https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Zlhpv00mpWg
Wasn’t defending capitalism actually in some sense I was defending it in comparison to communism Which is not the same thing because as Winston Churchill said about democracy, you know It’s the worst form of government there is except for all the other forms and so You might say the same thing about capitalism is that it’s the worst form of economic Arrangement you could possibly manage except for every other one that we’ve ever tried and and then and I’m dead serious about that I’m not trying to be flippant I mean that it isn’t obvious to me when dr. Zizek is speaking in more apocalyptic terms It isn’t obvious to me that we can solve the problems that confront us, you know And it it’s not also not a message that I have been purveying that unbridled capitalism per se as An isolated what would you say social economic structure actually constitutes the proper answer to the problems that confront us So I haven’t made that case in any of the lectures that I’ve anything I’ve written or any of the lectures that I’ve done Because I don’t believe it to be true He said well, what’s the problems with capitalism? Well the commodification of cultural life all life fair enough There’s something that isn’t exactly right about reducing everything to economic competition and capitalism certainly Pushes in that direction advertising culture pushes in that direction sales and marketing culture Pushes in that direction and there’s reasons for that and I have a certain amount of admiration for the necessity of advertisers and salesmen and marketers but that doesn’t mean that the transformation of all elements of life into element into commodities in a Capitalist sense is the best way forward. I don’t think it is the best way forward. I Think the evidence for that’s actually quite clear. There is by the way a relationship This is something I didn’t point out before there is a relationship between Wealth and happiness it’s quite well defined in the psychological literature now It’s not exactly obvious whether the happiness measures are measures of happiness or whether they’re measures of the absence of misery and My sense is as a psychometrician who’s looked at these scales that people are more concerned with not being miserable than they are with being happy Those are all actually separate Emotional states mediated by different Psychobiological systems, but it’s a technical point, but it’s an important one there is a relationship between absolute level of income and Self-reported lack of misery or happiness and it’s pretty linear until you hit I would say something Approximating decent working-class income and so what seems to happen is that? wealth makes you happy as Long as it keeps the bill collectors at bay like once you’ve got to the point where the misery is Staved off as much as it can be by the fact that you’re not Absolutely in you’re not in absolutely economically dire straits Then adding more money to your life has no relationship whatsoever to your well-being and so it’s clear that past a certain minimal point Additional material provision is not sufficient to let’s say redeem us individually or socially and it’s certainly the case that the radical Wealth production that characterizes capitalism might produce a fatal Threat to the structure of our social systems and our broader ecosystems who knows I’m not absolutely convinced of that for a variety of reasons. I mean Zizek pointed out for example that there are more forests in Europe in now than there were a hundred years ago There’s actually more forests in the entire northern hemisphere Than there were a hundred years ago and the news on the ecological front is not as dismal as the people who put out The most dismal news would have you think and there is some possibility That doesn’t mean that there aren’t elements of it that are dismal You know what we’ve done to the oceans is definitely something catastrophic And we definitely have our problems, but it is possible that human ingenuity might solve that What else there are inequalities generated by capitalism a proclivity towards a shallow materialism the probability of corruption The thing about that for me is those are catastrophes that are part of the struggle for human existence itself and not Something to be laid at the feet of any given socio Political system especially one that seems to be producing a fair modicum of wealth for the poorest section of the population and raising people up to the point where you know they their lives aren’t unending an Unending day-to-day struggle for mere survival There’s some evidence for example that if you can get GDP up to about five thousand dollars per person per year. Oh, that’s GDP That people start to become concerned about environmental degradation and start to take actions to prevent it And so there is some possibility that if we’re lucky we can get the bottom Billion or two billion people in the world or three billion as the population grows up to the point where they’re wealthy enough So they actually start to care enough about the environment so that we could act collectively to solve environmental problems now You might say well by that time we’ll be out of earth You know we’ll have we’ll have Exhausted the resources that are in front of us so desperately that there’s no hope of that but I would like to remind you of a famous bet between Julie and Simon and The biologist at at Stanford who wrote Paul Ehrlich who wrote the population bomb they bet Erlich who thought we’re gonna be overpopulated by the year 2000 bet Simon that by the year 2000 Commodity prices would have increased dramatically as a consequence of evidence that we were running out of material resources They made a famous bet over a 25 year period and Erlich paid off Simon in the year 