The harsh reality is that a culture of selfishness has become too widespread. Too many people (especially in tech) don't really care what happens to others as long as they get rich off it. They'll happily throw others under the bus and refuse to share wellbeing even in their own communities.
It's the inevitable result of low-trust societies infiltrating high trust ones. And it means that as technologies with dangerous implications for society become more available there's enough people willing to prostitute themselves out to work on society's downfall that there's no realistic hope of the train stopping.
I think the fundamental false promise of capitalism and industrial society is that it claims to be able to manufacture happiness and life satistfaction.
Even on the material realm this is untrue, beyond meeting the basic needs of people on the technological level, he majority desirable things - such as nice places to live - have a fixed supply.
This necessitates that the price of things like real estate, must increase in price in proportion to the money supply. With increasing inequality, one must fight tooth and nail to get the standard of life our parents considered easily available. Not being greedy is not a valid life strategy to pursue, as that means relinquishing an ever greater proportion of wealth to people who are, and becoming poorer in the process.
I don't disagree that money (and therefore capitalism or frankly any financial system) is unable to create happiness.
I disagree with your example, however, as the most basic tenet of capitalism is that when there is a demand, someone will come along to fill it.
Addressing your example specifically, there's a fixed supply of housing in capitalist countries not because people don't want to build houses, but because government or bureacracy artificially limits the supply or creates other disincentives that amount to the same thing.
> the most basic tenet of capitalism is that when there is a demand, someone will come along to fill it.
That's the most basic tenet of markets, not capitalism.
The mistake people defending capitalism routinely make (knowingly or not) is talking about "positive sum games" and growth. At the end of the day, the physical world is finite and the potential for growth is limited. This is why we talk about "market saturation". If someone owns all the land, you can't just suddenly make more of it, you have wait for them to part with some of it, voluntarily, through natural causes (i.e. death) or through violence (i.e. conquest). This not only goes for land but any physical resource (including energy). Capitalism too has to obey the laws of thermodynamics, no matter how much technology improves the efficiency of extraction, refinement and production.
It's also why the overwhelming amount of money in the economy is not caught up in "real economics" (i.e. direct transactions or physical - or at least intellectual - properties) but in stocks, derivatives, futures, financial products of any flavor and so on. This doesn't mean those don't affect the real world - of course they do because they are often still derived from reality - but they have nothing to do with meeting actual human needs rather than the specific purpose of "turning money into more money". It's unfair to compare this to horse racing as in hore racing at least there's a race whereas in this entirely virtual market you're betting on what bets other people will make but the horse will still go to the sausage factory if the investors are no longer willing to place their bets on it - the horse plays a factor in the game but its actual performance is not directly related to its success; from the horse's perspective it's less of a race and more of a game of shoots and ladders with the investors calling the dice.
The idea of "when there is demand, it will be filled" also isn't even inherently positive. Because we live in a finite reality and therefore all demand that exists could plausibly be filled unless we run into the limits of available resources, the main economic motivator has not been to fill demands but to create demands. For a long time advertisement has no longer been about directing consumers "in the market" for your kind of goods to your goods specifically, it's been about creating artificial demand, about using psychological manipulation to make consumers feel a need for your product they didn't have before. Because it turns out this is much more profitable than trying to compete with the dozens of other providers trying to fill the same demand. Even when competing with others providing literally the same product, advertisement is used to sell something other than the product itself (e.g. self-actualization) often by misleading the consumers into buying it for needs it can't possibly address (e.g. a car can't fix your emotional insecurities).
This has already progressed to the point where the learned go-to solution for fixing any problems is making a purchse decision, no matter how little it actually helps. You hate capitalism? Buy a Che shirt and some stickers and you'll feel like you helped overthrow it. You want to be healthier? Try another fad diet that costs you hundreds of dollars in proprietary nutrition solutions and is almost designed to be unsustainable and impossible to maintain. You want to stop climate change? Get a more fuel-efficient car and send your old car to the junker, and maybe remember to buy canvas bags. You want to not support Coca-Cola because it's got blood on its hands? Buy a more expensive cola with slightly less blood on its hands.
