I don't know how you can say that. What does "free market capitalism" entail according to you? Wikipedia's definition is just a ruse to be able to claim that free market capitalism is sane, but you can't exclude a governing authority and monopolies at the same time, because the latter always arises. So, in reality, you have to choose, and if you choose absence of authority, corporatocracy is an automatic extension of free market capitalism.
Every unmaintained system degrades. That's next to a tautology. In my opinion, the base problem is modern technology itself that creates the capability for widespread wealth inequality and social fragmentation, without needing real labor or social bonds anymore.
I think the latter problem already existed 1000, even 2000 years ago.
But maintenance requires supervision, which seems to contradict "free" in "free market capitalism." Without restrictions, greed makes corporations (or armies, or the maffia) seek influence at the highest levels of governance.
Only in the minds of people who make capitalism a religion. It has always been like this, early capitalism was even worse with dirty money buying every politician they could get their hands on. Just read anything about the US in the end of the 19th century.
Responsibility of intellectuals, or wise men/women, has always been to guide the tribe towards security, happiness and prosperity. Not to sow dissent inside the tribe by moralizing, while completely ignoring all the ills in other tribes.
So called "intellectuals" who do it just to further their own selfish goals, should not be awarded high ranking positions.
"You know, I ran into Henry Kissinger years ago and I asked him if he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of the work, and he said in effect, 'I am working with the ideas that I formed at Harvard years ago. I haven't had a real idea since I've been on this; I just work with the old ideas."
Sorry. I see responsibility of the intellectual is first of all to enjoy the stimulation. If not, putting quotes around the term, as you did, is correct.
One of the major lessons of the 1900s is that the moral ills of your own tribe are more important than the problems other people might have. You don't live in some other country, you live in your own. Local concerns are by far the #1 issue.
Even in the 2000s, one of the most ironic outcomes is that US hegemony forced a bunch of countries into really dominant regional positions (thinking especially of Japan, China and Germany) because they had nothing else to do but fix their own internal problems and it turns out that is a dominant strategy over militarism. Moral positions like peace, law, consistency and fairness aren't vague nice-to-haves, they are principles that lead to better outcomes for the people who stick with them.
How far are you prepared to go with the "loyalty to the tribe" argument? If your "tribe" is 1942 Germany and you know about the ongoing Holocaust, does your line of thinking imply that you should keep quiet about it? You know, not to sow dissent by moralizing.
In reality, you can predict a bear's behavior but you can never tell what a man will do to you given the chance. Maybe nothing. Maybe years of gaslighting, cruelty and violence because of mother issues. Maybe nothing and one day they just snap and shoot you and your entire family.
And it isn't simply a matter of sociopathy, but a model of masculine behavior and culture that trains men to view women as a currency and an entitlement, and doesn't allow them healthy emotional expression and identity separate from sexual and material conquests. A bear is just operating by instinct. Men choose their abusive behaviors and society often enables them.
How do we know men and women don't just operate by instinct?
Bears are smart. They can't design bearproof trash cans for national parks because the smartest bears are smarter than the dumbest national park visitors.
>How do we know men and women don't just operate by instinct?
Because we define "instinct" in a way that separates the behavior of animals from humans and we have evidence from both personal experience and observing the behavior of other higher primates that humans are capable of operating beyond their instincts, for instance by creating social and political abstractions which optimize for things other than survival and procreation. The existence of art, language, science, philosophy and law cannot be reduced to purely instinctual drives.
This is a profoundly uninteresting and juvenile line of argument which inevitably reduces to solipsism.
>Bears are smart. They can't design bearproof trash cans for national parks because the smartest bears are smarter than the dumbest national park visitors.
Humans split the atom, sequenced genomes and went to the moon. We can't design bearproof trash cans because those trash cans have to be usable by humans, which creates fundamental engineering weaknesses that animals can exploit, not because bears are smarter than humans.
Humans are known to come pre-wired to learn languages and to strive for social status (which explains art, politics, philosophy, law and so on) — what is that if not instincts?
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