Escaping The Loop

We're approaching a point in our social, cultural, technological and scientific evolution where capitalism simply isn't viable anymore. To be more precise, the system in which a few people at the top of the economical food-chain call all the shots, while the rest has to work in one of their production facilities to maintain a decent standard of living is coming to an end...

I'm once again going to concentrate on the United States of America because that country is furthest along the evolution I'm referring to; the rest of the world follows in its footsteps. America is a country which is among the least equal in the world; only the Russian Federation is more unequal, has a larger gap between the rich and the poor. This is a consequence of the capitalist economy that's based on maximizing profits and incentivizes all individual participants to gain as much as possible with the least amount of effort and investment as possible. We've lived with this system for so long that we almost accept it as a law of nature. However, in nature things are arranged a bit different. In nature there are a couple of animals that reside at the top of their particular food-chain, among which there is the lion. The lion acts completely different from the ones at the top of the capitalist food-chain; the lion sleeps or rests most of the day and only goes out to hunt when it's needed to feed himself or his young, and in fact it's mostly the lioness that does most of that work. If the lions acted like our top-predators, they would be constantly out to hunt and would soon run out of prey. Our capitalist hunters do just that; hunt every waking and sleeping hour of the day.

And we are their prey, they feed on us, on our mental and physical labor as well as on our most precious asset; our time. In capitalism they've devised a system in which we have to work for a living, while they let their capital work for them. And we are part of their capital, our labor is just another resource they need for keeping their production facilities running. Now consider the jobs, the work we do for our living, but mainly for their increasing wealth; almost all jobs consist of a couple of actions we repeat over and over again. There are only a handful of jobs that rely on our creativity, our ability to adjust to changing circumstances or changing goals or output; the majority of jobs within the production facilities of our ruling class consist of a narrowly defined set of actions that we repeat all day long. And that's the weak link because computers and robots are masters at repeating the same set of predefined actions ad infinitum; programmers know it as a while- or for-loop. And it's not just blue-collar jobs that will eventually be replaced by software driven hardware, a lot of standard work done by lawyers, doctors and other white-collar workers will also be automated.

This phenomenon of all repetitive work being "in the crosshair" of software and automation, is much better explained by Eric Weinstein in the below linked video, starting at 9:10 minutes. However, he suggests as a solution the one thing that doesn't solve anything: a Universal Basic Income. He explains that the future in which only a tiny amount of people will be needed to do all the necessary work, will demand that many souls will need to be taken care of essentially. That's no solution at all, as it maintains the principle that those unfortunate enough to not be part of the future chain of production, will still be subject to the pity of the ruling class, just like they are now. One of the speakers in the video explains exactly how this "charity" works: they cause harm by the billions while giving back in charity by the millions and one doesn't have to be a mathematician to calculate where that leaves the large majority of society. The feeling of despair among the young, who see exactly where this is going, is not to be underestimated; watch the first video for a remarkable revelation, namely that in the month of June this year, 1 in 4 Americans aged 18 - 24 has seriously considered suicide. Let that sink in for a moment; 25% of America's young adults dread their future enough to seriously consider ending it all...

We will have to think of something else. Or actually we don't; this problem is native to capitalism and socialism or communism doesn't have this problem because in these economic models the production facilities aren't private property, but owned by the workers. If socialism or communism is still too scary of an idea to contemplate, I disagree, but I can understand. And I essentially don't even care; what I do care about at this moment in time is that there should be no question in your mind whatsoever about the need to change the current system. Capitalism as we know it needs to end, that should be obvious. We simply can not maintain this system of private ownership of the means of production, combined with the need to grow the economy as fast and as much as possible. We can not maintain an overarching paradigm that atomizes us into our own personal bubble, cuts us of from the inter-human relationships we need to have at least a semblance of coherence in society. Watch the videos and draw your own conclusions.

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