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Comment by hbrn | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism might have it's downsides, but I came to think that software engineering problems are deeply rooted in human psychology.

> Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source

It's tempting to think that all the world problems are coming from a single source and therefore have a simple solution, but usually that's not the case.

Leftists will always blame capitalism. Feminists will blame toxic masculinity (most developers are men, right?). Nazis will blame Jews. Every ideology claims it solves every possible problem, but it never does.

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You’re not wrong that human psychology is the ultimate source of the problem, but inventive structures and cultural circumstances decide how the good and the bad in our psychological makeup get expressed. Eradicating corporate capitalism wouldn’t come close to see living all problems—it would only move us up Maslow’s hierarchy so we could grapple with more interesting problems than the depressing ones we’ve got now.

I don’t think you can fairly compare feminism and leftism (well-intended movements) with antisemitism, which has a historical record of resulting in mass murder. And toxic masculinity certainly exists, though not all forms of masculinity are toxic, and I don’t think men ourselves are in any way “toxic”. In fact, toxic masculinity and corporate capitalism are closely intertwined, each being an expression of the other.

This discussion has already happened hundreds of times. I'll say that Mao and Stalin are leftists that killed way more than Hitler. And you'll say they aren't really leftists.

The problem with these radical solutions is that they are ultimately unscientific. There's nothing you can say to a feminist that will convince them that wars aren't caused by toxic masculinity. Nothing you can say to a leftist that will convince them that horrors of capitalism don't outweigh the benefits.

At the end it comes to this: you can practice socialism in a capitalistic society. But you can't practice capitalism in a socialistic one.

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