2000 because commodity prices went down and not up And so there is no solid evidence that the fact that our population is growing and will peak out by the way at about 9 billion There’s no solid indication that the consequence of that is that we are in fact running out of necessary material resources And so it’s a danger, but it’s not a danger that’s proven And there is some utility in considering that the addition of several billion more brains to the planet Especially if they were well nourished brains as they increasingly are might help us generate enough problem solvers so that we can stay ahead of the Looming ecological catastrophe as our population balloons outwards now. We’re going to peak at 9 billion It’s not much higher than we are now, and it looks like we might be able to manage it The other thing is that I didn’t hear an alternative really from Dr. Dzizek. He admitted that the rise to success of the Chinese was in part a consequence of the allowance of market forces and decried the authoritarian tendencies and fair enough that’s exactly it It also seemed to me that the social justice group identity processes that Dr. Dzizek was decrying are to me a logical derivation from the oppression narrative that’s a fundamental presupposition of Marxism So there I never heard a defense of Marxism in that sense And so I think that the social justice group identity processes that Dr. Dzizek was describing are to me a logical derivation from the oppression narrative that’s a fundamental presupposition of Marxism So there I never heard a defense of Marxism in that part of his argument as well, and so for me again it’s to ask what’s the alternative I also heard an argument for egalitarianism, but I heard it defined as equality of opportunity, not as equality of outcome, which I see as a clearly defined Marxist aim I heard an argument for a modified social distribution of wealth, but that’s already part and parcel of most modern free market states with a wide variation and an appropriate variation of government I heard an argument for a modified social distribution of wealth, but that’s already part and parcel of most modern free market states with a wide variation and an appropriate variation of government intervention, all of which constitute their own experiment. We don’t know how much social intervention is necessary to flatten the tendency of hierarchies to become tilted so terribly that only the people at the top have everything and all of the people at the bottom have nothing It’s a very difficult battle to fight against that profound tendency, much deeper than the tendency of capitalism itself, and we don’t exactly know what to do about it It’s a very difficult battle to fight against that profound tendency, much deeper than the tendency of capitalism itself, and we don’t exactly know what to do about it So we run experiments and that seems to be working perfectly reasonably as far as I can tell Have you ever heard of data brokers? They’re the middlemen collecting and selling all those digital footprints you leave online They can stitch together detailed profiles which include your browsing history, online searches and location data They then sell your profile to a company that delivers you a targeted ad. No biggie, right? 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That’s ExpressVPN.com slash Jordan YT for three extra months free ExpressVPN.com slash Jordan YT Well I’ll close with this. Capitalism in the free market, well that’s the worst form of social organization possible as I said except for all the others There is a positive relationship between economics measured by income and happiness or psychological well-being which might be the absence of misery I certainly do not believe and the evidence does not suggest that material security is sufficient I do believe however that insofar as there is a relationship between happiness and material security that the free market system has demonstrated itself as the most efficient manner to achieve that And that was actually the terms of the argument. So thus if it’s capitalism versus Marxism with regards to human happiness It’s still the case that the free market constitutes the clear winner and maybe capitalism will not solve our problems I actually don’t believe that it will. I’ve in fact argued that the proper pathway forward is one of individual moral responsibility aimed at the highest good It’s something for me that’s rooted in our underlying Judeo-Christian tradition that insists that each person is a what is sovereign in their own right and a locus of ultimate value Which is something that you can accept regardless of your religious presuppositions and something that you do accept if you participate in a society such as ours Even the fact that you vote, that you’re charged with that responsibility is an indication that our society is structured such that we presume that each person is a locus of responsibility and decision making Of such import that the very stability of the state depends upon the integrity of their character And so what I’ve been suggesting to people is that they adopt as much responsibility as they possibly can in keeping with that In keeping with their aim at the highest possible good, which to me is something approximating a balance between what’s good for you as an individual And what’s good for your family in keeping with what’s good for you as an individual And then what’s good for society in the larger frame such that it’s also good for you and your family And that’s a form of an elaborated, iterated game, a form of elaborated cooperation It’s a sophisticated way of looking at the ways society could possibly be organized And I happen to believe that that has to happen at the individual level first and that’s the pathway forward that I see And so that’s my ten minute commentary