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May 25, 2021Liked by Caitlin Johnstone

Nice to hear about my cousins in Alaska. Thank you for the story, I dont know the phrase in my language but we have the same concept.

I find people who grew up here are very good at spotting sociopathic behavior, maybe because we need goodwill from one another.

We also have stories about the necessity of being inclusive since we dont know when that person may save our lives. So when we need to deal with someone their value to our collective survival is heavily weighted in whatever outcome for this person. Obviously these are the old ways, and there is some study of Inuit customary law, which I'm definitely not an expert.

Again, thank you, and keep it up.

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A funny complaint. It's a typical rhetorical dodge for socialists to tell their critics "But you use government streets and schools, and sidewalks and water supplies, and retirement plans and healthcare."

Of course, when the state monopolizes by force a certain part of the economy like schools or water supplies, you have to use them, especially if you aren't extremely rich and can't afford to both pay taxes and still have money left over to pay for private schools or bottled water for everything. And socialist services are often crapulent: in the US government schools are centers of bullying, and create residential racial and class segregation (you can only go to a school you think is better if your family buys or rents a house in the right district), and have high drop out and low graduation rates, as well as low test scores. And government water supplies are full of bacteria and lead - which is usually only covered in a partisan way, but it has been and is true in many jurisdictions ruled by both major parties, from Flint, Michigan to Washington, D.C.

It is a common smear used by leftist writers and comedians that Ayn Rand used Social Security and Medicare when she was old. But everyone uses those things, after being taxed for decades to fund them. Rand was additionally self-employed, as a writer, which means in the U.S. she paid the tax workers pay AND the tax employers pay, and as a self-employed person could not collect unemployment in periods where she was not being paid if she had writer's block or no one was publishing her.

You should read "Anarchy, State, and Utopia." In a "capitalist" system, as opposed to a corporate statist system, you are free to form communes or create worker owned enterprises. In a state socialist system, or a "capitalist" country with state socialized industries, like education or retirement, I am not free to choose where my kid goes to school or where I invest for my retirement.

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I think this is a great piece and makes some important points about how people are increasingly challenged to find new innovative ways to create situations in which their creativity and the creativity of others can thrive. We definitely need more of a creative dialogue about making creativity and creative work an "essential" part of the economy. AI, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and related things CANNOT replace true human creativity and reason. The problem is that not enough people are being given the chance, opportunity, or guidance which we all need at different times, to fully develop and unleash our creativity.

The idea of a society organized around the purpose of allowing everyone to fully develop their innate natural creative potential, their powers of creative reason, is a win-win situation for everyone i.e. you directly benefit from your neighbor developing his/her own creative potential to the fullest of their ability, and they likewise benefit from you developing your innate creative powers to the fullest extent possible.

This question actually lies at the root of the conceptual development of the nation state, which is what globalization was largely designed to attack. The idea of the nation state arose as the result of a conceptual leap whereby the feudal system of hereditary rule by a few individuals was overturned based on the idea that every individual had an innate creative potential, a capability for creative reason and love, and it was the ruler of a nation or the government of a nation's responsibility to promote the common good in such a way that this innate creative potential could be developed in every individual. That's ACTUALLY where the idea of the nation state comes from, which largely emerged out of what we today call the Renaissance. Before that, nation states had no real existence, there were empires, Europe was essentially a collection of fiefdoms ruled by a hereditary class. In a sense, we can understand much of the history of the last 500 years as essentially an attempt to undo the progress of the Renaissance, the win over the oligarchy that occurred for even just a brief period of time, and whose consequences the oligarchy has still been trying to undo with things like globalization, artificial debates over false binaries like "capitalism" or "communism," artificial cults and ideologies. There was an oligarchy and individuals and groups fighting against the oligarchical system of rule much before there was any notion of capitalism or communism.

It's arguably very helpful to go even further back, and consider something like the Greek story of Prometheus as told by Aeschylus in his famous "Prometheus Bound." The titan Prometheus stole fire from the Gods in order to give it to humankind, such that we might have knowledge of "fire." Zeus and the Olympians wished to keep human beings in darkness, ignorant, living in caves, while Prometheus sought to free them from their servitude, even sacrificing himself, letting himself be chained to a rock with a crow pecking at his liver. However, while Prometheus endured punishment for thousands of years, he knew (Prometheus means "foresight") that Zeus would ultimately meet his demise. Prometheus' actions were based on foresight, and an understanding of the true nature of human beings. The Olympians are those who reject this notion of humanity--the Promethean--and wish to deny humankind knowledge of "fire." The battle has been raging ever since.

Caitlin's writing is a fine example of Promethean "fire."

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Your motivation is exactly what ours was in the hippy community: not to live with complacency towards the capitalist system, but to try to make a different system while having to live with it for the time being.

And we thought that we could set an example of how others could separate themselves from the system, but we ran up against the propaganda machine which made our lives irrelevant and our beliefs laughable.

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Very good, Cait. But you know, what I do with my fiction stories is to try to get people to imagine a post capitalist world. So far they don't get much attention.

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This is inspiring, hopeful, and amazing! Thank you!

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Because of what you write, you've already left your children -- and the rest of us -- a better world.

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The problem isn't capitalism or socialism. The problem is living in a society so large that anomie develops and government is required.

Those lead to both capitalism and socialism, which are both just different mechanisms of animating a dead corpse of a society.

The ultimate end of all this is what we are now approaching, which is the merging of human with machine.

Civilization-Hoax.com

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What a fantastic, humbling and inspiring piece. People who come from the right place, right to the core of their being, are so incredibly rare. You're one of those.

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I like your focus on health. Social health ought to be the North Star of politics, not financial wealth.

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-----"They claim that because I have links to Patreon and Paypal at the bottom of my articles I am hypocritical for criticizing capitalism, which is silly for a number of reasons."-----

Yet you also have a link to your Bitcoin address. Exiting is a sliding scale, and one can opt out to whatever degree is practical for his/her situation. Every increment on the scale makes one that much more free.

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We need to implement Universal Basic Income: to detach survival from what we do.

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