In a society where people are routinely conditioned to tolerate evil for convenience, it's very easy to convince them to buy even greater convenience with even greater evil.
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In a society where people are routinely conditioned to tolerate evil for convenience, it's very easy to convince them to buy even greater convenience with even greater evil.
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If someone can watch YouTube videos of young Congolese guys digging Coltan in an unventilated mine shaft without tools or PPE on a tantalum-containing smartphone that they're essentially required to own, then you only need to make their next thought "well, I couldn't have a smartphone without that happening" and now they'll accept any injustice. You just have to convince them that it's _their_ fault and that they had no choice. Then you can make as many utilitarian arguments as you want.
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Capitalism paves the way for fascism by spreading lies like "You couldn't have cheap, accessible technology without slave labor. No one likes it, but that's just how it has to be." Of course you can, it just doesn't make a few hundred people wealthier than the rest of humanity.
But if you believe that, it's just a few steps to "You can't have safety and security without ethnic cleansing. No one likes it, that's just how it has to be."
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I'm not saying "smartphone bad," or "socialism is when no smartphone," or even "smartphone socialist hypocrite." those arguments have all been made with varying degrees of sincerity and they're all garbage.
I'm saying bad things are bad. Conflict minerals are bad, hell, probably most manned mining operations are bad. Slave labor is bad. Sweatshop assembly is bad. But none of them are necessary to make your life easy. They're necessary to make a few people rich.
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We condition people to tolerate evil for convenience when they could have convenience _without_ evil. But that doesn't play into the ruling class ideology. It's important for the hegemon to instill the idea that exploitation (and therefor incredible wealth extraction) is necessary for "civilized life" to continue.
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You can see it in the median attitude towards crime. Sure, people care when folks get hurt, but they care a lot more when someone is trying to "get a leg up on them by compromising their morals." They resent criminals for "cheating" at life, breaking the rules that the rest of us have struggled to follow and being rewarded for it. They hate the thief who steals their neighbor's car not because they love their neighbor, but because they could have stolen that car a hundred times and didn't.
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But if you teach people implicitly that compromising their morals will improve their material conditions, even at risk to their safety (or, in some cases, their "soul") then you are preparing a lot of them to take that deal when the going gets tough.
Leftism rejects this idea, positing that cooperation is actually better than even the most morally compromised form of competition.
Fascism, however, feeds on it by offering impossible comfort through dehumanizing compromise.
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G gustavinobevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org shared this topic
