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#4 – Democracy & Capitalism

Posted on September 29, 2019 by Epanemu

I go every morning to a bus stop, that has an interesting statement written right in front of it on a huge stadium, in big letters. It says something that could be translated into: Capitalism prefers private gain at the expense of general benefit and thus is not compatible with democracy, which must strive for the contrary, if it is not supposed to be just an empty word.

I have always, from the first moment I saw it, found it thought provoking. Firstly, I must say, that I am not a Communist, they have had their try in my motherland and it did not bring much good. But even so, I must say, it seems very true to me. You might say it is false, given the fact, that we live in democracy and some of us lived in it for more than a hundred years, in which there was capitalism put in place. Let me argue this through.

Capitalism is certainly not a bad system, it uses what everyone has in themselves, and puts it together to move humanity further at astronomic speeds (in some cases, literally). And at the same time, Democracy is the best system that has been put in place ever. As Winston Churchill famously put it: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” So what am I talking about?

The issue is not in one single of them, the issue is in the absolute lack of compatibility between them. All the populists that win the election, all the hatred between political parties, all the tribalism and cry for autocrats. This is all caused by people getting used to the way free trade works. You are not trying to

Parties with more money have bigger campaigns, thus more votes, thus more power and that power is then used to help those that gave their money to the parties, which are majoritively big corporates who have their interests lobbied into the legislative. Technological giants can rule in their own domain, and no one dares to disturb them. (Probably also because people that make decisions about those giants are usually so old, they do not have the will or capacity to understand the topic) We are being ruled by emotions, not by brains. People no more trust the experts, because they think they are the experts. Democracy was put in place to make every voice heard, to find a common ground to build on, but it developed, by human egoism into a constant fight between who is worse. This, of course, decreased popularity of election, which opened a door to opportunists that have a likeable face and know what to lie about to who and which things to boast about.

Do I have a solution? No. Obviously. To achieve that I have not thought long enough.

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