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It's difficult to argue with outcomes. You value certain outcomes, and a system delivers those. The system has proven it is competent at, if nothing else, delivering outcomes of value.
But of course there's more to it than that. Many sorts of systems can deliver outcomes of value. The real question, assuming that it can get there, is how it gets there.
This is a complicated question. It's an enormous simplification to say this, but let's try: capitalism rewards competence. To be more competent is to be able to create more value in a particular (perhaps very specific) context. This value is valued. To have less competence is to have less value.
Is the idea that everything should be based around value just? Kind of, I tend to think. If you're producing something of no real value that's a sort of wastefulness. There's a limited amount of time, material, and energy in the world. Spending it on things that aren't valued isn't sustainable for a good reason.
Sure, there's a whole class of endeavors and artifacts here that don't fit cleanly into this model. Art, for example. Self improvement and learning--time spent on activities that don't have immediate value. To this I say sure, make the useless things. Produce things with no real value. I can spend my time making fragile and leaky clay pots shaped like boxes. You can spend your time decorating the underpass of a freeway with old crayons and dead cicadas. These are genuinely interesting endeavors! They're weird and of almost no real value--it's what makes them interesting.
But it becomes dangerous when we start expanding outwards, pulling more people into the task of making leaky clay pots and whatnot. Using a lot of resources, taking a lot of time. Getting a bunch of pretentious rich people to donate to us so we can continue making our pots that nobody wants. When that doesn't work, getting some grant from the EU because we're supporting an obscure endangered tribe of people that got fucked over in colonial times when Belgium industrialized and destroyed their centuries old clay-production methods.
So yes, when we divert too far from the realm of value-production things get a bit sketchy. But it's equally true that when we adhere too religiously to the realm of value-production things get a bit sketchy too. So the answer is probably moderation[1], as always.
Last updated Fri Dec 17 2021 in Berkeley, CA