The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Dr. Medulla
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Atheistic Epileptic
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

Post by Dr. Medulla »

Flex wrote:
26 Jun 2022, 12:21am
I'm circling back to this after thinking about it a little (and having a few gins). I sort of instinctively draw back from the kind of anti-hedonism talk which, as you know, here in the U.S. is often particularly coded as a sort of moral majority issue where it's an excuse to demonize various proclivities. But there's something here that obviously has much more to do with rampant capitalist consumerism. It seems like we're dropped into a society that promises almost unlimited material pleasures and weds it with severe, artificial scarcity. In that context - how can you blame people for getting what they can when the getting is good right? The natural gravity is to eat away at the idea of the person as a moral actor. All that's available to us is the act of consumption, and that act is under constant threat, and so how else are we supposed to respond to the environment except with self interest? How can we judge anyone who acts harmfully in their own self interest? How can we ask anyone to act for a collective good? It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop that the more rampant the consumption the more we increase the threat that our consumption will be disrupted (whether because of financial reasons, environmental, other).
It's a sinister marriage of consumer capitalism and a shift in thinking on the left since the 60s where personal liberation comes from consumption. Marxist critics like Adorno argued that capitalism was standardizing us, a factory product like any other, which is why all fridges looked the same, all cars looked the same, etc. Massifying. Driven by the counterculture, liberty would be achieved by individual choice. Different colours, different shapes, different music, different tv—difference itself was how you resisted being turned into a drone. Be active in your tastes and be free! As Billy Bragg snarkily observed, "The revolution is just a t-shirt away." That wasn't exactly a disaster to those people who want to sell us things. Indeed, it made things even better because when the satisfaction from buying this thing doesn't happen, you just need to buy a different one. Hip capitalism has been a disaster for us as moral beings.
There's a broad solution here: the end of capitalism. I, eh, don't exactly know how that's going down. There's a conundrum where we can make changes for ourselves, how we act, but that itself feels atomised. We may improve our own behavior, our own actions, but what good does it do the collective? That seems like the sense of helplessness kicking in. At past historical moments there were mechanisms for collective action, unions for example, that seem lacking for many now. How do we even engage in collective action for the purpose of collective solidarity and social betterment. Not easy!
Well, it is going to end because capitalism is premised on the idea that there is an infinite supply of resources, both in raw materials and labour. Capitalism is a system where the rationale for production is to generate more production. Consumption isn't the end, it's the vital step to keep production going. Ford doesn't exist so that a consumer can end up with a car; it exists so that it can produce more cars, and the consumer is a key part of the process. So, as long as production keeps humming along—turning raw materials/labour into goods which are turned into money which is turned into raw materials/labour—the system succeeds. But if those raw materials and labour are compromised thru, I dunno, a poisoned biosphere due to the demands of production and consumption, the system breaks down. Short of magical technologies, it will break down.

Capitalism operates on defying the natural condition of scarcity and struggle. Every creature on earth works from the idea that food and security is scarce, so that's what drives their lives. Before capitalism normalized the idea of surplus goods, human beings operated under those conditions. Capitalism solved that with its system of endless production, generating greater and greater luxuries of things we need and don't need, but at the cost of poisoning the very environment it (and we) needs to survive. We'll go back to scarcity; the era of capitalism will prove to be a blip, not an arcing trend. We'll be dead by the time that happens (I hope), but a radical restructuring based on scarcity is inevitable and the "I got mine" individuality will be inoperable as a social principle.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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