Monday, March 30, 2020

How to Criticize Capitalism

Having bad guys who are greedy rich people isn't enough.  Believe it or not conservatives are anti corporate at times.  Republicans don't think there are no Lex Luthors, to them Lex Luther is George Soros and Ted Turner and Warren Buffet.  The Conspiracy Theory community is often all about trying to claim what most liberals think will hurt the corporations is actually exactly what they want, and they're not always entirely wrong.

While Hollywood and Anime do create a lot of genuinely anti Capitalist content in-spite of themselves due to how a Communist Utopia is what most people want, they just refuse to admit it to themselves. There is definitely a lot of media that seems to have potentially Anti-Capitalist themes but is really just coming down as saying this one CEO or group of them are individually Greedy ass holes.

A lot of Media analysis being produced by Breadtube is very offended every time there is a "Good Billionaire" in a movie or TV show.  And yes sometimes it seems like they are there specifically to vindicate Capitalism, especially when one serves as a Deus Ex Machina at the end, like the roles Kings sometimes played in stories produced under Feudalism.

I however feel like it is far more of a demonstration of Capitalism as a system if the CEO or Billionaire is at least not a card carrying mustache twirling one dimensional villain, but their business winds up doing evil regardless of that.

This is what the first Jurassic Park and the first Jurassic World do very well.  John Hammond and Massrani are both perfectly likable chaps, they have tragic flaws, but they are not monsters.  Spielberg I suspect feels similarly to George Lucas about Capitalism, so these movies wind up doing a great job of showing how a system that prioritizes profits over everything else leads to reckless, bad and dangerous decision making even when under a leader who personally seems to not care about profits that much.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom are also movies I like (The Lost World I can definitely say I like as much as the two praised above, Fallen Kingdom I need to re-watch before I can make a final verdict).  But one thing I have to observe about both is how they default right back to having an utterly unsympathetic Corporate villain.

Of course the Jurassic franchise are not the ones usually singled out when people get offended by the idea of a "good billionaire".  A lot of it is directed at Billionaire Superheroes, and that is a complicated discussion to get into given how each individual of these characters isn't even depicted consistently.

We are told Bruce Wayne spends a lot of money on charity and stuff.  But it sure seems like it can't be nearly as much as he spends on having an endless supply of military grade bat themed vehicles.  And sometimes Wayne Enterprises winds up doing some pretty bad stuff because of how little attention he pays to it.  The first Professor Pig episode of Beware The Batman kind of unintentionally vindicated environmental terrorism due to how the villains' actions made Bruce aware of the situation they were protesting.

Leftists argue that the very existence of Billionaires is immoral, that hording that much wealth in the hands of only a few thousand people when millions are starving is wrong.  And it's impossible to make that much money without being directly responsible for a lot of exploitation.

I don't disagree with that.  We are producing more then enough food to feed the entire population of the Earth twice over, but we don't because doing that isn't profitable.  America also has more empty houses then we have homeless people.

But not everyone is willing to see it that way and being a wealthy and/or privileged person, even one far from billionaire status, biases you against seeing things that way.  And the fact is no single Billionaire giving up all their wealth to the poor is going to make a long term impact, that can really only happen if they all do it together.

Corporations are not people, but the people running them are.  So you can make fiction about how the system is fundamentally wrong and immoral while still depicting some of the rich people unwilling to see it that way as at least not utterly inhuman goblins.

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