Capitalism vs. Sustainability

I think that also the problem with that is you are defining "poverty" and "wealth" according to the linear scale of money.

The global free market has created jobs for people in the third world, but are they jobs that enrich these people lives in a spiritual way?

I've had jobs where I was sitting in front a computer all day. I had money, and shelter, and food, and enough money to buy beer.

But I wasn't happy, not by a long shot.

The happiest periods of my life I remember were when I had no job and no money coming in.

 

Did it enrich their lives in a spiritual way? No. Did it enrich their lives in the fact their literal life is more secure now? Yes. It's easy to argue about spirituality over money when we all live in countries where 30% of the population doesn't live in $2 a day.

 

What about a country where the sun never shines, and it's cold and dark and miserable all the time, and everyone is fighting, there are nothing but cars anywhere, we all have to work in offices, and no-one is allowed to have any fun.

I'd rather go and live in India on 2 dollar a day. I doubt very much I'd need much more than that to be honest if I had my own house.

 

lol yea good luck in India on 2 dollars a day, seems like a glorious spiritual life until you run into the problems of no sanitation, lack of food, lack of clean water to drink, disease running rampant, lack of housing so you live in a slum in a shack built out of aluminum siding, yea good luck with that, tell people in India $2 a day is fine.

 

Different things for different people?

 

Or alternatively I could go the western way and get an office job, on loads of money with a nice comfortable life...

...until such times as i develop arthritis, or heart disease or some other western illness because I have been sitting on my ass all day crunching numbers.

Or until I suffer a stroke because the stress of my job pushed me to alcoholism and smoking tobacco.

Or I suffer a heart attack because I've not been eating properly, or living a healthy sustainable biorhythm.

 

Who cares about all that shit, anyways?


Thats not important!

 

Of course it's important!

 

Yes, I know.


That was sarcasm.

 

I got that.

You mustn't have heard the bellowing laughter that came after me getting it.

 

This medium is notoriously poor for conveying laughter.



Maybe that's why Balbus is such a grouch...

 

All of those can be easily avoided by personal choices.

 

That is true, but that's how our culture expects us to live.


And most people can't stand up to that kind of influence.

 

Yeah, such as choosing to fuck off out of the system and live a more sustainable lifestyle.

BUt not everyone has that choice.

Do you think if it was really down to choice, people wouldn't choose them?

 

Well, some people choose comfort over freedom.


As evidenced by the fact that fascism is growing by leaps and bounds around the world.

 

I never found the whole thing very comfortable. I just felt shit the whole time.

 

I DO think people have a choice. I realized many years ago that IF I were unlucky enough to live in the city, I would spend all my free time studying up on how to live off the land, put out lots of feelers, and eventually find myself a place out in the sticks where I could at least feed myself. So, if I can think of it, so can others. And it is entirely possible. Because people do it all the time. That was what the "back to the land" movement was in the late 60's and early 70's. People getting out of the city and into a more REAL lifestyle so they could learn to be more responsible for their own lives.



Thing is, I don't really see capitalism VERSUS sustainability, because they are not mutually exclusive. You can have "capitalism" in a sustainable society. In fact, I see "capitalism" is just a fancy and handy word for something that ALWAYS happens when people trade one item for another of value. Which is always gonna happen, because people are always gonna NEED things they can't make or do themselves. AND because inevitably, it's just too damn hard to carry around barter items, so people eventually invent something (wampum beads) like paper money, just to make it handier.

 

Yea, comfort over freedom. Very short sighted. Because it ain't all that comfortable when you are not free.

 

Yeah people do it all the time, whist the rest are stuck in dead end job, working their fingers to the bone trying to pay the bills.

There are choices and opportunities, but not everyone has them, in fact most people don't.

 

Actually everyone does have choices like I said. But the wisdom or knowledge to MAKE them is the thing lacking. And it takes a bit of time to prepare for changes. But nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head and saying "you have to live a certain way". Unlike someplace like Gaza where they really have very little choice... Perhaps this is the greatest part of the problem, people who have gotten themselves in too deep with "CONSUMING" because it never occurred to them that it might not be such a good thing to go so far into debt. And then they feel trapped because they have all those bills to pay. BUT, they DID have a choice, whether they knew it or not. They just chose to put themselves in the hole.

I discovered something when I came to WV. There are SO MANY empty houses and unused farmland everywhere. There have, in the past, been MANY old homesteads just ripe for CARETAKING. (That's how I ended up owning this one - lifetime caretaker...) Those owners who felt they had no choice moved away to look for work ($), but they are so attached to their old family farms they hang onto the places hoping someday to go back. Now,I am reading a lot about hundreds of empty homes in the suburbs, people kicked out for not being able to pay their mortgage ($). So, we have all these empty/abandoned/unused farms with houses that COULD feed and shelter MANY people who have no place else to go, while the homelessness and number of folks on welfare and foodstamps just grows and grows rather than CROPS... There is no balance to any of this, and it just seems, well, STUPID actually...

I dunno. Ya MAYBE only got one life, why waste it, just in case, being miserable/hungry/homeless/a slave to THINGS and the tax man.....