
Capitalism Cancels the Passions - ojarow
https://musingmind.substack.com/p/mind-matters-cbc
======
fogetti
Why is this flagged???? I argued with many people on this site that people
here are indocteinated... But really? People can't even stand reading
something which is well argued and contradicts their belief?

~~~
UncleOxidant
And I'm not even sure it strongly contradicts the (largely) Libertarian
beliefs here on HN. For example, it appeals to economics over morality:
"Forget Morality, Contemporary Capitalism Is Bad Economics"

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ojarow
As the author of linked article, I'll add 3 things to this mix:

1) For those criticizing the article for claiming capitalism is the result of
intentional design, that it was "devised" rather than emerged organically from
historically contingent forces, they're absolutely right.

It was just sloppy writing on my part to suggest capitalism is anything other
than an emergent phenomenon from a complex stew of factors. That's not my
claim, just my sloppy representation of Albert Hirschman's thesis (who doesn't
claim that either).

2) But that capitalism was seen as a system that would nullify our passions by
diverting attention to our interests, is not my claim, but Hirschman's. If you
want to critique that, I highly recommend Hirschman's "The Passions and the
Interests."

3) Why was this submission flagged? Is there such thing as the Hacker News
Capitalism Defense Force, and might they actually have flagged this for its
critical undertones, or did I violate some other rule?

~~~
UncleOxidant
I guess I'm having trouble separating "passions" from "interests" but it seems
that there are earlier definitions of these words with somewhat different
meanings than they way they're commonly used in the modern context.

Interesting article. We do need to explore what comes after neo-liberalism as
we're going to need something to replace it soon. You refer to an article on
mutualism - it sounds like it has some similarity to distributism.

------
9214
The title instantly reminded me of "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" authored by
Deleuze & Guattari. A very interesting text on micropolitics of desire.

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coldtea
> _“The passions were wild and dangerous, whereas looking after one’s material
> interests was innocent or, as one would say today, innocuous.”_

Oh, the irony...

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jpster
According to this article, some people believed that self-interest =
capitalism and capitalism = safety. Very interesting.

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ashtonkem
It’s extremely hard to square the basic premise of this article: capitalism
was created so that passions wouldn’t result in autocratic regimes, with the
apparent retreat of liberal democracy across the western world. It’s also hard
to square this hypothesis with the re-entrenchment of authoritarianism in
countries recently exposed to capitalism, such as China & Russia.

~~~
voidhorse
Edit: note that this point is unfair to the original comment it’s responding
to, which was repeating the argument of the article—the point should stand
against the article, not the parent.

Eh be careful of talking about capitalism in terms of it being “created” it
perpetuates one of the old lies of capitalism: that it is an inherently
_rational_ system (in your formulation, a designed one).

Capitalism grew organically out of evolving practices around markets and trade
and redoubled and reinvigorated itself through works of economic theorists
like Smith, who argued it was “rational” because of certain of its properties.
However it is important we get away from this notion of capitalism being
somehow a “rational” thing since it has bred profound economic irrationality
through the inequitable distribution of resources, leading to irrationality in
other spheres as everything is reduced to abstract exchanges (see climate
change)

Edit: This criticism also applies to the OP article, which also falls under
the spell of representing capitalism as some sort of intentioned system.

~~~
lend000
I think your point that most pro "capitalism" folks will take issue with is
that while there has never been a system in which all resources are perfectly
allocated, it is believed that the information in prices set by a free market
can do a much better job of allocating resources in the long run than any
other known system, (including communism, socialism, or an autocracy).

So sure, free markets are emergent properties of human activity, and therefore
are influenced by human traits such as greed and fear, resulting in bubbles
and crashes in the stock market. But I suppose that's better than 3+ years of
famine during the Great Leap Forward.

~~~
XorNot
Except they never offer much evidence to support this statement. "Capitalism
exists therefore it is efficient". While one can point to the proposed
historical alternatives, it's not an automatically conclusive argument that
"not-capitalism" was the problem in say, Soviet Russia as opposed to the fact
that the government was defacto a brutal authoritarian dictatorship (i.e. not
democratic) that was also incredibly corrupt (I mean, corruption is
essentially pure capitalism in action - monopolize a resource and charge what
the market will bear for access).

It's a very specific American thinktank led strain of thought that declares
America's success is "capitalism" and not robust and responsive democratic
institutions which aggressively try and prevent corruption.

~~~
jlawson
Capitalism inherently resists corruption more than other systems because
nobody is expected to work for anyone's interest but their own.

Systems like socialism and communism require some central economic decision
authority which controls what people can eat, drive, where they can work and
travel and live. These people are expected to do this for the good of others,
yet they hold tremendous power. Such power attracts corruption and cannot be
defended from it. So socialist systems always become hopelessly corrupt as the
do-gooders are instantly outcompeted in the race for power by people who only
care about power. Because of course the power-hungry will gain power better
than those who want power only to do good; the power hungry are fighting 100%
for the goal while the do-gooders are fighting for another goal as well. It's
no contest.

