I'm someone who typically leans on the left of center on political spectrum but today, I realized something intrinsic to human nature and its emotions that made me consider shifting my compass towards right of center (capitalism).

The core thought process here is asking yourself this fundamental question of which human emotion or tendency gives rise to these ideologies.

Capitalism is primarily driven by human greed, be it the greed to put tasty food on your table or better your living standard by getting a new equipment or acquire more stocks in some limited company. Greed for more resources is the motivation here.

On the other hand, the Communist and Socialist ideologies are primarily driven by much darker emotions of fear and envy. The envy is that the "rich capitalist" has a lot more resources than I have, and/or the fear is that the wealth inequality may increase even more due to inflation and my resources will naturally decline over the due course of time.

Despite the world being an unfair place and such fears even having some validation in economic data, I want to still insist that even though both emotions are roughly in the same realm of darkness (and beneath the realm of positive spiritual emotions like love and compassion), greed is way more preferable than fear/envy.

We can understand this with the help of an often used analogy of Would you rather your Foe be an X or Y?:

If you're lost in a forest, would you rather be chased by a Lion or a Cheetah?

I remember reading this anecdote or puzzle many years ago somewhere. Most people would answer Cheetah here as it would seem a less ferocious animal than Lion. However, when you consider that Cheetah can climb trees while Lions can't, you might reconsider that answer as you might get lucky if there is a tree around which you can use to climb and save yourself. However, what really makes Cheetah more ferocious is that it kills just for survival. Cheetah doesn't care if it's hungry or not, it sees you as a threat to be eliminated just due to some innate tendency (fear?). On the other hand, a Lion is more likely to kill you only if it's hungry (greed for meals?).

Would you rather your foe be a ruthless capitalist or a ruthless communist?

A ruthless capitalist is the Lion in above example. They might come after you but only if the cost-benefit analysis of coming after you makes sense and they materially gain something like money, wealth, data, etc. But a ruthless communist, on the other hand, would come after you regardless and blinded by the ideology just because you own more resources (or fall in a higher income strata than them). A ruthless communist will always try to shame you while reminding you of your "privileges" regardless of who you are because their ideology is powered by fear.

If we talk about religious ideologies like Christian Supremacy, Zionism, Islamist, Hindutva, etc, they also roughly fall in this same category as Communist/Socialist, they're also primarily driven by fear. As you climb up the wealth ladder, the fear of blaspheming your religious doctrine declines and the fear of losing the already acquired wealth increases - which is very much a positive fear because this fear doesn't harm anyone, it merely seeks to preserve and protect.

We know there is massive wealth inequality in this world, it isn't just or fair in any manner. But the way towards betterment is using the path of higher emotions like love, compassion and even positive greed and not the darker emotions of fear and envy. Wouldn't you agree?

1. What do you think of popular figures like Noam Chomsky, Jason Hickel, Richard Wolff, David Graeber, and Bernie Sanders?

2. Why does grotesque inequality persist? Will the lot of the downtrodden and the oppressed ever improve?

3. What do you think of Anarchism?

Just looking to learn from the community members here. Thanks.

This might just be because of the change I’ve made in my online behavior, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

I’ve talked many many times about my long stint on Twitter. Specifically the brief stint where I was highly active on leftist twitter from early to mid 2020 (where I managed to get around two thousand followers which seems crazy to me now considering I’m just a random guy). Back then tensions were high. People were getting laid off, high profile civil rights protests were happening, and there was nothing much to do but to be online. Personally my internship I had lined up during the summer (since I was just about to graduate college) ended up getting cancelled which led me to a period of depression. It’s also the reason I started spending so much time on Twitter and what led me to drink heavily and gain a bunch of weight. I imagine a lot of people who became extremely online during this period were in similar boats.

