Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people […] Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.
While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”.
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A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality.
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Numerous academics […] have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.
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It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables [such as the use of smartphones], where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.
The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters?
Economic systems are mostly about incentives. What are people incentivised to do by receiving the most reward.
Capitalism incentivises destroying competition, creating monopolies, expanding the wealth gap, donating to ineffective charities for tax breaks, paying employees as little as possible to protect profits, lobbying congress for no labor protections, and filling the media with nonsense to distract from all this.
Communism makes it so, in principle, you have no reason to overwork yourself, other than if you enjoy what you are doing.
At least that is my understanding.
In reality, people in Communist countries didn’t give a crap about their work, because there were no actual incentives whatsoever, thinking for yourself was discouraged, showing initiative was heavily penalized, there was no competition to force anyone to improve what they were doing, there was barely any chance to advance (unless you were an apparatchik willing to literally go over bodies), no chance whatsoever to influence where the country as a whole or even your local community was heading towards. On top of that, you still had to overwork yourself if some fancy five year plan needed at least some real results to go with the made-up numbers (or at least pretend to be doing so, provided your country’s ruling party has mellowed a little, shackled off Stalinism/Maoism, but not actually tackled the rampant corruption yet [none of them ever did]).
The idea - in theory - was that e.g. a factory or farm was owned “by the people”, but to the people themselves it just felt that they and their labor were being exploited by an overbearing state and its faceless bureaucrats, similar to how they were previously being exploited by capitalist or feudal owners of the means of production. Importantly however, there were barely any niches in this system, unlike in capitalist or feudal systems, for some equally determined and lucky individuals to build up something for themselves. The most you could actually hope for is retreat into the private sphere and be left alone there, even though you knew that there were at least some informers among your closest family members and friends.
Seriously, have you ever actually seen footage from a factory in a Communist country? A few minutes of that should tell anyone what a terrible idea this whole thing is. Here’s an example: https://youtu.be/emoF0EFxjjA?t=339 Compare this to a capitalist factory from the exact same time: https://youtu.be/cVabxDEJPgM It’s not just the lack of modern tools and machinery, but also the organization, work ethos, even things as simple as making the workplace nicely lit, clean and safe.
For each of the countless flaws of capitalism, Communism has ten more, usually far more serious ones too. From exploitation to environmental destruction, it was all worse. These issues remain unsolved equations to this day, because almost every one of them has as its defining variable humans, these greedy creatures who are simply not suitable creatures for this kind of system. Maybe capitalism works better, because it not only rewards this greed, but actually uses it as a mechanism to force the system and its participants to constantly reinvent themselves. Not always in good ways, perhaps not even most of the time, but at least there is change happening.
I find it honestly perplexing that Communism is still being brought up by people who consider themselves smart as some kind of viable alternative, even though we’ve seen it fail again and again in the real world, every single time. It has never worked, ever. Yes, I’m sure they were all not real Communists. You would be one though if you were in charge though and because you would be, it would actually work this time. Maybe this time it can be actually done for real, with AI or quantum computers or something.
If this comes off as a bit abrasive, I apologize. Not my intention and perhaps due to a particularly unpleasant interaction I’ve just had with another user on this site. It’s mostly an expression of frustration in regards to anyone who is bringing Communism up in any context other than crimes against humanity.
You wrote a lot, and apologies, but I didn’t read it all. Communism is an economic theory. Most of your examples are government misconduct, which happens both under communism and capitalism.
I don’t think either are a good system and would like us to work past the need for capital at all.