Is materialism the cause of western societies problems? Do we need to abandon it and accept spirituality once again?

You could theoretically program a bunch of automatons and call it a utopia. At that point the word is meaningless. I figured we were talking about human societies.

Consumer based societies are bound to fail.

Yah i was just meming in my inital post. But I do believe spirtuality leads to a society with a strong ethical foundation. I believe learning different ways to interpret religious texts and apply them to your life is valuable and its completely lacking from western civilization.

is my seminal fluid the source of your mother's venereal diseases? Yes

Unfortunately, 6860 is right. We have found ourself in a fucked up place on account of technological development stemming from social hierarchy and control over the means of production. While you might think that spiritual society (Medieval period for instance, or maybe even Saudi Arabia/Taliban-era Afghanistan if that's your jam) is nice, you have to understand that technology drives morality and not the other way around. Morality is a response to technology, an attempt to find or make rules to live 'sensibly' under certain conditions.

Even in the Middle Ages, you had development of weapons technology (crowssbows, siege defence structures, siege attack mechanisms) because all those 'spiritual', 'Christian' rules spoke a big spiritual game but practiced war and domination techniques. War and domination requires a technological edge, and all the technologically weakest societies got conquered and rekt and aren't around anymore to spruik the value of the simple life. Even Popes and Abbotts took up arms and employed forceful means to maintain and grow their power. Look at the Saudis today - humble Islam for the poor and oil money, topshelf whores, big cars, and military tech for the rich. If you like, there never was an spiritual age to 'return to again'.

For another example, check out Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism". It was precisely the ascetic, self-sacrificing, virtue-focussed nature of the hyper-religious Anglo-German Protestants that drove the accumulation of early capitalist wealth (because they didn't spend all their money, eat all their food and have all those children like those workshy, indulgent Catholics), and the hard-working spirit of innovation that led to the development of steam-powered industry.

1/2

If you want to look at particular technologies today and just pick 'birth control', 'washing machine', 'penicillin', whatever, you will end up with some of the picture but not all of it. If you want, you can certainly the effect that birth control has on the entire reproductive cycle, the way drugs has disarmed the scary venereal (and other) diseases of the past, or the way running water, the dishwasher, microwave and washing machine have freed up domestic time and enabled women to swell the workforce.

But in addition to the ability to make this stuff ('productive forces'), you've also got the entire structure that enable us to make them ('social relations'). Social relations dictates that you work 8 or 12 hours in a factory that makes washing machines, or you spend 10+ years getting degrees in research medicine to make new drugs for profit. You might think we have it easy because we have factories that produce iPhones or cheapish cars or cookware, plates, knives, chairs, etc... but you can't build a profitable factory under capitalism that builds 'just enough' chairs, or 'just enough iPhones' -- instead you are forced by inevitable profit motives and competition to aim for total market saturation, including fashions and updates that require the obsolescence of last year's model. This means that under current conditions we can't just do 4 hours of work to make 'enough' stuff.

This imposes an entire lifestyle question - when you wake up, what your daily routine is, what your available entertainments are - that also influences 'morality' and 'spirituality'. A worker who has to work 12 hour factory/retail swing shifts on Sunday can't go to church in the regular manner; a worker who is mentally drained from a management job can't study the Bible/Classics or other texts of spiritual value.

Happy to elaborate further, but in short: technology has broken the link to spirituality and caused us to be materialists, rather than materialism causing us to develop all these ungodly ways of living.

>The problem is the dogmatic fundamentalists who take the bible so literally
So to what extent do you think the bible should be interpreted? And upon what interpretations should we all agree? Also, with something as subjective as faith, how do we go about making sure that everyone follows the same anti-fundamentalist dogma?

Your logic is so flawed it hurts. You're essentially trying to say, "If everyone was perfect and nothing was wrong, then everything would be perfect and nothing would go wrong."

Finally, to take a leaf out of the Communist Manifesto (bourgeoisie here means 'big capitalists', or 'moneyed elite' if you prefer -- and Liberals! Don't ever think Marx would approve of today's Liberal "left").

