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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

>We will probably won't find a culprit

It's capitalism. That's the answer you're looking for

Comrade, have you ever studied the history of the USSR? Give it a try, it's fun. It tells a story how 1/6 of the planet's land surface for 80 years was turned into garbage. They did it with one simple trick.

This is such a predictable response

I’ll say it for the millionth time:

The Trotskiest-Leninist State-Command Economy (aka USSR) is not the opposite or even that much different than State Capitalism.

I won’t fight this strawman

So far, nothing else exists.

Communism/socialism failed like Chernobyl reactor number 4.

Adopting a new socio-economic system some young cocky pal imagines in his head? Nope, thank you. I'm too old and experienced for that. Not in a million of years.

> It's capitalism

We had capitalism for a LONG time before we had the international teen mental illness epidemic.

Yes but we didnt' have the entire thing uploaded into our heads. To use Byung-Chul Han's phrase, you're both master and slave in one now. You're not even a subject any more (that has some places to escape to) but a project.

To tie it into the article, the social media dynamic, young girls seeing themselves as never-ending beauty projects that have to get lip-fillers, more clicks, more likes, compete with each other, is just the logic of capital without even someone needing to subject them to it, they're doing it themselves.

Capital's eaten all the physical space, it's still hungry so it's gobling up all the mental space, and information tech was the vector to jump from one to the other. And it does to the mental environment exactly what it did to physical spaces once its done harvesting them.

And this teen epidemic would be the first complaint I’ve heard lodged against capitalism. Can’t be that.

Not this level of capitalism. The post-war consensus economy of the west had heavy state intervention and economic involvement.

Things started to change towards "free market" neoliberalism (AKA voodoo economics) in around the 1970's, and the rate of the change exploded after the fall of Soviet Union.

So long as we're making sweeping claims without any attempt at supporting them, you're wrong, this is all downstream from the Protestant Reformation.

Capitalism (an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit) was invented prior to written history so the reformation only exists in the context of private property being a core assumption of society. That assumption is NEW in the history of humanity, the concept of "property" has only existed for about 50,000 years

The protestant reformation then was an attempt to wrest property away from the catholic organization and distribute it. The goal being to eliminate the primary economic organization and "democratize" it.

The concept of hoarding property flowed from scarcity anxieties that are only socially maintained and hoarding property is the root issue

You can read my proof here: https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html

anti-capitalism ideas, so great they're mandatory and a wall built around you so you can't flee to somewhere else - everywhere it's been tried

I’m sorry that you’re ignorant of every single indigenous culture but that’s really not my problem

No matter, you’ll simply make the following argument: that might makes right because those indigenous cultures couldn’t stand up to the genocidal domination tactics of property based thought right?

I know this may come as a shock, so you may want to sit down for this one: those indigenous tribes and cultures were genociding each other for millennia before Adam Smith ever wrote The Wealth of Nations.

Do you realize you responded precisely in the way I described a response to this would be?

This is how perfectly predictable this argument is.

And yet predictable != inaccurate

If I predict ahead of time that my plans to install a puppet government in Machuria and invade China are going to be compared unfavorably to Japan's actions in WW2, that doesn't somehow magically make the comparison inaccurate just because I predicted it.

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