Individual is part of nuclear family, nuclear family is part of extended family, extended family is part of tribe, etc. When one part is in need, the others jump in to help.
Ancient egypt? Roman times? Medieval times? Byzantine times? Pre-colonial Philippines? Pre-colonial America?
I think it may have started in the late 1800s at the earliest. I would need a bit more evidence to be convinced that your model of individual to nuclear to extended etc has been a thing longer than a few centuries, vs the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states. We just had clans which were all our family. A fellow villager wasn't much different than a cousin. The individual and nuclear family, not so much a thing.
Probably you're focusing too much on the parent comment's mention of nuclear family. Even that, despite only being named a few decades ago, is likely to exist to some extent. Even in some ancient tribe or village, most people would favour their spouse (or equivalent) or child over a cousin or niece/nephew if some dispute formed. That hardly seems controversial.
in which they lived in families, extended families and tribes as the primary units. I didn't understand your argument at all.
Moreover, actions have consequences. Instead of traveling and having fun when you are able bodied, you can work more, save and invest your money for the future and safe-guarding against situations like these. Other people have chosen to do that. In the end of the day, all that outcry about capitalism is the classic "I made the wrong decisions and I want society to bail me out of them".
After that, tell me how someone who became disabled after an accident which they themselves did not cause, made the wrong decision?
Thirdly, tell me how someone who lived perfectly healthy just happend to have some blood clot shot into their brain suddenly, made the wrong decision?
For someone who has been born disabled, the conversation should be moved to the people who brought them to life and are responsible for their survival.
Which wrong decision did the parents of a disabled person make? Not getting prenatal genetic testing and an illegal abortion?
Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough).
It's probably helpful to at least expand 'productivity' to something beyond just what is useful for your work. Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work. Ditto spending time with friends and whatever else that doesn't have anything to do with work.
I hope we figure out what to do about disabilities, since the current status quo is inhumane in large parts of the world (and even in places with good benefits systems, getting that support isn't trivial).
How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
People keep mindlessly saying this but I have never seen evidence for it. Before money was ever invented the idea was already there that if you're healthy you can sustain yourself. All 'capitalism' did was saying "and most people nowadays perform abstract services in trade for an abstraction of a promise of a pinky swear saying "if you trade this pinky swear to me you'll get some food".
It's not 'economic systems that are fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently', it's a fundamental reality of life. Either you are capable of getting enough food for you and your family, either directly by farming, gathering or hunting, or you are not.
Yes, you need food. Guess what, we have plenty of food. But the system for allocating food says this guy doesn't get any because he's disabled.
I'm not saying it's an ought situation or even an is situation; it's that I disagree with his diagnosis of what causes it.
(I think about the "worst system, except for all the other systems" quote often)
"Capatalism" means something different in the USA than it does in say France. In the USA, any attempt to keep check of or reign in capatalism is seen as socialism, and governemnt overreach. In France it's seen as common sense, though they would still say they practice "capatalism". Similarly, taking care of people that can't take care of themselves is obvious in France, but seen as nearing socialism in the USA.
It's important to note, because when people go for things like "democratic socialism", they may not be against what they think they're against.
The author of this post apparently lives in Porto.
There absolutely is. Labor can be fullfilling and give joy, but for most people it is just an easy tool on how to survive and hopefully have some comfort as well. Do not ever feel ashamed of your labor and even more, do not ever feel ashamed of not doing labor if you don't want to. You have one life in this universe. Make it a nice one.
It's a policy where, if you become disabled to the point where you can't work, it pays out $X per month, every year until you're 65. And if you're partly disabled and have to cut back your hours, some policies compensate you for those lost wages.
These LTD policies are expensive, but they DO give you peace of mind about this possibility.
My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?
This isn’t an argument to remove support—it’s an argument to remove binary thresholds with smooth ramps to incentivize people to work.
In general, step functions (earn 200 get benefits, 201 no benefits) are really really bad from a public policy perspective. If you want to get people out of these dependency traps then you need to taper them more effectively.