Worse, since that central authority has both economic and police power over
people, there's no practical way to replace it. A corrupt corporation can be
peacefully outcompeted or allowed to die, but the government itself cannot be
- it must be overthrown with mass violence.

Systems like anarchy require that individuals self-organize into collectives
and work for the good of the collective instead of the good of themselves. Of
course such systems become corrupt 5 minutes after scaling beyond Dunbar's
number, because there's no mechanism to punish free-riders (aside from some
kind of mob justice, or a hyper-invasive police authority).

Unlike socialism, capitalism is decentralized. The government doesn't need to
hold so much authority over the details of peoples' lives - where they work,
what they eat, where they travel - so there's nothing to corrupt. There is no
center of power to corrupt, nowhere for the power-hungry to steal from the do-
gooders. There is only the contest to make money; a single goal which is
inherently attractive since it brings status and wealth and sex, but when you
accomplish this goal you also do good as a side-effect.

So it's not democratic institutions preventing corruption in capitalism.
Capitalism is inherently resistant to corruption in a way that socialism and
anarchism aren't, because the individual incentives are aligned.

~~~
voidhorse
That's a nice armchair theory of capitalism, but I don't know how anyone could
look at how advanced capitalism has actually manifested in America and make
those claims.

> central economic decision authority which controls what people can eat,
> drive, where they can work and travel and live.

I don't think this is accurate. There are plenty of systems one could describe
as "socialist" in varying degrees in which this is not the case.

> These people are expected to do this for the good of others, yet they hold
> tremendous power.

Sounds like FAANG c-levels and boards?

> Such power attracts corruption and cannot be defended from it. So socialist
> systems always become hopelessly corrupt as the do-gooders are instantly
> outcompeted in the race for power by people who only care about power.

Kind of like how someone who only pursues economic incentives in capitalistic
societies will usually wind up with more power and higher quality of life than
someone who sacrifices the pursuit of capital for the pursuit of other things
like an ethical calling, e.g. help the poor, spread the truth, etc.

> Worse, since that central authority has both economic and police power over
> people, there's no practical way to replace it.

Lobbying comes to mind. The recent protests in America and how they unveiled
sources of police funding (surprise, often corporations) comes to mind.

> A corrupt corporation can be peacefully outcompeted or allowed to die, but
> the government itself cannot be - it must be overthrown with mass violence.

Interesting--what major corporations or monopolies were "peacefully
outcompeted" in the history of American capitalism? As far as I'm aware all of
them needed to be broken up explicitly by government intervention?

> Systems like anarchy require that individuals self-organize into collectives
> and work for the good of the collective instead of the good of themselves.
> Of course such systems become corrupt 5 minutes after scaling beyond
> Dunbar's number, because there's no mechanism to punish free-riders (aside
> from some kind of mob justice, or a hyper-invasive police authority).

Citations? Actually, the reality of open-source software itself would argue
against this notion quite strongly. At its origin point OSS was largely
autonomously organized groups working toward common good. It wasn't totally
free of nastiness in certain corners, but it also wasn't disastrous by any
means.

> Unlike socialism, capitalism is decentralized. The government doesn't need
> to hold so much authority over the details of peoples' lives - where they
> work, what they eat, where they travel - so there's nothing to corrupt.

How interesting. Here in America, the government still seems to play a pretty
big role and is mostly funded by major companies where capital has
concentrated. Also, when did the memo get sent out that American capitalism
and global capitalism are _corruption free_ (tm). Let's ignore things like
child labor, foxconn, sweatshops, backroom deals, money laundering, lower
taxes for the rich, and all the rest of the laundry list of naughties that
have managed to creep their way into our pure, much better system.

> There is no center of power to corrupt, nowhere for the power-hungry to
> steal from the do-gooders.

Right, until you realize having one instrument of value (capital) _is
centralization_ and breeds the very things you're claiming its free of, only
in more subtle forms (which makes it harder for wage laborers to even fight
against the system since the mode of oppression supports gaslighting of the
kind you've seem to have fallen for)

> There is only the contest to make money; a single goal which is inherently
> attractive since it brings status and wealth and sex, but when you
> accomplish this goal you also do good as a side-effect.

Sure work hard and prosper. Anyone can do it. Going from the projects to being
a big billionaire CEO is no problem even though the quality of your education,
your quality of life, your access to the instruments of capital, etc. is all
determined by the relative economic status of your originating conditions,
right? Yes it does happen in rare cases, but _again_ we're talking about the
construction of an _equitable_ economic system, not one in which 0.000001% of
the little guys manages to scrounge his way to the top through a mix of good
luck and perseverance.

> So it's not democratic institutions preventing corruption in capitalism.
> Capitalism is inherently resistant to corruption in a way that socialism and
> anarchism aren't, because the individual incentives are aligned.

This armchair notion that there are "inherent mechanisms" in capitalism making
it "more fair" while there are literally people laughing their way to bank
