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ScrimbloBimblo  The Loveable Scrunko  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2629 thread views

Where Have All the Good Men Gone and Where Are All the Populists?

When it comes to the spicier cultural issues that generate flame wars online, I tend to find myself falling on the side of the conservatives. The exceptions to this are LGBT rights and drug use, but these days, these issues seem to divide more on old/young lines than conservative/liberal lines anyway.

I'm strongly against all forms of gun control. I believe that nations often have the responsibility to get involved in the affairs of other nations, including militarily. My diet consists mostly of red meat and I have a longstanding beef with vegans. I find media that overtly panders to minorities irritating whether or not I'm in said minority. I believe that wealthy liberals are intentionally and maliciously fanning the flames of race and gender conflicts to break down community bonds to make people easier to manipulate. Yadda yadda.

In short, when it comes to cultural views, I'm a milquetoast example of exactly what you'd expect to find from a young, online, cultural conservative, or at least libertarian.

And yet, despite all of this, I'm a Socialist. Not a Socialist-lite or Social Democrat in the vein of Bernie Sanders, but a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist.

I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core. I believe the overwhelming majority of working people in the US (and probably the world) are being ruthlessly exploited by a class of nobles we'd all be better off without. As a result, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to favor trade unions, strikes, and literally anything that protects workers from corporations. I believe the only realistic long-term result of unchecked Capitalism with rapidly improving technology is a dystopia. Yadda yadda.

Now, neither my cultural beliefs nor my economic beliefs are particularly unusual. The proportion of people in the US identifying as an Economic Leftists or Socialists has gone up every year since 1989, and the cultural conservatives, reactionaries, anti-progs, and anti-woke types are growing rapidly as well. Yet, I've never met anyone else in the overlap.

The combination of cultural Conservatism and economic Socialism is what's historically been called Populism, so that's how I'll be using that word. (I'm clarifying this because some people call Trump a "populist", but he's about as anti-socialist as someone can be, so I'm not using that word the same way as these people.)

Looking to the past, I can see lots of examples of this kind of Populism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but practically nothing in the present. Libertarians are culturally liberal and economically conservative, and there's loads of them, so you'd think the opposite would also be true, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

With this in mind, I have 3 questions for this community:

  1. Why are there drastically fewer Populists today than there were in the past?

  2. Besides "Populist", what are some other names for the belief system I'm describing?

  3. Where are all the Populists that are left? I assume there's not literally zero, and that some of them hang out online together somewhere, so where are they? Are there populist blogs? Populist forums? Populist subreddits?

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I don't believe that all of the the people that make up corporations are evil, they follow the same incentives as the rest of the population. But I believe these incentives will lead these corporations to evolutionarily optimize for things other than the good of human beings, and doing this is the closest thing to "evil" that I believe in.

Even if the CEO of a megacorp is a genuinely good person deep down, he is still obligated by his shareholders to maximize short-term profits over literally everything else, including the wellbeing of employess and sometimes even the satisfaction of consumers. Think about how every single large tech company turned on it's userbase the second they realized they could make more money by selling their users' data and intentionally making their own products worse in order to extract the maximum amount of money.

I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core... I believe these incentives will lead these corporations to evolutionarily optimize for things other than the good of human beings.

Sure, and people can be (and are) incentivized to optimize for things other than the good of human beings.

Corporations can do more harm than good in an environment that incentives them to do so. They can also do more good than harm in a different environment. The most productive countries in the world are countries that try to set up an environment that enables companies to produce surplus.

Are you willing to claim that corporations as they exist in America do more harm than good? Do you think an economy could support anything resembling a modern standard of living without them? Are you willing to sacrifice 80% of GDP to get rid of corporations?

They can also do more good than harm in a different environment.

I can agree with this, but I would have difficulty calling an organization not optimized for profit a "corporation". This may be getting into no-true-scotsman territory though.

The most productive countries in the world are countries that try to set up an environment that enables companies to produce surplus.

I don't think productivity is an inherent good if the average person doesn't benefit from it. Take South Korea. Sure they're better than North Korea, but they still have the highest suicide rate in the first world, despite being one of its most productive nations.

Are you willing to claim that corporations as they exist in America do more harm than good?

I'm honestly not sure, but regardless of my answer, I think they do a lot of harm, the majority of which isn't strictly necessary for the good. It's like if I were in the trolley problem (5 on the first track, 1 on the second) and I flipped the switch, but then stabbed two people on the trolley. Sure I'm technically coming out ahead, but I'm still probably not the best person to be driving the trolley.

Do you think an economy could support anything resembling a modern standard of living without them?

Since you can imagine an organization acting differently in a different environment, it can't be too much of a stretch to imagine them continuing to be productive with a different organizational structure.

Are you willing to sacrifice 80% of GDP to get rid of corporations?

No, but I'm willing to sacrifice, say, 20% of GDP to convert them to worker-owned collectives. It doesn't matter to me if the pie is getting bigger if the average person's slice is getting smaller.

e is still obligated by his shareholders to maximize short-term profits over literally everything else, including the wellbeing of employess and sometimes even the satisfaction of consumers.

Is that why all those tech companies decided to ban a bunch of cash cows because their employees thought they were mean and bad? Indeed. What we see is that these large companies trend toward a bizarre level of cowtowing to employee preferences.

In the end, the question of evil was probably the least important of my points.

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