Even tapering them is problematic as you end up with astronomically high effective marginal tax rates, but it's better than a hard cut off.
Not that that's like ... a policy slam-dunk or anything. Even putting aside the massive hurdle of getting UBI enacted into law, you'd still have to cope with sources of unreported income, asset/gift valuation, and so on. But that second category are, at least, tractable problems as evidenced by most countries' tax codes having contingencies to deal with them.
Worth and productivity are synonyms in direction, wouldn't a better phrase not track either? It's difficult to answer anything other than naught without some mental gymnastics because the words themselves are implicit.
How about happiness? That is one human quality that is not directly tied to any of worth, value or productivity.
I've worked 96-hour weeks for six months at a time. Even working nonstop, I can't save any money. I don't have enough to buy a house, and I'm exhausted. I've done so many different kinds of work, but no matter how much I work, the money just doesn't accumulate. It's not that I haven't tried.
Good jobs are only in big cities, and to live in a big city, you have to pay rent. If I pay rent, my salary doesn't accumulate. I can't even think about getting married.
I really gave it my all, but I don't know anymore. Why is my life like this? By the time I paid off my student loans, I was already in my mid-30s, and I still can't even think about marriage.
I just work and try hard, but the money doesn't add up. It feels like my life has gone wrong. I used to laugh at people who gambled or traded coins, but now I feel like a fool for working so diligently
I would, however, encourage the author that maybe the answer to their question at the end of the article lies in the very world view they rejected half-way through: Christianity. Yes, in the Christian scheme of things, hard work is a virtue and laziness a vice. But to see this as the direct root of ableist capitalism is a severe twisting of the actual Christian teaching.
On the contrary, the Bible simply resounds with two truths, throughout the Old and New Testament:
1) We are to care for those who cannot care for themselves. We have a God-given duty to provide for our family members, community members, and fellow citizens who (for whatever reason) are dependent on our help.
2) Our worth as humans does not depend on who we are, what we can do, how much we own, or any other property residing in ourselves (which may change at any moment). Our worth comes directly from the fact that we are created and loved by an unchanging God. We have worth because we are valuable to the One who made us!
This isn’t to say that the purpose of Christianity is to fix these social problems, but it’s easy to forget how central generosity and compassion are to the Christian message. “Money Cult” by Chris Lehmann is a good exploration of how American Christianity corrupts these truths.
As another commenter has pointed out, the surest ally in this case is family. Not all families are tight, but families are largely the ones who will take care of the indigent in a compassionate, long-term way.
The productivity topic is interesting. From my view, it really is _people_ that require you to be useful. Different social or political systems can be better or worse about this, but all of them are sort of playing with the same base human behavior.
Try being the one who constantly needs help from your friend. That friend will leave eventually. And they'll leave in an emotional sense. They'll sort of think less of you, or be a bit disgusted.
Try getting a woman to be sexually attracted to you if you constantly need her help or support. Outside of a few interesting fetishists, you're out of luck.
You don't even need to imagine the workplace scenario -- you already know how that works.
But picture a pre-industrial, barter economy. How well would you do when you're not able to contribute? There is history of people caring for the old, infirm, and indigent ... but remember that when you go that far back you're talking about kin-groups. You're taking care of your grandfather, or your great uncle. Not some random guy you happened up.
Or that an unproductive member of society wasn't always scorned or at least viewed negatively by those having to produce.
I hail from a culture that's decidedly Catholic, but at the same time shares this mindset.
To me it has more to do with farming and the culture around it.
On a farm you have to earn your keep and there's no space for "freeloaders". You work all day, every day and don't complain.
Attitudes are very different in places where there was a significant urban class in the renaissance era already.
It is so much beneath him to ask for help from others, he’d rather change the world so that he doesn’t have to ask — instead of expressing some humility.
I also have a lot of pride in myself, and I feel deeply for the author. However it looks to me that he’a banging on the wrong door, and instead of waiting for all the people in the world to change a lot, he could change himself a little.