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

>The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

> The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

> The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

> The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

> The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

> The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

> The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

> It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

> The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

> We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

That's me done with my TL;DR for now.

Ah yes, the old post-marxist analysis that completely ignores supply, demand and competition.

Or put differently: when you say "social relations dictates..." you really need to go into detail how this happens. And when you say "you can't build a profitable factory that... builds 'just enough'" you need to show why.

Of course you can work 4 hours a day. Get a job as a contractor like Uber or whatever.

Come on matey, I've already been a bit of a goose and tried to quite huge chunks of the Communist Manifesto, I'm not going to be able to dump all of DK vols 1, 2, and 3 on here to explain how it works am I?

As for Uber, sure, I could do that, but I would also starve. I don't know I'd even make my fixed running costs (rego, fuel, tyres) back in 4 hours of work.

Good posts, but I think you're overestimating the 'inevitability' of technology. I would say morality responds to environment and technology is a part of it. Morality HAS TO evolve otherwise it will become tyrannical.

The notion that people are just working too hard to be religious is nonsensical. It's completely unfounded. Hope this is not some sort of Marxist drivel...

oh.

I think he's referencing the fact that Marxism fails to account for natural changes that occur from supply and demand, unless there was somehow infinite supply and less than infinite demand.

Uber driver here. Ive made 500 dollars in 4 hours before. You gotta know when and where to be

Well, how about this -- if modernist spirituality was possible, how come it does not currently co-exist with high technology anywhere? Everywhere technology+money encounters spirituality, spirituality loses. This even includes Communist China if you want to think of idealistic Communism as a kind of 'spirituality' belief.

I'm not making an atheist or anti-spirituality argument here.

As for Marx, I am not using his work to justify 'Communist Revolution' or any of that stuff, I just think he made a very powerful critique (analysis) of the way capitalism works today.

When I say 'social relations dictates' it comes down to how no capitalist (owner of the means of production) will pay me more than they have to for less than they can squeeze out of me. Even if this is 'voluntary agreement' rather than 'exploitation', still nobody is giving away free money, or trying to reduce the average working day, or trying to encourage greater private spirituality (ignoring stuff where corps try to inculcate 'Christian work-ethic' meaning 'do free work for us for cheaper' etc.)

Yeah but could you feed a family on 4 hours of uber driving every day? Is it consistent? I think if it was everybody would be doing it, and then various curves would start shifting around until it became unprofitable anyway.

You've quoted chunks of stuff but missed the key bit! How does social relations "dictate". How do you ignore the role of choice? How do you sell more chairs without making them somehow better? How do you decide what's "enough" chairs independent of the sum of individual's choices? Why does the objective of a firm to dominate the market matter when their competition directly restrains this?

You get points for effort but this is stale, mid-20th century memes.
Any analysis in 2016 that doesn't primarily focus on electric media is outdated and out-of-touch.
You're coloring your posts with the whole Marxian wearied laborer and factory memes, it's old hat my dude. Instantaneous communication is what we're talking about. Electronic media is as big a change as printing was, and as writing was before that, possibly bigger.

Swap dictates for 'causes', then. I am not making a Marxist moral or economic argument, and I am not here to argue with a marketist on a Burmese banana-leaf knitting circle like I am a freshman Trot selling papers outside the University gates. I am just trying to sketch out how technology and modern society has made spirituality much weaker and less attractive or viable for people. I would like a nice lovely world of community and spiritual certainty and all that stuff, I am noy a frothing Marxist trying to tear down religion.

Yeah, absolutely. WoW, or Veeky Forums, or Netflix on weed is a better multimedia experience than church could be, and so people do that instead. Completely agree.

What about Jews? They define high tech and money yet they're one of the most religious people on earth.

Today is not the day of Marx. He lived 150 years ago. He has done enough damage. His message needs to be buried in an unmarked grave.

I don't think it's technology necessarily that destroys people's ability to believe. It's the ideology that is exported alongside technology.

Environmentalism, vegetarianism, etc. for example is religious to the core. They worship mother nature(or the great goddess), they just can't articulate it.

This.

