this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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collapse of the old society
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Ah the ol' "you can't participate in a society you gave criticisms about".
"Don't like capitalism? Stop buying things."
"Hate fossil fuels? Don't use transportation or electricity which relies on it."
"Hate slavery? Manufacture your own clothes."
"Don't like the country? Move away."
Even just social media is a sort of must today. It isn't, not really, but neither is a car or buying things if you really get down to it.
But for like a teenager, social media is pretty much a must. We can all pretend it isn't and how brave it is to be against the mainstream and do your own thing but you might feel a twinge of regret 20 years down the line when you have little to no relationships.
It's easier to use the things, complain about them, organise and change them, then it is to change them via expecting everyone to make the same personal choices. There's clearly something worthy or interesting about the systems. So let's just try to take out/regulate whatever makes them shit.
Ah, the ol' strawman approach - argue with a ridiculous version of what somebody said instead of what they actually said, which in this case was don't buy from companies you object to. Seems pretty straightforward and not at all stupid like move to a different country or stop using electricity. No need to be a dick.
That's trivial when youre boycotting a single company that isn't relevant for some large industry, but try boycotting some large fossil fuels company.
You simply can not trace back the origins of all the products you use which have employed petroleum products at one point or another in the manufacturing process.
Being a moral consumer is legitimately impossible.
If you managed to have enough money to buy yourself a bit of land and built literally everything by hand, then perhaps you might avoid contributing to capitalism, but unless you plan to abandon literally all modern conveniences and hand-forge plumbing for your outhouse, it's not going to work.
It's not a strawman when there isn't a version of the argument that isn't hard to attack. I just steel-manned the argument and it still doesn't work.
Seems pretty straightforward.
You proved it's impossible to be a completely ethical consumer, but did you prove that it's necessary to be a consumer at all? Or that all volumes of consumption are equally culpable?
Depends on how you define it
In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”