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Capitalism is an unrealistic death cult.
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
1001 points (97.4% liked)
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Meh. I'm no fan of capitalism, but I'd say the problem is humanity itself, or maybe an evolutionary system that favors short sighted local advantage at the expense of eventual extinction.
I already posted the great filter today, so...
Yeah, the AI are the bad guys in that movie. But it's the humans that blot out the sun.
The problem with "Great Filter" Theory is that we have yet to identify even non-intelligent life outside of Earth.
It's one thing to say intelligence is self-terminating. Or, at least, incapable of sustained extra-terrestrial expansion. It's quite another to say every other observable planet in the galaxy must have already experienced intelligent life and wiped itself out before we started looking.
Far more likely that we're in a Dark Forest than a Great Filter. Or, at a minimum, that we are unable to identify extraterrestrial life because we haven't figured out how to spot it at such a large distance.
I don't think there's a conclusion that's "far more likely" than other; multiple explanations explain the data equally well.
My preference for the great filter is just based on my pessimism on how not only power works, but how the human mind works. Since life is everywhere and always competitive, short-term survival is what life will always be programmed for; and beyond biology, we have systems. Greedy systems--systems that seek power at the expense of everything else--will be advantaged over systems that seek equilibrium.
Humans, in small enough numbers (ie, Dunbar's Number), play reasonably well together for extended periods of time. Environmental limitations and other social resource limits can cause conflicts. But humans have presented a fairly advanced skillset for mitigating violence between larger communities, equitably sharing resources across areas as large as continents, and both budgeting limited resources over time as well as expanding the accessible volume with advances in technology.
The human mind takes a lot of undeserved shit. But I'm in a room with dozens of other people right now. None of them are trying to crack my head open with a rock and feast on the delicious goo inside.
I don't know how you look at a modern day metropolis and see a system that has failed to achieve some high level of equilibrium.
I didn't get into my problems with the way the mind works, but the root of it is the mind prefers comfort to truth. That's how we get the just world fallacy. And you'll also see how people oppressed by systems are often the ones who defend it the most fiercely.
I do like cities, and they are, on the whole, remarkably stable. I will consider this.
Everything has its limits, and you need to burn a lot of calories to hunt for Big-T Truths. So people spend some of their time in introspection, but they don't explore forever. Eventually, they want to exploit their understanding to some benefit.
This is an experiment that's played out iteratively across billions of people and thousands of generations. Minds aren't static or perfectly elastic, they do amazing work over a 20-40 year period, and then they fall into a more stable pattern of survival and preservation.
Individuals don't all value abstract notions of justices equally highly. And systems of oppression tend to be layered. Also, the same guy who vocally defends the System of Oppression when he's getting the Good News on TV will decide actually, he hates oppression, and wants it overthrown when the TV (or his boss or his credit card company) tells him the Bad News instead.
But, even more broadly, when you go looking for the Big Truths, sometimes you don't find Liberal Progressive Egalitarianism. Sometimes you find an enduring history of bigotry and a real material advantage to exploitation and a certain cosmic understanding of your own insignificance that washes away personal guilt for global phenomena.
Sometimes you need to be a bit naive, delusional, and straight up stupid to do the Right Thing or to blaze a trail into the wilderness or to go down a rabbit hole of scientific inquiry that - 9 times out of 10 - wastes a career when it terminates at a dead end.
Sometimes you're playing a very strategic game of chess on a board that stretches to infinity. And other times, you're just one of the rungs on a Plinko board that other people are bouncing off of. And that's not a consequence of the human mind or the nature of evolution or reality, beyond the simple fact that we're not Gods. We have a certain limited scope of action and opportunity, a certain limited amount of information to act on, and thousands - perhaps millions or billions - of years to try things and fail and let our successors know what we found out as a result.
This makes me think we're talking about different things. I'm talking about existential truths, truths that threaten our sense of meaning and belonging and purpose. Truths like we are all going to die or that we live in a fundamentally unjust world. The only caloric cost of "discovering" these truths is the increase in anxiety.
Yup. And we have no control over what our values are, and its good to know when your difference of opinion with someone is based on values or facts. But the reality is most people value group loyalty, belonging, and existential comfort over everything else. People who value truth over existential comfort are relatively rarer. And maybe this is necessarily so.
Do you have an example?
