Short-Sighted Society

I use reading glasses, so I'm the opposite of short-sighted. The term also refers to a lack of imagination or foresight, which combine to the inability to imagine a different or better future; that's the kind of short-sightedness our society suffers from.

It wasn't always like that though; just look at the many beautiful cathedrals and other impressive constructions all over the world which took generations to build. The architects and the ones who placed the first stones, or their children and in some cases even their grandchildren, didn't live to see the finished product; they were the opposite of short-sighted and didn't only believe in a better, more beautiful future, but acted on it. We, the modern homo-economicus, have lost in great part that ability, we suffer from what I like to call generational selfishness, a selfishness that's rooted in every aspect of the socioeconomic arrangement centered around capitalism and free market principles, and is acted on by every natural and legal person. Instant gratification is the name of the game, and after us the deluge...

It's so obvious that it always surprises me how little this is discussed; in capitalism the primary beneficiary of all our individual actions is the individual itself. If you ever wondered why our society seems to care so little about about the future, about the condition we leave the planet in for our offspring, there's your answer. Capitalism doesn't care about the long term, only about what's profitable here and now. The corona pandemic has revealed, for those willing to look and see at least, this essential flaw in the current global paradigm. It's just common sense to save some essential things for a rainy day because you know the rain won't be stopped. We've known about and lived with pandemics for as long as we exist as a species, so it's common sense to be prepared for when, not if, the next pandemic strikes. But the producers of those essential things, like medical equipment, face masks, even food, all operate within the rules set by capitalism. And it's just not profitable to produce surpluses, just to store them in a warehouse until they're needed. No, in capitalism we destroy the surpluses we produce to protect market prices.

This pandemic rubs our collective nose in the simple fact that we're in all of this together, it's obvious to us now that our own health is only as good as the least insured person in our vicinity, we suddenly feel a deeply rooted responsibility to the society we're part of, so much so that we're willing to radically change our individual lifes and wash our hands, keep a safe distance, even stay at home when we'd like to go out and party. This pandemic awakens in us the memory of times before we got infected by the short-sightedness of the capitalist virus. We've all heard about the butterfly on one continent causing a hurricane on another continent. We all know that our mood affects all others in the room we enter. We know that laughing and yawning are "contagious". Why then, do we fail to understand, as a society, that an economy centered around the individual can't cause anything else than society's failure? Democracy is how we marry the individual to society, why then do we allow the interests of a few individuals destroy that marriage? And, if you still believe capitalism is a blessing for mankind, or that it's "the best we can do", I have to ask: why?

A short note on the below linked video in which professor Richard Wolff explains how capitalism fails each and every time. Wolff discusses in it the need for contact tracing, something I'm highly concerned about when it's implemented by our corporate owned governments and wrote about in Corona Panopticon a few days ago. I'm not concerned with this however if it were the result of a truly democratic process in a world that has material democracy as well, which I believe is what Wolff has in mind when he talks about it. With that said, please enjoy the video :-)

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