re: The first 25 minutes of the latest All in podcast is a master class in capitalism

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And by denigrating or even penalizing productive capacity and achievement, left-wing ideologues promote a stagnant society in which laborers are discouraged from ever becoming owners.

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It's not just left wing. This is rampant in populism, too, doing the same strategy.

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Another important insight is the way political language is often repurposed where terms like “justice” and “equity” are used as semantic camouflage, obscuring policies and trade-offs that might be viewed far less favorably if described in more direct and precise terms.

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Yes 100%. Also applies to my statement above.

Removing personal responsibility from the equation, be it outward leftism or populism, removes agency from the person.

This reminds me of old school Jordan Peterson before he got guru-itis. His best stuff is his lectures from before he got internet famous. This video is probably my favorite (it keeps getting deleted from the internet)



Some exerpts:

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And so if your life isn’t everything it could be, you could ask yourself: well, what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you? You’d be who knows how much more efficient; ten times more efficient, twenty times more efficient; that’s the Pareto distribution. You have no idea how efficient efficient people get. It’s completely… it’s off the charts. And if we all got our act together collectively and stopped making things worse – because that’s another thing people do all the time: not only do they not do what they should to make things better, they actively attempt to make things worse, because they’re spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things bundled together in an absolutely pathological package – if people stopped really really trying just to make things worse, we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that. So there’s this weird dynamic that’s part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability, social judgement, both of which are major causes of suffering, and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt.

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And so, you know, you think: well, there’s nine billion, seven billion people in the world, we’re going to be peak at about nine billion by the way, and then it’ll decline rapidly, but seven billion people in the world and who are you? You’re just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, but that’s simply not the case. It’s the wrong model, because you’re at the center of a network. You’re a node in a network. Of course, that’s even more true now that we have social media. You’ll know a thousand people, at least, over the course of your life, and they’ll know a thousand people each, and that puts you one person away from a million, and two persons away from a billion! And that’s how you’re connected and the things you do – they’re like dropping a stone in a pond – the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can’t fully comprehend.

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And this is the best part

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And it means that the things that you do and that you don’t do are far more important than you think! And so if you act that way, of course, the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do. And you might say: well, that’s better than living a meaningless existence; it’s better for it to matter. But, I mean, if you really ask yourself would you be so sure, if you had the choice: I can live with no responsibility whatsoever, the price I pay is that nothing matters; or: I can reverse it, and everything matters, but I have to take the responsibility that’s associated with that. It’s not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path. Now, when you say: well, nihilists suffer dreadfully because there’s no meaning in their life and they still suffer; yeah, but the advantage is they have no responsibility. So that’s the payoff, and I actually think that’s the motivation. Saying: well, I can’t help being nihilistic, all my belief systems have collapsed; it’s like: yeah, maybe, maybe you’ve just allowed them to collapse because it’s a hell of a lot easier than acting them out. And the price you pay is some meaningless suffering, but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you, and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr, so that’s a pretty good deal, all things considered. Especially when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world.

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Anyone who has dealt with one of the people in bold/underlined has an intrinsic understanding of the problem, whether that understanding makes it to the rational part of their brain or not. That is describing Chamath's dad in the clip, for instance, or the tens of thousands of men in the Rust Belt who gave up when their suboptimal factory job left and they gave up on life and turned to addiction instead, creating future generations of pathology with no concept of hope.

These are the people who think Elon has a trillion dollars in a bank account, swimming in his gold coin vault like Scrooge McDuck. The worst are the somewhat educated/working people who believe this, especially, ironically, if they have a retirement account.