hedonicflux~~ on 22/5/2018 at 05:36
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
Nobody has quite as much power as they think they do... And there may be something to adopting some Buddhist wisdom here. Only Westerners think they can replace natural cycles from nature with artificial linear constructs. Nature always wins out in the end and the fact that Chinese recognize the cyclical nature of the world economy is a big part of why they will soon displace the US as the financial capital.
There's some erroneous logic here, and I encounter it all the time. It has to do with not understanding what
our capitalist economy actually is underneath--it's as much ideological as any socialist ideal. Sure, you can't impede on the natural cycle of things, evolution and thermodynamics, entropy... but in our postmodern hyper-capitalist economy (which Jean Baudrillard calls hyperreality), we're trying to impede on it by putting it in hyperdrive rather than slowing it down. We don't even live in a true capitalist economy anymore, we live in a hyperactive bastard child of capitalism fueled by mass ideological capitalism-affirming propaganda (think Ayn Rand and her enourmous influence on mass mentality, legislation, etc.) It began when people en masse started calabrating capitalism as an ideology.
Humans have an inherent need for ideology. We are incapable of thinking without reference to an ideal. But nature has no ideology. So whatever we attempt, it will have massive unintended consequences and lead to disaster. The disaster we've created is no more or less natural than the breakdown on the Soviet Union. And just like it, the capitalist project has failed because it's run amok and no longer responds to our ideological attempts, whether to reverse or save it. It's no longer under our control, but as a catastrophe it was created because we had the fancy notion that we
could control it. The other animals have never managed to create such catastrophes because they act exactly as nature intended, with no need for ideological justification.
So what I'm basically saying is, nature doesn't give a shit whether we try to embrace nature or not.