Anyways, I made a couple of online friends during this time period. It initially started as “Bernie” or “Rose” twitter. We were all pretty normal social democrats supporting Sanders for the presidency (which before Super Tuesday seemed like a big possibility). And then when it became clear that Biden would be the democratic nominee, a lot of people ended up going to the dark side. They started using hammer and sickle emojis on their display name. Started talking about how they were going to read Marx and Lenin (but they never did). They started making memes about how awesome Castro and Mao were. Bios went from “BernieOrBust” to “Marixst-Leninist-Maoist.”

A lot of talk started happening of “grow your own garden the end of the world is near” and also “arm yourselves comrades the class war is among us.” Somehow everyone became very fond of the second amendment. There were twitter accounts LARPing about joining the Socialist Rifle Association, e-girls were taking provocative pictures of themselves posing with automatic rifles in front of a Soviet flag. It became a whole thing. Some of this online behavior was covered in articles like The Cut's Before We Make Out, Wanna Dismantle Capitalism?

I ended up disconnecting from all this around September/October of 2020. I actually ended up voting for Biden in November which I wasn’t planning on when I was addicted to Twitter. I go a little bit into this detox here.

Fast forward to this year. A wave of mass shootings happen. Something that used to be a normal thing pre-pandemic but which stopped/slowed down thanks to lockdowns and schools remaining closed. With all of this in the news again, I start thinking back to the friends I used to have. And their gun loving, revolutionary wanting, “libs get the bullet too” type of tweets that they were writing back in 2020. I don’t remember most of them let alone their names. But I do remember a few.

I look them up. And there are dozens of tweets about the need for gun control. They’re talking about how nobody actually needs guns, and all of the typical liberal arguments in favor of gun control. A stark contrast to what they were saying before. They still have “socialist” in their display names and bios, though from the retweets I saw of them they were no longer following the “Mao is cool” type of people. For lack of a better term, they calmed down. They don’t long for a revolution to happen. They don’t want blood on the streets.

I think what had happened is that they all forgot what mass shootings were. How destructive they were. And now that society is mostly back to normal, including mass shootings, they remembered what that was like.

Now this is too niche of a corner on twitter to talk about in terms of larger online behavior. But back in 2020, I did predict that when Biden became president a lot of these online socialists would retreat into the liberals that they used to be. And it seems like that has happened, at least to some extent.

I mean, I’m glad for them. They seem more balanced, and it’s good that they eventually found themselves like I did (even if I did it a little quicker than they did). But it is still an interesting progression that a lot of my former online friends took.

(Yes, I know "socialism" and "capitalism" are vague terms, hence why you should probably very much clarify what type of "socialist" system you want, since "socialism" can be anything from market socialism, Marxism-Leninism, Syndicalism, democratic socialism, Trotskyism, anarcho-socialism, anarcho-communism, Luxemburgism, etc. Also, I'm a far cry from informed in this, so please correct me when needed.)

So anyway, if you call yourself a socialist or at least want to abolish capitalism, why?

So for the best reasons I have seen are:

• Capitalism is inherently hierarchical and incompatible with democracy, which is egalitarian.

Obviously not all types of socialism (I.E, most types of socialism that have been tried for more than a few years because they weren't overthrown or voted out) are egalitarian however and many of these systems are completely centralized.

• Big companies will naturally use the state to their own advantage, as capitalism is driven by self interest instead of any vague marker of "competition".

The main argument against this is that you definitely regulate capitalism to be more competitive with stuff like antitrust without abolishing the whole thing.

Is socialism achievable in our lifetimes? I'm M/29/India. I haven't read Marx or Kropotkin.

1 Honestly, at some point you have to ask yourself: if our economic system doesn't secure public health and well-being, and doesn't protect and regenerate ecology, then what's actually the point?

2 This economic crisis is revealing that the main reason we all have to work for wages isn't just to buy the things we need, but to pay rents and debts - in other words, to give money to the holders of capital.

If capitalism is preventing a large majority of human population from leading happy and dignified lives, then why can't we change the economic system?