I am a capitalist. I like markets. I like people having the freedom and individual capacity to choose the course their life will take. We enable that freedom by letting people choose to improve their material conditions.
That might be where the Marxists and I agree. Humans live in a material reality that exists outside of our own condition whose boundaries have significant implications on how we live our lives. I don’t know if I care about the dialect but we are connected and how we change has contradictions.
So how do we include more people in those improvements? How does America continue to do that? I’ve been trying to get my head around what inclusion means in a pluralistic democracy of our size.
Who decides what material conditions matter? Do we agree that we improving our conditions? What are those material conditions? I think making life better does involving improving our material conditions.
I just don’t think we improve those conditions from the top down. I maintain a firm belief in the coordination value of free markets. We make improvements by making our own choices. How do we include more people in making choices where we all benefit?
Some take for granted that diversity improves material circumstances. Certainly empires benefited from breadth and scale in the past. But we’ve seen nationalism and homogeneity work quite well for some endeavors.
I’ve been so fatigued by organizing my life around my identity and not my choices. My choices are obviously enabled and constrained by my identity. I’ve dwelled on gender and disability quite enough.
I’d prefer my conditions be more enabling than constraining which is why I believe so firmly in technology. We enable coordination to individual benefit through building systems that connect each other.
I believe the choices that benefit me can also benefit others just as surely as I believe in the golden rule. Do unto others. Applying that from nation state to neighborhoods to companies and collectives is a process. I’d like more of us to have a say in improving it.