I don't think we're disagreeing. Do you think we're disagreeing? I think you're trying to argue me out of a pessimistic frame of mind, but that is based on averages and you're discussing exceptions; like I'm saying, "on a long enough time line, the average of 2d6 rolls is 7" and you're saying, "but you can get a bunch of 12s in a row!"
None of that is immediately intuitive. It takes a long time for an individual to have a full sense of the world and a coherent view of Justice as a concept. And there's no firm consensus on any of it, anyway. Sitting around and pondering the clockwork mechanisms of the world and how to improve upon them is a luxury at the best of times.
These things are real, tangible, and approachable by the vast majority of people. Even past that, I think there's a certain nihilism in dismissing the fate of an entire species, because you look around in disgust at a lot of young people who desire something as crass and fleeting as Love. Much less older people who still cling to or covet it. "Ah, well, fuck all of you! Lazing around naked in bed with a full belly and another warm body and a bit of free time?! Don't you realize death still exists? Don't you realize that someone, somewhere is being treated unjustily?! You'll doom us all!" Its just a bleak attitude to carry as you go through your life.
Any college student who aspires to be a daycare teacher rather than an office manager or a civil engineer rather than a petroleum engineer, just for starters. Anyone who studies Pure Math, without an eye towards joining the Quant pool at a hedge fund. Or a physical therapist instead of a supplements salesperson. Or a mechanic rather than a used car salesman. Or a plumber rather than a real estate agent. Anyone who chooses to be a parent and to give it their full time and attention.
That's just career level. You can find a thousand examples of individuals who sacrifice their own personal comfort or future prosperity for some higher goal or passion or personal sense of duty. We're not all just getting dragged around life by our genitals when we're young and our aching backs when we get older.
No, it is immediately intuitive. That's exactly the problem. We have to run from it constantly lest the light break through. Go to a Christian funeral for some horribly murdered victim and see how much of the time is spent talking about a loving God.
Listen to anyone who has gone through religious deprogramming. The energy isn't spent accepting the truth, it's spent desperately clinging to beliefs one-by-one, coming up with rationalizations and logical backstops until finally they are untenable.
If your argument is that discovering the truth burns too many calories, I think the evidence shows us the opposite--that we burn very many more calories to hiding the truth from ourselves.
I'm kinda scratching me head here. Did I do that?
Or that? Because if you have have love, a full belly, and a warm body, and a bit of free time, I'm certainly not going to begrudge you that. Those are all things you can enjoy in this life, which is a difference from the material utopia of the future that will never come.
Yes, those people exist. (And a quibble: I don't think people CHOOSE any of that so much as their values choose those things, and people do not, as I stated before, choose their values. Jeff Bezos could no more choose to be a day care teacher than darling Mrs. Lewandowski from my Montesori could choose to be a ruthless capitalist.) And if I were Q, judging the human race, they would sway me to save it.
But there is no Q and I am not here to judge the human race. The human Mrs. Lewandowski's of the world are teaching day care and the human Jeff Bezos are running companies and governments. Both exist, but only one will consistently take and accumulate power. Psychopaths are concentrated at the top of the org chart.
And I have seen with my own eyes that people--seemingly good people--will support and defend evil in institutions to preserve and advance their status... and it is fealty to those self-serving systems, systems large enough to encompass the globe and last centuries, that will be our filter.
Just a going theory, anyway.
Evolution only cares about passing on genes. It's rare in the animal kingdom for menopause to exist. For the most part there's no point in an animal living if it's unable to mate. Scientists have the "grandmother hypothesis" for why this happens in a few whales, humans and some chimps: in a species where the grandmother might help care for a baby that has some of her genes, the grandmother can be useful to the mechanism of passing on genes even if she's no longer able to pass on her own.
That means that a creature might care about how the world looks maybe 25 years past the point where it can have offspring. Caring about environmental degradation that takes place on a multi-century scale is just not something that evolution prepared us for. Why would it? No creature in history has ever been able to modify its environment the way humans can.
Viruses are actually a good analogy. A virus depends on a living host. But, viruses often kill their hosts. Like humans, it can actually modify its environment in a way that that environment becomes toxic to the virus's existence. That seems bad. For any individual virus though, its "life" is so short compared to the life of the host that any mechanism that made it try to avoid killing the host would just be a useless genetic trait that would not be optimal.
Humans have these immense brains, and they allow us to do things that aren't simply the result of evolutionary drives. But, we're still animals. Those drives really structure everything we do.
