Internal emails highlight how an advertising company can use its in-house resources to oppose public policy proposals.
One of the world’s largest advertising firms is crafting a campaign to thwart a California bill intended to enhance people’s control over the data that companies collect on them.
According to emails obtained by POLITICO, the Interpublic Group is coordinating an effort against a bill that would make it easier for people to request that data brokers — firms that collect and sell personal information — delete their dossiers.
Capitalism turns anyone into a fucking soulless ghoul.
Not necessarilly. What it does is encourage the people with sociopathic tendencies to be sociopathic, and discourages kindness and comradery.
Nothing can turn someone who doesn’t have sociopathic tendencies into an outright sociopath.
Respectfully but strongly disagree. If people’s survival requires constantly competing in scenarios that favor sociopathic actions and outright sociopaths while also repeatedly discarding kindness and devaluing communal activity in general the outcome is the same.
While you are right that the people at their cores might not be sociopathic and may be very uncomfortable and unhappy with the way they’ve become required to live their lives, the resulting society becomes as if it were entirely inhabited by sociopaths.
You can definitely condition people into acting entirely in their own self interest in the public sphere. And, unfettered capitalism is undeniably very effective at doing this. In fact, it’s arguable that governments worldwide have been trying to regulate against this with almost no effect. I think the global climate emergency is an excellent example, though far from the only one. It’s more the sum total of all humanities failures at this very thing.
Well said.
Ben the nice bus driver will kill in a war, kill fathers, sons, anyone, because he got indoctrinated (maybe brainwashed, or just convinced) to do it. We got enough of records of that to know it’s true.
This must have been the best description of this that I‘ve read so far. Thank you very much.
Sure, society as a whole is much more individualistic and sociopathic compared to human nature (as shown by anthropologists, where people just shared things in the past) as a direct result of capitalism. I just don’t think on the individual level that capitalism can change the nature of an individual to become sociopathic if they weren’t already.
With human nature, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” rings true.
Also mass industrialization and urbanization caused people to not know their communities nearly as well, if at all, leading to an even more individualistic culture.
Mental health is derived from biology, psychology, and sociology. Capitalism influences all three but especially the sociological aspect.
In other words, capitalism encourages anti-social behavior by rewarding it.
Or are you arguing that sociopaths are born that way? Because epigenetics has basically killed the nature vs. nurture debate (it was always a combination of both.)
I was indeed arguing that some people are born that way. Can you link me to some research saying otherwise?
I’m thinking of those types of people who hurt animals as a child and grew up to be serial killers.
Or to put my longer post another way, there’s never a point in your hypothetical born a sociopath argument where capitalism wasn’t exercising an influence on that organism’s mental health and how it’s expressed.
Capitalism changes us before we even hit the crib. Check out Gabor Mate M.D.'s book the Myth of Normal. It’s all about this stuff.
Mate’s work is like a poultice on our souls capitalist infection.
Listening to him speaking some of his work on YouTube has literally brought me to tears.
Like the phrase, “feeling good is good enough”, just being told it’s ok to simply exist, that existing for existence sake is good enough. Something so simple, but capitalism whittles that away from you before you even hit your 20s.
Sounds like a fascinating book!
Our culture teaches children that animals are there to serve us, even to the point of hurting them (food, medical research, hunting, etc). I believe compassion is something that can be taught to children, but I think our culture and many families within it tend to teach cruelty instead. And most of us aren’t capabable of the self reflection needed to change our disposition in regards to empathy until the prefrontal cortex develops.
Environmental factors, many of which capitalism produces as negative externalities, affect how the prefrontal cortex develops in addition to how it socializes us towards antisocial behavior. To name some of the less obvious factors: trauma, substance use, and financial stress/insecurity.
Additionally, the gene expression for anti-social behavior surely is adapted to turn on when most beneficial to the survival of the organism.
I don’t have a study handy as most of this is stuff I learned taking human services classes. I can look for a paper on nature vs nurture and antisocial behavior specifically if you’d like. Or epigenetics and antisocial behavior. If my comment wasn’t enough.
My evidence is extremely anecdotal, but generally speaking, the people I meet whi care more about other people make less money, and the people who care less about people make more money.
Children (at least in the US) are generally taught that “sharing is caring,” and yet you still see children who don’t share, along with children who do share. Regardless of this, though, I think that sharing is in our nature as humans, since what set humans apart from neanderthals is our comradery and need for socialization. There’s a reason that sociopathy is considered a disorder in our society (even though I think the term disorder is overused).
Genetic expressions can certainly change due to environmental factors, but only so much. There are probably a decent amount of people who were affected by capitalistic nurture into having more sociopathic tendencies (like, they were on some kind of line where it could’ve gone either way), but I also think that there are many people who regardless of nurture, still care about other people.
In a theoretical society that rewards caring about people, I think there would be a number of people who have purely selfish intentions who would do good things for other people purely to get ahead in life, just like those same people in capitalism would step on top of other people to get ahead in life. In this specific case, I think intentions speak more than actions.
Of course, intentions aren’t exactly something that can be measured, especially if people are dishonest about them.
I tried finding a study but everything I found was paywalled. I did find an article with numerous citations. The tldr is that genes only contribute 50%. Epigenetics, social conditioning, and environmental factors (brain damage for instance) take up the other 50%. In other words, without outside factors the antisocial personality genes don’t manifest as antisocial personality disorder. They don’t alone have enough influence.
https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/psychopath-genes-born-not-made/
Sociopathy isn’t defined by what people will do in extreme contexts, but what they’ll do in “normal” ones. Yes, humans have survived so successfully in part because we have a strong survival instinct and will do whatever it takes to live. But there’s a meaningful difference between that and sociopathy. Context matters.
Not a technical sociopath, no, but it does a damn good job of of getting people to mimic those tendencies. It just means those with the barest amount of empathy aren’t successful capitalists, they just end up exploited and happy about it.
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Am I mansplaining right now?
… and if you refuse to become a soulless ghoul then you become the merchandise.