[FRIAM] capitalism vs. individualism

uǝlƃ ☣ gepropella at gmail.com
Mon Nov 4 17:40:41 EST 2019


I know I've seen some screeds, here, about "postmodernism" and it's unhinging belief from truth, though I probably can't reconstruct them. In any case, along those lines comes this opinion piece:

  Will "post-truth" politics be capitalism's undoing?
  https://www.salon.com/2019/11/03/capitalism-created-the-post-truth-society-and-that-may-be-its-undoing/

I kinda-sorta agree that individualism contributes to such unhinging because individualism is antithetic to any kind of consensus building. But it's totally unclear to me how this is fundamentally related to *capitalism*, which I loosely define as the private ownership of property. In fact, it seems to me that capitalism defeats individualism in several ways, including fiat currency (which reduces property to a readily divisible value), collective "persons" like corporations which can own property using explicit sharing agreements, and built-in mechanisms like markets where some kind of consensus on things like price obtain.

That makes me think that either I'm missing some important part of the author's assumptions *or* I simply disagree in some non-obvious fundamental way.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ



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