Comment on Too broke for therapy
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months agomore optimistically we will hopefully be able to dismantle capitalism and stop expecting people to work their bodies and minds to the breaking point to get basic necessities.
A not insignificant amount of people are simply not capable of sustainably doing much traditional work at all, and it’s fucking inhumane to demand they do so regardless when we have robots and regularly throw away like 40% of our food.
OpenStars@discuss.online 6 months ago
Is that realistic though? I mean obviously it is optimistic ofc. Looking at the behavior of the likes of Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Trump, etc., I don’t think they care about how sustainable kindness is or could be, based on technology or whatever, and there is an insubstantial chance that for them even so much as the cruelty may not be the point, but rather as they chase their dreams (of making daddy proud of them or whatever), it becomes a “game” (see also Wolf of Wall Street) to “win”. At which point the needless deaths of literally millions (and soon billions?) does not even bring them glee, so much as it fails to register entirely on their scope. i.e. there seems a deep disconnect between humanitarian principles and how daily life works inside of one of those companies, even as those mega-corporations put other companies - and more notably mom & pop shops - out of business.
So I don’t know about actually being able to dismantle capitalism (then again I’m not arguing against efforts to try), just saying that we all need to do our own parts, for what is right in front of us.
Also a lot of these types of activities - e.g. providing therapy as mentioned in the OP - used to be provided by religious services. People go to church, and old people scream at the young people “don’t make that decision!”, like “don’t marry him/her of all people!”, or even just “get up off your butt and go get a real job!” As society transitions away from that religious framework, we need to ensure that these basic human needs get met in other ways, which oftentimes I think they just do not. In the old TV show Friends, people would meet in a coffee shop and discuss their lives, providing feedback, offering to be a sounding board, picking up the slack by taking someone in if they needed a place to sleep, etc. But irl, how many people have such “friends” to do this for them, I wonder? Especially if e.g. a young person flees the rural areas they grew up in - an extremely common scenario, as in roughly 100% of all rural people that I have ever met (tbf, I am someone who lives in a city:-P) - and so leaves behind those old connections from their youth.
So in essence we are saying similar things, just my focus is on a smaller scale while you are talking about bigger things, which we may never see happen in our lifetimes - especially as the entire world transition harder & deeper into fascism. (especially when the only counter trend to that seems to be neoliberalism which is only like 1 step removed?)