Mexie: Capitalism Does Not Give a Damn About Disabled

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https://youtu.be/OiMUuFxcULY

I'm about 7 minutes in, may not get through it all the way as I have to get to bed soon.

The best way to think of it - capitalism has been the most stable default for how well it mirrors nature. Think about the last part of that very carefully. To mirror nature even better we'd be in some sort of neofeudalism situation, mirrored even better we'd be starving under a warlord. In that sense the cruelty in the sort of capitalism we have is almost baked into the cake.

The drive to make a better world than we have seems like it's built on a question along lines something like this - can we build a better world than nature that's durable to the nature that we carry within ourselves? While it's true that we used to be horribly oppressed by nature from the outside it seems like more of the external oppression (over humanity) has lifted and we've found that the oppression from whithin - ranging the whole gamut from psychopaths on one end to the normal problems people have in life like trying to pilot an ape vehicle that can hardly stop thinking about sex and by a woman's late 20's or a guy's late 30's or early 40's that animal starts getting really panicked and pushy if you haven't made offspring yet. Our culture wraps all of that up in tape with social status, what's fascinating is just how skilled people are at keeping each other precisely in their place - it's as if everyone's trying to figure out who you were in high school, as an adult, to sort out your placement on the totem pole and it's a non-negotiable point of reference even in light of current competence.

The only thing I can possibly think of that has a snowball's chance in hell at lifting out of us is such rapid and serious technological innovation in the industrial and green/renewable directions that we can move much closer to Star Trek type living where scarcity, waste, and climate change issues have been solved by how we've rebuilt our systems and focused our technology. We know how certain other popular models, like socialism, have shot for the moon and did so well at landing on the moon that they left the countries they were tried in very much back on earth without a government.

I've probably shared this before but I think the only other hope, aside from rapid growth of sustainable tech, is really focusing our culture around what might be called 'anthropic capitalism' where we set things up in such a way where markets serve us rather than the market being the Red Queen whose kingdom you have to run twice as fast in to stay in the same place. Also some people may differ on this one but, we have to also get back to some sort of agreed upon set of values - for practical purposes, and get away from jettisoning humanity and really civilization for short-term competitive edge that lands us either back in the jungle or as bleached bones on a desert planet within a few generations.

On a side note - I've experienced a lot of what she's talking about. For example I had migraines from similar causes in my mid 20's, when I've had a full-intensity job like level 2 accounts payable or more recently trying to teach myself two programming languages in full professional capacity with a gun to my head - I started carving into my health and was too spent to do much after work and in the later case there was no 'after work', it was from breakfast to bed time. I think the only thing I can say that's been helpful with programming is its project-based so I can follow my own tempo a bit when things are more sane/balanced and I'm not in a situation where I have to be there precisely at 8:00AM, leave precisely at 5:00PM, and having my right to feed myself judged on whether I'm just as fast - in that bounded time frame - as someone else.

Also I don't know if this is just part of how being on the autistic spectrum works or if this might even be common with people who have higher IQ without autism, it seems like the trade-off for IQ is endurance, almost like people who are in the center of the bellcurve might not have a whole lot of breadth in their thinking (or maybe not much at all!) but they can be complete battering rams and if you give them a task where no matter how well you do it the productivity rate is like 5-10% (like constantly emailing people to do things they don't want to do, who you have no direct authority over, and getting rated on how well you make them move) they seem to have more left over at the end of the day.