The solution for cancer is usually killing the cancer or removing the cancer. I wonder what the capitalism equivalent is…
If we just let a self selected group of people have total control of our economy, things will turn out better this time. They promise.
“The previous attempts failed because they didn’t do it right. We will get it right, this time.”
I take it more as humans acting out of individualist self-interest (which capitalism incentivizes above all else) as being more likened to cancer. All it can take is one mutated-individualist-greedy cell to ignore the signals from the surrounding tissues to cause cancer.
“I’d like to share a revelation I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.” -Agent Smith
Eh, roughly 1-2% of people are psychopathic and we’ve only really destroyed the Earth since we adopted capitalism, the system in which a very small, unempathetic minority has control of pretty much everything.
But that’s not my largest issue with Smith’s comment. It’s more that an program of his stature definitely should have a better grasp on taxonomy. Viruses aren’t even alive according to some current classifications. Parasitic organisms would be much closer. Unfortunately there aren’t really any parasitic mammals. Vampire bats, perhaps? And that simile — capitalists as vampires (the human kind) — is a bit older than Smith’s virus metaphor.
Marxferatu “The figure of the vampire is the ultimate individual: predatory, inhuman, anti-human, with no moral obligation to others.”
“viruses are not even alive” - viruses and other acellular entities that are part of what we call life on earth in general are finally starting to be recognized as such: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26305806/
Are my red blood cells alive, per se?
Also, not to be a quenchcoal, but a single paper suggesting a classification doesn’t really mean scientific consensus on the matter.
As I said, most current definitions. I am aware of different views as well. It’s not my personal opinion, just the prevailing definition.
Humans lived for 200,000 years before we started acting like a cancer. It’s not our species that is cancer, it’s the dominator culture that evolved within our species that is the cancer.
it’s the dominator culture
It’s Capitalism. Capitalism is humans as cancer. It’s why we joke about late stage Capitalism.
You’re not wrong.
I see capitalism more as a tool that arose due to the rise of the dominator culture in our species. A species without dominator instincts would not invent capitalism.
The Earth isn’t a closed system. The Universe might be but I feel pretty confident we’ll have moved on from any currently recognizable economic system by the time we fill that up.
The Earth isn’t a closed system.
Where else in the universe there are trees and animals?
For all ecological purposes Earth is a closed system.
For practical purposes, the earth might as well be a closed system. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
This isn’t actually a measure of resource usage in reference to a closed system tho.
