Episode #206 ... Capitalism is dead. This is Technofeudalism. (Yanis Varoufakis)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thanks to the people on Patreon that make this show possible for the whole world to listen to. Patreon.com/philosophize this. As usual, I hope you love the show today. So So we've been talking a lot lately about some of the problems we're dealing with in the modern world, the ways that different philosophers are diagnosing what they think the problems are, the ways they think we could be moving beyond them. And one of the culprits of all these problems, a name that keeps coming up in these conversations, is our good old friend, doctor Benjamin j capitalism. These philosophers just can't seem to get that name out of their mouth. They can't stop bringing up the fact that the problems we're dealing with might have something to do with the economic, political, religious organization of people's lives that we often just politely call capitalism as complex of a thing as that's proven to be sometimes. Seems like it may be something more than that at other times. But one perspective that hasn't been covered yet, that seems very necessary to be mentioned as part of these conversations, is what if we aren't even living in a capitalist system anymore? What if we're focused on the wrong things because of that? Or as it was put by the philosopher economist, Janis Varoufakis, recently, we know things have changed when it comes to technology and the economy in the last couple decades. But what if things have transformed so much that if you look around you and you pay attention to the way politics and the economy is actually structured, capitalism is dead. It's been dead. And what is actually going on is we've entered into a brand new age that structured entirely different than before, an age of what he calls techno feudalism. I mean, if that were true, then again, it just needs to be said, seems like something that's necessary to talk about here. We know the world's always changing into something new. We know it never stays completely still in terms of dialectics. And we know that there's no guarantees out there that the world's gonna stay the same thing long enough for us to solve the problems being created by it before it evolves into something else. So in that sense, it's entirely possible for you to live most of your life railing against the evils of something like monopoly capitalism, only to get to the end of your life and realize, wow, I've been chasing a ghost this entire time. See, if these philosophers are talking about how to make things better, then it is crucial that we have a real understanding of what the problem is that we're dealing with. And what if instead of capitalism, what if we're actually living in something that more closely resembles the power structures of the feudal system of the middle ages? Well, first reaction you might expect …