There's a fixed housing supply in capitalist countries because - in addition of the physical limitations - the goal of the housing market is not to provide every resident with an affordable home but to generate maximum return on the investment of purchasing the plot and building the house - and willy nilly letting people live in those houses for less just because nobody is willing to pay your price tag would drive down the resale value of every single house in the neighborhood and letting an old lady live in an apartment for two decades is less profitable than kicking her out to modernize the building and sell it to the next fool.
Deregulation doesn't fix supply. Deregulation merely lets the market off the leash, which in a capitalist system means accelerating the wealth transfer to the owners from the renters.
There are other possibilities than capitalism, and no Soviet-style state capitalism or Chinese-style state capitalism are not the only alternative. But if you don't want to let go of capitalism, you can only choose between the various degrees from state capitalism to stateless capitalism (i.e. feudalism with extra steps, which people like Peter Thiel advocate for) and it's unsurprising most systems that haven't already collapsed land somewhere in between.
Let's not ascribe the possession of higher level concepts like a 'promise' to abstract entities. Reserve that for individuals. As with some economic theories, you appear to have a zero sum game outlook which is, I submit, readily demolished.
> The harsh reality is that a culture of selfishness has become too widespread. Too many people (especially in tech) don't really care what happens to others as long as they get rich off it. They'll happily throw others under the bus and refuse to share wellbeing even in their own communities.
This is definitely not a new phenomenon.
In my experience, tech has been one of the more considerate areas of societal impact. Spend some time in other industries and it's eye-opening to see the wanton disregard for consumers and the environment.
There's a lot of pearl-clutching about social media, algorithms, and "data", but you'll find far more people in tech (including FAANG) who are actively working on privacy technology, sustainable development and so on then you will find people caring about the environment by going into oil & gas, for example.
> There's a lot of pearl-clutching about social media, algorithms, and "data", but you'll find far more people in tech (including FAANG) who are actively working on privacy technology, sustainable development and so on then you will find people caring about the environment by going into oil & gas, for example.
Sure, we don't need to talk about how certain Big Oil companies knew about the climate catastrophe before any scientists publicly talked about it, or how tobacco companies knew their product was an addictive drug while blatantly lying about it even in public hearings.
But it's ironic to mention FAANG given what the F is for if you recall that when the algorithmic timeline was first introduced by Facebook, the response from Facebook to criticism was literally that satisfaction went down but engagement went up. People directly felt that the algorithm made them more unhappy, more isolated and overall less satisfied but because it was more addictive, because it created more "engagement", Facebook doubled down on it.
Also "sustainable" stopped being a talking point when the tech industry became obsessed with LLMs. Microsoft made a big show of wanting to become "carbon neutral" (of course mostly using bogus carbon offset programs that don't actually do anything and carbon capture technologies that are net emission positive and will be for decades if not forever but still, at least they pretended) and then silently threw all of that away when it became more strategically important to pursue AI at any cost. Companies that previously desperately tried to sell messages of green washing and carbon neutrality now talk about building their own non-renewable power plants because of all the computational power they need to run their LLMs (not to mention how much more hardware needs to be produced and replaced for this - the same way the crypto bubble ate through graphics cards).
I think the pearl-clutching is justified considering that ethics and climate protection have now been folded into "woke" and there's a tidal wave in Western politics to dismantle civil rights and capture democratic systems for corporate interests that is using the "anti-woke" culture war to further its goals - the Trump government being the most obvious example. It's no longer in FAANG's financial interests to appear "green" or "privacy conscious", it's now in their interest to be "anti-woke" and that now means no longer having to care about these things and having freedom to crack down on any dissident voices within without fearing public backlash or "cancel culture".
> reality is that a culture of selfishness has become too widespread.