while _providing no actual production value to the economy_ (those
centralizing middlemen like banks, wall street, etc. that capitalism
supposedly eliminates) swarming around you is perhaps the starkest evidence
that one has drank the capital kool-aid.

I don't mean to be harsh, but economic systems are _not just abstract
theories_. They are _actually realized, practiced things_ that we should
examine _empirically and theoretically_ and attempt to understand and change.
Capitalism in the theoretical vacuum of abstraction and over-simplification
does no justice to the empirical realities of capitalist systems and the
inequalities they perpetuate.

------
relevantquotes
"I can't resist making a point about "capitalism" and "socialism." Rand used
to identify certain terms and ideas as "anti-concepts," that is, terms that
actually function to obscure our understanding rather than facilitating it,
making it harder for us to grasp other, legitimate concepts; one important
category of anti-concepts is what Rand called the "package deal," referring to
any term whose meaning conceals an implicit presupposition that certain things
go together that in actuality do not. Although Rand would not agree with the
following examples, I've become convinced that the terms "capitalism" and
"socialism" are really anti-concepts of the package-deal variety.

"Libertarians sometimes debate whether the "real" or "authentic" meaning of a
term like "capitalism" is (a) the free market, or (b) government favoritism
toward business, or (c) the separation between labor and ownership, an
arrangement neutral between the other two; Austrians tend to use the term in
the first sense; individualist anarchists in the Tuckerite tradition tend to
use it in the second or third.[12] But in ordinary usage, I fear, it actually
stands for an amalgamation of incompatible meanings.

"Suppose I were to invent a new word, "zaxlebax," and define it as "a metallic
sphere, like the Washington Monument." That's the definition — "a metallic
sphere, like the Washington Monument." In short, I build my ill-chosen example
into the definition. Now some linguistic subgroup might start using the term
"zaxlebax" as though it just meant "metallic sphere," or as though it just
meant "something of the same kind as the Washington Monument." And that's
fine. But my definition incorporates both, and thus conceals the false
assumption that the Washington Monument is a metallic sphere; any attempt to
use the term "zaxlebax," meaning what I mean by it, involves the user in this
false assumption. That's what Rand means by a package-deal term.

"Now I think the word "capitalism," if used with the meaning most people give
it, is a package-deal term. By "capitalism" most people mean neither the free
market simpliciter nor the prevailing neomercantilist system simpliciter.
Rather, what most people mean by "capitalism" is this free-market system that
currently prevails in the western world. In short, the term "capitalism" as
generally used conceals an assumption that the prevailing system is a free
market. And since the prevailing system is in fact one of government
favoritism toward business, the ordinary use of the term carries with it the
assumption that the free market is government favoritism toward business.

"And similar considerations apply to the term "socialism." Most people don't
mean by "socialism" anything so precise as state ownership of the means of
production; instead they really mean something more like "the opposite of
capitalism." Then if "capitalism" is a package-deal term, so is "socialism" —
it conveys opposition to the free market, and opposition to neomercantilism,
as though these were one and the same.

"And that, I suggest, is the function of these terms: to blur the distinction
between the free market and neomercantilism. Such confusion prevails because
it works to the advantage of the statist establishment: those who want to
defend the free market can more easily be seduced into defending
neomercantilism, and those who want to combat neomercantilism can more easily
be seduced into combating the free market. Either way, the state remains
secure."

------
nickff
I would phrase it a little differently: _capitalism cancels vanity_.

Up until the 16th-18th centuries (in Europe), the best way to get rich was to
use force to loot/steal from others. Capitalism was the result of a set of
institutions which allowed for more widespread trade, and profit from
innovation.[1] These institutions took money from the rich who used their
wealth for vanity projects (the passions this author desires), and gave it to
the innovative problem solvers and inventors.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7863046-the-most-
powerfu...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7863046-the-most-powerful-
idea-in-the-world)

~~~
OpossumMinister
That's not phrasing it differently, that's changing the whole meaning of the
article and it's title.

~~~
nickff
Yes, I intended it as a modest proposal.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal)

------
john_moscow
I think the article brings attention to a very important aspect of Capitalism,
but I cannot agree with the author's conclusions.

Capitalism doesn't cancel passions. On the contrary, it directs them into a
constructive direction. And other people willing to pay money is a very strong
indicator that your passion is net positive. There's nothing wrong with being
passionate about making craft beer. Or artisan bread. Or niche software. This
is how most modern companies were founded. This is how the Western society was
built.

You break the feedback loop and people start being passionate about tribal
feelings. How to take from someone else, rather than create your own. How to
make the alleged oppressor's life worse, rather than your customers' lives
better.

I think, if we wanted to preserve a civilized society where happiness prevails
over suffering, we should find a way to restore the old school pre-corporation
Capitalism, rather than focusing on destroying it completely.

