Hatred often makes you want to hurt people, but people hurt peope in the name of greed more often, and not only with less potential for guilt, but is often the cause of delusional accolades and reassurance both from within oneself and from others.
Hypothetical:
A CEO lays off 10,000 employees that helped that company succeed, solely to increase earnings and not because the company is hurting, not only seriously hurting 9,997 people, but causing 3 to commit suicide.
A bumpkin gets in a fight with someone he hates the melanin of because he’s a moron and kills them.
Who did more damage to humanity that day? They’re both, I want to say evil but evil is subjective, they’re both highly antisocial, knowingly harmful behaviors, yet one correctly sends you to prison for a long time if not forever, while the other, far more premeditated and quite literally calculated act, is literally rewarded and partied about. Jim Kramer gives you a shout out on tv, good fucking times amirite!
Edit: and this felt relevant to post after someone tried to lecture me about equating layoffs to murder.
“Coca-Cola killed trade unionists in Latin America. General Motors built vehicles known to catch fire. Tobacco companies suppressed cancer research. And Boeing knew that its planes were dangerous. Corporations don’t care if they kill people — as long as it’s profitable.”
https://jacobin.com/2020/01/corporations-profit-values-murder-culture-boeing
Is there a lemmy equivalent to /r/im14andthisisdeep?
“Hurr durr people don’t like greedy corporate goons ruining things for everyone for generations. Stupid teenager thinking they’re being d3ep.”
Is that how you mean to come across? Because that’s how you come across.
The intent behind OP’s statement is pure, and is shared almost universally.
But the specific proposal misunderstands so much about why laws are made and how they’re enforced, how power is abused, why hate isn’t illegal, how businesses work, how harm is measured, etc, that the most generous interpretation is that we’re communicating with an inexperienced mind. In this case, apparently hundreds of them.
On the other hand, no one is born with that experience, and it’s healthy for people (including myself) to keep that in mind.
If a company prioritizes profits over people, money over actual human lives… that is greed, and that shouldn’t be allowed.
Interesting thought. However greed is part of human nature, since we humans like to get as much resources as possible.
greed is part of human nature
Bullshit. For a couple hundred thousand years humans kept only what they could carry on their backs. And that only counts homo sapiens sapiens. We only started staying in one place and amassing surplus in the last fifteen thousand years and yet there are people saying “greed is part of human nature.”
It’s the greedy who somehow managed to sell us that propaganda. Greed is a mental illness.
I don’t agree with OP. I don’t think more punishments are the way to fix things. But neither is gestures broadly the best we can do.
When homo sapians were nomadic, we were quite a tribal social group. The alpha male always had more resources in the group which you can call greed. This was a thing before civilization. And lets be honest, if we had more, would we really share it? Most people want more but when we get more, we do not divide it with others in our community. Very few give up their time and money for charity.
The alpha male always
What makes you think that “alpha males” were the norm in the paleolithic?
always had more resources
I could probably be convinced that some individuals had more social capital than others.
What do you even mean by “had”? It seems extremely unlikely that in the paleolithic they had a concept of ownership even roughly like what modern capitalist systems employ. I’m quite certain they didn’t think of land ownership the same way we do today. I’d doubt they thought of ownership of tools or food or clothing the same way we do either.
I’d imagine anyone who carried more stuff on their backs than they needed would have significant disadvantages (encumberance) compared to other folks.
This was a thing before civilization.
How do you know?
Just from looking at Wikipedia, I found a paragraph that starts “some sources claim that most Middle and Upper Paleolithic societies were possibly fundamentally egalitarian.” (And that sentence has 4 citations.) It seems like the jury is still out at best on that topic.
And lets be honest, if we had more, would we really share it? Most people want more but when we get more, we do not divide it with others in our community. Very few give up their time and money for charity.
And what if that has a lot more to do with our modern world than with human nature?
Indigenous peoples in what is now the pacific northwest of the U.S. and Canada had rituals called “potlatch” in which the most wealthy would give away lots of their resources to those with less. Don’t get me wrong, those folks were not paleolithic hunter gatherers, but they’re a counterexample to your implication that humans with more never give things away to humans with less. And it was done regularly. (On occasions of births, deaths, adoptions, weddings, and other such events.)
Another example of this is the Moka ritualized exchange by indigenous peoples in in Papua New Guinea.
Hatred is too, yet we recognize that flaw/failing/deficit/defect in ourselves and attempt to minimize it’s effects by educating children that it is bad and not socially acceptable and with punishment if practiced to a harmful degree.
I argue practiced greed should be treated similarly. Greed is a vice and a personal failing. Modern society seems to have complety abandoned this fact. It’s part of our darker nature right next to hatred. It’s one of the most prominent devils on our shoulders, not angels. We should be teaching kids that harming someone else, even if allowed, if it gives them the opportunity to get more or “succeed” is deeply wrong, and even wanting a lot more than others no less deserving than you is wrong, not “rational self-interest.”
