• Ashwin Poonawala
    54
    The United States of America was founded on the basis of diffusion of state’s power, curtailing the power’s potential for injustice. The dazzling success of the system has made the concepts of democracy and capitalism popular around the world. The existing form of capitalism worked very well for a while, because then, wealth making power could not converge easily into a few hands. Industrialization has changed that. Now a few rich have undesirably high power to manipulate wealth distribution and politics, and to influence social values. Unrestricted capitalism favors the rich. It is easier to make money with money than by working. Extreme greed for wealth and the power of highly concentrated wealth has a degrading effect, the same as that of the power of state, on community.

    Man is a social animal. In a community, attitudes of the perceived leaders set trends, and the followers reinforce each other’s thinking accordingly, creating euphoria over time. This is how ordinary people gear up for heroic efforts in times of community crisis, like wars. Now big money makers have become roll-models, and have too high an influence on community’s thinking. As a result, now ruthless greed generated by reckless enterprise has become popular world over. Too many of them heedlessly fall in the spider web of our luring credit industry, sinking deeper in misery. And seeking and pursuing quick money-making schemes makes one abhor hard work. Being valuable to society by honest work has gone out of fashion. The rich and the ones craving to become rich have disdain for honest work, while the poor/nearly poor have lost their pride of performance. The resulting loss of emotional fulfillment leads individuals to flagrant ways of pleasure.

    Simply defined, morality is: ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you’. The existing degenerate environment of greed forces new entrepreneurs to compromise their moral convictions and adopt cunning ways. This craving for quick gratification is evident in mature and growing economies all over the world. Look at how processed food is made unhealthy with harmful preservatives and cheap ingredients, the quality of food in chain restaurants has degraded over the years, farm produce is made unhealthy by high-breeding, and the quality of dairy products by rampant use of hormones and antibiotics.

    The U.S. seems to be leading the way. This makes the nation fat and unhealthy, requiring more medical attention. On the other side, medical drugs/treatments are marketed at exorbitant prices, and once they are in circulation, our medical drug industry shows instances of suppressing and discouraging immerging cheaper/better remedies, and of suppressing discoveries of dangerous side effects. The common man is getting squeezed from every side. Our automobile industry ignored, or bought and shelved technical innovations, to avoid prerequisite expensive modifications to production processes, loosing against foreign completion in the end.

    A revolution almost always has wide spread economic hardship at its base. Too much wealth in the hands of a few robs democracy of its effectiveness. The present worldwide wave of expression of dissatisfaction for the existing political establishments is only the beginning. Man’s pursuit of happiness is ever existing formidable force. Only the means and methods keep evolving. This force initiates new currents in accordance with the perceived changes in the reality. Each new generation brings forth clearer perspective of the prevailing reality. The majority of the world population feeling safer than before has shifted its focus to achieving comfort. The biggest obstacle to comfortable living, the common man sees now, is the unjust distribution of wealth. As a result the demand for more profound socialism is forming in the mind of the world masses. Often, at the beginning, revolting masses are acutely aware of their pain but not clear about remedy. We are in the early phase of Karl Marx’s ‘Class War’. Unless the real underlying decease is addressed, treating the symptoms only with political adjustments will not mollify the masses. It seems like the next lesson on humanity’s curriculum is that, ‘unchecked commercial greed is detrimental to community’s happiness’.

    What we need is a way to defuse the power of money on economic decision-making, releasing the economic factors from the narrow channels of money flow that keep enriching the economically high and mighty. This needs to be effected without blocking individual’s ability to acquire wealth, which motivates economic production. It is best to achieve this economic power diffusion with least interference from other entities, like continued manipulation by government.

