Three Measures to unblind capitalism (2)

Continued from here.

The right to die after a life of laziness profiting from other people’s sweat:

You can have hundreds of measures to counteract all the immoral outcomes of capitalism. None will succeed if they don’t touch the heart of the matter: putting matter before mind. The three most important achievements in keeping morality as primary are threatened by the constant erosion from capitalism’s constant competition. Whether it is social security, access to education or human rights, there’s no Western election that can’t be won by people challenging it all as politically correct and endangering economic productivity.

Fragmenting human rights by expanding them into minute details is not the right way to go. It just makes for a pathetic left wing defensiveness that appeals only to the converted while alienating those bearing the brunt of capitalism. I propose three measures that – in my view – will guarantee that the issues are dealt with at the root. On this basis, it won’t be necessary to overly stipulate specific policies as they’ll evolve automatically as a matter of public discourse. I realize that it’s not possible to realize them as a big bang and that incremental development towards them will be required. I’ll come back to that later. For now the problem is not how to achieve this but whether, if achieved, it will suffice to capitalize on capitalism without bleeding out from its blindness.

Measure 1: universal and unqualified right to die

It is not odd to start with a basic personal right given what has been said above. I realize that this measure is the most contentious one, precisely because this ultimate individual self-determination is directly at odds with the delusion of original sin (and hence original responsibility). It shows that we don’t live to redeem ourselves or to repay some original debt. If we feel we don’t derive any value from our existence, it is our right to terminate it. Full stop. Sure, there are qualifications but these are of process, not of right.

Three Measures to unblind capitalism (1)

The share price of liberal freedom is frankly falling. If it falls any further, we will all be flat on our faces. I think we all know by now that the problem is capitalism as we by now know it all. It is stumbling ahead, winning victory over victory mostly without putting up a hard fight. This is one of the harsh qualities it has acquired over a long time by taking the moral high ground of liberal freedom and human rights. I will not be far off the mark when I say most people have grown used to holding liberal freedom and capitalism as synonymous.

This pamphlet tries to do two things. It separates freedom and capitalism by exposing the collapse of humanity in the heartland of the free world. Evidence for this collapse is the unhappiness of free people as expressed in them voting for tyrannical cultural pessimism. People unhinged by the insecurity that is essential to capitalism are always too easily exploited by nut cases of various brands, specifically those graduating from the Harvard of sociopathy. The pamphlet further proposes three measures for a capitalist society to move on. I say move on because moving back is not only not an option, it is simply backward. As a cultural optimist I am convinced we can only move on by building on what makes us strong, not by reversing history toward a time of melancholy that never was.

The cul-de-sac of blind capitalism

Liberals promoting capitalism don’t promote freedom. The reason is simple: their view of mankind is that it needs more and more money. On this view progress is a necessary by-product of society accumulating capital in a market that, itself, is free. This is defended religiously. It’s a religious point after all. Its central tenet is that man’s original sin is laziness. In the capitalist case we can only “work it off”. If we work hard enough it will redeem generations to come. Every American Dream is just a story of redemption where an individual shows us how to atone for the evil void inside all of us.

Thursday Take Down of Taking Down

The Antwerp city council election has been won by the nationalist right. I did not predict it that way in yet another of my lousy-because-too-lazy-to-review contributions to this place. Contrary to the spirit of my post, the winner won precisely because he was the loudest and maintained that offensive loudness for the longest period of time. The loser lost because he (yes, surprise surprise, two he’s) chose to be in the spirit of my optimism. He started late and quietly tried to explain why he thought his points were the points that needed to be carried.

After the (center-)left candidate lost he cried a little. Everybody agrees that if he had done so before the elections every chance was that he would have won. The winners just shouted that he should quit whining. I guess with this they wanted to complete their take down of the multicultural left wing profitariat.

After the right wing candidate won he proclaimed from the podium that “the city belonged to everybody but at this point in time it belonged mainly to US.” After that he marched to city hall with his followers, entered it, got up on the balcony, joined both hands and shook them a couple of times over his left shoulder and his right shoulder.

There was some mumbling about all this but all in all it was passed over in silence. After all, the victory was theirs and the way it was won was an aggressive way. When an animal wins in an aggressive way, no other animal will be so stupid as to challenge the winner right after the fight, right?

So no the only options is to let them take down themselves. I can only hope there won’t be binders full of stories like this in the future.

Thursday Takes Down Privacy

Most of us prefer to keep in the bedroom what happens in the bedroom. In part because we somehow believe that what does happen in our bedroom is potentially interesting to those outside of the bedroom. In further part because what makes what happens in our bedroom interesting to us is the thought that it may be interesting to others. Still, mounting spy camera’s in bedrooms is not very widespread. Nevertheless the idea is common enough to inspire a strong sense of privacy in all of us.

I don’t think we should take issue with this sense of privacy. Most of what we do is uninteresting and that is as it should be. The uninteresting should not be defiled by creating a YouTube (non-)event out of it. Specifically because it would be making yet another thing measurable in (lack of) hits. Let’s protect the idea that our uninteresting stuff might potentially be interesting. We are entitled to some self-deception and insofar as privacy is needed to protect our right to it, I’m all for privacy.

But as always there is a but: 99 times out of a 100 when somebody talks about privacy nowadays it’s a rich prick who just wants to make sure nobody knows his net worth because that would make him a rich prick minus a certain percentage