Tale as old as time. We’re yet another society blinded by our own hubris. Tell me what is happening now is not exactly how Greece and Rome fell.
The scary part is that we as a species are becoming more and more capable of large scale destruction. Seems like we are doomed to end civilization this way someday
> Tell me what is happening now is not exactly how Greece and Rome fell.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Ancient Greece was a loose coalition of city states, not an empire. You could say they were short-sighted by being more concerned about their rivalry than external threats but the closest they came to being united was under Alexander the Great, whose death left a power vacuum.
There was no direct cause of "the fall" of Ancient Greece. The city states were suffering greatly from social inequality, which created tensions and instability. They were militarily weakened from the war with the Persians. Alexander's death left them without a unifying force. Then the Roman Empire knocked on its door and that was the end of it.
Rome likewise didn't fall in one single way. "Rome" isn't even what people think it is. Roman history spans several different entities and even if you talk about the "empire in decline" that's covering literally hundreds of years, ending with the Holy Roman Empire, which has been retroactively reimagined as a kind of proto-Germany. But even then that's only the Western Roman Empire - the Eastern Roman Empire continued to exist as the Byzantine Empire until the Ottoman Empire conquered Constaninople. And this distinction between the two empires is likewise retroactive and did not exist in the minds of Romans at the time (although they were de facto independent of each other).
If you only focus on the century or so that is generally considered to represent the fall of Western Rome, the ultimate root cause actually seems to be natural climate change. The Huns fled climate change, chasing away other groups that then fled into the Empire. Late Western Rome also again suffered from massive wealth inequality, which the ruling class attempted to maintain with increasingly cruel punishments.
So, if you want to look for a common thread, it seems to be the hubris of the financial elite, not "society" as a whole.
>The harsh reality is that a culture of selfishness has become too widespread.
I'm not even sure this is a culture specific issue. More like selfishness is a survival mechanism hard wired into humans, including other animals. While one could argue that cooperation is also a good survival mechanism, but that's only true so long environmental factors put a pressure on people to cooperate. When that pressure is absent, accumulating resources at the expense of others gives an individual a huge advantage, and they would do it, given the chance.
Humans are social animals. We are individually physically weak and defenseless. Unlike other animals, we are born into this world immobile, naked, starving and helpless. It takes us literally years to mature to the point where we wouldn't simply die outright if we were abandoned by others. Newborns can literally die from touch deprivation. We develop huge brains not only to allow us to come up with clever tools but also to help us build and navigate complex social relationships. We're evolved to live in tribes, yes, but we're also evolved to interact with other tribes - we created diplomacy and trading and even currency to interact with those other tribes without having to resort to violence or avoidance.
In crises, this is the behavior we fall back to. Yes, some will self-isolate and use violence to keep others away until they feel safe again. But overwhelmingly what we see after natural disasters and spaces where the formal order of civilisation and state is disrupted and leaves a vacuum is cooperation, mutual aid and people taking risks to help others - because we intrinsically know that being alone means death and being in a group means surviving. Of course the absence of state control also often enables other existing groups to assert their power, i.e. organized crime. But it shouldn't be surprising that the fledgling and atrophied ability to self-organize might not be strong enough to withstand a fast moving power grab by an existing group - what might be more surprising is that this is rarely the case and often news stories about "looting" after a natural disaster turn out to be uncharitable descriptions of self-organized rescues and searches.
I think a better analogy for human selfishness would be the mirage of "alpha wolves". As seems to be common knowledge at this point, there is no such thing as an "alpha wolf" hierarchy in groups of wolves living in nature and the phenomenon the author who coined the term (and has since regretted doing so) was mistakenly extrapolating from observations he made of wolves in captivity. But the behavior does seem to exist in captivity. Not because it's "inherent" or their natural behavior "under pressure" but because it's a maladaptation that arises from the unnatural circumstances of captivity (e.g. different wolves with no prior bonds being forced into a confined space, naturally trying to form a group but being unable to rely on natural bonds and shared trust).