    This can be achieved by limiting the number of persons any business can employ. In conjunction with this there has to be a limit to how much interest an individual can own in how many businesses.
  • Anthony
    197
    Explain "Man is a social animal." Who is Man? Institutions? Bureaucracy? Media? Law? Sectarian? Market society? Two is company, three is a crowd. Is Man crowd psychology? Can Man socialize if there is no culture, economy, or popular mind ethos as a substrate for it? And if not, is it possible to wring from cultural norms and empirical expectations their inherent social decay due to interiorized sanctions and preexisting encoding/decoding authority and stereotypes? I prefer "man is a thinking animal."
  • dclements
    498


    I agree with your OP but I believe you are only partly aware of what is going on. Capitalism and the golden rule isn't about ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you’, which is really some kind of socialism, instead it is about "He who has the gold makes the rules".

    Capitalism has almost ALWAYS been about trying to give as much leverage to the merchants or business owners to give them some leverage over their countries leaders while protecting their backsides at the same time; while also at the same time doing next to nothing for the poor and working class. In the end, Capitalism is just a watered down form of Machiavellianism (ie the strong using and abusing those weaker than them) where it supposedly isn't 'right' to use violence to get your way, or at least if that violence is focused on those who have wealth and power in the country where they are a citizen.

    In reality we don't even live in a real capitalist society since 'free trade' is about as rigged as the games at the casino and almost no matter which game or how a game is played the money eventually all returns to the house. As far as I can tell, we live more in a plutocracy than a democracy, and/or our social model is merely Serfdom 2.0 since most of the working class are no better than the wage slaves at the start of the industrial revolution.

    I could go on and on, but most people are too brainwashed to really care and the ones that do understand are too few to make a difference or at least at the moment. Anywhere if you or anyone reading this does care or want to know more please check out the link to a YouTube video called "Poor us" (it focuses on some of the issues around poverty in the world) and the MotherJones link about both the inequality in the US and it's continual growth. I wish I had time to say more, but I realize there are already many on this and other philosophy forums that feel the same way so I shouldn't spend too much time preaching to the choirs.

    It's the Inequality, Stupid: Eleven charts that explain what's wrong with America.
    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

    Plutocracy
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy

    Poor Us: an animated history - Why Poverty?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxbmjDngois

    Wage slavery
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
  • Ashwin Poonawala
    54


    Man, as distinguished from some other animals, like lizards, tigers, snakes, etc. forms social groups, and prefers to live in a society, rather than in isolation. Elephants, Ants, Monkeys, and others form societies. A society achieves more abilities and strength by division of labor. This creates leadership roles. Leaders have larger influences than others on the overall thinking of the society. The collective thinking sets trends and traditions, which we call culture.

    Most animals do not carry their memories much beyond a generation. As a result, their cultures change fast, as conditions change. We have accumulated knowledge for millenniums. And over the past millenniums our cultures have deeply integrated religions, which give long, perpetual memory. Therefore, our cultures are much more profound, at the same time being stubborn.
  • ernestm
    1k
    The United States of America was founded on the basis of diffusion of state’s power, curtailing the power’s potential for injustice.Ashwin Poonawala

    That's not quite correct. The USA was founded on the basis that the people living on this continent were not accorded the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them. These laws entitle all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it was claimed, and that the British had violated these rights, thus providing the rebels with justification to alter and abolish the rules imposed on them.

    The consequences of that decision is that the US government has to honor the same rights for its citizens, or it no longer has the authority to govern. And those rights of the government to intercede in no way allow it to exercise the morality you suggest as superior. That would require overthrowing the US government and replacing it with a new one.

    If it is any consolation, Benjamin Franklin did say no government should last more than a century or two anyway, but the powers that be generally choose to ignore that statement when interpreting the will of the founding fathers.
  • Sivad
    142
    Man is a social animal in the sense that we don't want to be in perpetual war with each other(bellum omnium contra omnes)so we have to come to terms, to compromise, learn to live with each other, not be antisocial.
    We're also social animals in that we depend on each other and the group for our individual survival as well as for our individual success. Obama said "you didn't build that" but that's an overstatement, he should have said you couldn't have built that without considerable social investment and cooperation. And keep in mind that the society that allowed for and contributed​ to your success only exists because of a painstaking process of social evolution that every individual existence up to the present played a part in. No man is an island and the rugged individualist up from bootstraps workmanship ideal of randroids, libertarians, and market fundamentalists is a laughable simplism.
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