Viruses eventually evolve to be less deadly to their host. It just takes many failed viruses to get there. In that context, the collapse of the US and the rise of the EU, and China, just means that we are seeing one breed dying out.
I think that humanity will do fine, it is just that some societies will not be around in the centuries to come.
Altruism can actually be evolutionarily advantageous. For example, vampire bats share food with hungry individuals, and this can be reciprocated later. Insects like ants and bees have workers that give up their own reproduction to help raise relatives, thereby still passing on shared genes. Even among unrelated animals, repeated cooperation can favour altruistic behaviour.
I don't know why you need to go farther than humanity itself to clearly demonstrate the benefits of an altruistic survival model.
Modern human health care is predicated on individuals dedicating decades of their lives to education and research before dedicating decades more to the grueling physical labor of providing health care. And yet, our 8 billion person population size is wholely predicated on the massive bump in the human survival rate where professional medical services exist.
Yes, there's some advantage to the survival of the community, not just the genes. But, it's sort of an expensive gamble. Not just sharing with an individual that might out-compete you later, but also the energy / effort / "programming" etc. required to act in an altruistic way. That's why you sometimes see altruism in nature, but it's not the rule.
Yes but some systems push the bad side of human and other the good side
The systems that can feed the most bodies and enslave the most minds conquer, Borg-like, the ones the feed & enslave less. Wars grow bigger as their opponents grow bigger. Eventually we are all engulfed in one fragile system that has to fail but once.
Ackshuuully there's no such thing as overpopulation or overconsumption or carrying capacity overshoot. Those are myths made up by ecofascists, a very real and very scary right-wing political movement. The obvious true solution is for the whole world to come together and agree to follow my preferred system of government (or absence thereof) and then there will be plenty of resources to go around for everybody and billions of humans can live sustainably ever after.
And if you say that's unrealistic and won't happen, it must be because you are a literal exterminist Nazi who hates life and wants to do eugenics by genociding everybody- especially the brown ones and the poor ones- even though you didn't say that- but come on, we all know you were thinking it.
So be ashamed of yourself, you Nazi, and go away now so I can win this argument by default- before I'm forced to post the well supported counterargument which I totally have.
I wouldn't say human beings are a virus, but parasitism is a survival strategy for about 65% of life. In the case of human beings, we have complex social structures which allows for parasitism of ourselves.
The owner class behaves like a parasite, and we've seen this in feudal ages, in which the warrior castes dominate agricultural castes.
In capitalism, the ownership class behaves very much like a cancer. Resources consolidate at the very top with those who are in the owner class getting smaller and smaller. Currently, in the US, the difference of wealth between the 0.1%, the 0.01% and the 0.001% are stark, not to mention between them and the rest of us.
Multiple economists, including Nobel laureates are saying the ultra-wealthy are too rich, and have more wealth (total or percentage of the whole) than any other time in history, and the only way out of this mess is to redistribute it all. If we don't then the oligarchs dominating the US will soon turn their eyes and power to the rest of the developed world.
Yes, 100% agree with on the inherent dangers of the current economic system. But I also can't ignore that parasitic wealth concentration was not invented by capitalism and has been a feature of human societies since forever. Look at any empire in history and you'll find a class of parasites sitting at the top; therefore there is likely no permanent solution to this problem, just a constant struggle away from it (or, more realistically speaking, revolutions that happen cyclically or cyclical societal collapse).
Fraser, J. (2020). Eco-Fascism: The Rhetoric of the Virus. Organise Magazine. Archived at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jay-fraser-eco-fascism-the-rhetoric-of-the-virus.
Humans have beenaaround a lot longer than capitalism, and we didn't destroy the planet until recently.
The problem is not humans, as many small groups of people across the globe have proven they can live with the environment, and take care of it.
Look up what happened to the Maya.
Power not derived from the movement of animals is very new. The industrial revolution is what greatly changed the damage humans can do to the environment. The industrial revolution led to capitalism, not the other way around.
I think the seeds were there long before the industrial revolution, like for example when you've got large segments of the population devoted to being agricultural workers on land they don't own.
But obviously yeah I don't think you can get capitalism of the form and scale as we recognize it today without the industrial revolution and then the financialization of most lifeways available to workers
Cringe ecofash r/im14andthisisdeep ahh take
I remember learning that the sun would go out in 3rd grade earth science and it really fucked me up. It wasn't until 30 years later that I realized I'd had a childhood existential crisis, and now I had the capacity to read, well, if not existentialist philosophers, at least comic books about existential philosophy.
