I do not like its silly face
Wednesday, 23 December 2009 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Shopping this morning, I put four bags of pecan nuts1 onto the till counter, and noticed that the woman had only rung up three of them. When I gently pointed out that in fact I owed her another R18.50 (and, ye gods, when did pecan nuts shoot up in price? memo to self, plant tree) she looked at me as though I was a particularly insane three-headed alien waving my twelve arms and spouting gibberish in Esperanto. She then rang up the extra item after triple- and quadruple-checking that this was actually what I meant, as though she couldn't quite believe it. When I'd paid she handed over my receipt with a sort of grudgingly suspicious thank-you for pointing out the error.
This weirds me out. We live in a world where greed and chicanery, on a scale from petty to epic and world-destroying, are the norm - to the extent where a moment's deliberate honesty actually brings the system grinding momentarily to a halt while the act is checked for hidden pitfalls, since if it's not a scam in itself, it's a self-destructive weakness worthy only of contempt. The newspaper billboards this morning were full of a new phishing scam targeting South Africans and based around World Cup tickets. Last week in the supermarket they'd just caught some poor woman attempting to shoplift an entire bag of cheese, twenty or thirty items. They caught her because the shoplifting is enough of an endemic problem that they have undercover security people pretending to be shoppers wandering around the store.
I don't actually like most of the human race very much just now. I think we've lost the plot. Capitalism and its ethos of it's-actually-virtuous-to-grab-for-yourself-now has apparently identified altruism as a foolish weakness which needs to be eradicated from the herd by sheer Darwinian principles. I don't know how the hell the inventors of the system expected it to self-regulate so that rampant greed doesn't grind up everything in its path, but grind it has. And I don't see how you re-introduce the old-fashioned virtues back to this post-capitalist world once you've opened Pandora's box, short of sending the world to moral boot camp with floggings and stern teachers. The system doesn't work any more. Maybe it never did. Maybe humanity isn't actually capable of rising above its own base nature. Maybe I've been reading altogether too much China Mieville and am turning into a socialist. Maybe it's just Christmas getting to me.
I'm going to bed now, my head hurts. On the upside, the new Kelly Link is dynamite, and makes me realise there may be an excuse for the human race after all.
1 Promised jo&stv carrot cake.
This weirds me out. We live in a world where greed and chicanery, on a scale from petty to epic and world-destroying, are the norm - to the extent where a moment's deliberate honesty actually brings the system grinding momentarily to a halt while the act is checked for hidden pitfalls, since if it's not a scam in itself, it's a self-destructive weakness worthy only of contempt. The newspaper billboards this morning were full of a new phishing scam targeting South Africans and based around World Cup tickets. Last week in the supermarket they'd just caught some poor woman attempting to shoplift an entire bag of cheese, twenty or thirty items. They caught her because the shoplifting is enough of an endemic problem that they have undercover security people pretending to be shoppers wandering around the store.
I don't actually like most of the human race very much just now. I think we've lost the plot. Capitalism and its ethos of it's-actually-virtuous-to-grab-for-yourself-now has apparently identified altruism as a foolish weakness which needs to be eradicated from the herd by sheer Darwinian principles. I don't know how the hell the inventors of the system expected it to self-regulate so that rampant greed doesn't grind up everything in its path, but grind it has. And I don't see how you re-introduce the old-fashioned virtues back to this post-capitalist world once you've opened Pandora's box, short of sending the world to moral boot camp with floggings and stern teachers. The system doesn't work any more. Maybe it never did. Maybe humanity isn't actually capable of rising above its own base nature. Maybe I've been reading altogether too much China Mieville and am turning into a socialist. Maybe it's just Christmas getting to me.
I'm going to bed now, my head hurts. On the upside, the new Kelly Link is dynamite, and makes me realise there may be an excuse for the human race after all.
1 Promised jo&stv carrot cake.