The benefits cliff is a real problem (and the UK seems intent on making it worse). But "ooo nasty capitalism doesn't force people to pay for art"... Come on. And disabled people have it better than at any time in history. The UK is bankrupting itself to pay for PiPs and other benefits (and pensions unfortunately).
At any rate, judging by the author's 4.3k subscribers, he is doing fine. Whether you react with a heart emoji or revulsion, broadcasting sob stories into the internet is productivity -- in the attention economy, something that only exists in rich, capitalist societies.
It’s good that our society is doing this, and we could do better! but why do we have to characterize this existing herculean effort as “fundamentally hostile to bodies that cannot produce consistently”
Are you saying we're providing those things instead of food? Or that if we provided food we wouldn't need to provide those things?
If so, that's patently false. A lot more than food is needed to give someone a better standard of living.
For all who mis-interprent the post and focus only on the anti capitalistic view of it, don't worry your body will tell you soon!
Keep an eye for the signals, gut and digestive issues, back stuck and oain, sleeping problems, light sensitivity and irritability. When this will start remember that the problem is probably your work or your working environment not you! And you should react to it!
This article should be eye opening, and support for disabilities should be always there. The abandonment of human beings is the biggest failure of societes.
When you suddenly become unable to "give anything" to others and become the one who must be given to, you feel a disconcerting sense of loss and powerlessness.
I don't think it really has anything to do with capitalism.
1. That's your assumption. They could really ask out of interest. They couldn't care less if that's your main source of income.
2. In some cultures this question will never be asked.
3. If they do ask and judge; what does that matter? If you dislike such personalities, avoid them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu
[2] https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family%2C_Pr...
I've read that German society, for example, is largely based on contracts between the family unit and the state. Sweden, as a contrast, is largely based on contracts between individuals and the state.
As an example, Germany treats a married couple as a fiscal unit, Sweden abolished joint taxation in the 70s. Swedish parental leave is allocated per individual, and is mostly non-transferable.
In a lot of ways, individualism is produced by state contract in Sweden.
Please explain exactly what you are suggesting or advocating for here.
e.g my grandmother had a brother who their brain stopped developing at a very young age (afaik 5), the parents ensured and my grandmother ensured that my uncle lived a full (but sadly difficult) life living and been taken care of by them and then my grandma after they passed.
My best friend married the love of his life. Had amazing kids and a nice job. Then he got cancer.
He had amazing insurance, a very supporting family, a job at a company who totally understood his situation. Everything was taken care of. The only thing left was hopefully getting better.
Which he did not. All that was left was pain. I literally watched him die. I heard his last breath. I saw the life leave his eyes.
That was it. His book of life will never have any more pages. It's done. The only thing left is to remember him.
Sadly (arguably this is the greatest possible sadness) biology doesn't work that way. I think at our current rate of advancement we'll have practical immortality within the next 500 years, which is far too late for any of us alive right now, but it's not like a 90-year lifespan is an irreducible fact of reality. We've already found several genes that control certain aspects of aging and death. Interestingly, it seems to have evolved on purpose, and there are other animal species with indefinite lifespans.
My family until my parents generation were dirt poor in one of those countries you would also call piss poor.
A common thinking pattern. To prove it's luck, though, your great-grandchildren will be poor again - that always happens - they say rags to rags in three generations.
Somebody will have to endure cruelty when someone makes bad decisions. The question is whether the cruelty will be received by the person making the bad decision or somebody else.
> It's rarely "you are making a bad decision right now so you should stop that before you deserve cruelty in the future".
So it's the economic system's fault that you weren't stopped before making a bad decision? It's the economic system's fault that schools teach gender theory instead of personal finance, economics and rational decision making?
It's convenient when someone labels themselves as a propaganda poisoned shithead so thoroughly.
Sartre didn't respect your kind and I don't either.