True, hatred and greed is embed in human nature. However making laws against greed will likely not solve much but discentivise productivity. Or as libertarians will say “cause atlas to shrug”.
haha, you mean the impact on the marginal return to labour?
i mean most econonics rhetoric is fucking garbage, but the stuff from the ones who studied economics before learning calculus properly . . .
mmmm. . . bliss point . . .
“discentivise productivity.”
This right here. The jargon they use to rationalize cruelty. “growth or die” capitalism says, yet that same growth/metastasis capitalism demands is ironically choking the human race right now.
Growth is destroying our habitat. What we need is equilibrium.
Here is the logic issue with your post:
-
person lays off 10k employees to help the bottom line
-
capital responds positively and investment in the company grows
-
company eventually expands to 20k more hires
-
goods reach more people
Every decision the CEO (or whatever officer) made has knockoff effects that make it impossible to prove said person laid people off for their own benefit.
Your example and proposed moral challenges do not align with reality
I don’t think the “good” of letting 20k people not starve eventually, is outweighed by making 10k starve. This is of course hyperbole, but I hope I get my point across. Besides this strikes me as very similar to effective altruism and long-termism, which are slippery slopes by themselves, but that is besides the point.
Also:
make it impossible to prove said person laid people off for their own benefit.
No. CEOs most often receive bonuses for making the company more profit, so the CEO is most likely not doing this to get good to more people, but for their own pocket.
Copy pasting my own comment:
FYI this argument (often referred to as the human nature argument) only holds water when you look at European history. Most other societies had an element of communal property. Also in more developed life (including but not limited to humans), especially in situations of crisis, alturism is more expressed than self interest.
In other words: socialism is not against human nature. Capitalism is.
Tribes may work togeather in a crisis, but there is always a hierarchy. Looking at primates, we alway see a alpha male leader role who is fighting for more resource control in the group.
I don’t have the will nor energy to argue with you, especially as another person gave a quite good rebutal of your main point. I will point to the countless acts of kindness one does to those in their surroundings and community, especially in times of crisis, like the fires and hurricanes that storm parts of the US.
As much as it is necessary, greed is something very abstract and extremely difficult to prove in courts.
Not really. If there’s a known defect in a product that has the potential to severely impact the quality of a person’s life… and the company decides it’s cheaper to pay the lawsuits than proceed with a recall… that’s greed.
Any time profit takes precedence over the customers health and well-being… that’s fucking greed.
Nah, you’ll never get rid of human self interest, whatever you do. That’s just how biological life works.
FYI this argument (often referred to as the human nature argument) only holds water when you look at European history. Most other societies had an element of communal property. Also in more developed life (including but not limited to humans), especially in situations of crisis, alturism is more expressed than self interest.
In other words: socialism is not against human nature. Capitalism is.
There’s a difference between “self interest” and “how much money can I make through unscrupulous means that will harm untold numbers of people I’ll never know”.
I’ll do anything to protect my family short of something that will bring harm to another family for no other reason than personal profit. There has to be a line.
I’m going to ignore the insane part of your point where you equated layoffs with murder.
Greed, like hate, is subjective. It is therefore, like hate, a terrible prerequisite for the activation of the criminal justice system. The idea that motivations for crimes should change the definition and/or penalty of those crimes has fostered popular corruption of the justice system since its inception. Industrialization has accelerated the adoption of human fears into that justice system, to the point where we can no longer even count the number of infractions under the law.
Adding more subjective emotional consideration to a punitive system which is already weighed down beyond the ability to enact swift justice is the opposite of helpful.
“Coca-Cola killed trade unionists in Latin America. General Motors built vehicles known to catch fire. Tobacco companies suppressed cancer research. And Boeing knew that its planes were dangerous. Corporations don’t care if they kill people — as long as it’s profitable.”
https://jacobin.com/2020/01/corporations-profit-values-murder-culture-boeing
You’re funny.
What’s your point? That people organize themselves to commit crimes? That risky behavior is more dangerous when it’s amplified by concentrated capital? None of this justifies the phenomenal leap you made to say that an employer is responsible for the lives of their employees. None of this is precedent for the further corruption of the justice system into subjectivity and emotional bias.
Can’t you see that you’re actually making it worse? You go after organizations whose bread and butter is legal entanglement, using legal entanglement as your only weapon. You make the regulatory environment more difficult for startups and SMBs to compete in, and you do nothing but give your (supposed) worst enemies more political tokens with which to negotiate advantageous positions in that environment. Why do you think these corporate elites flush hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring progressive media outlets? Do you think they’re stupid?
When I switched from a small company’s insurance plan to Amazon’s insurance plan (not warehouse and delivery but on the development side), one of my monthly medications went from $0 per month to over $400 per month, and that’s with assistance. It was over $900 a month before I got the assistance plan.
Another one of my prescriptions, I used to get in 3 month increments. On the Amazon plan, I can get it in 3 week increments. I opted to pay for it out of pocket so I can continue to get 3 month increments.
If I can’t afford all that, maybe Amazon should be partly liable for not having decent prescription coverage. Of course, the problem isn’t Amazon. The problem is that it’s legal to offer such shitty prescription plans and that insurance is based on employment. So maybe the government is liable if I can’t afford prescriptions.
