Is it? Our system from the beginning was optimized for personal liberty, almost always at the cost of community. Those same values enabled and entrenched the classist society we have today, then further bolstered a completely useless and unresponsive political class. That's by design from the beginning. Oligarchy under the guise of false democracy... has it ever been any other way in this country? If not, there's no reason to mince words.
> Our system from the beginning was optimized for personal liberty,
Really? The US had legal chattel slavery for the first 89 years of its independent existence. And the abolition of slavery was followed not long after by the imposition of legally enforced racial segregation, which then endured for another (approximately) 90 years. Doesn’t sound at all like a “system from the beginning… optimized for personal liberty”
They didn't say everybody's personal liberty. Of course working people are still all subject to exploitation hand over fist. Regardless, your comment is nothing but a pointless deviation.
Legally enforced racial segregation denied everybody's personal liberty – although of course, African-Americans bore the brunt of that denial.
Berea College, founded by abolitionists in 1855, was the only desegregated and coeducational college in Kentucky – it admitted all students irrespective of their race or sex. Even though the state of Kentucky enforced racial segregation on all public educational institutions, Berea College was exempt from that as a private institution. Until 1904, when the Kentucky state legislature passed the "Day Law" (named for its sponsor, Democratic politician Carl Day), banning racially integrated private educational institutions. Since Berea was the only such institution in the entire state, it was a direct attack on Berea College's existence. Berea College refused to comply with the new law, and was convicted of the crime of being a racially integrated school; the College appealed the conviction all the way to the US Supreme Court, who in the 1908 case of Berea College v Kentucky, upheld Kentucky's law, on the rather specious grounds that the law did not infringe personal liberty, since Berea College is a corporation, and corporations don't have constitutional rights (such as personal liberty). Berea College was forced to expel all its African-American students; Andrew Carnegie gave them a large grant to open a new college for African-American students (the Lincoln Institute), although it was never very successful. Berea resumed admitting African-American students in 1950, when the Kentucky legislature revoked the ban on racial integration in private education.
So legally enforced racial segregation didn't just infringe on the personal liberty of African-Americans, it also infringed on the personal liberty of European-Americans, by denying them the freedom to associate with African-Americans when they freely desired to do so
Sure. I didn't need and I doubt anybody else needed any convincing of this, but it's still an utter deviation from and completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Congratulations on derailing yet another meaningful conversation into a one-sided race war.
Are you referring to chattel slaves and victims of racial segregation as working people? If so that seems like a very simplistic way to reframe it when their status hinged entirely on the color of their skin. I ask because I may be misreading your comment entirely and I don’t want to be uncharitable in my interpretation.
You are misreading, if reading at all. I have no idea what you're responding to. I definitely didn't do that.
However, their status only ostensibly depended on the color of their skin. Their function was of course literally to labor for the profits of the southern gentile.
Racism is a byproduct of capitalism. The Black Panthers did not repeat this ad nauseam for no reason.
If that were true, how do you explain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union (calling the Soviet Union "state capitalist" doesn't help here–it threatens to dilute the definition of "capitalist" to the point of meaninglessness; also, many of the Maoist advocates of "the Soviet Union was state capitalist" theory consider Soviet state capitalism to have begun with Stalin's death, yet the worst of Soviet racism, its genocidal excesses of mass deportation and mass murder, the antisemitic Doctors Plot, etc, occurred under Stalin's rule)
Is there any evidence for a correlation between how much capitalism a society has and how much racism it has? I'm not aware of any. Without evidence, it is just an unjustified assertion.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. Regardless of which $ideology you favor, you can't use HN merely/primarily as a platform for propagating it—that's not what this site is for.
Obviously, personal attacks and name-calling aren't ok either, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
None of the issues you raise are inherent to individualism, you can find historic examples of community-focused societies that also have social classes and useless politicians.
You also seen to be coming at it with a personal preference towards the community rather that the individual. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that and both have pros/cons, but course you aren't going to like the focus on individual freedoms.
Oligarchy was also absolutely not the plan from the beginning. Washington set the standard for a two-term limit precisely because he didn't want to see it turn into a lifetime appointment. What we have today evolved over time, though I would argue or problem today is fascism rather than an oligarchy.
I would only disagree that such people are inherently bad. Rather, they are fulfilling the role that the dictates of capitalism requires of their given class.
All people are inherently good, however all people are inherently social beings. Since capitalism is dominated by humans' relations to capital instead of humans' relations to eachother, the social nature of the human species is repressed, and as such people cannot be their true selves under capitalism.
Capitalists would love nothing more than for you to believe that some of them are good and some of them are bad, which is the guiding narrative behind nearly all capitalist propaganda. In reality, they are humans just like ourselves and the system is to blame.
A strong statement. I think it's more likely that most people are inherently ignorant clannish jerks who care to some degree about the fifty or so people they interact with often enough to see as real humans, and largely fail to give much moral consideration one way or another to everyone else except in ways that signal the virtues that gain them social status inside of their close circle. Some people are better or worse than that, and a few people are on the extremes at either end.
I don't think people are cookie-cutter clones of each other, or blank slates at birth either. There's hereditary/genetic components to selfishness, psychopathy, etc. Not every human born will be compatible with a given societal system. Some personalities, whether by evolution or upbringing or personal development, will succeed more in some systems than others.
Our current system favors sociopaths. I'd say they are, as a general rule, overwhelmingly bad.