You seem willing to quickly discredit ideas that make you uncomfortable, which, congratulations, is a very mature and adult take.
No just tired of ecofascists and useful idiots repeating the same tired trope which by the way happens to be rooted in eugenicism and racism. You're damn right eugenics makes me uncomfortable. Maybe educate yourself and you'll see why you're wrong.
https://srslywrong.com/podcast/ep-159-misanthropy-is-a-death-cult/
I think the entire human race is cursed, so I don´t know how I could be accused of racism or eugenicism? But I'll listen to the podcast, though, I suspect they are rejecting a premise based on not liking its conclusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism#Ideological_origins
You are not in good company.
Also, I think our conclusions are basically different. Like Paul Ehrlich, Malthus-repackager and Population Bomb author, thinks we should turn the rest of world into a military prison to enforce his population control policies while people in the US are merely offered tax incentives or some shit. I don't agree with that.
In fact, if I were going to choose which population to control and/or exterminate, I'd pick societies that are highly extractive, like the one I live in, and prefer the ones that make lower demands on the environment, like the ones the people you say I agree with want to genocide.
But I'm not about controlling population or exterminating anyone. I just think the human race, like this conversation, is doomed.
Unfortunately this is the natural conclusion of arguing that "humanity is a virus." Wittingly or not, you are spreading ecofascist rhetoric and ideology. I'm guessing you're not a true ecofascist, just a useful idiot.
That may indeed be my function. I encourage you, however, to find some better arguments against Agent Smith, because he makes a lot of sense to a lot of people, even if they fall short of what you think is an inevitable conclusion.
I'd be hard pressed to think of a better reason not to do anything than the fact that you're aiding, empowering, and aligning yourself with some of the worst people to ever exist but I'll give it a good think.
Sigh. I can not believe I am doing this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
You have been lost to right wing propaganda. That is exactly what they want you to believe, so you stop believing in a way out. So why not just keep the status quo with oligarchs using all of our resources and destroying our planet?
"Humans are bad and have always been bad" is not only factually wrong, it is a belief which only serves one political purpose.
Meh. So you're choosing to evaluate a claim not based on whether or not it is true, but whether or not it supports political change. Fine.
What I'm directly attacking is the "Myth of Progress", a hangover from Christianity, the idea that we are inexorably progressing to a materially perfect future. When Obama quotes MLK, "The arc history is long, but it bends towards justice," that is what he is talking about. If he just wait it out, all our problems will be solved. So believing in progress can potentially be as debilitating as not believing in progress.
For my part, I think change is possible, but I do not need the motivation of heaven on earth to motivate me. There will always be a struggle to share power and resources in a society, no matter what the system.
I mean, I guess in theory that’s how it’s supposed to work. Imagine something just outside our grasp, like a structuralists geometry of social dynamics. You might never know what kind of intelligent social system with generational knowledge actually has the opportunity to bypass the great filter. Evolution is a never ending game of FAFO. Maybe it stands to reason, the Neanderthals went extinct… such intelligent life forms tend to kill each other and eventually themselves?
I wonder if an advanced fungus based intelligence could do better. Or a silicon crystalline one, on hotter planets, with much lower temporal awareness of course.
Part of me wonders, if evolution can make a generally intelligent life form capable of advancing itself as a unit part in thanks to connective technology like the internet… and that’s in just a few hundred million years, what kind of life forms could theoretically exist with such abilities innate to their being? Perhaps in 30 billion years of evolution, might you come across a species that would find internet technology redundant and inefficient in contrast to their biological abilities?
What probably lead to the ultimate destruction of the neanderthals was a lack of calories. They are like a SUV: Big, and powerful, but takes a lot of energy to keep going. Odds are that they are just as smart as us, but the human brain is very expensive. Combine that with an ice age, and an economical competitor, it is pretty likely for the more efficient critter to become numerous.
Also, their raw power might have disincentivized the adoption of technology. They were just better than us at surviving trauma and in athletics, so things like bows, spears, and so forth, likely weren't a big priority. Why bother with fancy sticks, when you can walk up to a giant sloth and cave in its brain with a heavy log?
That scene has always haunted me with how accurate it was