Humans do not naturally form strict social hierarchies. For the longest time, Europeans would have laughed at you if you claimed the feudal system was not in the human nature - it would have literally been heresy to challenge it. Nowadays in the West most people will say capitalism or markets are human nature. Outside the West, people will still likely at least tell you that authoritarianism is human nature - whether it's the boot of a dictatorship, the boots of oligarchs or "the people's boot" that's pushing down on the unruly (yourself included).
What we do know about more egalitarian tribal societies is that they often use delegation, especially in times of war. When quick decisions need to be made, you don't have the time for lengthy discussions and consensus seeking and it can be an advantage to have one person giving orders and coordinating an attack or defense. But these systems can still be consent-based: if the war chief is reckless or seeks to take advantage of the group for his own gain, he is easily demoted and replaced. Likewise in times of unsolvable problems like droughts, spiritual leaders might be given more power by the group. Now shift from more mobile, nomadic groups to more static, agrarian groups (though it's worth pointing out the distinction here is not agriculture but more likely granaries, crop rotation and irrigation, as some nomadic tribes still engaged in forms of agriculture) and suddenly it becomes easier for that basis of consent to be forgotten and the chosen leaders to maintain that initial state of desperation and to begin justifying their status with the divine mandate. Oops, you got a monarchy going.
Capitalism freed us from the monarchy but it did not meaningfully upset the hierarchy. Aristocrats became capitalists, the absence of birthright class assignment created some social mobility but the proportions generally remained the same. You can't have a leader without followers, you can't have a ruling class without a class of those they can rule over, you can't have an owning class without a class to rent that owned property out to and to work for that owned capital to be realized into profits.
But just like a monarch despite their divine authority was still beholden to the support of the aristocracy to exert power over others and to the laborers to till the fields, build the castle and fight off foreign claims to power, the owning class too exists in a state of perpetual desperation and distrust. The absence of divine right means a billionaire must maintain their wealth and the capitalist mantra of infinite growth means anything other than growing that wealth is insufficient to maintain it. All the while they have to compete with the other billionaires above them as well as maintain control over those beneath them and especially the workers and renters whose wealth and labor they must extract from in order to grow theirs. The perverse reality of hierarchies is that even those at the top of it are crushed underneath its weight. Nobody is allowed to be happy and at peace.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I think the issue is a little more nuanced.
Capitalism obviously has advantages and disadvantages. Regulation can address many disadvantages if we are willing. Unfortunately, I think a particular (mostly western) fetish for privileging individuals over communities has been wrongly extended to capital itself (e.g. corporations recognised as entities with rights similar to - and sometimes over-and-above - those of a person). We have literally created monsters. There is no reason we had to go this far. Capitalism doesn't have to mean the preeminence of capital above all else. It needs to be put back in its place and not necessarily discarded. I am certain there are better ways to practice capitalism. They probably involve balancing it out with some other 'isms.
>"I think a particular (mostly western) fetish for privileging individuals over communities has been wrongly extended to capital itself (e.g. corporations recognised as entities with rights similar to - and sometimes over-and-above - those of a person)"
Possible remedy will be to tie corporation to a person - person (or many if there are few owners and directors) become personally liable for everything corporation does.
The harsh truth is people stop pretending the world is rule based.
If they signed the agreement... so what? Do people forget that the US has withdrawn from Paris Agreement and is withdrawing from WHO? Do people forgot Israel and North Korea got nukes even when we supposedly had a global nonproliferation treaty?
If AGI is as powerful and dangerous as doomsayers believe, the chance the US (or China, or any country with enough talented computer scientists) would respect whatever treaty they have about AGI is exactly zero.
It's the inevitable result of low-trust societies infiltrating high trust ones. And it means that as technologies with dangerous implications for society become more available there's enough people willing to prostitute themselves out to work on society's downfall that there's no realistic hope of the train stopping.