>he's not making a marxist argument
>his rhetoric is full of marxist memes

Loads of people follow "modernist spirituality" in western societies.

If you narrowly define spirituality, then sure, spirituality loses, because science undermines the lack of empirical basis for the assertions and free travel means that people are exposed to new ideas and see the world doesn't end when you stop believing a particular set of rules.

Lots of people want to be paid more and work less - workers! You're ignoring the supply side of the labor market.

There's lots of people encouraging greater private spirituality. Do a search for "spirituality" on amazon. You're ignoring the supply side of the spirituality 'market'!

Exactly - supply and demand curves would shift. People could find a way to work for 4 hours a day but they don't want that lifestyle. You save more time working and buying a vacuum cleaner than not working and cleaning without one. How can you argue there's "dictation" rather than "choice"?

>"abstract undefined concept dictates people to act against their will"
>"abstract undefined concept causes people to act against their will"

Nope, it's still just as bad

Holy... I want more

I already said I am not making a moral argument based on false consciousness or whatever. Stop being a spergy lolbeet who thinks you have caught a whiff of Red blood.

All I mean is that our ability to make technology (a microwave) is one thing, and our social process of manufacture governed by "free choice" driving "market competition" -- social relations as in the way people relate in society -- is another. If there is no market demand for spirituality it is unlikely to occur today. Modernity decreases spirituality.

As for the dude talking about self-help, fine, but jeez there is a big gap between selfhelp mindfulness books and fucking Dostoevsky, Greek Orthodoxy and Reactionary anti-Materialism yeah?

>he STILL thinks "manufacture", "labor", "factory", "market demand" are meaningful memes

Dude do you live in fucking China?
In the 1st world going to work means half-assed making caramel lattes while talking to your friends across the counter and listening to vaporware on your portable speaker hooked up to pandora

I don't know if you're a commie but you're using post-marxist discourse why?

So your argument is now that if there's a society with less of something then there's less of it? Sounds less impressive without the Frankfurt School discourse eh?

Yeah, there's a big gap. There's also Dostoevsky, Greek Orthodoxy and Reactionary anti-Materialism on Amazon as well. And plenty of writers who are trying to be the next spiritual leader. So my point stands that there's still encouragement of spirituality.

Have a quick look at US, Canada, EU, Britain economic stats. First world still makes stuff.

Are you kidding me? Fuck off back to Uni cunt. I am in Australia and among my friends are a bloke in line production at a steel foundry, an Army helicopter pilot, and a maritime electrical engineer.

As if a uni's going to teach him anything important.

If he does arts he'll end up spouting crap like this guy:

The proletariat is no longer the critical class. Their privileged status has been displaced. In the past they had importance because they theoretically controlled the means of production. The whole point is that production is not the driving mechanism of society any longer. Communication is. Therefore, they who control the memes are the new critical class.

Now say it in English.

muh spooks

>You probably are not high enough level yet to understand this

Materialism is bad in the extremes of Brave New World. Spiritualism and ascetisicm are bad when taken to the extremes of hermits.
Golden middle road's best, as always.

As for our problems, that's just because we struggle in a world with limited resources. That's the only true reason for conflict.

I hate materialism and spirituality. Both a bunch of shit to make incomplete people feel whole.

Go to bed Muhammad

And what do christian values say about land ownership? Does it expect someone who needs more resources to save a sick friend/parent to just give up if it would exceed their fair share?
To accept christian values requires a belief in an afterlife, and I'm sorry, but I just don't see it.

>muh communism
Someone needs to maintain and build those means of production. In a world of limited resources, greed's the only functioning incentive for that, comrade.

>Environmentalism, vegetarianism, etc. for example is religious to the core. They worship mother nature(or the great goddess), they just can't articulate it.

Or they just have different beliefs than you user. Look, I'll articulate them.

>I'm an environmentalist. I believe we should preserve the environment and rely on renewable energy sources so as to continue a comfortable standard of living.
>I'm a vegetarian. I extend my notion of moral rights and opposition to suffering to all living creatures and thus try to minimize the harm I cause to not only humans but animals as well.

Not even my ideologies. pull your head out of your ass.

