US. Didn't the UK have no cable TV and like three government channels showing hummingbirds flying around, or some sci-fi show with a budget of $100 per episode, or some weird comedy shows until about 1990?
The ads pay for YouTube so you don't have to. And you don't have to watch YouTube.
Worst of all though and possibly the most detestable way these companies advertise to people is when they cut out the middle man by advertising directly to children. All the colourful toys and chocolates are all placed at eye level for children. Daytime television advertising is mostly catered towards kids at home innocently watching their cartoons etc. It’s the equivalent of a salesman knocking at my door and asking to speak to my daughter directly and then asking her if she wants to buy a sweetie. It’s unethical as f**k and it utterly disgusts me!
You don't have to let your kids watch TV.
Commoditised Love
This is really sickening! One thing I hate about a capitalist society is how love is commoditised by these companies and corporations. Romantic love is commoditised through valentines day, mothers day, fathers day, birthdays and even Christmas.
If you don’t buy things for those you love there is some kind of offense implied. Obviously, the more money you spend on someone is an indication of how much you love them.
Yeah that's annoying.
Weddings costing in excess of 10k just to make a commitment to the one you love. Why? It’s f***ing extortionate.
I don't see wedding commercials, and weddings were expensive before this wave of reality shows on buying dresses or whatever they ahve.
Then there are cards! Does anyone even use these? Hallmark cards which have a generic “I love you” message printed by Hallmark and people just sign their name at the bottom. Seriously how much meaning does this actually have?! Wouldn’t it be more authentic to just SAY what it is you want to say instead of paying £5 to get Hallmark to say it for you!
I get mine from the Dollar Tree. My favorite is, "What's a birthday card with no money in it?" The next page says, "This one!" I gave that with a gift card, but I thought it was funny.
Anyone ever hear of De Beers? The assholes who monopolised the diamond industry and created artificial scarcity to control the market? They also made marketing campaigns “Nothing says I love you like a ten thousand pound engagement ring”. Absolutely sickening!
They have a security force, like an army down there, I hear. They also made a stamp to show a diamond was 'official'-- and not a blood diamond, to promote their diamonds.
You could find a nonmaterialistic woman who hates diamonds. Problem solved.
Health and Wellbeing
Finally, when you come to the end of your life. And your physical and mental health are exhausted and all the money you’ve ever earned through your labour circulates back into a system of slavery anyway. You can enjoy a few years in an old folks home or shivering under a blanket in your bungalow stinking of piss. What a brilliant and wonderful life we have here in the west. So much joy and happiness and purpose to all this.
Wear a deodorant adult diaper (nappy) made by a corporation so you don't smell bad.
Things like cigarettes and alcohol are legal because of the revenue they generate, despite all the problems they cause. Cancer and thugs drunk on booze are products of cigarettes and alcohol. I was a big drinker in my youth and I had many fall outs with partners, friends and family through drink!
The ads were on TV when I was a kid, and they are everywhere now. I have never been drunk. They drugged me for a few medical procedures in my lifetime. They can advertise. You make the choice. You could also drink just one beer or glass of wine if you heed the advertising.
The UK went to war with China in the 1800's over China stopping the opium trade. So maybe things have gotten a little better. They wouldn't do that now, would they?
Even today, in the UK and probably in most places in the world taxes and energy prices are rising and our politicians justify this by saying it will help the economy in the future. Again, a fictitious economic system which has no basis in reality is favoured over the lives and wellbeing of actual living human beings!
Maybe you can talk the oil cartels into selling oil cheap. Make several trips to world leaders and try. If oil is expensive, what can the government do?
And let’s not forget about war and how profitable THAT is! Just take a look at all these nobhead arms dealers on American media pushing the narrative that more weapons need to be sold to Ukraine!
We have experienced great economic growth because the US navy has been guarding shipping lanes. This allowed for greater economic integration between countries, enabling freer trade. It even enabled even small weak countries, militarily, to develop their economies. Free trade led to greater economic prosperity and poorer countries raising their standards of living. There is money in war, but there has also been a lot of money made from relative peace since WWII.
We need a radical change to our way of life. We need a society which is conducive to the lives and happiness of human beings! The old system of capitalism has become utterly obsolete with the rise of automation! Capitalism is completely unsustainable for the future and the elites themselves know this! That is why they want to implement the Great Reset before complete economic collapse.
Unfortunately, such a new system would need to be fought for! As the elites will never be willing to surrender their power and artificial wealth. Freedom is never GIVEN away. We have to fight for it and obtain it through violent struggle to implement a new system of freedom and flourishing for human beings.
I see a problem here. What are you replacing capitalism here? Is the great reset where some government bureaucrats give you a universal income payment if you are woke enough? No thank you. I would prefer that we get our money from diversified sources that the government has no direct control over.
