I'm afraid I think that's a basic structural flaw of capitalism (notwithstanding its many structural goods). When I hear this argument I feel it's a bit like proponents of socialism saying 'ok communism actually does suck but that's because it's a departure from the beautiful socialist ideal.'
The basic problem is this: no matter how good your system, it's not going to be used solely by angels, but by a distribution of people. A few of those will be very ethical and unselfish and operate completely within the rules and the spirit of the system. A few others will be total assholes and just exploit every weakness they can find to advance their own interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on others. And a lot of people in the middle will just go in the same direction as everyone else - when there are more good people around they'll conduct themselves ethically, when there are more bad people around they'll help themselves. But the middle group is generally passive and doesn't make any particular effort to either support or subvert the system within which they find themselves.
So in the context of capitalism you'll have some very high-minded entrepreneurial people and some corrupt cronyist types, in the context of socialism you'll have some very selfless individuals and some authoritarian thugs, in a religious context you'll have some saintly types and some hypocrites who prey on the naive and use fear of divine retribution to silence their victims, and so on.
When we design or experiment with social technologies, we have to be on our guard against two extremely risky assumptions: one, that our proposed system would work great if only everyone adopted it, and two, that our proposed system will be used by people like ourselves who share our basic assumptions about right and wrong.
In sum, you're right to point to cronyism but you're wrong to ignore cronyism given the fact of its widespread popularity. there are bad as well as good people int he world, and so we should consider what the possible negative outcomes of our technology would be if such people gained control of it.
>A few of those will be very ethical and unselfish and operate completely within the rules and the spirit of the system. A few others will be total assholes and just exploit every weakness they can find to advance their own interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on others
This seems far from the general consensus in social psychology, which is that the context we exist in determines the majority of our actions. The Milgram and Asche lines of research are the most prototypical, but Zimbardo has spent his whole career on basically this question.
True sociopaths are incredibly rare (less than 1% of the population). People find it very difficult to betray or hurt other people, and this comes from genetics, not context, and we know this because it is a human universal.
In similar experiments measuring trusting behaviors and betrayal vs. reward responses to those behaviors, 90% of people engage in a trust behavior (giving money to another research participant, over a computer game, never seeing this other person), and 95% of people who are trusted reward, rather than betray, their partner.
This sort of human-naturism is just defeatist propaganda meant to maintain the existing system of total hierarchical dominance of elites (the capitalist class, men, whites, cisgenderds) over the oppressed. You can choose to stop being a shitty person, and your doing that will create a context where other people are pressured to do the same, and will likely concede to that pressure.
(It's not surprising that this didn't exactly take on in an environment like the Soviet Union, where trust was intentionally minimized by the state, which itself didn't trust its citizenry because it was the active target of an espionage and proxy war for its entire existence. It's also not surprising that people in an environment that values capital accumulation over all else are quick to betray each other. However, there are a lot of examples of libertarian socialist territories, brief though they may have been, that contradict the notion that communism (which is the same thing as socialism, there is no difference at all) inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Since these societies were attacked both by capitalists and authoritarian communists, it's not surprising that they didn't last very long either.)
That most people are good is a big part of the problem though. A lifetime around people who mean you know harm makes us less suspicious. That trust can be exploited and then that exploitation can be aggregated.
Since we're mostly trusting, the market for this aggregated exploitation is quite large. I'd even argue that it includes, to some extent, all forms of labor.
The basic problem is this: no matter how good your system, it's not going to be used solely by angels, but by a distribution of people. A few of those will be very ethical and unselfish and operate completely within the rules and the spirit of the system. A few others will be total assholes and just exploit every weakness they can find to advance their own interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on others. And a lot of people in the middle will just go in the same direction as everyone else - when there are more good people around they'll conduct themselves ethically, when there are more bad people around they'll help themselves. But the middle group is generally passive and doesn't make any particular effort to either support or subvert the system within which they find themselves.
So in the context of capitalism you'll have some very high-minded entrepreneurial people and some corrupt cronyist types, in the context of socialism you'll have some very selfless individuals and some authoritarian thugs, in a religious context you'll have some saintly types and some hypocrites who prey on the naive and use fear of divine retribution to silence their victims, and so on.
When we design or experiment with social technologies, we have to be on our guard against two extremely risky assumptions: one, that our proposed system would work great if only everyone adopted it, and two, that our proposed system will be used by people like ourselves who share our basic assumptions about right and wrong.
In sum, you're right to point to cronyism but you're wrong to ignore cronyism given the fact of its widespread popularity. there are bad as well as good people int he world, and so we should consider what the possible negative outcomes of our technology would be if such people gained control of it.