>All the Luddites ITT

There is no going backwards, only forward. You're like Gatsby, thinking he can repeat the past.

>le progress meme

Sure sign you are dealing with nothing more advanced than an 18th-century mind.

>He thinks I believe in progress

That's where you're wrong.

One can go forward without progressing toward anything - onward and upwards, eternally!

Then how do you differentiate between forwards and backwards?

Not him but we are always moving forwards. Attempts to return to the past are doomed to fail. The conditions that allowed those prior times to exist are now gone.

Stay out of it kiddo, this one's too subtle for you

You can't be this out of touch

*teleports behind you*

hehe

I've been shitposting for the past 14 hours. I'm on an internet high like you wouldn't believe. fucking try me.

We still worship leaders even if we stop worshiping gods. We worship the very class system, believe vehemently that because we're all different we must treat each other with either disdain or admiration. Childishly we ignore the good mother's advice to treat all our siblings fairly, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Grouchy smurf, we live in the material world. Our brains think of odd things which are called spiritual. These things are indifferent to your hate.

Oh. Well then in that case I agree. The contrived language makes you sound like a pseud though.

It's generally considered trite language makes one a pseud. If you can say it concisely with legit words, do it. Leaving it at "It's dumb and impossible" and for you to consider what I meant would be pretty "pseud" imo

Except some of the words you use are pretty much archaic. Why use fancy diction on a mongolian basket weaving forum?

Mass society is the cause of western societies problems. We aren't ready to live in a cities of millions of people, constantly overstimulated by everything around us. There is no way around it, it doesn't matter what economic/political/philosophical system you invent, it is doomed because we didn't evolve to live like we do. The only way out seems to be to go back to our roots (anarcho-primitivism), but most people think it's silly, so I don't think we will be able to ovecome that.

Have to disagree, only because even living outside of a city you're overstimulated just by having a computer, not to mention all the other things.

Capitalism is spirituality though. Marx was a materialist, he believed that the material world dictates the metaphysical and not the other way around. He believed that the pursuit of capital as an end would lead to loss of humanity. In his writings he mentions alienation from society/reality due to this phenomenon, where people no longer regard currency as a means of exchange but as something worth devoting one's life to accumulating. Eventually people in this system start to believe in ideology as more important than reality (see Cold War, Red Scare, Culture Wars, "existential threats").

I wonder if society will somehow reset itself when existence becomes too meaningless and spiritually painful.

Basically this

>c'mon lit stop being so smart
So you had to look up a few words and you still couldn't figure out what she was saying? That's your problem.

I agree that the prolitariat has been displaced but I think it's just changed to a class of engineers and scientist. I don't buy the communication meme though, if the internet ever goes out, and this has already happened during the arab spring etc., most of the modern ideas of communication become pointless. If anyone also finds a way to kill the mobile phone net, the whole idea of instant communication anyhwere is dead.

Using words that are never spoken in real life doesn't make you seem smart

using new or obscure words to express abstract concepts more concisely = 101 of philosophy

using obscure words in casual speech, even though a more common word would have expressed the same thing = retarded

Now just add in 'oversocialization' and we full Unabomber now

>she

This isn't casual speech, this is Veeky Forums. Using a big word isn't retarded. Endlessly bitching about it IS.

Yes. Even if the Materialists are right, and especially if they are right, Materialism should be abandoned.

I don't think there's any going back though. The rubber band model of our Eschatological process seems almost certain at this point.

Clearly what we need is a proper dialectical synthesis

>We
Speak for yourself

>Only in a round about way.
What do you mean by "round"?

t. mahmoud abassi

Abandoning everything, especially all that is considered "eternal," is true spirituality.

In essence they're both the same.

This. While having his own notions and struggling to adhere to them, Dostoevsky was clearly critical of the capacities of human understanding in general and constantly evaded representing any one clear philosophical idea in his fiction. People talk about The Brothers Karamazov and they mention passages from Ivan's, Alyosha's, and Zosima's points of view, but they never talk about the courtroom scenes, or how the prosecutor and the defendant both coolly and logically argue incredibly thoughtful and emotionally appealing points that, ultimately, lead neither of them anywhere near the truth. Or how the narrator, himself, is a character whose very objectivity is suspect. Dostoevsky's general thesis seems to be, generally, that much on earth is concealed from us, we are moved by a desire for some "beauty," but that beauty is mysterious and elusive, and arises through the works of "God" and the "devil," within the human soul, alike.

