Internal emails highlight how an advertising company can use its in-house resources to oppose public policy proposals.
One of the world’s largest advertising firms is crafting a campaign to thwart a California bill intended to enhance people’s control over the data that companies collect on them.
According to emails obtained by POLITICO, the Interpublic Group is coordinating an effort against a bill that would make it easier for people to request that data brokers — firms that collect and sell personal information — delete their dossiers.
Respectfully but strongly disagree. If people’s survival requires constantly competing in scenarios that favor sociopathic actions and outright sociopaths while also repeatedly discarding kindness and devaluing communal activity in general the outcome is the same.
While you are right that the people at their cores might not be sociopathic and may be very uncomfortable and unhappy with the way they’ve become required to live their lives, the resulting society becomes as if it were entirely inhabited by sociopaths.
You can definitely condition people into acting entirely in their own self interest in the public sphere. And, unfettered capitalism is undeniably very effective at doing this. In fact, it’s arguable that governments worldwide have been trying to regulate against this with almost no effect. I think the global climate emergency is an excellent example, though far from the only one. It’s more the sum total of all humanities failures at this very thing.
Well said.
Ben the nice bus driver will kill in a war, kill fathers, sons, anyone, because he got indoctrinated (maybe brainwashed, or just convinced) to do it. We got enough of records of that to know it’s true.
Sure, society as a whole is much more individualistic and sociopathic compared to human nature (as shown by anthropologists, where people just shared things in the past) as a direct result of capitalism. I just don’t think on the individual level that capitalism can change the nature of an individual to become sociopathic if they weren’t already.
With human nature, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” rings true.
Also mass industrialization and urbanization caused people to not know their communities nearly as well, if at all, leading to an even more individualistic culture.
This must have been the best description of this that I‘ve read so far. Thank you very much.
Sociopathy isn’t defined by what people will do in extreme contexts, but what they’ll do in “normal” ones. Yes, humans have survived so successfully in part because we have a strong survival instinct and will do whatever it takes to live. But there’s a meaningful difference between that and sociopathy. Context matters.