I don't agree with railing against capitalism either-- it's not clear to me that there's any other system I would do better in, given my disability-- but the idea of, "if you do everything right, nothing bad will happen to you" is basically a comforting lie people tell themselves to feel safe. I believe in the value of hard work, and I am trying my best to better my situation-- switching my entire career from humanities to IT-- but I still am not fully sure how I am going to be able to support myself, and I don't think that's my fault.
I say we should all give it a shot. Capitalism has had its time to prove its value and its report card has left too many wanting. I think now is a good as time as any to re-evaluate alternatives to capitalism and its overwhelming role within our societies.
When a machine breaks, the best engineers find out what's wrong and fix it, no matter how many political feelings it hurts and what theories are shattered along the way. Chernobyl is a great show, btw.
People don't choose to be born blind, or with a deformed limb, or with a genetic blood disease.
What fucking choice were they ever given?
It's always somebody that got lucky that wasn't born with a disability that makes these statements.
Are you having trouble with reading comprehension? Jesus.
These are often the comments of a young, healthy man full of ego and feeling invincible.
I hope your wisdom grows as your years do. Best of luck.
You're treating it as if it goes on forever, but in reality, the end of your life is going to suck no matter what you do, and the beginning is set by your parents, but you get to control the middle, from about 20 to 60 years old if you're doing averagely well.
People are born with disabilities, which doesn't always show it's face until it is too late.
There are people who are completely incapable of saving and investing, because for them the "future" does not have any meaning in it self.
What is the point of investing if money by it self does not have any value?
There are also people who are born who will never be able to work a "normal" 9-5 job.
To put everything on their shoulders is what is wrong with the system.
Capitalism bears a heavy burden for causing a lot of angst.
The irony of you using this in a negative sense when capitalism has profited mightily from exactly this dynamic is not lost on me, in that insurance companies are insanely profitable things. And that's without getting into what b3lvedere notes in the other comment about disability and the absolute, fundamental dependency capitalism has on socialized risk, e.g., limited liability as a corporate model, bankruptcy protection, even the dependence on national military and economic strength to create the conditions for private profit. Note that I'm not even dinging capitalism here. Not at all. It's just that capitalism wouldn't work without whole social risk networks to create the conditions for private profit.
What's the point of society if not being a buffer for bad individual decisions? If I can't count on y'all when I'm down, why should I help y'all when I'm up?
Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.
Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.
Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.
I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".
And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.
We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
[1]: https://medium.com/@dtxtransitposts/how-much-does-it-actuall...
That sounds worth it to me.
> We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
Sounds like something we need to fix then.
Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system.
And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".
Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
This is something that needs to change at the cultural level but is incredibly hard to change because in order to do so you need to convince most people that the foundational understanding of their worth as a person needs to come from somewhere else.
Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.
Life is not about how much you make or how much you're worth. It's about being worth something to someone. It's about having meaningful relationships.
As a typical software nerd, it took me decades to get that.
I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
"I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
In Praise of Idleness
https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.4...
It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive?
This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmful. This constant focus on "mental health" ironically worsens mental health. For instance, any mild discomfort is "anxiety". Most of these things are pretty normal range of emotions. Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. This is obviously partly cheating the system, but it's also this harmful over-focus on "mental health"
Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exe...
If you enjoy it, then yes.
> Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
Hard work is good insofar as you enjoy it or it leads you to things that you do enjoy. Do those things if you enjoy them. Hard things are enjoyable too. I stopped doing most of them because I didn't enjoy them.
I guess this is the basis of my critique: the author seems to be writing as though capitalism is robbing him of some ideal that would otherwise exist: invoking the so-called "Protestant work ethic" to describe a system that took over the world and made us all worse off.
That doesn't feel right to me because I don't think previous economic systems did better at protecting the vulnerable. (But I'm not sure, that's why I framed my comment the way I did!)
Most replies to me are framed more as either "do what Europe does" (but the author lives in Europe!) or "we haven't gotten there yet" - which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.
sajithdilshan•1h ago
b3lvedere•46m ago