the idea that the profit margin is a necessary incentive for people to innovate and run a business
is bollocks
since those people whose innovations become corporate property don't work for profit: they work for a paycheck. They work to be reimbursed for their time, not to benefit from their own work.
The people who run the business that the capitalist owns, are not motivated by the profit margin, and will continue to do their work for as long as they are being paid to do so, even if the business is operating at a loss, and quite some would do so openly, as joyfully or as joylessly as they would had the business been more effective at extracting value from the hours they trade to be allowed to eat, sleep, breathe and drink water on this earth, the apparent property of the very same people to whom they sell the prime of their lives, and most of their lifetime's daytime hours.
The profit motive serves to distance the individual from their humanity, and in this, and only this, does it unite the capitalist from the people of the planet.
I use this term of phrase deliberately - not to deny that capitalists are people, to deny them their personhood, although I can find great empathy for the various type of rumor to bring into question precisely that - I mean the people of the planet, as a body, as an entity comprising humanity as such, outside of which you indeed can say that the capitalist has placed himself, when we consider that Humanity as a whole functions like an organism to which the capitalist has fashioned for himself a relationship more akin to a parasite, living off a host, than a brother or sister of the hive, making the world a better place one lousy day at a time with all the well-meaning they can muster.
Humans are a social animal, that exist only by the grace of our ability to work together, which depends on our ability to form narrative structures, with which to comprehend the world in a number of dimensions that allowed us to place ourselves outside of the food-chain - and as a result, at the top of it.
Well, the relationship of the capitalist in this regard is not unlike that of the relationship of the human being onto the natural world in the neoliberal business model - world view hybrid concept. (After socialism's 'the personal is political' we see capitalism's infinitely more cynical and therefor convincing 'It's nothing personal - just business')
They pick from a menu wether to eat a ubiquitous, commodified living being like a chicken or a cow, and then they nod with some approval as their phone reminds them they are paying Prince Bernhard's WWF to send them pictures of the leopard they are not eating near christmas.
We openly show ourselves concerned about the plight of street urchins in sierra leone , and retweet with lengthy diatribes the latest outrageous wrongdoings of some fascist tyrant or another against his own people or the queer community
but we still spend a few billion a year collectively - and some hundreds or thousands a year individually - on clothing and electronics which have been fashioned in the most deplorable, dehumanizing and ecocidal processes ever imaginable - and I mean that in the literal sense, for nothing seems to have pushed the ability for humans to 'think outside the box' in terms of where to externalize the true cost of their lifestyle as in the feedback mechanism between the profit margin on one side and the consumer's search for self-expression through consumption on the other.
A feedback loop capitalists spend plenty of money to keep running, as it is the flywheel to their mostly effortless opulence. Yes, effortless, even for those who enjoy working and thus spend time and energy doing it - as we can easily use a metric here such as 'monthly income divided by effort" to prove that the Sergei Brin is not the most hard-working laborer at google. Where again I too conveniently choose not even to go into power dynamics that go on between the sweat shop worker and the fashion industry leaders they keep in the top of the lists of wealthiest people in the world. From such things, the mind simply recoils. In my case, i believe it might be an attempt at self preservation. I have a tendency to let myself get depressed by gross injustices I see now way of intervening in.
You know I agree with the core analysis completely. I have felt for the longest time (and since studying it and observing it everywhere) that a mechanism was divided where empathy for each other, trust, relationships, tribal bonds, community and the spirit of self-determination have been completely eroded because everything has a price tag and money itself has become the object of pursuit instead of the things it allegedly buys us. It is this great diffusor, the great distraction, the great diversion of focus and energy that has mindblowingly shaken up humanity's existence at least since ancient Greece, probably much longer.
On the same note, one of my greatest blessings and breakthroughs in recent years have been to slowly find and establish my middle way, walking the line between the dehumanizing parameters of the matrix that everybody seems so stoked on and living a spiritual existence with all the focus put towards how to break the cycle for my kids one day.
If I am the one to do it in my family, to break that cycle of "normality" through "conquering" the game itself - my life will have really meant something in the human story.
Though I hope I am wrong, cryptos may just be the next chapter of the control structre, though - in the spirit described above - it seems a good idea to use them as a spring board in order to facilitate good in the world and eventually come into a position of networking, learning skills and amassing experience to drop out of the ancient con game forever or to reduce its relevance so drastically that it ceases to carry any significance in my life and the life of those I meet.
Talk about a hippie vision huh? <3
Much love to ya brother