Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people […] Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.
While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”.
[…]
A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality.
[…]
Numerous academics […] have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.
[…]
It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables [such as the use of smartphones], where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.
The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters?
I just want people to be happy and to not get exploited. As far as I know, people have been exploited under both capitalism and communism. I am not sure if it’s inherent to either economic structure, if there are safe guardrails you can put on either to make them not harmful, if it’s not inherent to the economic structure and what matters is also what other government type is happening alongside that economic structure, etc. Something that really doesn’t help is that often, if you grow up with one structure, you’re also taught the other one is a virus of evil that no good human being would ever support. Well, maybe a misguided one, but nobody good and smart who thinks for themselves.
It would be nice to see a civil discussion with people actually trying to figure out which one is best and least harmful, because as an outsider looking in all I see is
“capitalism is the problem”
“no it’s not, also you’re not a free thinker”
Is everyone coming in here with some prior knowledge I don’t have? Is there somewhere where people have tried to have this civil discussion that I could look at where it stayed civil?
I do think one thing I can certainly say is that there are people who lived under communism who worked hard and tried their best and still suffered in poverty under it and wanted out. And there are people who lived under capitalism who worked hard and tried their best and still suffered in poverty under it and wanted out.
Economic systems are mostly about incentives. What are people incentivised to do by receiving the most reward.
Capitalism incentivises destroying competition, creating monopolies, expanding the wealth gap, donating to ineffective charities for tax breaks, paying employees as little as possible to protect profits, lobbying congress for no labor protections, and filling the media with nonsense to distract from all this.
Communism makes it so, in principle, you have no reason to overwork yourself, other than if you enjoy what you are doing.
At least that is my understanding.
In reality, people in Communist countries didn’t give a crap about their work, because there were no actual incentives whatsoever, thinking for yourself was discouraged, showing initiative was heavily penalized, there was no competition to force anyone to improve what they were doing, there was barely any chance to advance (unless you were an apparatchik willing to literally go over bodies), no chance whatsoever to influence where the country as a whole or even your local community was heading towards. On top of that, you still had to overwork yourself if some fancy five year plan needed at least some real results to go with the made-up numbers (or at least pretend to be doing so, provided your country’s ruling party has mellowed a little, shackled off Stalinism/Maoism, but not actually tackled the rampant corruption yet [none of them ever did]).
The idea - in theory - was that e.g. a factory or farm was owned “by the people”, but to the people themselves it just felt that they and their labor were being exploited by an overbearing state and its faceless bureaucrats, similar to how they were previously being exploited by capitalist or feudal owners of the means of production. Importantly however, there were barely any niches in this system, unlike in capitalist or feudal systems, for some equally determined and lucky individuals to build up something for themselves. The most you could actually hope for is retreat into the private sphere and be left alone there, even though you knew that there were at least some informers among your closest family members and friends.
Seriously, have you ever actually seen footage from a factory in a Communist country? A few minutes of that should tell anyone what a terrible idea this whole thing is. Here’s an example: https://youtu.be/emoF0EFxjjA?t=339 Compare this to a capitalist factory from the exact same time: https://youtu.be/cVabxDEJPgM It’s not just the lack of modern tools and machinery, but also the organization, work ethos, even things as simple as making the workplace nicely lit, clean and safe.
For each of the countless flaws of capitalism, Communism has ten more, usually far more serious ones too. From exploitation to environmental destruction, it was all worse. These issues remain unsolved equations to this day, because almost every one of them has as its defining variable humans, these greedy creatures who are simply not suitable creatures for this kind of system. Maybe capitalism works better, because it not only rewards this greed, but actually uses it as a mechanism to force the system and its participants to constantly reinvent themselves. Not always in good ways, perhaps not even most of the time, but at least there is change happening.
I find it honestly perplexing that Communism is still being brought up by people who consider themselves smart as some kind of viable alternative, even though we’ve seen it fail again and again in the real world, every single time. It has never worked, ever. Yes, I’m sure they were all not real Communists. You would be one though if you were in charge though and because you would be, it would actually work this time. Maybe this time it can be actually done for real, with AI or quantum computers or something.
If this comes off as a bit abrasive, I apologize. Not my intention and perhaps due to a particularly unpleasant interaction I’ve just had with another user on this site. It’s mostly an expression of frustration in regards to anyone who is bringing Communism up in any context other than crimes against humanity.