Fusion reactors will help with that, if we even get that far without a solar storm that collapses current civilization.

>go back to our roots
>anarcho-primitivism
Not to dismiss anarcho primitivism, but to say its what humans should be "naturally" is entirely baseless.

It's not.

gdapress.it/public/it/2014/06/ImageProxy-31.jpg

>Hierarchy
>Bequeath
>"Fancy diction"
>Archaic

Kill yourself, seriously. You're the cancer that's killing English and language in general. Go talk about big butts with your nigs or something.

>If the internet goes out then blah blah blah

Ok, but in the context of my framework of technological development being the prime determiner of a society's characteristics, that's a totally flippant analysis.
Of course if the internet went out, things would change. The point is that it hasn't. We're talking about the society that actually exists not the one that would if x and y happened.
Just because electronic media isn't as durable (in your mind) as what came before it doesn't change it's extremely powerful influence on modern society.

>Dostojewski's novels have multiple perspectives so he wasn't an ideologue

The reddit invasion is completely out of control. Read his journals you fucking pleb.

What are you like a teenager?? Gotta be to be asking such DEEP questions.

>Read his journals you fucking pleb.
I addressed that in my first sentence. He was never blindly partisan, nor was he a zealot. He carried his own values but always understood the circumstance that surrounded them and how others might come to approach the world differently. He chose to go with Christ while admitting that he had no certainty that Christ was the way to any truth. He addressed this blatantly and constantly, and acting like an asshole does not change that.

You're an absolute dumbass. You didn't "address that in your post" and you've certainly never read his journals.

He believed that orthodoxy was good for Russia because he believed that the success of a nation in regards to its people was dependent on some higher idea, and he believed (believed) that the Orthodox notion of Christ was the best evident manifestation of that idea. He held beliefs and valued them, while accepting the limitations our perception imparted upon any understanding of certain truth. "The world stands on adsurdities." He sympathized with everyone, specifically the displaced and downtrodden and those "without dignity," but believed in a solution to Russia's problems that was different to some other people's beliefs and, therefore, is an ideologue in your eyes? Your view of Dostoevsky seems myopic, and your posts are not very convincing.

reddit is >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>/thatway/>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

No, spiritalism is the cause of western societies problems, we need to abandon it and accept the real world once again.

Dostoevsky is a meme.

This guy is right you know. Dostoevsky was a zealous, lunatic Christian retard. He only feigns "depth" because he's actually injecting a strong Christian message into everything he writes. It's pseudo-profound, because Dostoevsky writes everything in a really "sad" way, but in a way that's logical, and one that makes us desire the real world to "go away". It's the Christian logic summed up.

A real thinker, one who doesn't push another's ideology, would be Nietzsche, who basically accepts (as Dostoevsky, in his weakness can't) that life and it's trinkets are a mystery, and we will never understand it. And that's not fucking bad, that's great.

Nietzsche called Dostoevsky, roughly, the greatest psychologist who had ever lived and a beautiful stroke of fortune in his life, because Nietzsche was not someone to take some aspects of an individual's personal belief system and blithely reduce them to the point of pure dismissal. No, that user is not right. Dostoevsky had his views and he adhered to them, but he was ultimately an ironist in the same way that Nietzsche was an ironist. He talks about his notion of Christ as the ultimate beauty and the central most important idea, but he also clearly states that his perception is as limited as anyone's and that he has chosen to follow Christ regardless of where truth may lie. Just because not everything he personally believed gels perfectly with our conceptions in modernity does not make him some sort of foundationless ideologue, and I do not believe that either of you two have even attempted to represent him fairly.

>we didn't evolve to live like we do
But we did, because we are.

>glad he's dead
so salty

You would profit immensely from reading some essays on Dostoevsky.