"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." – Mark Twain
The same is true of what we too-loosely define as capitalism. What is capitalism? There isn't just one form, but a spectrum of methods, with both necessary variance and constant selection. Like sexual, cultural and option recombination, capitalism is also a highly recombinant process. It has to be, or else. Here's my personal definition.
"Personal-to-group capitalism is about forcing accelerated adoption of a 'better' way, in all it's distributed ramifications." RGE
There are very few good capitalists, or capitalist groups. Maybe if the Dalai Llama ran a business? :) Actually, most of our vaunted "capitalists" are outright idiot savants with incredibly narrow cognitive abilities. Their views are so obtuse they're not even wrong, they're just irrelevant, and they're preventing us from exploring our national options - which are growing exponentially. Yet here we sit, with "capitalists" insisting that we're "running out of fiat."
For capitalism, what does "better" mean, in practice? It means a better way to reduce the national Output Gap. Anything less gets boring very quickly, and is also maladaptive.
For members of any Social Species, the return on tribal or group ties always apply. Local actions are either patriotic, or they're treason, with a constantly varying grey area in between. That's true for the actions of any component in any system, of course, but Social Species make an art of accelerating distributed calculation of shared outcomes. Every physical or living ecosystem is effectively an analog computing system. Social species are simply the state of the art in analog computing achievement. Human cultures claim to be state of the state-of-the-art. We'll see.
What does this mean for notions of "capitalism?" Over time, local outcomes that are personally better ALWAYS track what's better for group, nation or species. The two metrics either converge, or the species or nation isn't Adapting and evolving, just dissociating and dying.
Selecting what's "better" ... that's difficult. Especially in rapidly growing groups, because the calculation becomes more distributed, at a rate that increases even faster than population growth does. So never lose sight of return-on-coordination as the highest return, by far. None of us will be better off if our neighborhood, state or nation collapses.
Adequate titration of what is "better" is a simple, mathematical function of inter-connectivity and feedback. An analog computing system is only as good as the range, tempo and agility of it's interconnections. That's especially true of every human culture and sub-culture, whether a family, neighborhood, business or nation.
We have fiat. "We" must figure out how to optimally use it. That means all of us.
What does this mean for notions of "capitalism?" Over time, local outcomes that are personally better ALWAYS track what's better for group, nation or species. The two metrics either converge, or the species or nation isn't Adapting and evolving, just dissociating and dying.
Selecting what's "better" ... that's difficult. Especially in rapidly growing groups, because the calculation becomes more distributed, at a rate that increases even faster than population growth does. So never lose sight of return-on-coordination as the highest return, by far. None of us will be better off if our neighborhood, state or nation collapses.
Adequate titration of what is "better" is a simple, mathematical function of inter-connectivity and feedback. An analog computing system is only as good as the range, tempo and agility of it's interconnections. That's especially true of every human culture and sub-culture, whether a family, neighborhood, business or nation.
We have fiat. "We" must figure out how to optimally use it. That means all of us.
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