Might be the prosperity gospel
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Could they be more credulous and hence more susceptible to the lies corporations tell us?
@jungekatz all the other answers are far more nuanced, and explain a lot more detail, but the most simple answers to your question are 1. Propaganda and 2. Herd mentality/echo chamber thinking.
Basically… because of slavery.
If you take a look at an indigenous population and decide that both:
- They are lazy, because their labor only produces subsistence and isn’t captured as surplus value stored in currency
- Their laziness is a moral failing which will doom them to eternal suffering
…then you have now put yourself in a mental model where you have a moral duty to force that person to work for (your) profit instead of subsistence, in order to save their soul.
If you have a whole country that thinks this way, they will try to enslave the whole world and feel good about doing so.
So in a Darwinian way, that mentality is the most “fit”. It’s very uhhh “successful”. And so it propagates.
Two reasons:
In the 70's and 80's in the US, the economic right wing formed an alliance of convenience with religious social conservatives (notably not Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and other non-Protestant sects) to seek polit8cal power.
Second, Christianity holds that humans tend to be sinful and selfish, and thus utopian schemes that rely on participants to be unselfish and egalitarian are doomed at scale, becoming instead forces of oppression.
Throw in Communism's historical opposition to religion as icing on the cake.
Because most religious conservatives don't think beyond "what is acceptable to my group" and do that. Or appear to do that. And not rocking the boat is highly valued in those communities, so people who want to abuse others financially find ripe ground for it.
Actual conservative here.
Not all progress is good. Its best made in measured doses.
Life is good. Sure there are problems, but they can be solved without completely changing the system. Better laws and regulations, going after those abusing the system, that sort if thing.
Also the only alternative presented is communism. And historcally, whats been advertised as communism has lead to a 100 million deaths, the oppression of everyone else involved, and generally bad shit. (No, Im not arguing about what is true communism)
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When people say they don't support capitalism then what is the system you see as a more viable alternative?
Edit: Imagine being downvoted for asking a question
Socialism is defined by the elimination of the purely capitalist class, wherin workers own the means of production.
That doesn't necessarily mean that capital isn't assigned for investment based upon market demand or that "EvEryoNe gEts pAId tHE SAmE" like others claim. Socialism in a modern economy can (and likely would be) market based, it just means that shareholders would be entirely made up of employees of a company (obviously this would lead to better conditions for workers, lower wages for executives and no dividend payments to people who aren't working). Taking a more academic definition of capitalism, it's entirely possible to be both socialist and capitalist. Few people are arguing against capitalism in entirety.
Socialism.
Check out how the Anarchists structured their society in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell fought alongside them and wrote a book about it called Homage To Catalonia, where he describes how utopian it was while it existed. It also deeply soured him on communism, because he saw how the communists betrayed the anarchists during the war and how authoritarian they were compared to the left libertarian anarchists, which likely influenced him when writing Animal Farm.
The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."
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