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Vin LoPresti's avatar

Want to reveal the subliminal effects of Capitalism's gouging of resistance values in a "populace made shallow and dull by bad education and crappy art made for profit"? Start criticizing investors and the excessive focus on investment as an immense unregulated destructive force on the ecosphere and the society at large. It sometimes makes even quite far-left folks nervous because their brains subliminally flash on their own investments, concerned that such criticism might threaten their retirements. I find that rather than a measure of their deficient commitment to systemic change, this anxiety instead denotes their lifetime of conditioning (i.e., brainwashing) to the necessities of the isolated self-earner imposed on them by a Capitalist system in which collective support and care is, at best, a flimsy illusion supported by yet another insurance policy; at worst, a pipe dream in a society deficient in empathy and mutual aid.

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Feral Finster's avatar

The first step towards solving a problem is to admit that there is a problem.

Moreover, there are no solutions, no one-size fits all nostrums, no One Weird Old Trick or lifehack that will bring us to Utopia(R). Rather, there are compromises which address a specific crisis in the short-to-medium term, and which carry both tradeoffs and the seeds of their own destruction.

This is why all sorts of political and economic systems have been made to work throughout history, and at the same time, all have proven transitory.

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