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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy
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Especially in business, it's like, who are we competing against - hostile aliens?? Nah, it's just us humans, trying to get by. We could be tossing eachother softballs, everyone winning, but instead there's this self-fulfilling fear of an existential threat from "rivals."
Omg you knocked it out of the park with this one. Everything is such a race to the bottom in this system.
It's always about competitive undercutting, and what's the most ruthless cold-blooded calculations one can get away with, and this Type A disease of being obsessed with zero-sum conflict to reveal who's the absolute best of everything.
"Why can't we just chill and it'll get there when it gets there?"
"What?! Look at (for example) China! Do you see them chilling? No! They normalized 12 hour shift burnout before us, this will increase their production 3%, and then undercut us by 12% and steal all our business and we're screwed! So we need to squeeze our people harder to beat them!"
"...And then they'll squeeze their people harder...so...?"
"..."
"..."
"This might be a good time to inform you we expect you to train the new overseas team before we'll surprise ambush-fire your entire department."
...Repeat the above but for undocumented immigrant labor...then maybe child labor...then probably right back around to slavery again...
"Oh no we all agreed this would be so bad for humanity, but gee, the competition did it and we wanna stay competitive so..."
Man seriously why can't we all just be doing our own thing lol...
God yeah, a hundred percent, great illustration of exactly what I was alluding to. It's so short sighted. Even the benefits are nothing compared to the heights we could reach if we oriented our economics around coopération.
Cruelly, this system "works" (or at least is successful in perpetuating its existence) right up until the point of resource collapse (or revolution, if we're looking at the good ending).
Thanks for your reply. I was pretty happy with this comment, so am chuffed to hear you appreciated it.