Matthew Taylor's lecture on 21st century enlightenment was particularly intriguing, especially on hearing that 3 of the main values in my country's national pledge are inadequate myths. What I found most puzzling was his mention that increased incentives decreases the ability to perform complex tasks because that drives against the idea of setting target goals and working towards a fulfillment.
But having watched Dan Pink's take on Sam Glucksberg's experiment on verbal behavior and problem solving, it became clearer that incentives narrow people's mind and increases ability to perform mechanical tasks as opposed to cognitive tasks. Does that mean we should pay the manual labourers more and give white collared workers less incentives to increase productivity?
Also, perhaps affluent societies have lower levels of happiness but (no references here) we could be less unhappy as well. In other words, we have a neutralized wavelength of emotions. If you're a dialectic then working towards a happier/ more contented society would also mean you create a one which experienced bitter sadness as well. But if we are able to experience sadness through empathizing (let's say with a less fortunate society) instead, and in doing so fill the gap in the "required" emotional polar, are you able to cheat your own moral compass and become a truly selfish, happy community?
Let's give a crude example... a charity organization runs a campaign and tries to educate us on the sufferings in a certain country. We are shown pictures and told stories about their plight and we empathize with them. Compelled by our morals to help, we donate to the organization and then walk away feeling very blessed and warm and happy with the thought of helping someone and a sticker to prove so. But the organization is a bogus that just swallowed your cash as administrative fee to make you happy. Blow this up big scale and you get a twisted dystopia of suppressed sufferers to feed the emotional quota of the happy folks.
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I also think that people have an idealized view of what our future would be like. *warning: generalization* Something not too far from the flying vehicles and sci-fi dreams that started centuries ago. Or maybe the dream of utopian society of lush green fields and evolved intelligent beings peacefully co-existing with nature? And as we work towards creating that vision of ours, we create a lot of by-products that are unfinished or failed experiments and low grade prototypes of what we imagine in those visions. Like the sketches you do before the final piece.
But experiments and creations like these take time and resources. And of course finances. So these by-products are then marketed to the mass, aka ourselves, and advertised and touted as desires of the individual in a society. As such, our bigger inert desire for the future fuel the market to sell us what is essentially the rubbish sketches, and in order to sell those, the market creates in us a sense of desire for these failures. Before long, we demand for more and improved versions because they are merely pale comparisions of something that we think we know deep inside us. And that demand drives the market to supply us even more of the rubbish, faster and with more ting-tongs to distract us.
Anyway, that is my explanation for where the demand the fuels a consumer capitalist market comes from.
But having watched Dan Pink's take on Sam Glucksberg's experiment on verbal behavior and problem solving, it became clearer that incentives narrow people's mind and increases ability to perform mechanical tasks as opposed to cognitive tasks. Does that mean we should pay the manual labourers more and give white collared workers less incentives to increase productivity?
Also, perhaps affluent societies have lower levels of happiness but (no references here) we could be less unhappy as well. In other words, we have a neutralized wavelength of emotions. If you're a dialectic then working towards a happier/ more contented society would also mean you create a one which experienced bitter sadness as well. But if we are able to experience sadness through empathizing (let's say with a less fortunate society) instead, and in doing so fill the gap in the "required" emotional polar, are you able to cheat your own moral compass and become a truly selfish, happy community?
Let's give a crude example... a charity organization runs a campaign and tries to educate us on the sufferings in a certain country. We are shown pictures and told stories about their plight and we empathize with them. Compelled by our morals to help, we donate to the organization and then walk away feeling very blessed and warm and happy with the thought of helping someone and a sticker to prove so. But the organization is a bogus that just swallowed your cash as administrative fee to make you happy. Blow this up big scale and you get a twisted dystopia of suppressed sufferers to feed the emotional quota of the happy folks.
__________________
I also think that people have an idealized view of what our future would be like. *warning: generalization* Something not too far from the flying vehicles and sci-fi dreams that started centuries ago. Or maybe the dream of utopian society of lush green fields and evolved intelligent beings peacefully co-existing with nature? And as we work towards creating that vision of ours, we create a lot of by-products that are unfinished or failed experiments and low grade prototypes of what we imagine in those visions. Like the sketches you do before the final piece.
But experiments and creations like these take time and resources. And of course finances. So these by-products are then marketed to the mass, aka ourselves, and advertised and touted as desires of the individual in a society. As such, our bigger inert desire for the future fuel the market to sell us what is essentially the rubbish sketches, and in order to sell those, the market creates in us a sense of desire for these failures. Before long, we demand for more and improved versions because they are merely pale comparisions of something that we think we know deep inside us. And that demand drives the market to supply us even more of the rubbish, faster and with more ting-tongs to distract us.
Anyway, that is my explanation for where the demand the fuels a consumer capitalist market comes from.
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