Originally Posted by
thesameguy
I think you guys underestimate the arc of capitalism. A large portion of society may be looking past capitalism now, but the machine is in full swing with no short-term signs of slowing down. There are still plenty of resources to plunder and plenty of people to buy finished products. I think 10 or 20 years ago people started disengaging from traditional capitalistic values, but at the same time the systems started moving out of view. The result could be people who think they're living post-capitalism but are just stuck in a system they can't see and don't understand. Capitalism is moving past its relationship with society and cementing its relationship with government. People like Trump are just starting to appear. It's probably going to get worse before it gets better.
But I do think it will get better. We have a lot of big problems to solve, but I think we're starting to grasp what those problems are and we may have the bulk of the tools we need to address them. What gets me down on the daily is actually exactly that. We have tools to solve a lot of problems we've exhaustively identified, but we don't act. I don't think we can solve all the problems Right Now, it's ambitious and ridiculous, but we can certainly stop throwing trash on the ground and stop leaving the lights on. Cancer is a pain and world hunger a challenge - how about we just do the things we can do?
Bah.
In any case, eventually society will evolve to escape the corpocracy we're forming or society will revolt. We still outnumber them and they can only push so far. I do believe that, 100%. Resource distribution is in increasingly good shape, and we're better and better at making more from less. So many of the conflicts that have traditionally plagued mankind are just irrelevant now. That's a good deal - freeing the collective we up from fighting for survival to fighting for comfort, rights, and knowledge is a transition we could reasonably start seeing in our lifetimes. I'm pretty down on humanity in general, but this gives me hope.