You wrote a lot, and apologies, but I didn’t read it all. Communism is an economic theory. Most of your examples are government misconduct, which happens both under communism and capitalism.
I don’t think either are a good system and would like us to work past the need for capital at all.
Any ethos that includes the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” cannot possibly call itself only a “economic theory”. Reducing it to that kind of category alone is inherently dishonest.
“In principle” is doing all of the work in this sentence. In practice, communism is nothing more than a dictatorship, dressed in fancy idealism. We’ve seen this lesson repeated over and over and over and over again during the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Communism doesn’t work. It will never work. It’s not realistic, and it doesn’t factor human nature and social instincts. At. All.
Nor does capitalism if I understand things correctly.
I find that place can be here, with some liberal blocking of asshats.
I was surprised how much thoughtless angry contrarianess was from the same accounts over and over, once I started blocking them.
Communist governments took power in poor countries and had to endure ‘primitive accumulation’ before they could start building a socialist economy. At best they created workers’ states where employment and basic services were guaranteed to all.
Where was that?
Soviet Union, China, Vietnam
@InevitableList
You obviously have no idea what it means to live -or have lived, as one of these countries already collapsed- under such regimes. But feel free to migrate there.
Poor countries like Germany? Germany is perhaps the perfect example of the differences between the two systems and which one actually worked out better for its people.
I was thinking of Russia, which was the poorest and most backwards country in Europe when the communists came to power. Within 30 years they transformed it into a military and technological superpower that defeated the Nazis and launched the first human being into space.
They defeated the Nazis, because 1) it’s a huge land and the Nazis were stupid to underestimate its size and 2) because they got help of every kind from their Western allies, without which they would have not lasted a year. Don’t get me wrong, some clever generals and industrial planners that were given more or less free reign by Stalin (provided he would be allowed to take credit) certainly contributed, as did millions of ordinary people who were caught between a rock and a hard place, but it was despite the system, not because of it; keep in mind that Stalin’s purges did not stop in 1941 for example and continued on until his death. Here’s a list of just American help (Britain and Canada also contributed):
Food is an interesting topic of its own. Spam (the canned meat) was such a vital ration for Soviet soldiers that they affectionately referred to it as the “second front”. So much of this stuff was shipped over that it’s still being found all over the territory of the former Soviet Union every once in a while.
When the Soviets launched the first human into space, it was primarily because they snatched up more German scientists than everyone else taken together (because Nazi Germany was irrationally pumping more money into the V programs relative to their economy than the US invested into the atomic bomb - the winners of WW2 reaped the benefits of that gamble) and were far more reckless with human lives than the Americans. Not that they ever admitted as much - unlike for example the US, which just made the likes of von Braun Americans and gladly ignored their war crimes (the Soviets only did the latter with people they needed). The post-war recovery and ascend to superpower status would not have been possible without forced labor, both from their own people, ordinary people they abducted and worked to death, as well as the aforementioned highly qualified experts (that they also abducted). They didn’t just catch rocket scientists, but experts in every field, dismantled entire factories and research complexes in the parts of Germany they had under control, rebuilding them brick by brick in their secret cities that still exist to this day. There were certainly bright minds using these human and other resources well, but they were always hampered by the Soviet system, its bureaucracy, irrationality, wastefulness and blatant disregard for even the most basic human decency. Some of the most brilliant Soviet scientists and engineers were forced to work in the Gulag for years, squandering their potential.
Any successes certainly weren’t due to the economic or political system, but despite of it, because the moment the short-term benefits from forced labor started to dry up, the descent into stagnation began. If this system was so brilliant, why did it never produce any results past the initial mass mobilization, conquering, theft and exploitation phase? Every single Communist nation went through this: Rapid growth industrial revolution style (with all of the same trappings as 19th century Britain, from smoke-filled cities to child labor), followed by the surprising realization that you cannot brute force progress in an autocratic system forever, because it’s ideas that are ultimately worth the most - and ideas, independent thinking are dangerous, comrade. We cannot allow that! The party is always right, after all.
If you’re thinking I’m exaggerating with that last sentence, putting on a bad Hollywood parody of those noble Communists, I’ll remind you that the East German communist party’s official hymn had these exact lyrics.
Has little to do with the economic structure and everything to do with the fact that shitty humans are shitty, have always been shitty, and likely will continue to be shitty. And the shittiest among us are the ones that seek power.