Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
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Re: Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
#2It's not a religion, because it is not based on faith. It consistently delivers results whether its practitioners believe in it or not.
Re: Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
#3It's not a religion, because it is not based on faith. It consistently delivers results whether its practitioners believe in it or not.
The faith part comes from interpreting the economic results of capitalism. Do you accept it as a useful economic system given all the problems you see with it? Are you willing to entertain the possibility of alternatives? If not, why?
Re: Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
#4It's not a religion, because it is not based on faith. It consistently delivers results whether its practitioners believe in it or not.
It would appear that the 40 year experiment in the west has failed completely though.
Re: Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
#5It's not a religion, because it is not based on faith. It consistently delivers results whether its practitioners believe in it or not.
The faith part comes from interpreting the economic results of capitalism. Do you accept it as a useful economic system given all the problems you see with it? Are you willing to entertain the possibility of alternatives? If not, why?
It takes a lot of faith to overlook the many impending environmental disasters.
Many also cling to the false dichotomy between capitalism and "soviet russia / north korea / venezuela"
Re: Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
#6It's not a religion, because it is not based on faith. It consistently delivers results whether its practitioners believe in it or not.
The faith part comes from interpreting the economic results of capitalism. Do you accept it as a useful economic system given all the problems you see with it? Are you willing to entertain the possibility of alternatives? If not, why?
> The faith part comes from interpreting the economic results of capitalism
Interpreting results comes from evidence, not faith. One constructs a theory based on evidence. One tests the theory by seeing if future evidence behaves like the theory suggests.
Religion isn't like that, it does not predict things in a way that is testable. Creationism, for example, makes zero predictions and so is not at all testable, making it a faith, not science.
> Do you accept it as a useful economic system given all the problems you see with it?
Yes. Without question. Look around you - all the goodies you have were created by capitalism.
> Are you willing to entertain the possibility of alternatives? If not, why?
All the alternatives proposed have a historical record of being worse, often far worse.
Re: Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
#7It's not a religion, because it is not based on faith. It consistently delivers results whether its practitioners believe in it or not.
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Re: Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
#8It's not a religion, because it is not based on faith. It consistently delivers results whether its practitioners believe in it or not.
Capitalism solves things with a good enough neural net. Socialism says that it can solve problems analytically, but it just uses a smaller inferior neural net of centralized bureaucracy with access to less data, and a slower learning rate.
Re: Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
#9It's not a religion, because it is not based on faith. It consistently delivers results whether its practitioners believe in it or not.
It would appear that the 40 year experiment in the west has failed completely though.
This comment is deeply insulting to everybody in history who has lived in a society that has in fact completely failed. Respect your relative paradise.
I guarantee you won't discover anything superior to "the west" unless you acknowledge the many things it has gotten right.
Re: Review: Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
The faith part comes from interpreting the economic results of capitalism. Do you accept it as a useful economic system given all the problems you see with it? Are you willing to entertain the possibility of alternatives? If not, why?
It takes a lot of faith to overlook the many impending environmental disasters. Many also cling to the false dichotomy between capitalism and "soviet russia / north korea / venezuela"
> It takes a lot of faith to overlook the many impending environmental disasters.
Capitalism is the only hope of fending off environmental disaster, because it is the only system capable of producing the surplus needed to deal with it. When people are starving, they lose all interest in anything but their next meal, regardless of how they get it.
For example, the US was the first to clean up its waterways, and this is because the surplus generated by capitalism made it fairly easy.